02, Apr 2025
Find The Right Marketing Channels
Most organizations wish they had more money to spend on marketing. Either to build awareness, or help drive customers to close. But, up to 75% of the marketing budget they do use is likely inefficiently spent. Poor choices in marketing channels, or spreading resources across too many channels, results in businesses failing to connect with [...]
05, Mar 2025
Avoid A Rebranding Fail
Rebranding feels like a fresh start. The chance to reinvent, reignite, and re-capture consumer attention. Done right, rebranding can spark renewed interest in a business, strengthen customer loyalty, and even set a company apart in a crowded market. Done wrong, rebranding can lead to customer confusion, loss of recognition, and a profits nosedive. How do [...]
24, Feb 2025
Use Original Research To Stand Out In AI Search
Publishing original research is a long-trusted method for building brand awareness and authority while improving search rankings. But, as AI reshapes content and SEO, does original research still hold the same value? The short answer? Yes. If anything, original research is more valuable than ever. Its alignment with AI search algorithms, not to mention its [...]
13, Feb 2025
Data Driven Pricing Strategies
Pricing is one of the most critical business decisions. Price too high and your customers may walk away. Price too low and you leave money on the table. Striking the perfect balance requires more than guesswork. Data-driven pricing strategies do just that. They allow businesses to align prices with customer expectations and market dynamics, resulting [...]
06, Feb 2025
Stay Ahead Of Customer Churn
Churn is a natural part of business. High churn shouldn't be. But here’s the challenge: churn drivers are often invisible. Customers aren’t always vocal about their frustrations—they just quietly leave. Underlying issues with onboarding, unmet expectations, or other critical elements go unheard until you're losing more customers than you can afford. Thankfully, proactive strategies keep [...]
05, Jan 2025
Spot New Trends Before Competitors
The ability to identify and act on emerging market trends gives companies a massive advantage. But, how do you actually detect trends before everyone else? The answer lies in strategic market research. By using a combination of techniques, companies uncover early signals and transform them into actionable strategies. The Importance of Detecting Trends Emerging trends [...]
03, Jan 2025
Pinpoint Declining Close Rate Issues
Established companies with market-tested products frequently face a common problem at some point: a declining close rate. After years of solid performance, once-steady win rates start going down. But, the underlying culprits are not clear. Is the product feature set no longer relevant? Has the sale team lost its ability to create value? Perhaps there [...]
01, Dec 2024
Prepping 2025 Strategy Planning Sessions
Market research is (often) the starting point for many strategic planning activities. It helps uncover why things are or are not working today, and it illuminates viable paths forward. This means that as a market research agency we have front row seats to the critical questions being voiced across our diverse client base. And, we [...]
05, Nov 2024
Why NPS Tells You Very Little
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) method of measuring customer satisfaction is a simple approach to quickly gauge consumer sentiment. In use for nearly twenty years, NPS is used as a proxy for business resiliency, customer loyalty, and other key performance indicators. But, its very simplicity makes it an extremely limited metric. Its sole focus on [...]
04, Oct 2024
Use Original Research To Get PR
Getting any kind of PR can feel next to impossible, especially when you have nothing seemingly new to talk about. Your business isn’t new. Your product isn’t new. Therefore, journalists don’t have anything new to report on. Enter in original research. Developing and publishing original research is that newness you need to get on journalists’ [...]
15, Sep 2024
Prioritize Your Product Roadmap
Product teams are tasked with building, managing, and prioritizing product roadmaps, all in the name of reducing customer churn and driving acquisition. How do you get your roadmap right? Including items asked for by customers is certainly one approach. But, making the right call is challenging when customers ask for very different things. Instead, we [...]
07, Aug 2024
How To Design A Successful Loyalty Program
Successful customer loyalty programs have the power to convert one-time buyers into valuable repeat customers. By accelerating re-purchase cycles and average order values, they play a significant role in building strong customer lifetime values. But, when done poorly, they have the potential to confuse customers, encourage discounting, or even alienate specific customer groups. This is [...]
