What research techniques do you use to identify potential customers for a new product or service?

The mobile web means that there are many opportunities for start-ups, from bootstrapped home-based ventures right through to those with venture capital funding. But where do you start to get the ideas to build that first app? According to Steve Blank, you get out of the building. It’s only by meeting with and understanding potential customer’s needs that you can develop a product that people want to buy.

Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur who arrived in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and has built two highly successful businesses, launched two movements in customer care and entrepreneurialism and written four books. He’s the go to guy when it comes to learning how to launch a new business and giving it the best foundations for future success.

The mobile web has led to an exponential increase in start-up activity. Apps are, often, cheap to develop and easy to launch. You don’t need a huge team of programmers and designers. You don’t even need to be able to do the programming or design work yourself – it can be outsourced efficiently to other parts of the world. Entrepreneurialism has never been so simple to get started with.

Steve Blank’s advice to “get out of the building”, however, is even more pertinent in this environment. When the barrier to entry is low; competition is very high. There are more than 700 apps released every single day of the year and if you want to rise above the pack – you need to develop a product that will sell.

What is “Get out of the Building” About?

Author/Copyright holder: steve blank. Copyright terms and licence:Fair Use.

Steve says that too many start-ups focus their efforts in the wrong place. They look at selling products that they’ve thought of to a market that they believe exists. This isn’t a recipe for success it involves too much assumption. And if you assume – you make an ass out of U and me… which may be a touch trite but it’s not all that far off the mark either.

A better approach is not to get involved in sales or design at the beginning but rather to get involved with customer research. That means “getting out of the building” (which can be either literal or metaphorical) and meeting potential customers and learning to understand what problems they are looking to solve in their lives. When you understand their problems, you can design solutions to those problems that are meaningful and cost-effective. This, in turn, increases the chance that when your products (apps) are ready to launch that people will want them.

Customer Research

You may be thinking “but I don’t know any of my potential customers” but fortunately that’s not the end of the world. We can find our potential customers on LinkedIn, on their company websites, through our personal networks, etc. The joy of an always connected world is not just that there’s opportunity for app developers but also that there’s opportunity to connect quickly, easily and cheaply with nearly anyone we want to.

Steve indicates that it’s best not to go looking to talk to CEOs and C-suite execs but rather to find the users who will drive the need for our products. It’s mid-level managers and those at the coalface doing the work who will best understand wide-scale issues and need solutions for them.

Author/Copyright holder: Shimer College. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

A Simple Approach to Customer Research

Getting out of the building doesn’t mean heading out to talk to customers with just a vague intention to chat. You need to have a methodology in mind. Here’s a simple one that can help as suggested by Google Ventures:

1. Plan Your Questions

Before you start making appointments, decide on what you want to know. Put together a list of questions that can help focus on assumptions you’ve made. But don’t be afraid to let the interviewee take you off-piste; you can find that the most important problems aren’t discovered through your questions but rather through information that the potential-customer volunteers.

2. Plan Who To Talk To

Who would be the best positioned people to answer your questions? Are they representative of the target market you have in mind for your product? It’s always best to be clear about this from the start, so that you can meet with people who may (at some stage) buy the finished product. Otherwise their input is not likely to be high-value.

3. Plan the Interview

You’ve got the questions, you’ve got the people – the next element is to structure your interviews. Where will they be held? Which order will you ask questions in? How will you record and analyse the data you generate? Having this in mind can ensure that your research reveals the best results.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Share Prototypes

You may not be all the way there but if you have a bit of a prototype – hand it to the interviewee; get their opinion. The folks at Google say that even using a competitor’s product or website to glean feedback can be very useful. The more reality you can put into a product – the clearer that feedback should be.

Author/Copyright holder: Rosenfeld Media. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

5. Don’t Sell, Listen

You’re not selling the product. You’re trying to find out what people want so you can build a product. Don’t pitch it, get feedback and listen. Don’t use leading questions to get the answers you want to hear – leave things open and get real opinions. You may not always like what people tell you but it will leave your design process much better informed.

6. Play Back to The Participant

Once you get to the end of an interview, summarize your understanding to the participant of what they’ve said – let them correct you if you’re wrong. It never hurts to be 100% confident that you’ve understood what’s been said.

7. Summarize Your Findings

Finally, work through all the data from interviews – what have you learned? What trends emerge from this? What can you use in your product?

By getting out of the building and conducting high quality customer research; you can develop better products for your start-up. Your app will have a greater chance of standing out from the crowd and making you money and your customers happy.

The Take Away

Getting out of the building is all about doing customer research. The better you know your customers and understand their real problems; the more likely you are to produce a product that meets a need and gets used. The mobile web makes it very easy to be an entrepreneur but if you want to make that turn into success – you have to get out of the building and talk to your customers.

References

See Steve Blank talk about “Get out of the building” as a strategy.

Google Ventures offer tips on how to make getting out of the building even more effective.

Learn all about Steve Blank and his achievements.

Hero Image:

Author/Copyright holder: Michael Gaida. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain.

Brainstorming an effective marketing strategy is never easy work — you have to make decisions on who you think your target customers are, then spend an enormous amount of time gathering and analyzing data about their consumer habits. It’s either time-consuming or expensive, and often it’s both.

