By research I mean things like:
- Looking for their social profiles.
- Trying to know how big is their business (if you have a B2B business).
- Trying to discover where are they based…
Are you doing this kind of customer research? Why?
My current project is B2C, and I’m still at the stage where I’m taking to potential customers face to face. Right now I want to use the feedback to guide my marketing and PR efforts.
Consider using Rapportive. It gives you 80% just by entering the email address.
And yes, I do. It helps to know which target market you are already reaching and aim for new ones - or improve marketing for the existing one.
For example, I think that www.linksspy.com is ideal for SEO agencies, but somehow a lot of bootstrappers and people with just 1 website ended up paying me. It’s good to know that, because it showed me that a) my marketing isn’t laser-focused towards SEOs b) there is some need for this product in other markets.
Cheers,
Christoph
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Is Rapportive still working? I’ve read that, since LinkedIn bought it, it’s working worse:
http://insights.credii.com/rapportive-alternatives/
It is still working for me. I had a similar discussion recently and my (limited) research told me that only some Rapportive features (that I never used) were discontinued.
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Rapportive doesn’t work for me anymore. I’ve been using https://vibeapp.co instead.
Lurking around on social profiles can be helpful, but nothing beats long conversations with actual customers. I think Indi Young’s Mental Models outlines a great methodology for making these conversations useful.
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Thanks for the links @kadavy. I’m trying to discover how common is for a business owner to use this kind of tools (or alternatively do this research manually) when receiving an email from a prospect or customer.
Vibe is brilliant – thanks for the tip! This is going to save me real time, and a ton of clicking around when prospecting (I was doing LinkedIn lookups by hand).
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