03, Jul 2024
Using Research For A Successful Rebrand
Legacy brands must work hard to stay fresh and compete in crowded categories. It isn't enough to have once been relevant. You need to stay relevant. Rebranding is a powerful approach to maintain relevancy. But it's no easy feat. After all, a successful rebrand isn't just updated logos and color schemes. It's a broader process [...]
10, Jun 2024
Correctly Measure A Product’s Market Size
How often have your rolled your eyes when hearing about a new product's $1 billion market size potential? Yeah, us too. It's exciting to imagine hockey-stick style growth curves when launching a new product. But, the reality is often far different. Flawed approaches to measuring market size lead businesses to overestimate demand for a product [...]
03, May 2024
The Best Ways To Use Zero-Party Data
Capturing customer data is no longer a "set it and forget it" mechanism. With everything from government regulations to customer expectations driving when and how data can be collected, organizations must be increasingly thoughtful about where they source data. Enter zero party data. As a rich source of data direct from customers, zero party data [...]
15, Apr 2024
How To Sell To Enterprise Accounts
So many companies, at some point in their history, think about selling into an enterprise account. This could be the small consumer goods company with a strong track record in regional, specialty markets wondering if they can sell to a Kroger or Albertsons. Or, it could be a B2B SaaS company with some financial backing [...]
02, Mar 2024
How To Perform Advertising Testing
Don't you want to put the best ad content in front of your customers? After all, many organizations spend at least 10% of their revenue on marketing. That's a lot of money to lose if your advertising falls flat. It's a key reason organizations allocating significant budget to their media fees often perform advertising testing. [...]
19, Feb 2024
Creating Benchmarks That Build Business Awareness
We often think about benchmarks as internal tools to see how our business is performing. While this is a great reason to use benchmarks, it often takes priority over another great use case: Using them to tout a business (and its know-how) to outside audiences. Because benchmarks are generally fairly simple numbers, they are easy to [...]
24, Jan 2024
Measuring Customer Lifecycle Stages
How strong is your brand? How effective are your marketing and sales activities (relative to the competition)? If you care about any of these things, you need to care about customer lifecycle stages, and how efficiently customers move across those stages. As prospective customers transition from early brand awareness to making a final purchase, they [...]
10, Dec 2023
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) Research
Nearly 30,000 new products launch each year...and 95% fail. No doubt highly motivated, intelligent people launch these products. Why then, is the failure rate so high? At first glance it doesn't make sense. We're living in a time period with the greatest opportunity to collect and access customer data. It seems we have all the [...]
05, Nov 2023
Key 2024 Strategy Planning Questions
One of the great things about being a market research agency is that we get a front row seat to our clients' business planning processes. We're connecting with them at critical junctures in their strategic planning and helping guide their paths forward. And, as typically happens, the year-end season is just one of those critical [...]
11, Oct 2023
Why Customers Are Not Buying
What happens when you spend time, money, and energy on marketing and customer acquisition...only to fall short of your goals? Naturally, you ask, “What happened?” The answer could be one thing, or a medley of things. From product-market fit to pricing to customer targeting, companies could have some or all of these things wrong. But, [...]
06, Oct 2023
How Voice Of The Customer Research Drives Business Strategy
"Listen to your customers" is a mantra we hear all of the time. And, while it's a great mantra, it's only as good as your follow through. Organizations that truly want to succeed need a systemic process to not just listen to, but also act on, customer feedback. This is where voice of the customer [...]
03, Sep 2023
How To Track Your Brand Health
You'd be hard pressed to find a single category with only one brand. That means from day one, you'll always be asking, "Do we have a strong brand?" Brand health tracking studies answer this very question. By uncovering a variety of dimensions—awareness, perceptions, and usage—these studies give you an objective view of how you stack [...]
21, Aug 2023
Measure Price Elasticity Via The Gabor Granger Model
Pricing a product or service is really hard. For some, it's one of the hardest components of any go-to-market plan. Understandably so. Price a product too high and you risk customer alienation. Price a product too low and you leave money on the table. But, if you find the sweet spot, you maximize revenue and [...]
