How Our Marketers are Leveraging Discuss to Harness the Power of Customer Insights

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Ever wonder why some marketing teams are more successful than others?

As marketers, we love to hear from our customers and often the easiest way to do that is with surveys. While the data helps us inform our marketing strategy, it still leaves us wanting the other half of the story, the half that allows us to listen to the voice of the customer. But with time and resource constraints, it’s often hard to hear from the people using our products — leaving us with only one side of the story.

I’m sure this sounds familiar, right? Every marketer and researcher has encountered this same challenge. I have good news for you. It doesn’t have to be hard to understand why your customers buy your brand from a retailer vs online or why they prefer website concept B over A.

Here at Discuss our marketing team leverages our own People Experience Platform. We’re able to get close to our customers and bring them to the forefront to make smarter, faster decisions in these three ways:

Understanding the why

First, we want to understand why. The best way to do that is by engaging with customers regularly. Having a platform to conduct rich and open conversations with customers allows us to share insights across the organization that can foster a culture of empathy.  This can inform product innovation, uncover new areas for exploration, or marketing campaigns that connect with a target audience. 

Example: At Discuss, we run regular Customer Advisory sessions to get in-depth market insights from our customers. We use these conversations to help inform our product direction, messaging, and overall strategy. 

Learning the how

Beyond the why we want to learn how products or services are used. This gives new and existing customers a way to increase their use and flexibility of your product or service and helps to identify any gaps or improvements that are needed to retain current customers and expand your customer base. In turn, leading you to build a better product or service. One that will keep your customers coming back and that will increase your market share.

Example: After launching our Self Caputres unmoderated feedback tool, we spoke with customers to gain insights into how they were using the approach. We learned that they needed a way to connect their asynchronous and live qual research. From these conversations, we listened, learned, and made changes to our product to allow our customers to go from an unmoderated conversation to a virtual interview seamlessly.

Informing go-to-market-strategy

Now that we have the why and the how we want to test some of our potential marketing strategies to see if they are resonating with our current and prospective customers. Whether you are trying to understand market product fit or what messaging triggers a customer need, conducting real-time qualitative research can help get to those top-of-mind moments that will help drive marketing decisions. These moments are important to understand when it comes to messaging, ads, and pretty much anything else that marketing serves up to their customers.

Example: By having regular conversations with customers, we have uncovered more ways that we can fit into our customers’ research process. We have created partnerships with platforms and technologies they use to make it easier for our customers to go from one research method to the next.

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So how can marketers start to harness the power of customer empathy?