Your Customers Help You Make Better Content ( If you talk to them ) - Teacher: Callum Armstrong

Hello, useful content creators today on the podcast. We're going to be taking a detailed look. A customer interviews. And to help us with that, we'll be talking with marketing coach and social entrepreneur, Callum Armstrong,

Callum, and I had a great conversation and he shared his process on conducting successful customer interviews.

including understanding the purpose,

identifying the right audience, setting up the mechanics,

and then using the data for content creation.

This will be a very useful episode for any small business who wants to attempt to conduct customer interviews for themselves. So enjoy the conversation, and let's make useful content.

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Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom, Callum. Armstrong. Hi Callum.

Hello, Juma. Thank you so much for having me here.

Yeah, it's good to have you on Callum. Um, I know we discovered each other on matchmaker. fm for all the people who want to know that is a podcast, a matching website with a very funny name. Uh, and so I know you reached out to me and, uh, you know, and we kind of had booked this for a while. So it's, it's really great to have you inside to talk about, uh, content marketing and customer interviews. So could you please tell the people. Uh, what you do and how you help your clients make useful content.

Yeah, definitely. So I'm really excited to talk about our customer interviews, but my background in content marketing started about six years ago. I. Had this vision to use business to bring more resources to the environment. I've been through a various iterations of different businesses over the last few years.

Um, and that, that evolved from creating content for clients as a freelancer, uh, blogs, websites, emails, newsletters, that kind of thing into a content marketing agency. We built a team around the COVID lockdowns of 2020 up until about mid 2022. And since then I've been a coach. So I help B2B businesses to, to, uh, turn their websites into 24 seven customer getting machines and also use those skills to help environmental projects to get more awareness and more airtime so that they can make a bigger impact because you need to be known before people can care and take action.

Right. So you run a content marketing agency and then you transition to, to coaching. Why the transition? What was the, what was inside of there that made you transition?

Well, there are a few reasons. Uh, the first one was knowing where your identity is, your place in the world. Um, I found that in running the agency, I've got a lot more joy out of coaching my team of writers on how to perform doing strategy with clients, training the client staff, then actually delivering the work.

And obviously the work was great, but part of it was where do I get joy? The other part was about setting up foundations for longevity. One of my promises as an agency owner was we will set up your business and your marketing so that if we keep working together for a long term, great. But if, if we stop working together at any point, you're set up for the future.

And I felt that when we got results for clients, the scope would grow and grow and grow as we got better and better results. And that would mean that we will become very reliant on the client and the client will become very reliant on us. It's sort of too much of a good thing. And I saw that the logical ending here is, is not an ending that I want.

And if I can focus more on building the capabilities of clients, businesses, Then it's just a lot more resilient, long term for the clients. And I get a lot more joy out of building people's capabilities and then, and seeing them thrive rather than owning the whole process myself. So I guess that's in a nutshell, it's been a long process to get to there, but ultimately it's just about setting people up to help their dreams come true.

Because at the end of the day, getting customers is an important part of growing a business. And growing our business is what creates the resources to bring our dreams to life. And so I'd rather set up foundations that, you know, last and help people to bring their dreams to life for them and their families and their teams.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think, um, people really discount the whole, um, what is the purpose behind your business? And I know over the last few years that has become kind of, uh, Uh, well, uh, well, we, we call it cringy because of like the Simonson X, Y. And, and it always has been a real thing. Like, what do you like to do?

What do you enjoy doing? And then what are you good at? Your values, your story, your expertise, and then you kind of dive into that really deeply. So that's good. I think, uh, the transit, you have to know where you can make the most impact

and then pursue that. So that's, that's a, that's an excellent thing.

and you know, just because you can do anything doesn't mean you should. Just because something makes money doesn't mean that that's your place in the world. And you try stuff and you learn and you iterate. And yeah, at the end of the day, there's no harm done in testing something new. And that is how you find what you love, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Great. Good stuff. And so we're going to talk a little bit more about something that you are very good at, which is customer interviews. And, um, and that's something that I am very interested in because we also do customer interviews for our clients. But it's always good to hear the techniques and to hear the methods from someone who does it in a, probably a different context. So I know you believe that you should. Interview your ideal customers to find the right content ideas to cover the right content ideas to make. Why do you believe that interviewing your ideal customers is the way to go to find the right content?

So I think to answer that, we've got to take a step back and look at how you can get feedback on what you're doing. At the end of the day, there's no point doing marketing if there isn't a reason and an outcome from whatever activity you're doing. Otherwise, you're just putting resource into the ether for no reason.