11, Jul 2023
How To Measure Brand Awareness
Brand awareness directly ties to revenue. Consider a recent study that showed repeated brand advertising results in 23% revenue growth. This is because the more people know a brand, the more they are likely to buy it. Additionally, brand awareness also has positive impacts on customer lifetime values (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC). It's a [...]
20, Jun 2023
When To Use A Conjoint Analysis
What Is A Conjoint Analysis A conjoint analysis is a market research approach that helps you understand how people make decisions. With conjoint analyses, you see how people make trade-offs in real time, giving you much needed intel on what features to emphasize, and which ones to deprioritize. In essence, it replicates the real-time decisions [...]
02, Oct 2023
Package Optimization Research
You can't judge a book by its cover...but everybody does. The same applies to packaging. You may have a killer product. But, if the packaging doesn't shine, customers just won't buy it. Packaging research addresses this dynamic head on. It makes different packaging ideas compete head-to-head, giving you objective benchmarks to measure how compelling each [...]
30, May 2023
Performing Customer Churn Research
It's hard to make people aware of your product or service. Getting them to actually buy may be even harder. That's why it's so difficult when they decide not to re-purchase. You spent ample time and resources acquiring them, and now you may not recoup your expenses. If you're starting to see more and more [...]
11, May 2023
Building Data-Informed Customer Journey Maps
How do you get a buyer from Point A to Point B? We bet there are a whole lot of things you think you can do. But, which of those is actually worth doing? Ask some questions to find out! Customer journey map research lets you visualize the unique steps users take when engaging with [...]
09, Mar 2023
Analyzing When To Sunset A Brand Or Product
It takes a lot to build a well-loved, revenue-driving brand. But, sometimes, brands lose their luster. Maybe they just don't keep up with the times. Perhaps they represent outdated technology or ideals. Or, they possibly just haven't gotten the investment needed to stay bright and shiny. Regardless of what leads to this point, the fact [...]
06, Mar 2023
Powering Your Content Marketing With Research
Content marketing might seem all the rage. Just produce blog posts or eBooks and new customers will find you. Right? Well, not quite. Your content marketing must actually be good! That means it must be informative and novel while (in our opinion) providing your audience something new or compelling that's worth their time. This is [...]
05, Dec 2022
How To Vet Your Product Or Feature Idea
Smart business leaders understand that a product or feature idea isn't good just because it seems like a good idea. It takes input from customers or prospective users to truly evaluate its quality and worth. This extra step is vital to avoid being one of the 95% of new products that fail every year. How [...]
15, Apr 2023
How To Produce Data Driven Personas
Too often, customer personas get lost in the wind. Either they get considered and forgotten, or no one cares about them from the onset. These common issues often stem from one core problem: Zero data was used to create those personas! In order for team members to buy into personas, and for personas to have [...]
12, Oct 2022
Key 2023 Strategy Planning Questions (And How To Answer Them)
The end of the year is a great time to reflect on what went well over the past 12 months. And, what went...not so well. As teams gear up for 2023, it's time for them to plot a course to keep rowing the ship in the right direction or readjust their course. In turn, it's [...]
11, Oct 2022
Determining Survey Sample Size Needs
We get a common question all the time: what should my survey sample size be? It's a very reasonable question. You want enough people in a survey that you feel confident about the results. But, you don't want to break the bank and pay for too many respondents. What's the sweet spot? It depends. Let's [...]
09, Sep 2022
Finding Business-Relevant Patterns In Interview Research
Interviews or open-ended responses are unbelievably useful ways to collect rich, nuanced feedback. This data opens your eyes to ideas, challenges, pain points, or roadblocks customers have. And, in doing so, gives you needed insights into how to better build your business, brand, or products to meet market needs. But, the very thing that makes [...]
22, Aug 2022
Calculate Market Size & Total Addressable Market
How do you know if it's worth investing in a new product or service idea? It may sound great...but is there actually an audience for it? And, will they actually spend money? You estimate it's potential market size. That's how. Market sizing is a strategic approach to estimating a business's revenue potential. It tells individuals [...]
