9 ways to know your buyer so well the marketing strategy writes itself

How a single Slack message killed my marketing plan and taught me what buyer understanding actually means

The Slack message landed at exactly the wrong time.

I was seven coffees deep, straight-backed in my desk chair, sun streaming through the window behind me.

The office was humming with activity somewhere beyond my door, but I didn’t notice. I was completely lost in numbers, leaned forward, elbows on the desk, jumping between an obscene amount of tabs. Spreadsheets, dashboards, ad campaign portals, conversion funnels. Number crunching at its finest.

It was probably 2pm, that thick part of the workday where time blurs and I am always just realizing that I forgot to eat lunch. I had a vision: track ROI down to the keyword level, optimize every ad based on what it was actually driving all the way to the bottom of the funnel instead of just lead-level conversion rates.

I wanted to slice paid performance down to the smallest possible unit so I could prove, with precision, that every dollar was doing its job. This was serious marketing. Responsible marketing. The kind that makes leadership feel safe.

The Slack message that broke my marketing plan

Then a Slack notification popped up in the top right corner of my screen and disappeared before I could grab it.

I scrolled up to find it. The message was from someone on my team who had done the job of our customer before joining us. They were our ICP, sitting right there internally.

It was just an offhand comment:

“Most of these people run ad blockers anyway.”

My hands froze on the keyboard. I felt myself slam back into my body from wherever my brain had been.

The channel consuming the largest portion of our budget wasn’t rooted in how our buyer actually bought. Or browsed. Many of them used DuckDuckGo. Many of them avoided ads altogether. Yes, the campaigns were driving demand. The numbers weren’t wrong. But they weren’t grounded in curiosity about the person on the other side of the screen.

When did proving ROI become more important than truth?

Being a good CMO meant having numbers to prove my value. I was afraid if I slowed down, if I questioned the system I was building, it would all get blown up. I would be forced to invest in areas where I couldn’t measure, take a leap of faith grounded in deep understanding of the buyer. That felt risky. Leadership would question everything if I didn’t have the numbers to back it up.

Years later, I sat on stage at the Exit Five conference in Burlington, Vermont, speaking to 250 B2B marketers. I shared an example of something I had done that worked really well. Ten hands shot up. Every single person asked: “But how did you measure it?”

Sitting on that stage made me flash back to my desk that afternoon. I cursed the attribution tools, the measurement obsession. Don’t get me wrong, data is incredibly valuable. But it can create a false certainty and kills the curiosity that leads to work that actually sparks something.

The minute I closed all those tabs, I felt guilty.

I hadn’t spoken to a customer or listened to a single sales call in months.

I had been so wrapped up in protecting my credibility and my team, that I’d forgotten something fundamental. I’d forgotten to be curious about the person I was speaking to.

7 ways to understand your buyer

1. Start with Reddit

In that moment, the very first thing I did was go down a giant Reddit rabbit hole.

Reddit is amazing for understanding your buyer because of its anonymity. People are incredibly honest. It’s generally vendor-free because you get trolled if you try to post anything promotional. You get raw perspectives: the jokes people make, the things they complain about, the acronyms they use, the things they love to rant about.

Reddit rants are my favorite source of creative inspiration.

And, I felt like an idiot having to Google half the acronyms they were using.

It made me feel like an outsider, but also excited by new understanding. I didn’t find one clean, tidy takeaway to plug into my strategy. But it gave me a sense of connection, a sense of the flavor of the people I was speaking to. It made me feel human again, less like a dashboard rotation bot.

The next time I showed up to leadership, it wasn’t just with dashboards. It was with stories and anecdotes. It felt messy and squishy, but I realized those little stories are far more memorable and impactful than any dashboard I have shown. There’s still a place for numbers. They’re just not everything.

2. Run a Marketing Shark Tank

I ran an event with my team where we pitched our craziest, wildest, boldest ideas (Shark Tank music opening the scene and all). The most important part: our sharks were internal folks who represented our buyer personas, who had done that job before or knew that type of buyer really well. We literally had name cards with buyer persona job titles on them.

My takeaway: It doesn’t matter what the executive team thinks. It matters what’s going to land with the buyer.

3. Do group call listening

This is so simple, but sometimes one-to-one time actually listening to a call is irreplaceable. You can spend all day analyzing transcripts with AI, but there’s something different about just listening, feeling the emotion, seeing the expressions, hearing the tone of skepticism or hope.

The best way I’ve found to do this is as a lunch and learn. Doing it together.

We’d hang out and listen to a call together, pausing every couple of minutes to share a new realization. This also helps because if you block your own calendar to listen to calls, half the time you’ll skip it (you know it’s true). But if you do it together, you get the benefit of shared insights and you actually do it.

4. Find your ICP internally

This is what saved me that afternoon.

People who have done the job of your customer are incredibly valuable…find those people inside your company and ask for their help.

I remember a time I had launched a podcast, we brainstormed the name with our solutions engineers who were on calls with buyers all day. They threw in ideas and voted. The result was an inside joke to the buyer that immediately connected.

5. Use transcript analysis with AI

It’s useful, of course. What I like to do is write a prompt that asks for pain points, buying triggers, objections, the terms we should be using verbatim that people use a lot, etc. And then an interesting way I’ve found to get a little deeper is asking for “inferred emotions.”

People generally don’t actually say their emotions on calls, but AI can do a decent job at least sparking some curiosity about what “inferred emotions” are underneath those objections.

Ideal way to set this up is through a system that can parse call transcripts as they come through (if you try to just dump a bunch of transcripts into chatGPT it tends to max out the token window and you get weird result - doing them one by one you’ll get the best results, and a workflow to do this as they come through saves you a lot of copying and pasting).

Here’s some things I look for:

• Internal/external speakers (important cleanup step ensuring AI is identifying your internal folks vs the prospect/customer)

• Pain points

• Buying triggers

• Context on what their world looked like before looking at your solution

• Most common use cases

• Frequently requested features/gaps

• Objection themes

• Buying signals

• How they describe your company in their own words

• Value drivers

• Problem statements in their own words

• Most emotional quotes

• Competitor mentions

• Status quo mentions

• Voice of customer gold (phrases used a lot we should be using verbatim)

• Inferred emotions

6. Watch website session replays

You can learn more about how people interact with the website from watching 20 session replays from something like HotJar than from trying to dig through a bunch of trend data.

You see exactly where people get stuck, what they click on, what they hover over the longest, what they look at right before they bounce.

It’s the difference between reading about something and actually seeing it happen.

7. Survey your buyer

I’ve done this where you survey your buyer on where they get their information, what they want to know, what events they go to, who they follow on social media.

A successful way I’ve found to get people to actually fill it out: tell them you’ll share the insights afterwards.

Everybody feels a little behind and wants to know what their peers are doing. As a bonus, you get an awesome research piece you can publish (and tag all those people on social). Plus, you know exactly who they trust, which channels to focus on, and what to say.

Here’s an example of a survey I’ve done that’s worked really well (easy to set up in TypeForm or other):

What topics do you actually care about?

[Multi-select] Select all that apply.

[insert topic areas]

What’s your go-to content format?

[Single-select] Select all that apply.

• Text

• Podcast/Audio

• Video

• I like to mix it up

What sources do you trust for [insert topic area] insights: written, podcasts, or otherwise?

[Open text] (List any blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or reports you actually follow.)

Who do you follow on social for [insert topic area] insights?

[Open text] (List any Instagram accounts, TikTok channels, YouTube channels, LinkedIn influencers, hashtags, X accounts, etc.)

What events do you regularly attend?

[Open text] (List conferences, events, meetups, or webinars you make time for.)

Which online communities do you hang out in?

[Open text] (Think Slack groups, LinkedIn communities, Reddit forums, or anywhere else you talk shop.)

Want to see the results? (Optional)

Drop your email below, and we’ll send you the final insights once they’re compiled.

8. Communities

Similar to Reddit, I see communities becoming more and more popular and engaged right now (especially niche, focused, and private ones) because everyone feels behind with AI and wants to know what their peers are actually doing.

Because everyone wants to prove that they’re AI pros, oftentimes the more honest questions happen behind closed doors rather than in public places like LinkedIn.

This could be a Facebook group, a Circle community, a Slack group, etc. Bonus if you launch your own community, that’s a real gold mine not just for questions people are asking about your problem in general but also your company specifically.

9. Going to events

Whether it’s a conference or a dinner, going in person to an event can be the ultimate crash course in your messaging, your pitch, their objections, responses, etc. You can test in real time and you’ll easily see the questions can get asked over and over when someone walks up to your booth or sits near you at a dinner.

Protect your focus

Everyone right now is obsessed with automating everything, trying to do more and more with AI. They’ve forgotten about the buyer, the person who’s actually valuable to understand. They’re so wrapped up in their own fear of falling behind.

I’ve been there too. Performing for the sake of your job, your paycheck, your career safety. That’s a hard thing to work against.

But the best strategy shows up when you understand the buyer so completely that your next move feels obvious.

That proximity, that curiosity, that humanness makes messaging and growth channels clear. The work you’re doing starts to spark something instead of just filling a dashboard.

You weren’t hired to optimize everything. You were hired to make impact. And it makes the job a lot more fulfilling and clear when you feel connected to that person on the other side.