And so before you create a piece of content, you want to validate that that's actually worth creating. Typically, there are two ways at a very high level that you look at it. One is quantitative. Um, feedback, what is the search volume on Google for this topic? What's trending on YouTube or social media? Uh, what's, what's the hot thing today?

Or is there, you know, consistent demand for this topic? In which case you can say, well, people are searching this. That doesn't mean that your clients and your ideal customers are searching that keyword on Google or consuming a type of content on YouTube or a type of podcast. And there's a lot of different ways you can figure it out.

But the other type of feedback is qualitative feedback. Okay. This is not the numbers, not the data, not the hard stuff, but what actually matters to them. And, you know, there are so many fancy ways of getting this feedback and this data. There's a million and one tools out there these days that proclaim to do it.

But at the end of the day, just because you see your competitors doing something or you see something trending doesn't mean that that's what your customers want and need. The only people that can really answer that is your customers. So at the end of the day, what's the best way of finding out what people want?

Just, just ask them.

Yeah, I think so too. And I think people really discount that's the idea of just talking to the people who you're selling to or talking to the people who you want to sell to. But how, what do you do if you don't have many customers? Because I know it may, people may think that they need a certain number of persons to talk to. Before they could find out, get good quality, uh, data from them. What do you do if you have very little or no customers when you're starting out? How do you deal with that problem as a business owner? 

There's a few points to this. The first is just because you get feedback today from your customers or from your potential customers doesn't mean that that's going to inform the content and the strategy you use forever. It's a, it's a learning process. It's constant iteration. So see what people say now, you know, take some steps forward, but be prepared to change.

Uh, the other thing is if you don't have many customers. It's important not to put too much weight onto one particular opinion because it's easy to not realize that maybe that's not your ideal customer or maybe that opinion doesn't reflect your whole entire audience. So one way is, you know, you can go out and you can offer your expertise in exchange for feedback.

I've seen people, uh, there's a newsletter I subscribe to, Justin Welsh, and he talks about how you can. You can find people by LinkedIn and other social channels and say, Hey, I'll give you 30 minutes of free consulting. And I want to interview you for 30 minutes. That's a way if you're part of professional groups, like networking groups, or you've got people in the network that maybe aren't your customers now, but they're the type of people that you would want to serve.

Perfect. Go and talk to them. Uh, that that's, that's a couple of ways then. I think it also depends on the amount of resources you have to dedicate to customer interviews and customer research. Look, if you, if you're spending 5 hours a week or 10 hours a week on your marketing, or you have a paper thin budget, it doesn't make sense to do 20 different interviews, right?

You know, you might, Do a little bit, get the insights you can with what you've got, go forward and test it, get some more customers and talk to them. Um, but then there's also feedback. So what questions are people asking you? What objections are they saying to your sales calls? What pain points are people saying in the sales calls?

If you have a sales team or a customer services team, what, what problems are they getting? Um, when you talk to other people in your industry, What are the, what are the common, common threads and common themes? And I think that's something you can start with and just keep refining over time and, and, and keep your assumptions top of mind and say, Hey, is this actually what people are believing or not?

And be prepared to change your mind over time.

you seem to be suggesting, or you suggested earlier that people do work for free in order to get the data. So is it that you're looking at it as an exchange? Like I am. Offering my expertise to collect this data. And that's the way a business owner should approach it in the beginning.

It depends where you're at, right? If you don't have enough insights and you're, you don't have enough customers to get meaningful insights, it's an option. I'm not saying that's perfect for everyone. Um, but to ask people to give you half an hour of their time to talk about the insights with nothing in exchange, if it's a business person, I don't think that's a fair request.

And so, yeah, if you don't have enough customers and you don't have enough people with enough level of rapport and relationship to, for them to be happy to help you, then why not? It doesn't mean that you have to give half an hour of your time for free. It's one option, but I think it's important to put yourself in the shoes of the person you're looking to get insights from.

They're thinking what's in it for me. And some people will be kind and generous with their time, but you know, we're all busy. We've all got stuff going on, so it's going to be compelling. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and just for the, for the record, I don't disagree with that. I think doing work for someone who you think can give you great feedback, and it might not even be in a case where you want data, it might be a case where you want experience. I have no problem with that. But I think it's very important that business owners are very strategic about how they use their time and how they give their work.

Unless of course, it's something that you really, really believe in and you want to put your energy into that as something completely different, but to collect data and for experience, I think it's important that we all measure those things as, as business owners. That's, that's my

take on it. Cause I, trust me, I did a lot of stuff for free.