20, Jul 2022
Longitudinal Metrics Any Business Should Care About
Working on hunches is problematic. A single event like a particularly bad customer review or the launch of a long-awaited product can skew perception. The world may appear rosy when problems are actually lurking. Or, the sky may seem like it's falling...when it really, really isn't. How do you instead get an objective view of [...]
22, Jun 2022
Actionable Buyer Persona Research
Fluff is great when talking about a sweet confectionary marshmallow product. It is not great when talking about market research output. And yet, that's a common complaint when it comes to buyer persona research. The output is fluffy and you can't do anything worthwhile with it. If this is an issue you've faced, it's because [...]
20, Jun 2022
Using Research To Drive Business Strategy
Investing in market research is not a novelty project. It represents time, financial resources, and personnel bandwidth commitments. Which begs the question: What business value can you get from doing market research in the first place? The quick answer: A lot! Using research to drive business strategy across key revenue centers like marketing, sales, and [...]
13, Jun 2022
The Pros & Cons of Focus Groups
Are you considering running a focus group? They are a fantastic market research method that helps organizations explore new customers, markets, or product ideas. However, as with any research method, they are not a one-stop shop. The very thing that makes focus groups unique also drives their limitations. Let's look at what defines this research [...]
06, Jun 2022
Collecting Survey Feedback From Niche Audiences
Regardless of what type of market research you're planning, you need to find people to participate in your study. Sometimes, this can be very simple. If you have a list of existing or prospective customers, use that. It's readily available and affordable. However, what do you do if you don't have a readymade list of [...]
01, Jun 2022
When To Do A Qualitative Product Concept Test
Product concept tests are a fantastic way to do mitigate business risk. Rather than launching products and hoping customers love them, concept tests let you assess customer appeal first. It's a time-tested market research approach to increase the chances of products actually resonating with customers. And, it helps you avoid launching one of the 95% [...]
18, May 2022
How To Do Brand Positioning Research
Brand positioning helps build great brands. It's a foundational branding element that helps communicate to customers a product's value, how it will make them feel, and why it's right for them. When executed correctly, it gives a brand that je ne sais quoi that compels you to buy. However, landing on the right components that [...]
01, May 2022
How To Learn From Customer Churn
How much effort does it take to get someone to check out your product? Not to mention trial it and buy it. There's a lot of time, energy, and cost associated with building awareness and acquisition, especially if you're engaging in any kind of paid marketing activities. If you lose that person and never get [...]
22, Apr 2022
How To Perform Ad Creative Testing
Don't you want your ads to perform well? And, don't you want to avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars on media fees that don't improve sales? Ad creative testing lets you hit both of these "birds" with one stone. It's a streamlined market research approach to collect an initial read on the relative appeal [...]
15, Apr 2022
Standard Customer Interview Framework
Some of the richest data to inform business strategy, marketing execution, and go-to-market planning comes direct from customers. You get feedback directly from people who know what they need, how they need it, and what they expect you to deliver. The data is invaluable. But first, you need to figure out how to gather it [...]
06, Apr 2022
4 Ways To Isolate Why Your Marketing Isn’t Working
It's tempting to point to insufficient funds as the reason why your marketing isn't working. Just spend a little more and your problems are solved. Right? Wrong! Going down this path likely means throwing good money after bad. This is because so much has to go right to get a new customer. First they need [...]
30, Mar 2022
How Many B2B Customer Interviews Are Enough
Whenever we plan out a B2B interview-based market research project, one question always pops up: "How many customer interviews are enough?" Of course, we also talk about the business objectives that drive the study and the learnings we want. But, planning for the number of participants tells us how much work we'll need to put [...]
28, Mar 2022
Create Case Studies With Market Research Tactics
Ready to create case studies? If you're a B2B business (or a B2C business with long sales cycles), you should be. Case studies fuel a host of marketing and sales activities, from PR and content marketing to outbound sales enablement. But, volume matters. The more case studies you have that represent a wide variety of [...]
18, Mar 2022
Running A Competitive Audit To Kick Start Customer Acquisition
We get it. You want to jump into the deep end with lead generation and new customer acquisition. But how do you pick the right approach? We suggest always kicking things off with a competitive audit. Competitive audits methodically examine marketing, sales, and product dynamics across competitors in any given market. With objective comparisons in [...]
