4 Ways to Learn What Your Audience Wants

A trucking logistics company once showed me their email templates. They were ugly. Plain text, minimal formatting, no design. They looked like someone had typed them in Notepad and sent them without a second thought. When I asked why, the answer was that they had done extensive testing and found that the more they stripped out the design, the higher the engagement went. They had started with templates any modern marketing team would be proud of. Clean layouts, images, headers, calls-to-action in the right places. Almost nobody opened them. So they started removing elements. Every time something came out, engagement went up. They kept going until they landed on the bare-text version I was looking at.

Their audience was truckers. Truckers ignore anything that looks like marketing and pay attention to anything that reads like internal operations. The more professional the design, the more it triggered distrust. When the design disappeared, trust went up.

This is one of the most important lessons in marketing, and it sounds obvious until you realize how often companies get it backwards. The job is to build for the audience. This is harder than it sounds because the people doing the building are the most convenient audience they have access to, so companies drift into building for themselves without realizing it. Your taste is not your audience's taste. Your language is not your audience's language. Your priorities are not your audience's priorities. You have to go find out what the real priorities are.

Method 1: Ask Your Sales Team

The sales team has more data about customer preferences than anyone else in the organization. They hear the same objections over and over. They know which features matter to customers versus which ones seem impressive in a demo. They can tell you what question comes up in almost every conversation and what takes a skeptical prospect from maybe to yes.

Here is what to ask them: Which questions do prospects ask most often? Which objections come up again and again? What has to happen for a skeptical prospect to say yes, and what makes someone walk away? What do customers say after they buy that they wish they had known earlier?

Write down the answers. Do not try to remember them. The patterns emerge when you see them all written out on one page. These patterns become your content roadmap. Your blog topics. Your email subject lines. Your positioning statements. Your sales team has essentially handed you a research report they get paid to compile.

Method 2: Interview Your Customers

Schedule 15-minute calls with a handful of actual customers. Start every one the same way: "Why did you choose us to begin with?" The answer will surprise you. Companies always believe they get chosen for their technology or their price. Customers tell a different story. They usually mention that a salesperson listened carefully, or an early project came in faster than expected, or someone followed up when they said they would. The gap between what companies think drives purchases and what does is one of the most useful things you can discover.

Follow up with three more questions: What were you dealing with before you found us? What other options did you consider? What almost stopped you from buying? And crucially, what would you tell someone who was still on the fence about us?

That last answer is gold. Whatever customers say in response will be more convincing than anything you could write about your own company. Copy the phrasing they use. Put it on your website. Use it in your emails. Customers' words are better raw material than anything your copywriter will come up with on their own.

Method 3: Read Reviews Everywhere

Go to G2, Capterra, Google, Yelp, or wherever your industry gets reviewed. Read widely. Read your own reviews and your competitors' reviews. Competitors' reviews are often more revealing than your own because they show you what people value and what they fear at the category level, not just at your company level.

In positive reviews, look for things people mention that you might not have realized were values. A review saying "finally, a company that answers the phone" is not complaining. It is pointing at a positioning opportunity. Most of your competitors are probably slow to respond. If you are fast, that becomes part of your message.

In negative reviews, find the fears. What kept someone from buying? What problem did they expect you to have and did? A complaint about taking three weeks to respond is both a warning about the category and a clear opening for any competitor who can beat it. Those fears become promises you can credibly make if you can deliver.

Copy the exact language people use. The phrases they reach for when describing their problems or their desires are better copywriting raw material than anything you would come up with alone.

Method 4: Watch Your Data

Your analytics tell a story if you take time to read them. The pages people spend the most time on reveal what they care about, regardless of how your navigation tries to guide them. The places they drop off are either confusion or misalignment with their needs. Email open rates and deletion rates together show a pattern in what resonates. The search terms that bring people to your site show you how they think about the problem, which is often different from how you describe it.

Data tells you what is happening. It rarely tells you why. That is why you combine it with customer feedback. Data flags the areas worth investigating. Customer conversations explain what you found.

Want the full framework?

This article is adapted from How to Grow Any Organization by Tom Zandstra. The book walks through each method in detail and includes templates for customer interviews and analysis frameworks.

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Start This Week

You do not need all four methods to start understanding your audience better. Pick one. Just one. An hour is all it takes.

Buy your sales team lunch and ask them what they hear from prospects every day. Bring a notebook and write everything down. The patterns start surfacing when you are back at your desk with the notes in front of you.

Or schedule three 15-minute calls with customers and ask the three core questions. Take notes. Look at the three sets of notes side by side and find the themes.

Or spend 30 minutes reading reviews, yours and your competitors'. Copy the most striking phrases into a single document. When the time is up, you will have a document that tells you more about your market than research reports people charge real money for.

Any one of those methods will change how you think about your audience. The cost is an hour of your time. The return is the foundation everything else gets built on.

Tom Zandstra

Founder & Fractional CMO at Acculead · Advertising Professor at Calvin University

Tom has spent over a decade helping companies listen to their customers. He believes that most marketing problems are listening problems at their core, and that the cheapest research is often the best research.