Small Business Website Content Marketing Blog

The Eden Platform is all about using your content marketing site to find new customers.  This subject tends to be one of the more confusing aspects of business development.  So how do most successful companies do it?

Even with huge budgets, customer discovery is more than art than science.  I’ve listed the five basic steps below.  The most important part of this process is to be very methodical in your approach.  Knowing where you’ve been is the only way to improve and repeat successes.  Be sure to pay close attention to the details and record everything in a consistent format.

1.  Classification Structure

This step is also known as segmentation.  You might have a product in mind, or a general concept, but sometimes, you might just be fishing – looking for a problem to solve in a market that seems attractive.  What makes a market attractive?  Maybe your see alignment with your idea or product.  Or, maybe something about a segment strikes a chord and gets your creative juices flowing, knowing what you know about your company’s capabilities.

The segment selection process can be intuitive or it can be driven by highly sophisticated segmentation tools that carve up the total market into standardized groups.  In emerging industries, segmentation can evolve quickly.

2.  Hypothesis Testing

With your evaluation structure in place, you now need to determine, one segment at a time, if there is really an opportunity you can address.  You search from a research standpoint, paying particular attention to competitive offerings.  There’s a range of tools you can use.  A consumer products company might do a formal, quantitative study, and a company selling to enterprises might set up personal meetings with senior executives.

What are you looking for?  You’re identifying customer problems.  They should be big ones – “pain points.” If a problem isn’t urgent and important, it’ll be difficult to create a meaningful competitive advantage.  At the same time, you’re looking to see how your solution solves the problem.  Is it dramatically better?  Is it “demonstrable”?

If you’ve found a pain point in a large market you can address and there are no competitors (yes, it happens), you’ve stumbled upon an “unmet need,” one of the holy grails of new product development. Segment by segment, you are testing a hypothesis related to fit or alignment: that you have something of value to offer a customer group.  You’re not just collecting information.  This process never stops, even after you introduce your product. In fact, the best is yet to come.  Once a product is in the market, learning based on actual usage will flow in.

3.  Nuance Testing

This step is easy to overlook.  All problems have context. In other words, when customers solve problems, they are affected by circumstances associated with timing and physical surroundings, and by the nature of the task itself. As a marketer, you won’t understand context by doing a survey, conducting a focus group, or talking to senior executives.

You understand context by experiencing customer problem solving yourself. To do that, you turn to customer immersion techniques. Did you know dairy farmers use tablets? To elegantly solve their problems, you better be willing to get up at 3 a.m. on a freezing morning. Some consumer goods companies even live with customers in their homes for a short period of time. Procter & Gamble, considered one of the best marketers in the world, uses such an immersion program called “Living It.”

4.  Customer Stories

Hypothesis and nuance testing findings get captured as stories. They’re much more descriptive than use cases in that they focus heavily on problem/solution decision making.

5.  Solution Iteration

Tight product alignment with a customer is a matter of iteration. You put something out there (an idea, a prototype, an actual product), and you get feedback, and you go away and improve and refine. Your customer stories get more refined as well.

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll identify a pain point and address it perfectly in one fell swoop. In fact, to even try is highly risky, especially if you’re building hardware.

Most of the time and money wasted in new product development is related to late-stage rework, but you can avoid it by developing in small steps, ever tightening the alignment. This is what agile development is all about, and why it’s gaining so much in popularity in and outside Silicon Valley.