09, Mar 2022
What To Expect From A MaxDiff Research Study
Did you know that companies that prioritize effectively reduce costs by 15%? By cutting out unnecessary items and focusing on optimum deliverables, businesses perform better. It sounds obvious, right? But, how do you begin those prioritizations in the first place? If you're a business trying to launch a new product or service, what do you [...]
21, Feb 2022
Using Thought Leadership Research For Marketing
We are huge fans of using thought leadership research to drive marketing wins. So much so that we eat our own dog food and publish this type of work on a regular basis. Why? Because thought leadership research builds the foundations for marketing activities like awareness-driving SEO and PR as well as consideration-generating content and [...]
17, Jan 2022
Performing One-To-One B2C Customer Interviews
B2C customer interviews are extremely powerful tools. They let you validate product-market need, drive new product ideation, and understand evolving needs and expectations. However, without a structured approach for developing your interviews, you may find the results lacking. That would be a darn shame considering how much time it takes to perform interviews in the [...]
03, Jan 2023
The Difference Between Quantitative vs Qualitative Research
As market researchers, a really common question we hear from clients is, "Should I do quantitative or qualitative research?" We say it's not about the research methods. It's about the broader business questions you have, and the conditions you find yourself in. After all, very few people are doing research for the sake of research. [...]
27, Dec 2021
Performing Customer Segmentation For Better Marketing Results
With so many potential customers to go after, who is the best target? And, how do you target them? These are key questions anyone developing marketing or go-to-market plans must answer. After all, how can you create compelling marketing positioning and messaging, let alone pick the right marketing channels, if these questions remain unanswered. This [...]
18, Dec 2021
How To Perform A Brand Awareness Study
We perform brand awareness studies because a brand is such an important thing. Studies show the stronger a brand's awareness, the more likely people are to buy it. In fact, brand awareness has positive impacts on customer lifetime values (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC). Why? Because trust matters. And a brand, if anything, is [...]
09, Dec 2021
Reach The Greatest Number Of Customers With TURF Analysis
All businesses work with finite resources. This means making trade-offs is a daily activity. In the world of marketing and product development, this translates to deciding which products get launched or which messages get made...and which ones get left behind. How do you make sure you're making the right trade offs? Through a time-tested method [...]
06, Dec 2021
Unearthing Hidden Sentiment To Create Compelling Marketing Messaging
Do you know how customers benefit intrinsically when they use your brand or product? Or, at the very least, what they hope they'll get from using it? Sure, you can ask. You could even do classic word association games to let them make those connections themselves. However, there's a problem to this general approach. The [...]
24, Nov 2021
Aligning Marketing Tactics To Business Strategy
Tactics should follow strategy. Always. After all, it's only by homing in on core business needs and goals that an organization can determine the activities necessary to achieve those goals. Marketing is no exception to this rule. Marketing tactics can support a wide variety of business needs—driving awareness, building interest, converting new customers, fueling retention—but [...]
16, Nov 2021
Running A Brand Awareness Study When Classic Approaches Don’t Work
Let's say you're ready to launch marketing programs and spend money to build awareness for your brand. Will it work? A classic approach to answer this question is launching a brand awareness study. This is a survey that polls relevant individuals before and after the campaign to see if you're moving the needle. It's an [...]
15, Oct 2021
Performing Brand Voice & Tone Research
Branding is often intangible. It describes how something makes us feel or the ideas it evokes in our minds. That intangibility can make branding easy to brush off. Yet, it's what makes branding so powerful. After all, the ability to create those emotions is the difference between someone picking your product and leaving your competitor's [...]
11, Oct 2021
How To Perform Message Testing Research
How do you talk about your business? Do you describe its products and services in a way that gets your target audience interested and excited? Do you know? Good marketing messaging is like a shiny light. It piques someone's interest to get them engaged and ready to learn more. But bad messaging falls flat, and [...]
