Want to understand your market better? Talk to them.
I recently had the privilege of working with the Maplewoods Centre, University of Guelph’s well regarded training facility for mental health specialists. Maplewoods’ teaching model relies on its post-graduate students gaining practical experience with actual clients by providing counselling services under the supervision of expert faculty. Despite a critical community need for mental health care, and some early branding and advertising efforts, they weren’t seeing enough clients who would gain value from their services in this uniquely reciprocal relationship.
My work was to engage the community’s social service and health sector in simple one-on-one interviews that allowed us to candidly explore the potential barriers in the market and how to overcome them. Before long, the conversations started to paint the picture we needed and after a handful of chats, themes emerged, and an effective marketing strategy took shape. Today, Maplewoods has retooled its approach based on the advice of the people who know their market best and is on its way to filling the roster and giving students – and community members – a great mental health support experience.
I realized that it had been several years since I’d led a similar exercise—to discover what we didn’t know and build a road map simply by having the right conversations with the right people. Even important folks with big jobs and busy days were willing, even eager, to set aside 30 minutes to chat about their sector and how my client could help them support unmet needs.
All I needed to do was ask.
Back in the day, I would lead several similar projects each year for clients ranging from law firms to charities. It was a planning staple that allowed me to tap my journalism training and curiosity to gather invaluable insight. As a bonus, who doesn’t love a good chin wag?
In the world where we can access seemingly endless data, we seem to have shifted away from emphasizing this personalized primary research. Beyond any doubt, we can learn a lot from data to guide a marketing and communications strategy: analyze website traffic patterns, search engine optimization keyword research, social media activity, user group commentaries, drill into Google or Facebook reviews, and nowadays, even pull in AI to find and distill mountains of studies and research that live online.
Marketers are also using sophisticated Customer Relationship Management systems to understand the clients themselves—by seeking and recording their stories, opinions and experiences, and pulling that data into spreadsheets that can give us accurate pictures of our customer personas.
All are viable tactics. Why wouldn’t we tap our unprecedented access to data in an effort to create an evidence-led strategy. No brainer.
But data gathering tools can’t have an intimate conversation with customers and sector leaders who know the market well. Analyzing data can’t focus on listening in a conversation, finding the unexpected gems and going down the rabbit holes that are hallmarks of one-on-one conversations. It can’t intuitively build on what we hear in one discussion when speaking with someone else to validate or further explore the point. It can’t toss out ideas and what-ifs and bounce them around for a while.
Since the first business courted its first customer centuries ago, we’ve relied on that connection to truly understand how to make their lives easier. Why stop that now? In my experience, never, not once, did a series of interviews not yield surprising and extremely useful information.
Want to get into your customer’s head? Just ask.