Yeah, you gotta get 

did a lot somehow, right? And hey,

I don't think it's a hard and fast. This is the rule. It's part science, part art. Right? You, you, you test and you improve. But I've got this analogy I like to use. Use to explain marketing to people. Um, which I think would be quite helpful to cover now. Do you mind if I just quickly touch on it?

sure. Sure. Feel free.

So I like to think of marketing as going fishing. So if you're going fishing first, you have to know what fish you want to catch, um, where they hang out, what types of food they like, et cetera. Then you need to get the right equipment. That might be weaving a better net, fixing the holes in your net, getting the right fishing rod and bait or tackle or lures.

And then going out and testing different spots and, and testing different times and then doubling down on what actually works. And so what I often see businesses doing is they spend so long building this beautiful website with interviewing 100 customers. and they don't have time to actually go and promote themselves.

It's like putting your net in shallow water where no fish are hanging out. You know, you might get the odd fish accidentally fall into it. Um, and then there's other people that will go out and promote like crazy without actually saying what am I catching and is my equipment up to the job. Sure there might be the odd fish that falls in a leak in a But you're missing out on so much opportunity.

So yes, when you're interviewing customers, it's important to get enough feedback to go out and fish, but it's important not to get so carried away with it that you don't end up getting out and going for the expedition and bringing home some food. So I know it's an abstract example, but I think it's important to say, well, what, where are we at?

What size is our business? How. Like what, what's the financial implication of these insights? If you're an Amazon or a Google, you're going to have a lot more resource and a lot more importance on getting the exact precise insights than say a one man band or a small business that's just getting started.

So, you know, make it realistic for yourself and improve as you go.

Yeah, that's good advice. Make it realistic. Make it appropriate for yourself. Don't do things that don't apply to you, you know, because I know people often look at other people and say, well, I'll just do what they do, but you do have to experiment and test and find anything that fits

for you and for your business.

That's, that's good stuff. Okay. So I know, so let's get more into the actual. Customer interviews. And I know one of the things that you talk about is that people often want to jump straight into creating content and they don't take time to validate whether that piece of content may work or may not, or may actually be something that their customers want to hear.

So let's talk about how to start with customer interviews. What are the things that people should know? So I'm somebody, I'm a business owner. I want to do customer interviews. Where is my starting point?

So I think the starting point is understanding why you're doing this in the first place. It's not to get a complaints or feedback data. It's not to sell to someone and close a deal. If you do close a deal from the interview, great, that's a bonus. But you shouldn't be going into this looking to, um, use it as a custom service tool or as a sales tool, but rather as research and insight gathering.

That's really critical because if you, if you go into it with the wrong intention. You're going to get different feedback from someone, and that's not on that person not giving you the right information, that's on how you actually approach them. And then the second thing to keep in mind as you're starting is to just have a broad view of the buying process that we all go through.

So no matter what we purchase, there's generally four, sometimes people say more, but four stages, four main stages in purchasing something. So firstly, you're unaware that there's a problem. Then you become aware that there's a problem. Then you become aware that there's a solution. You're searching around for your alternatives.

You're considering what's going to be the right thing to purchase or to solve your problem. And then you're ready to buy it. You go through getting a quote or adding it to your cart, accepting the proposal, or entering your payment details and going through checkout information you'll purchase depending on the industry.

And so at each stage of this buying journey there's going to be questions that people have. There's going to be pain points they have. There's going to be consequences of not getting their problem solved through you. There's going to be issues that they're facing and this is what we're uncovering. So I think before you even think about who you're going to talk to, you just need to know that we're doing this for research and we're trying to understand that heroes journey that our customers go through, that we solve them for them or with them.

Right. So the first thing that we do is really discover and be comfortable with why we're doing it and understand the reason we're actually going to do this customer interviews. And it's true. Sometimes people may get carried away and try to pitch people in the middle of the interview, which is never a good idea.

I think, you know, um, okay. So that's the city. Why is it for the spots? Um, what, why am I doing this and being clear on that? What would be the second step in. getting your customer interviews together.

So next up, you want to know who you're talking to. Let's say that I am an accountant. I'm not an accountant by the way, but let's say I am. Am I targeting all businesses in my country? Am I targeting all services I'm offering? Within the people, let's say I decide that I'm targeting restaurant owners. Am I targeting just restaurants getting started?

It might be a food trailer at the market. Am I targeting five star restaurants? Is there a specific type of person I'm reaching? Is there a way that I'm defining my audience? So you need to say like. These different segments of the market of people you could serve are all going to have different bits of feedback.

