<aside> 💡 *SparkToro is an audience research tool founded by two influential marketers, for marketers. As you can guess, their team had no problem with, well, marketing.
A year after their initial launch, overall brand awareness, traffic to the website, and new user signups were healthy. Free users converting to paying customers, less so.*
SparkToro worked with Forget the Funnel to figure out why some users loved the product, “got it” immediately, and stuck around for a long time — while others disappeared shortly after signup.
*What they learned enabled them to double their free-to-paid conversion rate.
Here’s how it happened…*
</aside>
🔗 Uncovering where customers really get value
🔗 Mapping value to features & attributes
SparkToro’s team was facing a problem many SaaS teams face: the curse of knowledge.
They knew all the ins-and-outs of what their product was capable of. They knew every single feature: where to find it, what it was for, how to use it. Like any team building a SaaS, they were experts in their own product.
Unfortunately for almost every SaaS company, there’s a big gap between how the team understands the product, vs. how customers understand it. And it’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the jar.
So to help the team figure out what their customers actually found most valuable about SparkToro, we ran a survey to their paying, most engaged customers to understand:
What customers told us can be summarized into a high-level customer “job statement” — i.e., what “job” they “hire” SparkToro to do for them, and the desired outcome they seek when “hiring” SparkToro:
When I’m exploring or optimizing a marketing channel, give me easy access to useful, compelling insights, so I can gain clarity, take action, and impress my stakeholders.
Let’s break that down:
“When I’m exploring or optimizing a marketing channel…” summarizes our learning that customers realized they needed SparkToro in situations where a) they were testing out a marketing channel that was new to them, or b) they’d seen early success with a marketing channel, and now wanted to double-down to make their investment in that channel more effective.
“Give me easy access to useful, compelling insights…” summarizes what mattered most to customers as they searched for a solution: