From market insights to actionable strategies
From Wynter Games 19, 'The Playbook We Use to Gather Target Customer Insights' by Talar Malakian, CMO @Phonexa
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When I first joined Phonexa as CMO, I quickly realized that our marketing foundation needed some serious rebuilding.
One of the first challenges I encountered was outdated Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) decks that were no longer serving us. These ICPs were supposed to guide our marketing efforts, but instead, they were collecting dust, outdated and disconnected from our actual market needs.
I’m sure many of you have been there—stepping into a new role with high expectations and an urgent need to make impactful changes.
My approach?
Get scrappy, get smart, and most importantly, turn market insights into action that drives real results.
One of my first tasks was to take a hard look at the data we already had. Our customer data lived in various places, like HubSpot and PlanHat, but it wasn’t being utilized effectively. I started by exporting this data and analyzing it from multiple angles, focusing on demographic, technographic, firmographic, and psychographic aspects to rebuild our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).
For example, I discovered that our go-to-market strategy had been overly focused on specific industries, like insurance carriers and home services. Initially, it seemed logical to target by industry, but as I dug deeper, I realized that industry alone wasn’t a strong driver of engagement in our affiliate marketing efforts.
Instead, what really mattered were the types of businesses involved—companies that do affiliate marketing, entities who are affiliate marketers, and networks that connect affiliates to advertisers.
This insight led us to pivot our strategy from an industry-centric approach to one that was more aligned with the business types within the affiliate marketing ecosystem.
Additionally, I examined our customers’ tech stacks, specifically looking at what technologies they were using before switching to us. This analysis revealed crucial insights into what we needed to displace in our messaging and sales efforts. For example, we found that our product had several modules, but we weren’t successfully upselling these additional features.
Understanding the tech stack our customers were coming from allowed us to refine our approach for multiple ICPs and target these upsell opportunities more effectively.
Once we had a more accurate and updated view of our ICPs, the next step was understanding what our customers and prospects were actually saying about us and the broader market.
This is where social listening tools like BuzzSumo and Mention became incredibly valuable.
We used these tools to monitor conversations happening around key topics like affiliate marketing, affiliate tracking, and attribution. For instance, we discovered that there was a significant amount of discussion happening on TikTok about affiliate marketing—a platform we hadn’t initially considered as part of our B2B strategy.
This insight was a game-changer.
It led us to expand our social media efforts beyond LinkedIn, where we had been primarily focused, and start engaging with our prospects on TikTok. This wasn’t just about expanding our reach; it was about meeting our audience where they were already active and comfortable, which made our messaging more relatable and effective.
Through social listening tools, we also identified the top questions being asked in our space, the most engaged content formats, and the influencers who were driving these conversations.
This allowed us to refine our content strategy, ensuring that we were addressing the real concerns and interests of our audience, rather than just guessing at what might resonate.
Data and social listening can tell you a lot, but nothing beats the insights gained from direct feedback. This is why I made it a priority to engage directly with our customers, prospects, and even churned clients through interviews.
One of the most eye-opening moments came when we started speaking with customers about how they described our services.
We had been using broad, generic language on our website, talking about how we help companies automate their marketing efforts. But when we asked our customers to describe what we did, their answers were often different from how we saw ourselves. For example, while we emphasized automation, our customers frequently highlighted the ease of tracking and managing affiliate campaigns as the most valuable aspect of our service.
This discrepancy led us to completely overhaul our website content and sales collateral. We started using the exact phrases and descriptions our customers were using, which made our messaging more aligned with their expectations and experiences.
We also tailored our messaging to different personas, logging how each customer segment described their challenges and the value they found in our product. This personalized approach significantly improved our sales interactions and content effectiveness.
Speed up go-to-market feedback loops now.
Lastly, a critical piece of turning market insights into action is fostering collaboration across teams. At Phonexa, we broke down silos between sales, marketing, and customer success to ensure that insights from one area informed the strategies in another.
One practical example of this was our commitment to regularly listening to sales and customer success calls.
These calls provided a wealth of information about common objections, frequently asked questions, and recurring issues. For instance, we found that prospects often had concerns about the complexity of integrating our solution into their existing tech stack. By documenting these concerns and creating targeted content—like FAQ sections and onboarding videos—we were able to address these objections proactively, both in our sales conversations and on our website.
This collaborative approach ensured that the content we created was not only aligned with our ICPs but also directly addressed the real-world challenges and questions our customers and prospects were facing.
Turning market insights into action isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing process of learning, adjusting, and refining. From rebuilding our ICPs to leveraging social listening tools and gathering direct feedback, every step is about getting closer to the real needs of our customers and meeting them with solutions that resonate.
If you’re in a position where you need to refresh your strategy, I encourage you to start by dusting off those old ICP decks, diving deep into your existing data, and engaging directly with your audience.