There's no one right or wrong way of answering it. And there's a lot of ways you can slice and dice that you're targeting, but you've got to decide like who are we actually wanting to reach and trying to find people that are as close to that profile as possible so that the insights you get are honest and are actually representative of who you want.

A good way of thinking about it. You might have your audience really narrowed down. You might say, this is my segment. This is who I want to reach. You might not, if you don't, a good question to ask is who within my market is it easiest for me to get results for if you're in a service space or who in my market, if I'm selling a consumer product, who in my market is, uh, Like going to get the most value out of my offering.

Yeah, there's a lot of ways about looking at it, but know which segment you want to reach first. 

Right. So first part is why second part is knowing the person who you're supposed to be talking to. I suspect that inside of that, knowing that person is that you kind of have to figure it out, that out. So is it that you kind of have an idea? What's your product or service, the problem it might solve, and then look for somebody who might fit that, or what's the best way to figure that out if you're not completely sure who you actually are serving.

So, just to confirm what you're asking is, if you don't know who your audience is, how do you figure that out?

Yeah, yeah, that's basically it.

You put it much better.

I like this, why then who? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think that that's a really fundamental thing to understanding your marketing. Um, you can look at who brings you the most joy. You can look at who is the easiest to serve, who makes you the most money, who you have the most experience serving, uh, where your reputation is held.

You know, what's most aligned with your ethics or values or beliefs. It can be very personal or it can be very business decision oriented. If you have a team, it might be worth chatting with your team and shareholders and investors. If you don't, you can figure it out as you go. You don't have to have one niche, one focus forever.

Uh, but if you say we serve anyone, it's really hard to succeed, or a lot harder to succeed with your online marketing. I see small businesses do this so often where, you know, I'm interviewing them in our onboarding and I say, Hey, who is your ideal customer? And they say, well, anyone that breathes that can give us cash.

No, no, no, no, no. That's really hard because there's so much noise online. You're not going to stand out. You're just going to be bland. And when you think about, The calls to action of what, what's the benefit of working with us. Each audience has a different reason why a different trigger that will make them say, Hey, I really want to work with you.

And a different set of points. They're going to pull out of your content and your message. That's going to build trust with him. And that's going to make them know, like, and want to deal with you. So decide it. Um, and just keep in mind that you can change it and you don't, it's like that Goldilocks thing.

You don't want to box yourself so narrow that you say, I'm an accountant that looks after food trailers that are in this one specific park with 10 trailers, but you also don't want to say, Hey, I serve any business from a single man band to Google, right? Because then it's just so hard to think about.

Right. So not too big, not too small. You're looking for the just right segment for you.

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

that sweet, that sweet spot.

Yeah, 

exactly. It's a very deep topic. We could do a whole podcast episode on this, but I'd say if you're not sure about that, it's worth sitting down and spending some time journaling and jotting down thoughts and just thinking about who do you want to serve because your offer and your audience is going to influence so much of your business, how you fulfill, what offers, what, what the price points are, your profitability of it, how easy it is to market and sell, how you can collaborate and partner with all these other considerations really do fall out from that.

So. Um, yeah, it's definitely worth considering in more detail.

All right. Great. Before we go down into that big rabbit hole, let's let's go on to the third one. So what's the third step? So you talked about why you talked about who then, uh, what's the third step in setting up these customer interviews?

So the next step is the mechanics of it. Do you have anyone in your audience that in your relationships and your network that you can speak with at a first point? Is there anyone that you have a personal connection with where you're not trading, you know, pitching to a stranger and saying, Hey, can I give you some of my time for your insights?

Do you, can you talk to them and. I still offer something. I still say, Hey, even if I know you really well, I've done a whole lot of favors for you. I'm still going to offer you something just because that's who I am. But is there a client you can talk to? Is there someone that's a lead or a potential customer?

Is there someone you've collaborated with someone in your, if you're in a professional networking group, if you're a part of an online community or a coaching program or something else. If you don't have that, then you can look online. You can, you can find trending topics on, on LinkedIn or, or other platforms and see where they're at.

And if failing all of that, you can Google search your audience. You can look at people's websites. You can find people that are companies that are closer to who you want to reach and reach out to them, email them, phone, call them and find it. Part of this, you know, if you have people in your network, it can be as easy as just sending a message and saying, Hey, I'd love to talk to you.

