As you know by now, hearing us talk about it all the time, understanding your customers isn’t just a business advantage, it’s the key to success.

But how do you navigate the sea of information and data you’ve gathered about your audience to discover what truly matters?

Every start up expert talks about the importance of picking a clear target customer segment and solving an unmet need, but beyond “talk to your customers” there’s little practical advice on how to create audience segments that are actionable.

Interviews are vital to understanding the range of problems, motivations, needs, ambitions or concerns that drive customer behaviour. However, unless you layer measurable data over the insights, you’ll be left guessing which are most important and how many people are affected by each.

Enter quantitative surveys, your key to pinpointing needs-based audience segments.

What is needs-based segmentation and why is it important?

Like other forms of customer segmentation, needs-based segmentation aims to identify factors that divide people into groups that can be described and targeted separately.

The best way to divide people into target groups is based on their highest priority needs or jobs-to-be-done (the problem they’re most intent on solving). This helps show you where your biggest opportunity is to create value.

How to use surveys for needs-based segmentation

The key to a successful survey lies in both quantity and quality.

Aiming for an average response rate of 10-15%, you should target a minimum of 30 respondents, with 50 being the sweet spot. Remember, the more data you have, the stronger your conclusions will be – it's a numbers game and you want to win.

Profiling questions

The best way to get started with needs-based segmentation is to look at what you already know about your audience and pull out key demographics or other criteria (e.g. income, job title, location) that describe contextual differences between your potential customers.  

Use these contextual factors as the basis to create ‘profiling questions’ in your survey. Use multiple-choice questions to identify those that apply to each survey respondent. These questions are a vital part of your survey as discovering what contexts cause customers to have different priorities and unmet needs that pinpoint segments with the highest opportunities for growth.

You can use the answers to profiling questions to split your survey data to understand similarities and differences between key segments.

Prioritising customer forces  

From the interviews, you’ll have uncovered information about what pushes and pulls customers toward your product or service as well as the anxieties and attachments that might prevent them from switching to using it.

Your next job is to understand which of these forces are most prominent in the audience's minds and influence the decision-making process most intensely.

To do this, you can use multiple choice questions listing these various force insights and ask people to pick the 3 that apply most to them. Alternatively, ask people how much they agree or disagree with them written up as statements.

Analysing this data overall then splitting by key profiling characteristics, you may start to see nuances in the decision-making process between segments. This helps you create targeted messaging that pulls the right mental levers.

Job-to-be-done opportunity scoring

You should only pursue audience jobs-to-be-done that’s both important and currently unsatisfied through your audience’s perspective. The most important and least satisfied jobs-to-be-done are your audience’s underserved needs which offer the most opportunity for you to create value.

To understand which jobs–to-be-done are the most underserved. You can use two simple questions in relation to each of your previously discovered jobs-to-be-done.

On a scale of 1-5…

1. How important is [job] to you?
2. How satisfied are you with your current ability to achieve [job]?

You can use the responses to these two questions to calculate an opportunity score for each job-to-be-done.

Opportunity scores are your guide to prioritising without bias. Here’s the formula to decode this treasure:

Opportunity score = average job importance rating + (average job importance rating - average job satisfaction rating)

• >12 = high opportunity
• >10 = solid opportunity
• <10 = limited opportunity

These scores are your north star, guiding you towards the most promising jobs that deserve your focus and have the highest potential to stand out and create value in the market.

In conclusion, surveys are a great way to clearly understand your customer’s priorities and unearth needs-based segments that unlock a clear focus for targeted strategy and messaging that truly resonate.

Key takeaways

👉 Surveys help you validate customer insights and decide how to best move forward.

👉 Putting numbers behind insights helps bring clarity and focus to what matters most to your audience.

👉 Calculating jobs-to-be-done opportunity scores identifies where you should focus your efforts to really stand out and create value.

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