Demand Curve Growth MOC

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

#growth #marketing #business #strategy #startups #brand #branding

# Outline

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

Interview users to get deeper insights.
Use surveys to tap into larger audiences.
Do field research to observe real-life behavior.
Analyze your current customer data for trends.
Study your competitors’ products, customers, and reviews. The most important questions your research should answer:

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.

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.

Judge which competitors are worth researching based on their quality, rigor, and relevance. Here’s how to judge them.

Quality: High quality companies generally:
1. Generate lots of revenue (or have raised a lot of money).
2. Have teams that have evolved beyond their founders.
3. Have a consistent history of growth.
Rigor: Filter out competitors that do not meet at least two of these criteria.
1. Publicly share their growth experimentation efforts.
2. Hire dedicated growth marketers and data scientists.
3. Use experimentation software (find this out using BuiltWith).
Relevance: The best competitors to study, in order of relevance to your company:
1. Direct competitors (same problem, customer, and solution)
2. Indirect competitors with a different solution (same problem and customer)
3. Indirect competitors with a different problem (same solution and customer)
4. Indirect competitors with a different customer (same problem and solution)

Research competitors’ landing pages, ad channels, and content marketing for growth insights.

Landing pages
- Study your competitors’ sites for their brand messaging and to see if any A/B tests are being run.
Ad channels
- Use Ahrefs to find out their paid search keywords and ad landing pages.
- Use BuzzSumo to see which pages have the most social engagement.
- Look at competitors’ Facebook and Instagram ads using Facebook Ads Library.
- View their ads on LinkedIn.
Content marketing
- Use Ahrefs to find out their organic keywords and the pages with the most backlinks.
- Look up competitors in Google Trends to gauge their brand awareness.
- Look through your competitors’ active social media channels and see how often users post authentic comments.