02, Oct 2021
Choosing Between Conjoint vs MaxDiff Analysis
When doing product or pricing optimization work, a classic research challenges is choosing between conjoint vs maxdiff analysis. Both are excellent market research methods for letting you understand ideal feature sets or pricing to maximize purchase interest. However, they yield very different results. By looking at the difference in how each method is set up, [...]
13, Sep 2021
Developing Go To Market Research
How do you avoid being one of the 90% of companies that launch failed products this year? One clear failure mitigation approach is developing a Go To Market (GTM) plan that identifies market opportunities and outlines a clear path for a successful launch. However, the most successful GTM plans are based on objective market intelligence and strategy. This [...]
01, Sep 2021
Marrying The Buyers Journey & Marketing Tactics To Drive Conversions
When you're ready to start driving customers to your business, where do you start? Do you go for paid ads or blog posts, conferences or social media, sponsored content or PR? The answer: it depends. Without first identifying where your customers are in the buyer's journey, an approach that lets you know how much they [...]
26, May 2021
The Marketing Budget Step You’re Likely Missing
So you're ready to start marketing your product...or perhaps you're ready to ramp things up and start spending more. Of course, you'll need to put a complete budget together. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, sort of. Figuring out the typical line items that should go into your budget may not be too challenging. But building the [...]
19, Mar 2021
How To Do A Product Concept Test
If you build it, they will come. Right? No, it doesn't work that way. If you build it correctly, with the right set of features and benefits, then they will likely come. This doesn't sound nearly as good...but it is far closer to reality. Being thoughtful about how you develop products and services means that [...]
22, Feb 2021
Get Smarter About Customers In Each Stage Of Their Buyer Journey
Being successful in a competitive landscape hinges on a critical element: keeping your customers' needs and wants front and center. That's why making the voice of the customer the North Star of your marketing process is key to not just understanding how prospective customers are evaluating your product but also to knowing what you need [...]
15, Jan 2021
Troubleshoot Why People Aren’t Buying (More)
A lot has to go right to get a new customer. First, they have to know you exist. Then, they need to be able to evaluate that your product does what they want it to do, and determine that they're willing to pay for it. And, even if they do buy it, they need to [...]
27, Dec 2020
Are Your Digital Paid Media Campaigns Set Up Right
It’s not uncommon to see companies spend tens of thousands of dollars each and every month on running Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads. Unfortunately, not all of these companies have a strong understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes and if their media budgets are really being used wisely. And no, we absolutely don’t [...]
19, Nov 2020
9 Key Questions To Assess Your Biggest Marketing & Sales Opportunities
When we speak with prospective clients, it's not uncommon for the starting question to be: "How can we grow more?" Driven by initial success in building customers and seeing revenue come in, there's a natural desire to put fuel into the fire to see more topline volume. As reasonable as this desire is (c'mon, who [...]
15, Nov 2020
Why A Strong Marketing Infrastructure Drives Business Performance
There comes a time in any business's life when it needs to evolve from rote marketing to smarter, optimized activities...or risk petering out. But the path to getting there can seem murky. When organizations have a variety of marketing activities live at any given time, understanding what's working (or not working!) and how to do [...]
10, Oct 2020
How To Pick the Right Market Research Method
You can’t build great products or services without knowing what your customer actually wants. And you can’t know what they want if you don’t take the time to even understand who they are in the first place. This is where market research becomes so vital: It affords teams the actionable insights they need to inform [...]
04, Sep 2020
How Marketing Strategy Drives Slam Dunk Customer Awareness & Acquisition
Supported by a robust sales force and tight cost controls, Pharm Ltd. experienced sustained double-digit growth over a number of years, only to find that their supply chain struggled to keep pace.
10, Aug 2020
Building Strong Go To Market Plans For Successful Product Launches
Many businesses, large and small, have a huge source of great ideas that can help them improve, innovate, and grow, and yet so many of these companies never think of using this amazing corporate asset. What is this highly valuable asset? Its own people.