Uh, I'm trying to understand how I can better serve you and people like you. I'd be happy to exchange something really flexible to chat when you're available. If you don't have that, it might be a bit of a numbers game. But yeah, it just depends on where you're at in your business. So in setting up the meeting, I ideally like the golden, uh, the golden way of doing it, in my opinion, would be to have either an in person meeting, grab a, grab a cuppa, go to a cafe, talk to them because then you get all the body language.

You can see the patient, their causes, the way they act. If they're willing to, for you to record it, please do record it. If not, a Zoom call or a Google Meets call or some online Skype call is great. Again, try to get it recorded because we take in such a small amount of data and info that we remember and quite often our mind twists the facts.

It's just the nature of our biology. So if you can record it, you can then go back, you can use apps like Rev. com to get a transcript, you can reread through it, um, Our coaching offer, for example, this is how I built it. I talked to people, I actually didn't record it. I think I just jotted down notes frantically while talking to them on the phone and in person, which wasn't ideal.

Um, but then the insights from that, I was way off. I was like, people need a marketing strategy and that's what I care about. And then after interviewing a whole lot of my audience, I was like, Hey, okay, this is, this is actually what they need. So yeah, basically set it up and try and get some kind of collateral that you can go back to in a different frame of mind to look at.

You know, I've never, ever, ever done an in person customer interview,

uh, but what you're saying, what you're saying makes sense in terms of the, like the body language, because what I've, what I've found sometimes, and you, I'm sure you would have found this too, is that the things people say with their mouth, And what they write sometimes doesn't necessarily always align. And then I have another friend who does this and I think she said that sometimes even their, what they do and what they say don't align. And so you have to be very, you have to look for these signals inside of the interview. Would you say that it's always better to try and get it in person? Or, I know you suggested Google Meet or Zoom.

Uh, once you record it, but would you say that if you could do it, always do it in person, that is the way to actually go?

Yeah, coming back to what we said earlier, make it realistic for you in person is great. You can't be the human connection these days, especially when so much is online, but there is the fact that you need to find someone locally or you need to travel to them. You need to get prepared. You need to find a park.

You need to, there's a lot of, um, requirements to it on person. So that's ideal if you can. But I wouldn't. Make that a requirement, uh, but ideally at least be able to see them because if someone's talking politely on the phone But you can see they're actually not engaged whatsoever You might say hey, is there something I'm missing here?

But if you're talking to them on the phone or even if you're emailing or getting everything to fill out a survey form Which is not ideal. You're not going to see that. It's just going to be missed. Yeah.

Also survey forms are not very good. Why don't you like survey forms?

Well, I think It kind of gives people the space to consider, you know, they can consider the replies and that's awesome. And there's a lot of benefits of a survey form, um, but you don't get the unspoken cues. There was, I remember reading somewhere, I can't remember quite where, but it's like 7 percent of body language, of communication is verbal and the rest is non verbal.

So, when I send someone an email, I You know, I've got my thoughts, this is how I feel about it, and then I've got my first draft, and then I've edited that first draft, then I've reviewed it before I've sent it, so yes, it can be helpful, it can be helpful for someone to distill their thoughts, if they're engaged, if they're not distracted, and if they're sincerely wanting to help you, it can actually be a better way, but let's face it, we live in a distracted world, where we've got so much going on, if this isn't someone's top priority, and they just want to get it done, Which, more often than not, is the case, even if that's not communicated.

Then, you're going to miss so much context. However, in saying that, if you do have an audience that's super engaged, and they are going to go away, they're going to think about it, they're going to come back and review their survey or their email, and they're going to give you that time, perfect. But, you know, nine times out of ten, we've got the memory and attention span of fish.

No, no offense to fish, by the way.

All right. So we, we have now started to interview people. Uh, what is the baseline number? How many people do we want to interview? Or does it depend on our size or maybe the stage of the customer journey? How do we know what makes sense in terms of actual numbers?

I think part of it's our size and the stage in our marketing. You know, if you've never done marketing before, get some insights, get started, invest a bit of time and resource and review. Obviously, if you're much larger and more established, you've got things that are working and things that aren't, you're going to have a lot more data and feedback.

Um, I wouldn't give it a solid number, but I'd say when you start seeing the same trends coming through and they make sense with where you're at and where you're going, then you know that you're onto something. Uh, when I think a good way of looking at it is when I used to do a lot of blog writing, I would research what other competitors are saying.

And I might research the top 10 or 20 blogs. And sometimes I would go through all these different articles and I'd find so many different points and it'd take me 20 articles to get a gist on it and say, okay, this is, these are the key points I'm starting to see overlap. I can see where there's gaps and what to talk about.

