How to get the voice of your customer with no budget
Any good marketer knows that gaining customer insights is the foundation on which all of his or her work is built. Without truly understanding a customer - or a customer’s customer - any marketing strategy or plan is often populated with the supplier’s best guess. This wastes time and money as whatever you come up with sitting around a table with colleagues is unlikely to surpass going straight to the source: your customer.
This step is often overlooked in the chemical industry - because the science speaks for itself, right? It’s a critical (and easy) first place for a marketer to start the journey of becoming a customer-centric business. Unfortunately, conducting formal market research using an external consultant typically costs 10s of 1000s of dollars. Costs cover the consultant’s time and work, as well as recruitment costs. Given that marketing is an oft-questioned function within scientific companies, the ask to spend $30,000 on market research is often met with a laugh followed a hard “no”.
How are you supposed to get these insights? It’ll take time and elbow grease, but you can leverage multiple channels to talk to your customers. You may not be able to conduct research at the same scale as a consulting firm, but you’ll get enough directional data to point you down the right paths.
Here are four low- to no-cost ways to gain value customer insights without breaking the bank:
Trade shows: Want to find a customer in their natural habitat? Head to industry and association trade shows. If you’re looking to connect with marketers and scientists, they’ll be inhabiting their company’s booth for 2-3 straight days. Typically at these shows they’re focused on their own customer, so you’ll want to be strategic about when you approach to engage them in conversation. My advice is to wait for lulls in show floor traffic when booth staffers are likely to be idle. Don’t forget to be alert while you’re in the elevator, in the buffet line, or waiting for a talk to begin. You never know who will be next to you, and a 5-minute introductory conversation could be the start of a longer dialogue about that particular customer.
Social media: We forget just how much information everyone shares online. This channel requires a more granular approach - you may have to work through data individual by individual or job title by job title to gather your insights - but you can easily review anyone’s public social media activity. What are they posting? Where are they engaging? By going back up to a year in social media activity, you can sketch a deeper understanding of your customer.
Articles, company posts, podcasts: Even if your target persona doesn’t have public online activity, he or she may be speaking in other ways. Have they authored or been quoted in an article? Maybe their company featured them in a blog, or perhaps they’ve been a podcast guest. Anything someone has said in a company capacity is helpful to understanding their typical talking points.
Ask for a conversation: This should be the most obvious tactic but in my experience it’s the one we’re most afraid of at chemical companies. I’ve seen account managers who don’t trust a marketer to talk to their customer, or technical specialists who think a qualitative conversation is irrelevant to the scientific matters at hand. Your first option is to ask your colleagues directly for an introduction. Spell out what you’re trying to do (gather customer insights about X), set a time limit for the discussion, and offer for your colleague to (quietly) sit in. If that fails, you may need to move forward and beg for forgiveness later. Use e-mail or a LinkedIn connection request or direct message to reach out to the target customer. The same rules apply as going through your colleague: explain the purpose of the request, share the bigger picture of how it’ll ultimately benefit the customer, and ask for a reasonable amount of time.
Is this process more tedious than outsourcing market research to a dedicated professional? Yes. But given that it’s one of the most important marketing activities, it’s well worth your time to invest in your own primary and secondary research. The other cool thing about these low budget tactics is that they’re also applicable to other functions. If you’re an account manager trying to prep more thoroughly for a meeting? Do some social media research. If you’re a scientist hoping to learn more about the business? Invest in your own mini-project about a customer and bring those insights forward. The organization will only benefit from having more people who deeply understand the customer and use those insights to help drive the business and R&D pipeline forward.
