It can be difficult to determine how consumers feel about a product or service, especially if it hasn’t been released, yet.
Fortunately, there’s a way to get a definitive answer on customer sentiment: online reviews.
By reading reviews for your own products as well as competing products, you can get a pretty good idea of what the market wants from a particular product or service.
In this post, I demonstrate how reviews can be used for market research as well as how to integrate that research into product development.
How to Use Reviews for Market Research
There’s a lot you can learn about what consumers want out of the products and services you and your competitors sell just by reading reviews customers have made.
You can learn:
- their overall sentiment toward your product
- specific issues they had
- features they love
- products they intend on using instead of yours
- products they intend to switch from in favor of yours
All of this information will help you develop new products and perfect existing ones.
You can learn it all by examining your own reviews and competitor reviews as well as using AI to conduct a bit of research.
If you track common bits of feedback left by customers in a spreadsheet, you can use your spreadsheet’s formula and graph features to really see which issues they care about more than others.
Start with Your Own Reviews
I’m including this section under the assumption that you have a product or service you want to improve by conducting market research.
If not, feel free to skip to the next section.
You can actually do research pretty casually, if you wish.
Just set up a new page in whatever you use to take notes with, open your reviews, and try to figure out your customers’ primary motivations for buying your product.
Answer the following questions in your notes:
- What problems are customers trying to solve with my product (or service)?
- How do customers claim my product (or service) falls short in providing solutions to those problems?
- Are there any brands customers recommend instead of mine?
- What does that brand do better than mine?
If you do find your customers recommending a different brand in your reviews, try to keep an open mind instead of getting defensive.
Research that brand, and determine what they do better than your brand.
You should also look through positive reviews customers have left for your brand.
These will be filled with features, services, and benefits your customers are already satisfied with. Therefore, you shouldn’t change them. Or at the very least, you should put them lower on your list of priorities for things to improve.
Look at Competitor Reviews
You can look at your competitors’ reviews whether or not you have a product at the moment and whether or not your own customers recommend them.
If you don’t have a product, look through your competitor’s 3, 2, and 1-star reviews. These will have complaints customers have made about your competitors’ products and services.
These complaints represent needs and pain points your competitors are not satisfying.
Jot down each complaint, and take a count of each.
This will give you an idea of which needs and pain points consumers in your target market care about most.
But being different isn’t always enough to earn customers, especially if you offer the type of product or service potential customers will need to switch to.
Depending on which niche you’re in, switching might not be as easy as buying a different brand of bread at the grocery store.
Because switching might be a bit of a headache, not only do you need to make them want to switch, you need to give them a good reason to.
So, look through your competitors’ 4 and 5-star reviews to see what they do well.
You don’t need to offer the same exact features as them, but you should provide the same (or better) benefits.
Where to Conduct Research On Online Reviews
Look at score-based reviews on:
- Your website
- Your competitors’ websites
- Yelp
- Tripadvisor
- Trustpilot
- Amazon
- Walmart
- Review websites specific to your niche, such as G2 for SaaS products
- Ecommerce websites specific to your niche, such as Best Buy for tech products
These locations might not have stars or scores, but they’re still worth looking at to see what customers have to say:
- Reviews on YouTube
- Reviews on blogs
- Reviews on social media
- Comment sections on each of these channels
Use AI to Get an Overview of Customer Sentiment
Open up an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini, and ask it the following questions:
- What complaints do customers have about [brand name]?
- What do customers like about [brand name]?
You can do this for your own brand or for competing brands.
If a brand name is similar to another, try to include identifying keywords in your question.
For example, when you google our brand name, Starfish Reviews, you get a mixture of results for other brands and products with “starfish” in their names.
So, to ensure these chatbots only take our own reviews into account, we can rephrase our question like this:
What do customers like about the Starfish Reviews WordPress plugin?
If you’re a local brand with the same name as brands from other states, try including your city name (and maybe street name) in your question like this:
What complaints do customers have about Subway restaurants in Seattle, Washington?
While you should verify the list it gives you by taking a look at actual reviews, you can get a better idea about common complaints and praises customers have about a brand when you conduct research in this way.
Create a Spreadsheet to Track Customer Complaints & Praises
Using a spreadsheet instead of notes gives you access to charts you can use to see your data in a visual way.
Note: Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are popular spreadsheet solutions.
It’s not too complicated. Just make one column for complaints and one for the count. Create a second sheet for praises.
When you find a complaint, jot it down in the Complaint column, then put a 1 in the Count column. If you see that complaint in another review, put a 2 in the Count column.
Just don’t include complaints in which a customer cited incorrect or misleading information as a complaint.
Then (in Google Sheets), highlight everything, and go to Insert → Chart. Then, customize your chart however you like.
You can add data labels by going to Customize → Series, then check the box that says “Data labels.”
Don’t Let Negative Reviews Outweigh Positive Reviews
Have you ever had a brand you love change their flavor or formula in a way that completely turns you off to it?
What about SaaS products? Have you ever relied on an app only to have the company remove a key feature you need?
Companies do this for one reason or another. It’s mostly about saving costs. But some companies make the wrong moves and move preemptively by correcting an issue only a small handful of customers complained about.
Sometimes changes like this go over smoothly. Other times, the company winds up losing a lot of customers as the features they changed were primary motivators for using their products.
That’s why I added this section. I feel it’s important that you take each complaint customers make with a grain of salt. Don’t let one complaint change your entire roadmap, especially if the majority of your customers have quite the opposite to say.
It’s only natural to pay more attention to negative reviews than positive ones, but it’s important to remember that you can’t please everyone.
All in all, make sure a significant number of customers complain about a feature you intend to change before you change it.
Ask to speak to customers directly if you need to.
How to Use Customer Feedback in Product Development and Marketing
Start by coming up with additional ways to collect customer feedback, such as:
- Adding customer feedback formats to support portals
- Asking customers to leave reviews
- Using social media to ask customers how they use your product
- Creating an online forum for customers, such as a subreddit
This will give you a lot more complaints and praises to work with.
Take these steps if you don’t have an established business:
- Choose one to develop:
- A product or service that has similar features to existing products
- A product or service that’s different but solves the same problems
- Design the basis of your product/service to ensure it offers the same benefits as existing products
- Develop additional features (or expand your service offerings) that solve problems existing products/services do not
- Develop features customers claim existing products are missing
If you have an established business:
- Choose one:
- Improve your existing product
- Scrap your existing product, and come out with a new, revamped version
- If you choose to improve your existing product, make sure it offers the same features, but develop it so that it offers features customers claimed were missing
- If you choose to develop a new product, make sure it exceeds customer expectations and solves more problems than your original product does as well as more problems than competing products solve
Ask customers to test your products with services like VocalPoint, UserTesting, and Home Tester Club.
When you market your new product, use golden marketing phrases like “you spoke. We listened” or “we listened to your feedback.”
This is something Microsoft did when they added new features to Microsoft Teams in 2021.
LinkedIn did it as well when discussing upcoming features.
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