Sometimes I would read the first three articles. They will be amazing. That have everything I need to know the next year would have nothing really to add value. And I go, okay, I've got enough. I can start thinking about how I'm going to approach this. And I think it's the same with customer interviews.

You know, one answer isn't the same quality as another answer. And you don't know that until you get into it. You might be lucky and find that the first few people that answer your interviews are great. You might find that actually you're not getting the answers you need. You can't know that until you get into it.

But that's a really good question because. Like, how much time do you set aside? What resource do you put into this? And how do you know if you're doing it right or not? Right?

Yeah, that's a really good point. Like what the answers are not equal. Like, uh, one customer might give you a really great, like actionable insights. And the other one might just be like, yeah, I'm just trying to, uh, you know, finish my coffee before this interview is over or something like that. I don't know.

Um, yeah, I once had somebody say that, and I can't remember who now is that it's a bad idea to exchange something for an interview. Like to give away something. I don't know if you've heard about that and whether you think that is true or not.

I feel like it depends how it's done, and I feel like it depends on your offer. Look, if you're selling t shirts on an e commerce website that are low price point and you don't have much relationship with your customer and you say, Hey, we'll give you a free t shirt for an interview. You're probably going to get a lot of people that just want a free t shirt and they'll say, what if they like, it's like those old survey platforms in the day where you'd get a few cents to answer a survey and you put in a lot of people would put in all these silly answers just so they could get a voucher to spend on something they wanted.

However, if it's. If it's a higher value or you have more of a relationship with your audience or it's more strategic, then I would say that's probably, you know, if the value of the person's time that you're trying to reach is higher and they have less available time to help you, then you should consider giving something in exchange.

If that feels right for you and it fits your business and your ethos. Um, yeah, there's no one right or wrong way to do it. I do think back to the time when here in New Zealand, where I'm based, There were people going out and they were selling wine, like boutique wines from all these vineyards and They would get into your door by saying hey, we'll give you a free wine tasting at your home And we're going to give you a set of four coffee mugs and there's you know coffee mugs and so many people I knew would They'd take the free coffee mugs and kick the person out of their house, which I thought was really nasty It was not nice whatsoever, but that would be an example of giving something away in a bad context Don't do that, right?

But in general, like, think about, think about your customer. Like, where are they at? Who is your audience? And, you know, if it doesn't make sense for your audience to give them stuff, then don't. Think about it another way. And you don't have to give someone money or give someone some merchandise or consulting time.

It might be saying, hey, if you help us, and let's say it's people that care about the environment, we'll donate money to a charity you're choosing. It might be saying, Hey, like here's a guide, like a lead magnet, some kind of bit of information that costs you nothing, but is strategically valuable to them.

It might be that you sell courses and you say, Hey, this course doesn't actually cost us anything. I don't, don't tell them that, but like, well, um, we'll give you this course that's worth something. There's a lot of ways to go about it, but I think you have to come back to that. Why, why are we doing it? Who are we serving?

And then let that answer the question. Interviews are one way of doing this. If you're at the early stages of your marketing journey, they're invaluable. But as you get further down the line, there are so many other ways to gather customer feedback and data, which can be just as valuable and also a lot more passive.

So there's a heavy lift, there is work involved in interviewing people. There's preparing, arranging the interview, offering something, giving your time, showing up, reviewing the data, deciding what's useful, acting on it, and then actually, you know, doing stuff with that. But there are other ways. Like I was working with a coaching client that I serve earlier today and, and we were setting up, they just moved their email marketing providers to a new system.

And they had all these lead magnets that, People were downloading hundreds of them each month, and we realized that there was no feedback loop. And so one of the things we did was we set up a question at the start of the email saying, what, you know, what is your most burning problem in this industry that we serve?

Um, and can we help you? We, we read every email and we'll genuinely try to help you find an answer. And within a few days of just changing that one little tweak, they're getting all this feedback from customers. And now we're using that to create content that's actually aligned to what they need. Um, another thing like their sales team wasn't previously recording all the, all the objections and challenges.

So one thing we said was, you know, have a weekly sync with sales and marketing. What are the biggest objections? And then using that to create content to solve those problems, or what are the pain points that people are bringing in? You know, in a software company that I used to do content marketing for, one of the biggest sources of ideas that we probably could have spent more time looking at, but was this customer service team, how are people not liking the app?

What, um, what requests are people having that we aren't serving? Yes, that's good for the engineers to develop better stuff, but it's also good for marketing to say, well, this is what people are saying in the market. If you have a partnership program, or let's say you leverage partners in some way, talk to your partners.