The insights you gain will not only inform your marketing strategy but will also drive meaningful action that makes a real impact.
When I first joined Phonexa as CMO, I quickly realized that our marketing foundation needed some serious rebuilding.
One of the first challenges I encountered was outdated Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) decks that were no longer serving us. These ICPs were supposed to guide our marketing efforts, but instead, they were collecting dust, outdated and disconnected from our actual market needs.
I’m sure many of you have been there—stepping into a new role with high expectations and an urgent need to make impactful changes.
My approach?
Get scrappy, get smart, and most importantly, turn market insights into action that drives real results.
One of my first tasks was to take a hard look at the data we already had. Our customer data lived in various places, like HubSpot and PlanHat, but it wasn’t being utilized effectively. I started by exporting this data and analyzing it from multiple angles, focusing on demographic, technographic, firmographic, and psychographic aspects to rebuild our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).
For example, I discovered that our go-to-market strategy had been overly focused on specific industries, like insurance carriers and home services. Initially, it seemed logical to target by industry, but as I dug deeper, I realized that industry alone wasn’t a strong driver of engagement in our affiliate marketing efforts.
Instead, what really mattered were the types of businesses involved—companies that do affiliate marketing, entities who are affiliate marketers, and networks that connect affiliates to advertisers.
This insight led us to pivot our strategy from an industry-centric approach to one that was more aligned with the business types within the affiliate marketing ecosystem.
Additionally, I examined our customers’ tech stacks, specifically looking at what technologies they were using before switching to us. This analysis revealed crucial insights into what we needed to displace in our messaging and sales efforts. For example, we found that our product had several modules, but we weren’t successfully upselling these additional features.
Understanding the tech stack our customers were coming from allowed us to refine our approach for multiple ICPs and target these upsell opportunities more effectively.
Once we had a more accurate and updated view of our ICPs, the next step was understanding what our customers and prospects were actually saying about us and the broader market.
This is where social listening tools like BuzzSumo and Mention became incredibly valuable.
We used these tools to monitor conversations happening around key topics like affiliate marketing, affiliate tracking, and attribution. For instance, we discovered that there was a significant amount of discussion happening on TikTok about affiliate marketing—a platform we hadn’t initially considered as part of our B2B strategy.
This insight was a game-changer.
It led us to expand our social media efforts beyond LinkedIn, where we had been primarily focused, and start engaging with our prospects on TikTok. This wasn’t just about expanding our reach; it was about meeting our audience where they were already active and comfortable, which made our messaging more relatable and effective.
Through social listening tools, we also identified the top questions being asked in our space, the most engaged content formats, and the influencers who were driving these conversations.
This allowed us to refine our content strategy, ensuring that we were addressing the real concerns and interests of our audience, rather than just guessing at what might resonate.
Data and social listening can tell you a lot, but nothing beats the insights gained from direct feedback. This is why I made it a priority to engage directly with our customers, prospects, and even churned clients through interviews.
One of the most eye-opening moments came when we started speaking with customers about how they described our services.
We had been using broad, generic language on our website, talking about how we help companies automate their marketing efforts. But when we asked our customers to describe what we did, their answers were often different from how we saw ourselves. For example, while we emphasized automation, our customers frequently highlighted the ease of tracking and managing affiliate campaigns as the most valuable aspect of our service.
This discrepancy led us to completely overhaul our website content and sales collateral. We started using the exact phrases and descriptions our customers were using, which made our messaging more aligned with their expectations and experiences.
We also tailored our messaging to different personas, logging how each customer segment described their challenges and the value they found in our product. This personalized approach significantly improved our sales interactions and content effectiveness.
Speed up go-to-market feedback loops now.
Lastly, a critical piece of turning market insights into action is fostering collaboration across teams. At Phonexa, we broke down silos between sales, marketing, and customer success to ensure that insights from one area informed the strategies in another.
One practical example of this was our commitment to regularly listening to sales and customer success calls.
These calls provided a wealth of information about common objections, frequently asked questions, and recurring issues. For instance, we found that prospects often had concerns about the complexity of integrating our solution into their existing tech stack. By documenting these concerns and creating targeted content—like FAQ sections and onboarding videos—we were able to address these objections proactively, both in our sales conversations and on our website.
This collaborative approach ensured that the content we created was not only aligned with our ICPs but also directly addressed the real-world challenges and questions our customers and prospects were facing.
Turning market insights into action isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing process of learning, adjusting, and refining. From rebuilding our ICPs to leveraging social listening tools and gathering direct feedback, every step is about getting closer to the real needs of our customers and meeting them with solutions that resonate.
If you’re in a position where you need to refresh your strategy, I encourage you to start by dusting off those old ICP decks, diving deep into your existing data, and engaging directly with your audience.
The insights you gain will not only inform your marketing strategy but will also drive meaningful action that makes a real impact.
