You’re in product marketing. How can you improve your customer focus?

It might sound obvious but you just have to get as much time with customers as possible. As a product marketer, you can do this in a number of ways. You can ask your Product Manager or research partner if you can join customer calls where they are providing customer feedback. After a while you could even put your hand up to lead these calls yourself to take some pressure off these teams and to get to actually chat to customers yourself! Another great way to get to know your customer is to spend some time with the customer support team working on cases (if you get permission!). It is also a fantastic way to get to know the ins and outs of the product as well!

To improve customer focus in product marketing, develop a deep understanding of your target audience, leverage customer feedback, map out the customer journey, and use data to inform decision-making.

Try to build a consistent routine of talking with customers. Start with 1 every week, then 2, 3, 4... But be sure to talk with customers every week. This is crucial to 1) understand their core problems, 2) discover where there are opportunities and 3) uncover where your business should evolve. Usually, I prefer to have 1:1 conversations because that's where you get detailed insights but, of course, that depends on the business.

Customer is a unique opportunity for company to check how it operates. Speaking to them allow company to grow and develop further. Gathering insights can be fast and simple through different surveys (Google Forms, Surveymonkey) or you can conduct complext and deep interviews to ask customers something specific.

To improve customer focus it's important to - Talk to customer - Attend as many sales meeting - Analyse support tickets - Run surveys & take feedback - Reach out to customers for reviews and testimonials - Work on the customer feedback -Improve your customer satisfaction levels

Customers are different and it may happen that different cohorts may have various problems. Splitting the base by segments will allow to focus deeply on different problems and improve the product. Segmentation can be done by demographics (gender, age, sex), by industry that your product is aimed for and by occupation (what are the businesses of your customers?). Also you may check cohorts based on purchase story and combine if you can see similar trends and patterns. By differentiating customer groups, business can focus deeply on specific problems and use insights to product improvements.

Identify your segments: Analyze your customer data to identify meaningful sets based on relevant criteria. Common segmentation bases consider demographics, purchase history, usage behavior, psychographics, etc. Allocate resources effectively: Prioritize marketing and development efforts based on the potential values of your customer segments. This allows you to distribute resources more effectively and achieve a higher ROI. Feed insights into product development: Insights from each segment can help refine/revamp future product development initiatives, ensuring you create products that truly address the needs of your ICP.

Your competitors who get segmentation right are eating your lunch. They’re swooping in with tailored messages, products, and offers that make your one-size-fits-all approach look like a joke.

To refine our marketing strategy, we used the ABC method to segment our customer base into A, B, and C groups based on demographics, purchase behaviours, and product usage. This approach allowed for highly personalised campaigns, particularly when assessing industry-specific needs and purchase history. Targeting our 'A' segment with premium offers resulted in a significant increase in engagement and sales. We regularly review and refine these segments to keep up with changing customer dynamics. Detailed segmentation not only improves marketing effectiveness but also enhances our understanding of diverse customer needs, leading to more nuanced and successful marketing strategies.

Learning your customer pains and challenges through various methods is the best way to leverage their feedback into building the right product. Learning from peers and competitors is also a great way to innovate and gain edge on top of their offering

Creating buyer personas could feel like a mammoth task, but is also the most insightful and rewarding. If you're doing this by yourself, here's how you can create buyer personas for your business. 1) select 15-20 ideal customers who have been users of your product/service for at least 6 months. Filter by activity, usage of product, revenue they contribute to etc based on whatever makes most sense for your business. 2) Create a questionnaire that is built around their trigger points, the problem they're solving, job to be done, their decision-making universe, their daily activities, and much more. Get to know them. 3) Get on calls with customers. Let them do the talking. 4) Document the calls and let patterns emerge. 5) Create personas

Develop comprehensive buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. Include their goals, challenges, preferred channels of communication, and decision-making processes. This exercise helps to empathize with your customers and tailor your messaging and product development accordingly.

Create detailed buyer personas that represent different segments of your target audience. Use real data and research to inform these personas, ensuring they accurately reflect the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your ideal customers. Use buyer personas to guide marketing decisions, such as channel selection, messaging tone, and value proposition highlighting. Align marketing efforts with the needs and preferences of each buyer persona, ensuring relevance and effectiveness.