If they are serving the same audience with a complementary product, what pain points are they seeing that you can solve in your columns? But I'd say also, in interviewing, in getting this data, it is a little bit more removed from directly asking someone. Um, so just keep in mind, is this part of that problem to solution journey?

Like, you know, problem unaware, problem aware. Solution aware, solution ready. Are you looking at talking about content that's relevant to helping someone to buy from you and solve the problem that, that going through their journey of solving you provide the solution to? Or is it something that is a problem for them, but it has nothing to do with your business?

Because if that's the case, you should write that off nine times out of 10 and focus on what's actually going to be in that journey.

And I'm thinking that, you know, there's, the point is, is that you just have to know your customers deeply and there are many ways you can get to that place. Interviews is one way, but then there are many ways you could probably get to know your customers deeply, but, but as at the core of what the interviews are, it's like finding out these people who I serve, what do they care about? And how can I make a solution that would really work for them so that I can help them? And because I helped them, I can gain some benefit by them paying me for it. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. 

so if you, so if you, if you do that, Like you have, let's suppose you got all this stuff done, you follow column steps, everything is going well. You get all these juicy customer interviews and let's just suppose that they all are really good. And now you have all this data. How then do you use that data? Or how are you going to convert that into something like, like content? Can you just give us a, some ideas as to how that might work for, for a business owner,

Yeah, so I have a pretty simple process. I've kind of strapped together from various people I've learned from. Um, we go like this. You, you make what we call an idea farm document. I took this idea from a company called animals that does content marketing. It's not my own idea and it's simply just a document.

It can be a Google doc, a word document, a sticky note. It can be a spreadsheet. One of your top project management tools. Set out the stages in the buying journey. Problem unaware to solution ready. When you look at the insights, put all those insights into each area of this document. Share it with your team.

As you go, explain, you know, what the document's for and how to use it, of course. As you go about your day, you talk to customers, you find, find other insights, add into the content idea farm. Just keep putting ideas in there. Don't try and come up with ideas and select the ideas in the same setting because it's two completely different types of work.

Come back to it when you're ready to plan your content, look at the idea farm and then validate it. Ask, is this something that our ideal customers actually care about? Is this something that naturally leads to our solution and our service or our product? Is this something that's actually on the buying journey and the buying pathway to solve the problem that we solve for our customers?

And is it something that fits our values, our ethos, our, um, you know, what we want to show up and talk about? Is it something maybe we have, there's a lot of different ways you can rank which ones are better than others, but, you know, essentially, is this, is this how we want to show up in the world? Is this our identity and is it helping our, our business to grow?

Is this investment going to be returned or likely to be returned in multiples? And then from there. We create what's called a content calendar. So again, you can make it elaborate and complex, so you can keep it really simple. Uh, you can have a spreadsheet or a Google sheet or on any of your project management tools and just put it in, okay, here's the content topic and here's when it's going to go live.

And then you make sure you have enough time to produce it and then decide how you're going to use it and how are you going to repurpose it if you're doing video like yourselves. You might say, okay, we've got a, a short form video, a long form video, and that'll be broken up into shorter videos. We might repurpose that into blogs and collaborate on a webinar or a podcast.

If it's a blog, you might say a written form. You might say, okay, there's going to be a downloadable ebook, checklist, lead magnet of some sort. We're going to bring out a collaboration and some blogs from that. etc. So essentially you want to start with the ideas you want to validate them in a separate time frame when you've got a separate mindset ideally with your team if you have a team to work with on it or your agencies or your contractors um and then put it into your content calendar and think about how you can get the most out of it and how you can repurpose that so that you're not It's starting from scratch on every platform and every project and everything you do.

And that's how you start to evolve these ideas into campaigns that can then holistically grow your business and be a really great experience for the customer.

as good as a good synopsis. Uh, are there any final things as we, as we kind of come in for landing here? Are there any final things that you may have wanted to mention? I didn't get, I didn't get a chance to mention that business owners need to know about customer interviews and the final notes on customer interviews.

Yeah, definitely. Your customers are changing all the time. Your customers are different people in different contexts and situations. Your customers are different people in different moods. Each customer is a different customer. Just because you did an interview two years ago doesn't mean that that's relevant today.

I saw some very smart people in marketing at the start of the lockdowns. Instead of going to sell to everyone to meet their budgets, they went out and interviewed their customers to ask their biggest pain points and then pivoted their offers and their comms based on that. I took my hat off to that.

