When I first started in demand generation, I thought I had a solid understanding of what drove our customers’ decisions. I’d confidently design campaigns based on these assumptions, only to discover later that we’d missed the mark. One day, after yet another campaign didn’t hit the expected numbers, I realized we weren’t gathering insights from the most important source—our customers. That’s when everything changed.
At Apollo.io, we’ve developed a few simple but powerful ways to gather market insights and turn them into action. These approaches not only help us understand our customers better but also guide our marketing efforts to increase conversions and optimize our strategies. Here’s how we do it, and how you can apply these strategies to your own business.
It all started with a simple survey. We needed to know why customers were choosing Apollo over the competition. The results were game-changing. Instead of assuming we knew what worked, we asked, and they told us—loud and clear. This process is one of the easiest ways to collect valuable market insights.
Here’s how we do it:
Want to know the secret sauce? Keep your survey short, incentivize it with something like Amazon gift cards, and ask open-ended questions. The answers you get will not only help you understand your customers’ thought processes but also provide customer language you can use in your ads and on your website. How would you turn market insights into action if you discovered that customers cared more about the quality of your product than its features? You’d act on that insight, just like we did.
Ever wonder why some visitors never make it to your demo page or sign up? We did too. That’s why we use user testing to identify friction points on our website. In the past, we had misconceptions about what was holding people back—turns out, it was often the simplest things, like confusion over what a demo form meant.
For example, we learned that potential customers weren’t sure if signing up for a demo meant talking to sales or getting a free trial. Armed with this insight, we clarified the messaging on our demo page, which reduced confusion and increased conversions. This is part of our ongoing effort for B2B conversion rate optimization.
The process is straightforward: select a panel from your ICP, have them navigate your site, and ask for their honest feedback. Then, run tests to remove any friction points they identify. It’s a simple step, but the impact can be huge—at one of my previous companies, we saw a 30% lift in demo page conversions after running similar tests.
Understanding your total addressable market is crucial when planning your strategy. We’ve used Apollo’s own platform to dig deep into prospect data, helping us pinpoint where our target customers are and how to reach them more effectively.
For example, when I was at Autodesk, we used this type of analysis to discover that Texas—specifically Houston and Dallas—was a major hub for our target market. Armed with that insight, we focused our efforts on executive dinners and out-of-home advertising in those cities. The result? A noticeable boost in engagement from high-value prospects. By knowing exactly where our prospects were located and what titles they held, we could tailor our strategy, making it far more effective.
This approach is especially powerful for total addressable market analysis. When you know where your future customers are, you can plan your marketing and sales efforts with laser precision, ensuring you’re putting resources in the right place.
Gathering market insights is one thing—acting on them is where the magic happens. Whether it’s adjusting our messaging based on survey responses or improving our user experience after running tests, each insight helps us create a clearer path for our prospects to convert.
So, the next time you gather insights, ask yourself: how would you turn market insights into action? It could be as simple as tweaking your messaging or as involved as rethinking your entire go-to-market strategy. But one thing is certain—those insights are the key to unlocking higher conversions and more meaningful customer relationships.
If you’d like more details on how we gather these insights, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn—I’m happy to share the survey questions and other strategies we’ve used to grow at Apollo.
By applying these three strategies—surveys, user testing, and quantitative analysis—you’ll be able to gather the market insights that matter and use them to fuel your business growth.
