What are your favorite tools for conducting market and customer research to inform messaging?

For a lightweight way to test positioning and/or messaging, I love using UserTesting. You can easily create messaging concepts and get them in front of users who are similar to your target audience, and execute this yourself as a PMM. For customer research, I like using Survey Monkey to gather quantitive data directly from customers. It has some good self-serve tools for slicing and dicing the data different ways post-survey as well as good visualization tools for presenting the results.

I completely agree with @Courtney about the value of UserTesting tool. It lets you observe how real users react when interacting with your messaging, allowing you to quickly and conveniently test it and make informed decisions. Wynter is another great tool that I haven't tested personally, but I've heard a lot of positive feedback about it from my network. It enables you to test various messaging formats, such as written text, visuals, or video presentations, and receive detailed feedback on message clarity, resonance, emotional impact, and purchase intent quickly and easily.

To further validate your messaging and ensure it resonates, I recommend running an A/B test on different versions of your landing page.

When conducting market and customer research, I recommend using multiple tools to gather data and understand pain points. Google Trends, for instance, offers real-time insights into recent trends and search queries. Additionally, Sprout Social is a fantastic social listening tool that helps uncover customer pain points and craft strategic and effective messaging. For collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, Typeform and SurveyMonkey are reliable options, with the choice depending on your survey format and desired analytics level.

Userinterviews.com helps you get a panel of qualified users very fast. We often get more qualified applicants than we need in 24 hours or less. We have used it for 1:1 moderated interviews and unmoderated product feedback - it delivered high-quality participants for both of these research formats.

We also use lookback.com for unmoderated interviews. This is an amazing, easy-to-use tool for product feedback. It integrates very nicely with userinterviews.com.

I also like Wynter for B2B user interviews. I used it specifically for landing page/website feedback, but they have expanded to 1:1 and other research formats. It's another very easy-to-use tool with super-fast response times.

You definitely want to use a number of tactics to round out the research for your messaging.

• Talk to the Product / Leadership team - why did they create the product? What makes it unique?

• Talking to the Sales team - what do prospects get most excited about when Sales is pitching? What helps them close the deal? What do prospects seem most concerned about?

• Talking to customers / the buyer persona - what is their biggest challenge in their day to day work? Why did they select your solution? How does your solution help them most? What is their favorite part about your solution?

• Reading industry publications - what are the hot topics right now in the industry? Do you solve for any of those unique challenges?

• Asking ChatGPT - what does it say about your buyer persona? The industry?