However, this time and monetary investment could yield game-changing results for your company. Are you starting to roll out your marketing plan and netting yourself some customers? Follow these 10 steps to be successful.

1. Survey Customers

You won’t be able to connect effectively with your potential customers if you don’t have a customer in mind. Survey current customers, as well as members of your target market, to find out how you can better present your product or service, or what aspects might be missing from what you’re currently offering.

Cast a wide net to capture those you think might be interested in your product or service, and use their data to shape your brand in a way that better resonates with your target market. Once you know who your audience is, where they hang out online and what they respond best to, then you can begin to market.

2. Research Your Competitors And Find Out Who Their Customers Are

An easy way to find out which kind of marketing campaign works and which don’t is by researching competitors in your industry.

Not only will this inexpensive effort give you some ideas to follow for your own campaigns, this research will also reveal dark spots in your competitor’s process and present new directions for you to take your own marketing strategy.

After all, just by going into business in the same industry, you’ll be going after some of your competitor’s target market — you might as well use their example to make your service and product better for their customers.

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3. Target Ads

Far cheaper than most methods of advertising, Facebook and Google targeted ads prove that a little can go a long way.

While most advertising in the real world only reaches whoever comes across a billboard, bus stop or commercial, these targeted ads can locate the people who are most likely to need your service based on geographical location, demographics (including age, gender, education and relationship status), interests (based on what they’ve shared or “liked”) and browsing activity.

By investing in targeted ads and paying through their Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression method, companies can see a significant bump in their user engagement, conversion and sales.

There’s having a presence on social media, and then there’s having a social media presence. When it comes to keeping customers, a little more effort on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram really go the distance.

Far too many businesses use their accounts to simply promote their own company, while smart social media managers strategize relevant posts, link to cool articles, answer customer questions as soon as they’re asked, and otherwise give online surfers the impression that there’s actually a human who cares.

These are the companies who retain their customers, give users new ways to use their service or product and help solve problems as they come up.

When Paul English was still presiding over Kayak, one of the most valuable practices he insisted on implementing was to keep an extremely annoying, loud phone in the middle of the office to receive customer complaints. This ensured the calls were answered — by anybody, including engineers, developers, content managers, or even English himself.

At Zappos, Tony Hsieh values customer service so much that they build in customer service training for every new hire, regardless of the job. And its customer service has gone to such lengths as to go to a rival shoe store to get a pair of shoes that the site had run out of.

The point? Always answer calls, always care for your customers, and always fix problems as they come in — your customers will love you for it.

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has been around since the early days of the Web, and it’s still an overlooked but highly effective means to raise your brand awareness significantly.

And with the number of affiliate networks out there, who operate on a PPC (Pay Per Click) or PPA (Pay Per Action) basis, it has never been easier or safer to find your product being promoted by appropriate publishers.

EBay, Amazon and certain marketing companies offer their own affiliate networks, but you can also try an exclusive PPA affiliate network.

7. Establish Trust In Your Community: Publish User Reviews, Get Likes, Syndicate Articles

With so many new, competing businesses congesting almost every industry, it’s getting increasingly difficult to stand out and grow a decent-sized following. To gain support, companies first have to establish trust.

As more than 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, it only makes sense to start by publishing user reviews and sending samples of your product for trusted bloggers to review.

As your company keeps growing, start placing in-house content in big websites that publish syndicated content, like Huffington Post, Forbes, FT, Fast Company and Inc. Don’t forget to use your real name — people respond better to a human being than to a corporation.

8. Connect With The Right Influencers

Engaging with big players in your industry can be an extremely effective way to garner a wider share base. After all, if you can get the attention of a thought leader or an influencer, you have the chance to capture their fans and friends, as well as establish trust and credibility.

Reach out to appropriate bloggers or entrepreneurs at conferences or over Twitter, send them relevant and interesting blog content that might pique their interest, and once again — be a human being, not just your company.

9. Post Relevant Content On Blogs

Keeping a practice of continually and diligently publishing relevant and original blog content not only helps keep your company shining in the warm Google sun, but it also helps potential customers truly get to know your company and where it’s coming from.

The content doesn’t have to be self-promotional (and shouldn’t be), but it should offer context into why your product or service is important, suggest the best ways to solve industry-related problems that arise in the everyday lives of your target demographic, impart some valuable wisdom, and generally inspire people to share your point of view.

If you don’t have enough resources or writers on staff to keep rolling out a constant stream of content for your blog, enlist the help of a content marketing platform like Content.ly or a virtual communications platform like Commeta.

10. Craft An Engaging Newsletter To Foster Leads

One of the most time-consuming aspects of online marketing is generating leads. Often, that involves analyzing customer demographics and social media activity, putting out ads and online surveys and updating user data from year to year.

However, new companies are cropping up to simplify the process of lead generation, and, in some cases — like LeadGenius — they even do the work for you.

A great way of nurturing prospects is with personalized email newsletters, A/B test advertising and promotional campaigns. Use the data to fine-tune the efforts that work and scale your best campaigns.

Gosh, that sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? That’s why companies like LeadGenius exist — to help you develop and nurture your leads without compromising your time.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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