Please don't listen to your CEO if they say "we don't have any competitors". Your competitors are who buyers say they are. With this understanding, go and interview 10 buyers from your most recently closed won and lost deals. Ask them questions like: - What made our solution stand out against competitors? - How did our competitors' offerings compare, and what were their strengths and weaknesses? - What could we have done better? - Can you describe the decision-making process and how our proposal was evaluated? Lesson: go and speak to your buyers to identify: a) who your competitors are b) how you stack up against them You might be surprised by the results.

Analisar a sua concorrência pode ser a chave de sucesso para que você sempre esteja um passo à frente em seu mercado. é um exercício primordial para ver que seu produto e solu??o n?o est?o sozinhos no mercado. Isso envolve um olhar criterioso para entender quem s?o os seus concorrentes diretos e, o mais importante, indiretos… e está aí que mora o perigo e que muitas empresas desenvolvem um olhar raso perante a concorrência. Além disso, outros benefícios s?o: - Encontrar possíveis oportunidades; - Mitigar riscos de amea?as externas; - Se antever a possíveis movimentos no mercado; - Melhora o posicionamento do produto e da marca; - Você toma decis?es mais assertivas e torna suas estratégias mais eficientes.

DON'T ASK LEADING QUESTIONS..... That's the best way to have a survey. Also, if you are asking for a scale of 1 to 10. Disable "7"!!! People inherently mark 7 if they are unsure about the review. Ask them what if you can't put 7 and then things become much clearer. 6 is bad and 8 is too good!

While quantitative surveys have their place, truly understanding your customers requires a deeper dive. Foster open communication through face-to-face interactions or targeted surveys, and meticulously track their touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Actively solicit and analyze qualitative feedback from reviews, social media mentions, and support tickets. Don't overlook the Net Promoter Score - it's a valuable metric for gauging loyalty and predicting future business. Customer satisfaction is a continuous process, not a static target. Elevate your customer experience by actively listening, tracking data, and iterating based on insights. This data-driven approach fosters lasting relationships and business growth.

Optimize your marketing with targeted experiments: 1. Goal-Driven Testing: Define clear goals (e.g., conversions). Formulate testable hypotheses (e.g., CTA color effects). Validate assumptions through experiments. 2. Personalized Experiences: Leverage data to segment your audience. Tailor messaging and experiences dynamically to individual preferences. 3. Social Media: Experiment with post formats, timing, and targeting to maximize engagement. Analyze results to understand platform preferences. 4. Email: Test subject lines, personalization, and send times to optimize open rates and clicks. Compelling subject lines drive engagement. 5. Continuously Learn: Stay informed about trends and new approaches regularly; iterate based on data.

1. Look at NPS data on a month-on-month basis, and distil user feedback on products/pages 2. Listen in to Cx calls and gather themes 3. Conduct regular user insights and get an idea of user pain points and user needs

I would say, focus on these three areas. Listen Actively: The easiest way to do this is to sit with the customer support team and review the tickets. Sniff the patterns and make a note of it Data-Driven Insights: Regularly analyze market trends. Look at the usage. See what features are being used and which are not getting the attention. How frequently are they using your product? Customer-Centric Culture: Give priority to customer satisfaction and relationships. Closely work with the customer success (CS) team to understand the customer's needs. Share monthly reports from CS to the product management team.

One of the biggest problems product marketers have is not getting in front of customers. That's why their customer focus is often so poor. They think they know/understand the customer perspective, but since they're not actually involved with customers, they really don't. To solve that problem, product marketers must get more engaged with customers by working more closely with sales. Go on customer visits, listen in on customer phone calls, participate in customer meetings, listen in on customer support calls, etc. In other words, become an active participant. All of those actions will help you understand the real issues customers face and not just the ones you think they face (because let's face it, most PMMs think they're the experts).

This isn’t done so much anymore, but getting a good understanding of a “day in the life” of your customer tells you a lot. This is different than traditional customer feedback. I always learned more niche or differentiating things when I was able to observe someone using my product. More difficult in today’s software world, but creating really good questions to ask when interviewing your customers goes a long way. Don’t just ask what features they use the most, but rather “tell me about your day”, “what are you tasked to do”. Get a feeling for their surroundings and environment as they are using or needing to use your product.

Another tip to improving customer focus in product marketing is all about really getting to know your customers. Dive into research to understand their needs, map their journey to see where you can make things smoother, and always keep the lines of communication open through feedback and social media. Personalize your approach to make each customer feel special and keep tweaking your product with their input. Excellent customer service? Non-negotiable. And hey, make sure your team is as excited about serving your customers as you are. Keep measuring how happy your customers are and adjust as you go. It's like building a community where everyone feels heard, valued, and connected.