We’ve summed up the most important insights about market and customer research into a concise cheat sheet. Consider this a checklist for you to reference while doing research and implementing your findings.

Step 1: Collect customer and market data

To find out what jobs customers are hiring your product for, use a combination of research methods:

1. Interview users to get deeper insights.
2. Use surveys to tap into larger audiences.
3. Do field research to observe real-life behavior.
4. Analyze your current customer data for trends.
5. Study your competitors’ products, customers, and reviews.

The most important questions your research should answer:

• What is the problem people are hiring your product for?
• How do people decide to solve their problem?
• What criteria do people use to judge different products?

Step 2: Leverage your research

Three ways to leverage your research findings:

• Create customer personas to help visualize your audience as individuals.  
• Use a customer/market profile to summarize your research in one place.
• Map out the customer journey to identify user pain points and behaviors throughout different stages of the buying process.

Step 3: Improve your marketing and product

Apply your research to your marketing and product using the psych framework.

• Run through each stage of your customer journey map to find negative psych elements that discourage people from moving on.
• Mark where these negative elements happen in the journey.
• Then optimize your marketing and product to reduce them.

Not all psych elements are within your control, but using this framework helps to identify those that are.