13, Jul 2020
Optimizing Sales Operations To Drive Conversions
Says Morgan Fraud, the author of The Thinking Corporation, “Given that we are all capable of contributing new ideas, the question becomes how do you successfully generate, capture, process and implement ideas?†Becoming an organization capable of answering this question can benefit in a number of ways
28, Apr 2020
Customer Interview Best Practices To Nail Early Product Development
At a time when purchasing behaviors have drastically changed, many businesses are re-looking at their existing products or services and considering if they need to pivot their focus, or evolve their current offerings. And, even younger companies who perhaps haven’t even closed their first customer are wondering if the product they’ve built is going to [...]
03, Apr 2020
Optimizing Your Performance Marketing Funnel
Performance marketing, or using paid tactics to drive measurable lead and customer conversions, is nothing new. SaaS and e-commerce companies have been doing it for years. Yet right now, traditionally offline companies are finding that they have to look to performance marketing to survive…not to mention those businesses that have historically straddled the online/offline divide. [...]
19, Mar 2020
Evaluating Marketing Activities & Budgets During The Covid-19 Crisis
One of the biggest issues we're helping our clients tackle right now is how to think about their marketing budget and in-market activities amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Revenue is falling and with no clarity around when this crisis might end, businesses are scrambling to adjust and ride out the storm. In such ambiguous times, a [...]
15, Feb 2020
Leveraging Customer Personas To Drive Business Success
How are you keeping your customer front-and-center as you prioritize product, marketing, and sales efforts? Are you and your team adept at understanding what drives your customers, what keeps them from reaching their goals, and why they seek you out in the first place? This is where customer personas come in. At their core, customer [...]
07, Jan 2020
Eight Components Of An Actionable Marketing Operations Audit
An all too common issue we hear from business leaders sounds something like this, “I just don’t know if my marketing is working.†This can mean anything from having limited confidence that advertising is set up correctly to incomplete visibility into the scope of marketing activities, how those activities are performing, and if the spend [...]
02, Jan 2020
Data-Driven Approaches To Nailing Pricing
How much should I charge? How much can I charge? These are the classic questions made by anyone launching a new product or service. Sometimes we have strong guidelines in place like competitive product pricing to help make decisions. Other times, especially in completely new industries and sectors, pricing can feel like a Wild West [...]
05, Dec 2019
The Metrics Your Marketing Team Should Be Tracking
We've all heard the adage "you can't manage what you don't measure." That's a nice idea and all until you get to the next question: what the heck should you be measuring in the first place? It can be all too easy to run from zero to swimming in data and suffering from analysis paralysis. [...]
17, Oct 2019
Measuring The Impact of Branding on Customer Acquisition & Lifetime Value
Let's be frank. Sometimes talking about "branding" or "marketing strategy" feels talking about fluffy unicorns. It sounds pretty and nice, but is it really going to move your business forward? The answer is "yes." The right marketing strategies and brand frameworks are necessary elements to driving customer acquisition and building revenue. Thankfully, you don't have [...]
24, Sep 2019
Customer Segmentation: What It’s All About And Why You Need To Do It
Who's your customer? This is one of the first questions we ask when talking to a prospective client. After all, how can you begin to develop a plan to reach them, let alone sell to them, if you don't know who they are and what they need. This is where customer segmentation comes in to [...]
04, Aug 2019
Understanding the Whys & Hows of Customer Journey Mapping
Whether you're talking marketing, sales, or product development, the customer experience should always be front and center. After all, how else will you know how to attract a prospect, gain their trust, convince them to buy, or build a product that will wow them if you don't know what it is they need and the [...]
01, Jul 2019
Developing Websites That Improve On Site Conversion
You want a website that converts visitors into customers, right? If so, you’re likely wondering if a website redesign is a good decision. You want to do everything in your power to get people excited and interested in your products and services…but you also don’t want to do unnecessary work. Truth be told, most people [...]
03, Jun 2019
How To Pick The Right B2B Marketing Tactics
Are you ready to hit the ground running and start acquiring leads and new customers? If so, you’re probably wondering what type of marketing you should do. While the marketing landscape can appear seemingly endless, you’ll generally find that B2B businesses leverage a select set of tactics. We’ll go throw the most commonly-found tactics in [...]
