If you work in a B2B industry, you probably don’t spend a lot of time checking out all of the AI-powered mobile ethnography tools out there. Why would you? Just the word ethnography evokes images of everyday consumers showing you their pantry or garage or bathroom closet. Ick. That’s not B2B.
Well, I’ve been spending time digging into some of these tools, and I have a few ideas about repurposing them to solve your toughest B2B challenges.
First, we should probably define what a mobile ethnography tool does. There are a few key elements to these tools:
- Real-Time, Contextual Information – Capture moments (usually on a smartphone) as they occur to minimize recall bias and provide a richer understanding of what impacts behaviors.
- Flexible Engagement– Interact with participants in a variety of ways including through video/photo uploads, screen recordings, text responses, etc.
- Deep Understanding – See and hear participants in their native environment to create a holistic view of their experience.
That’s the fancy research explanation for what these tools do, but basically, they allow you to ask participants questions on their mobile device, in-the-moment. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about take a look at Indeemo, Sympler, or Qualzy. There are other options out there, and some have slightly different features or question types. Overall, they do similar things (DM me if you want to know my personal experience with them).
How does this apply to a B2B space? Well, I think that there are quite a number of serious B2B challenges that these tools can address. Here’s a short list:
Improve Conversion Rates
- Challenge: Potential customers are entering into the top of your sales funnel online, but they never make it to the end. What is happening along the way that makes them opt out?
- Methodology: Recruit target customers to voice-over their experience as they navigate through your online sales funnel. Understand where they are getting stuck or disinterested
- Outcome: Identify some improvements or interventions to help usher customers through to that all important pay screen.
Make Product Improvements
- Challenge: Your R&D team has too many projects and too little bandwidth. Because you sell your product through distributors, you are not sure which improvements/new products are going to have the most impact on end users.
- Methodology: Depending on the types of R&D projects being evaluated, this may call for a test of new prototypes or an old-fashioned ethnography to look for unmet needs. Whatever the specific objective, these tools are ideal for understanding the impact of new products.
- Outcome: Prioritize the new product development process to ensure that efforts will provide the greatest boost to future sales.
- Understand Your Audience
- Challenge: Your company has launched an initiative to target a new type of customer (e.g. small businesses, a new industry, a different job title). Your previous messaging does not seem to be resonating. What do these customers want?
- Methodology: Recruit a variety of participants from your target audience to conduct some day-in-the-life exercises that help to illuminate their experience.
- Outcome: Identify ways that your solution will improve their work and create target messaging that highlights the benefits unique to their circumstance.
The success of any B2B research hinges on your research partner's ability to recruit the 'right' participants. With the increasing challenges of securing reliable quantitative samples, B2B researchers will need to be more scrappy in their approach.
Beyond the richness of the insights that mobile ethnographies can provide, they also allow researchers to validate participant selection through video. In my mind, that’s just one more reason to consider repurposing these consumer-focused tools in your B2B space.
