The Growth Marketers Guide to Customer Research
Article written by
Stuart Brameld
What Is Customer Research?
Customer research is the systematic process of gathering insights about your customers' needs, behaviours, and motivations. It involves directly engaging with your audience to understand their daily challenges, preferences, and expectations.
For growth marketers, customer research is essential. It helps you make informed decisions, optimise your marketing strategies, and deliver products and services that genuinely resonate with your target audience.
Why Customer Research Matters for Growth Marketers
Great marketing doesn't come from guesswork—it comes from directly asking your customers about their challenges and needs. Customer research provides clarity on what your audience truly values, enabling you to create targeted messaging, improve your product offering, and ultimately drive growth.
Even if you don't yet have customers, speaking with prospects can provide invaluable insights. Direct customer insight is often free or low-cost, so there's no excuse not to prioritise it.
At Growth Method, we actively encourage our customers to seek insights from their audience. In our Getting to Know Your Business questionnaire, we ask:
"Do you actively seek insights from prospects and customers? For example - user testing, polls, surveys, analytics, heatmaps, session recordings, sales call recordings, customer interviews? If so, is this done regularly as a repeatable process or more of a one-off?"
Qualitative vs Quantitative Customer Research
Customer research typically falls into two categories: qualitative and quantitative. Understanding the differences between these two approaches helps you choose the right method for your goals.
Qualitative Research | Quantitative Research |
|---|---|
Explores customer motivations, opinions, and behaviours | Measures customer behaviours and attitudes numerically |
In-depth insights from smaller sample sizes | Broad insights from larger sample sizes |
Methods include interviews, focus groups, and open-ended surveys | Methods include analytics, closed-ended surveys, and A/B testing |
Helps understand the "why" behind customer actions | Helps quantify the "what" and "how many" |
Common Customer Research Methods
Here are some of the most effective methods growth marketers use to gather customer insights:
Research Method | Description |
|---|---|
User Interviews | One-on-one conversations to explore customer motivations and challenges |
Surveys | Structured questionnaires to gather quantitative and qualitative data |
Analytics (Web Analytics, Heatmaps, Session Recordings) | Data-driven insights into user behaviour on your website or app |
Sales Call Recordings | Analysing recorded sales conversations to identify customer pain points and objections |
Market Trends & Research | Analysing industry reports and competitor insights to understand broader market dynamics |
Live Chat Logs | Reviewing customer support interactions to identify common questions and issues |
Self-reported Attribution | Asking customers directly how they discovered your product or service |
Popular Customer Research Tools
To streamline your customer research process, consider these popular tools:
UXsniff – User experience analytics and insights
Keak – Customer feedback and insights platform
User Interviews – Platform for recruiting and conducting user interviews
Lookback – User experience research platform
Respondent.io – Recruiting platform for qualitative research
Wynter – Message testing and audience intelligence
Grain – Tool for recording, transcribing, and analysing customer calls
Always-On Customer Research
Customer research shouldn't be a one-off project—it should be an ongoing, systematic process. Adopting a regular approach helps you continuously gather insights and create feedback loops that inform your marketing and product strategies.
One effective way to implement always-on customer research is to set up a regular "customer coffee hour". Here's how:
Block out one hour per week for customer calls (two 30-minute conversations).
Create a discussion guide to structure each conversation.
Rotate team members (founders, product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success) to ensure insights are shared across the organisation.
Use your CRM to automate scheduling calls with customers or prospects each week.
Record and transcribe calls using AI tools like Granola.ai, Otter.ai, or Tl;Dv.
After each call, spend five minutes documenting key insights in a shared document.
Over time, this shared document becomes an invaluable resource for your content, product, and sales teams. It can also be a great way to collect customer reviews and testimonials for your website.
How Growth Method Supports Your Customer Research
Growth Method is the only work management platform built specifically for growth marketers. It simplifies your workflow by combining ideation, experimentation, and analytics in one powerful platform.
With Growth Method, you can:
Capture and categorise customer insights and hypotheses using our intuitive ideation system.
Integrate seamlessly with analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and MixPanel to centralise your quantitative data.
Use AI-powered categorisation and experiment summaries to quickly identify actionable insights.
Generate industry-leading reports to clearly communicate customer insights and experiment results to stakeholders.
"We are on-track to deliver a 43% increase in inbound leads this year. There is no doubt the adoption of Growth Method is the primary driver behind these results." – Laura Perrott, Colt Technology Services
Ready to Level Up Your Customer Research?
Growth Method helps growth marketing teams, agencies, and consultants implement a systematic approach to grow leads and revenue through effective customer research and experimentation.
Book a call today to see how Growth Method can help you better understand your customers and accelerate your growth.
Article written by
Stuart Brameld