Four "On the Cheap" Product and Content Marketing Research Strategies

Our emotional product manager, product marketer, and content marketer brains want to have high quality, effective, extensively leveraged content and programs that come in under budget (or have trivial budget). We want it all.

How can we satisfy our logical brains' (and our C-suites') need for actionable insight to inform our decisions when we don’t have a lot of time or a huge (or any) budget? I’d like to offer four practical strategic approaches you can implement with limited staff and budget. Spoiler alert, these approaches involve personas, business goals, sales cycles, and “fail fast” tests. Not rocket science for PMs, PMMs, and content folks.

Before you fire up your latest favorite martech stack tool to execute a cool integrated marketing program or JIRA to add new product stories, cool your jets, grab a cup of coffee, and hop on a Zoom or lean on your cubie wall and chat with your marketing, PM, and content buds. Discuss well. Reflect. Document. Then act.

Caveats: I acknowledge up front that these suggestions may or may not drive statistically significant findings. With that said, my questions always are: 

1. Do we have the time and budget to engage a longer and more formal process?
2. If we did, would those results have much more impact on our plans?
3. If we did, what opportunity cost in time and money would we spend?

If your organization can afford the time, money, and opportunity cost to be more formal, then you should! Or if you have a department that can do it all for you, that’d be cool too. Regardless, I’d still suggest trying the suggestions below -- in the worst case they will further inform the more formal research.

1. Quick and dirty persona research

Who is buying? Who is influencing? Who is using? Who are product and solution reviewers and analysts? Who are your resellers? What regions? Who? Why? What? Where? When? Competitive landscape. Etcetera. Basic stuff.

Here’s my suggestion for a fast, inexpensive, and surprisingly informative and actionable approach to persona research. Spend one to three full days making phone calls using a simple bulleted conversation guide (NOT a call script) and a spreadsheet you design with with checkboxes you can summarize and free-form notes you can begin to sort into categories when you spot trends.

Five calls to your top salespeople. Five calls to your top channel partners. Five calls to your top existing and happy customers. Five win-loss style calls to deals or accounts lost. And three calls to key execs in your company. That’s 23 calls. You can do that in a few days +/- (and you may need to call 15 to reach five in each category.)

Think strategically about your results. Try to categorize detailed answers into different “opinion categories” that you can sort on the spreadsheet to show trends and that would work well in charts. Prepare some “pull quotes” from what the respondents said on the phone. Put your results on a single slide executive summary for the slide-dependent in your company. Expand some details slides. Make some recommendations about where to start in your offerings, messages, content, and programs based on this work. Make it clear that you will use a “fail fast” methodology. 

Chances are that this little persona exercise can inform what assets and programs and messages you should be creating for a set of personas better that is way better defined than they were before. And help get buy off on what you are planning. And I bet you can do it in a week, tops. With no external budget needed.

2. Learn about the short and long-term business goals of your company

Remember those sales folks and company executives you talked with in the last step? Make sure in your conversations with them you understand what the short and long term business goals are for your company and what they think the business (or other) goals of your customers are. No use creating a whole bunch of assets and programs and features that address a persona your company will never address or a feature your company will likely never produce. 

An interesting side effect of hearing the business goals of your internal teams occurs when you learn the business needs of the customers you talked with are not aligned with internal teams. These customer and internal facing conversations intermingled and in quick succession may put you in the front lines of seeing challenges for your company earlier rather than later. Very valuable indeed.

3. Deeply understand how your best sales folks sell

Make sure in your conversations you understand what the sales cycle looks like for your product or solution. No use creating an asset or message about an aspect of your offering that is irrelevant. Who cares that “Widget 2020” has the updated Refrazzalator - when the market doesn’t understand or even care what a Refrazzalator is to begin with. Your best sales folks will know more about what is selling and isn't than most others. (This doesn't mean you should be sales driven instead of market driven. But top sales folks always have great insight you should account for.)

Use the conversations you had to understand how your buyers buy and how to help tell them know what they need to know when they need to know it. These answers can help you build a communication library that can be like “on-demand manufacturing” for customer facing team communications. Plus, you’ll quickly find out if what you have or are planning maps to what your sales team needs and what your road map is proclaiming.

Extra special activity during your work with your best sales folks: Ask your best sales folks to show you the presentations and emails and notes and funny cartoons they use when interacting with prospects and customers. Listen in on some pitch calls. Or conversations at a trade show or conference. How different are the sales leaders from what you are creating or planning? Instead of being angry with them “How dare you change the message!” evaluate what the top folks are using and try to have it inform what you’ll do next. 

4. Test, test, test, and try and test. And fail-fast

I’m shocked how many times I’ve seen teams unable to just pull the trigger on a test to see if something works.  

• Will someone scroll and engage with this part of my web site? Use a heat map for a few weeks and test.
• Which image engages better with a particular persona? Execute a multi-variant Twitter test targeting your personas and see, quickly and cheaply, which one won. 
• Will your target customers really use that new feature? Get a drawing in front of them. Ask users, buyers, and influencers if it is important. Ask them if it is more important than some other capability. Ask them if they would pay more for that new feature.
• Will someone watch our 5 minute demo video? Publish a one minute version, a 3 minute, and a 6 minute. See what the drop-off rates are. 

If an itty-bitty test doesn’t work, change it and test again. And again. There are many ways to test ideas quickly that won't impact or ruin your brand even if they fail. Just try. (Within reason...)

The bottom line

Is the entire approach in this post oversimplified? Probably. (OK, sure, it's simplified.) Indeed simple tests don’t often have “statistical significance” -- was there enough web traffic to show true trends on a heat map? Maybe, maybe not. Did I ask the right people about the feature? Did I ask enough people? There are a lot of reasons not to do these things and to discount initial findings. Skepticism is good.

But...

I posit something else. Would you rather have people on your teams just guessing at what actions to take? Or testing, even if imperfectly, to see what is working before doubling down and investing more in a program? Or spending $100K on research and taking too long to get results that may or may not be more accurate?

Let me know what you think in the comments,

Regards,

Gary

You can find some other cool blog entries related to this topic. Here’s a three-step version of an approach and here’s a five step version.