Why Customer Research Should Come Before Your Marketing Strategy
- Matt Adams
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
The Temptation to Skip the Research
When leadership gives you a growth mandate, the pressure to move is immediate. Build the campaign. Launch the product. Fix the funnel. The instinct is to start doing — and figure out the details as you go.
At M&T Bank, we had that pressure. Customer growth was lagging behind competitors. Attrition was climbing. There was executive appetite to build a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical, and there was no shortage of opinions about what that should look like.But before we built anything, we decided to go find out what we were actually dealing with.
Starting With a Question, Not an Answer
I was brought into a newly formed innovation group tasked with redesigning the small business customer experience from the ground up. The team's first move wasn't a brainstorm or a brief — it was a research sprint.
We started with one central question: Why do small business owners choose our bank?
It sounds simple. It wasn't. We had assumed the answer was something like "local relationships" or "competitive rates." What we found was more nuanced — and more useful.
Over four sprint cycles, we conducted customer interviews, spoke with the bank employees who served them daily, and audited the competitive landscape to understand where peers were winning and why. We weren't looking to validate a strategy we'd already decided on. We were genuinely trying to understand the customer's world before we inserted ourselves into it.
What the Research Revealed
The interviews surfaced two things that reshaped our approach entirely.
First, our existing digital experience was harder to use than it should have been. Enrollment into digital tools was friction-heavy, which meant customers who wanted to self-serve were running into walls — and the ones who hit those walls were more likely to leave.
Second — and more importantly — the human relationship with a bank employee wasn't just a nice-to-have. It was a primary driver of long-term engagement. Business owners weren't just looking for a place to park their money. They were looking for a partner who understood what they were building.
That second insight changed how we thought about everything: the content we created, the onboarding experience we designed, the value proposition we brought to market. You can't get there by looking at your own analytics. You have to talk to people.
From Insight to Strategy
With the research synthesized, our team organized the findings into four core jobs-to-be-done — the primary reasons a small business owner would choose, stay with, or leave a bank. These became the strategic foundation for every initiative that followed, from building the content hub to redesigning the digital onboarding experience to how we structured our messaging and campaign testing.
We also mapped the competitive landscape, briefly defining each major competitor's value proposition to the SMB audience. That exercise helped us identify where the white space was — what none of them were saying, and what our bank was actually positioned to deliver.
The result was a new SMB value proposition rooted not in what we wanted to say, but in what customers told us they needed to hear.
What I Learned
Research doesn't slow a strategy down. It stops you from building the wrong one.
Every meaningful result from our M&T Bank work — the 40% YOY growth in checking accounts, the content that drove 87,000 unique visitors, the onboarding improvements that reduced drop-off — traced back to something a customer or employee told us during those early sprints. The research wasn't the prologue to the strategy. It was the strategy.
The other thing worth saying: this kind of research doesn't require a massive budget or a dedicated insights team. What it requires is the discipline to ask before you build, and the willingness to let the answers change your plans.
If you're starting a new acquisition initiative or rethinking an existing one, research is the right first step — and it's something I can help with. Get in touch to talk through what that might look like for your organization.
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