06, May 2019
The Fundamentals of Marketing Strategy
Just about any company ready to hit the ground running and attract new customers asks, "What marketing should we do?" But, the real question should actually be, "What's the right marketing strategy for my business?" No matter how seemingly good or clever your marketing might be, without the right marketing strategy in place, these efforts [...]
24, Apr 2019
Top Customer Retention Tools & Practices
In recent research we published, we found that 80 percent of SMB owners are looking forward to strong performance in 2019. A variety of factors was attributed to this optimism, including the quality of their employees as well as the strength of their marketing and sales efforts. One notable finding though was the 51 percent [...]
20, Mar 2019
Understanding Earned, Owned, & Paid Marketing
One of the biggest struggles with starting out with marketing is figuring out exactly what you want to do. There are so many things you could tackle…but with limited time and resources, it’s often necessary to limit your scope to just a few activities. This is why understanding the difference between earned, owned, and paid [...]
01, Mar 2019
Understanding Which Marketing Research Tactics To Use
Consider the unintentional marketing research we came across one day at a client’s office. Someone brought in a box of assorted cherry confections from a local company and shared them with the team. After an hour, the once-full box looked like this: At first glance, it was clear that the Honey Pecans, Vanilla Almonds and [...]
05, Feb 2019
The Best Content for Account Based Marketing (ABM)
When organizations are ready to jump on board the Account Based Marketing (ABM) bandwagon, they often quickly realize one major challenge: they don’t have the content needed to actually start the process. They may have done the work needed to pinpoint company targets and the stakeholders that are part of a major purchase. But, without [...]
30, Jan 2023
B2B Customer Interview Questions & Preparation
Launching a B2B customer interview project is one of the best ways to make sure your business is on the right path. Data from these interviews validates several key business areas, including product-market fit, industry evolutions, and buying cycles. In essence, they are critical for building better and smarter marketing, sales, and product engines. Why [...]
03, Jan 2019
How To Choose Marketing Automation Software
If you're new to marketing automation, chances are you're scratching your head determining how to choose marketing automation software that will be right for your business. Or, maybe you're still deciding if what you get is even worth the expense. Let's pull this issue apart a bit. By first understanding exactly what marketing automation is [...]
02, Dec 2018
How To Choose CRM Software & Tools
CRM software is currently estimated to be the fastest-growing software market, expected to reach $80 billion in revenue by 2025. There’s one core reason why this is happening: CRM software and tools are crucial for helping businesses close deals faster and smarter. Let’s learn a little more about what CRM software is, why it’s so [...]
01, Sep 2018
The Fundamentals of Account Based Marketing (ABM)
At its core, Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a way of using hyper-tailored content pushed to extremely targeted prospects for the goals of driving awareness and interest in your business, and ultimately converting new customers. It's a long process with a lot of upfront investment, which is generally why it's found in B2B businesses. When [...]
03, Aug 2018
Startup Analytics: Key Metrics For Any Young Business
How do you know if your young business is healthy and has a viable business model? Do you keep tabs on marketing efforts and if they are working as efficiently and effectively as they could? How can you gauge the likelihood of outside parties being willing to invest in your business? Across business types, there are [...]
10, Jul 2018
How To Decrease Customer Acquisition Cost
One of the fundamental metrics startups and young businesses need to get a handle on early is their customer acquisition cost (CAC). Quite simply, CAC is the amount of money spent on acquiring a single user. More often than not, once you know your CAC, you want to figure out ways to decrease it. When you're [...]
05, Jun 2018
Using Data & Content Marketing As Your Acquisition Strategy
Being cash-strapped doesn't mean you can't employ the exact same tactics that the big boys and girls do to gain attention and fuel their content marketing efforts. On the contrary! Being in this marketing situation forces you to be more frugal, and find thrifty ways to effectively reach your target audience. It's one reason we [...]
15, May 2018
Building A Brand: The Upfront Framework
Just about every company wants more customers, or at the very least wants to build greater awareness for who they are, what they do, and why they’re better than everyone else. The classic answer is, “Let’s go do some marketing and advertising and people will come.†But will they? If your marketing and adverting activities [...]