That was so smart. And I'd say, you know, make this a regular process. It might be a heavy lift at start, at the start if you haven't done this before, but have the idea of the process and system in place. And then give, give yourself the opportunity to improve and to refine. And just keep in mind, like, things, ideas come out of nowhere.

And, you know, it's easy to look at numbers. Like I was saying with the quantitative versus qualitative, it's easy to say this is what people are searching for. This is what the market buying or offering, uh, and content AI is the hot thing these days. Right. Uh, but that doesn't mean that that's what people need and you know, so just.

Keep an eye out for what's coming up next. And then, you know, if you're talking to a customer at a work function, and maybe they've had a few drinks or they've let their guard down, they're going to say different things to the first time you meet someone. They're going to say different things to a repeat customer, and that's going to probably be different to someone that's on a sales call.

So, you know, that's probably going to be different to what people put in LinkedIn comments. So just. Bear in mind the context that people are different people and different days and we're all different people in different stages Look, I'll talk to my mother differently than I talk on this podcast.

That's just the nature of how life is and so You know take take it with a grain of salt but also take it seriously and be able to see how things evolve because You know, we're only as right as the assumptions we make and if we make too many assumptions, then we can Just block ourselves off from actually perceiving what's happening.

Yeah, so what I'm hearing you say is that we just have to keep on talking to our customers all the time

Yeah keep that 

feedback feedback loop. Exactly. It is good to build those relationships.

So it's good to relate, as I often say, this is good. This is good column column. People may hear this and they may want to find out. More from you. Where can people find you online?

cool. Thank you for asking. I have a business based in publish We coach B2B service companies on how to set up their foundations and do that If you're interested in that you can go to our website based in publish comm Evergreen Leads is the program. If you would just like to talk about content marketing or just connect, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.

So I'll give you the link and we can put that in the show notes to uh, to see me there. But yeah, always happy to help. I'm happy to collaborate. So yeah. And so much for having me on the show. Like we said, relationships are everything and it's just great to get to know you Juma and to see all the awesome work you're doing as well.

That's really cool.

Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I, and people don't know this, but I was a bit late to the, to the interview, to the conversation. It was all my fault. I sent the wrong link, which can happen sometimes, but we, we did it. We here and we, we got this, uh, conversation

all the way done and wrapped up. Excellent. So thank you for listening to the useful content, podcast, students, useful content classroom. Dismissed

Cheers.

and we're clear

Cool.

and we clear good stuff, man. Good

Was that alright? Or 

was that helpful for your team? People?

Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It's good stuff. Um, I, I, I like, um, everybody does come customer interviews slightly differently, so it was good to hear. Um, some of your take on it and, and, and so on and how you approached it. I mean, some things are very similar, but it's always good to hear how people do customer interviews, especially for business owners that don't think sometimes they can do that.

And that's something that they should be doing. So it would encourage them to just talk to the customer some more, you know,

you know, as basic as like a, like a survey, even though we know that service can be sometimes misleading, but they have to start somewhere, you know,

I think we can get so caught up on doing it the one right way. And, um, you know, the thing is doing it and showing up and taking action is better than trying to get something perfect and waiting three years to do it. So I was trying to get that across that, like, you know, there are ways to do it better like this, but just do it.

Um,

absolutely.

got a resource. I didn't want to derail the call and mention it on there, but I've got like this free toolkit and it's. Just a Google doc. There's no download required or email address or anything. Um, that has like, it's got a list of questions, tips to set up the interview, how to identify your ideal customer, questions to ask, things to look for, how to probe for more info.

Like if you want, I'd be happy to provide the link for people. If it's going to distract from what you do and take away your business, I won't send it, but yeah, I just, yeah. 

No, no, no, no, no. I, I, I, I found the resource. I I've seen it. It's great.

And I will share it in the show notes.

Uh, people will see this too, because this is, this is like the post credits conversation. Yes, I'll put it in the show notes so people can go check it out, download it and, um, and, and use it if they want to, as a template for doing their own customer interviews.

It's fine. It's Good 

fantastic. No, awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here. Um, yeah, really appreciate it. As if there's anything I can do to help all of us and promote it when it comes out, but, um, anything I can do to help you just saying out, um, yeah, I hope you have an amazing hike as 

Sure. Sure, not a problem. As soon as, um, I get this done and up, it should take a few weeks because there's, there are many, uh, interviews in the queue right now. But, uh, I'll, you'll definitely, um, I'll let you know when it's coming out. Maybe I could cut some clips and, you know, I'll do my thing with it.

Cool.

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