2 User Research Methods That Do Double-Duty with Content Marketing

When it comes to B2B SaaS companies, it’s incredibly important to know your ideal clients better than they know themselves. 

Get this customer insight right and give your company a major competitive advantage.

However, if you mess this up or are asleep at the wheel in the buyer persona, buyer’s journey, or jobs-to-be-done department, your next marketing campaign or product release may fall well short of expectations.

In this blog post, you'll learn about two user research methods that can help you do double-duty or double-dip with your content marketing.

Level Setting on User Research Methods

Usability.gov, part of the Technology Transformation Services department in the U.S. General Services Administration, defines user research as “understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.”

Some of the most common user research methods include:

• Buyer personas
• Card sorting
• Focus groups
• Prototypes
• Surveys (more on that in a moment)
• Usability testing
• User interviews (also, more on that in a moment)
• Website click testing

Adobe, creator of the Adobe XD user experience design software for web and mobile applications, says that user research methods get “carried out to learn as much as possible about your users in order to improve your products — what they need and what’s important to them, how they behave and use your products or services, the challenges they encounter, along the way, and how you can fix those.”

For a resource-constrained B2B SaaS startup, with a solo marketer and product manager, you can gain a lot of efficiencies by coordinating and double-dipping your marketing and product design efforts. 

Research Reports That Support User Research and Content Marketing

For an important market segment/buyer persona:

• Create a simple 10-20 question survey. 
• Get anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred people to complete the survey. 
• Publish the findings and some basic analysis in a nicely formatted PDF and potentially on a pillar content page. 
• Repurpose every last drop of content value out of it: blog posts, a news release, podcast episodes, infographics, webinars, live streams, and explainer videos, just to name a few.

Podcast Interviews That Help with Both Your User Research Methods and Content Marketing Campaigns

Again, for an important market segment/buyer persona:

• Create an interview-based podcast. 
• Find several people to invite on as guests. 
• Ask each guest the same handful of questions. 
• Publish episodes as some great evergreen content on your YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts channel, and blog
• Repurpose the podcast interviews into long-form, short-form, and micro-content in video, audio, image, and text formats.

And just like with the research report, you've gained important insight into what's top of mind for your prospects and customers.

With a decent-sized marketing team (even outsourced/contractors), you could really step on the gas with both initiatives.

However, even a solopreneur/marketing team of one should be able to make a nice dent in gaining valuable B2B SaaS GTM insight while creating great content and deepening important relationships with customers and future customers.

How have you gotten creative with double-dipping your user research methods with content marketing strategy? Let me know in the comments.

And if you're serious about getting some serious content marketing mileage from your user research, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.