Destination: Insights

Hey Contentlandian,

We’re going on a scavenger hunt to find all of the insights hidden across your company.

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At the end of your journey, you should have enough material to help you construct at least a quarterly content strategy.

The last time I took a company through this journey, we found enough insights to create a content strategy spanning two years.

Funny thing was, they had no idea they even had all those insights.

They were caged in tall towers and guarded by dragons.

Don’t worry, I’ve sharpened my blade and you can borrow it whenever you feel like it…

Shall we begin our journey?

Launching from dysfunction junction

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You know how we always talk about how marketing operates in a silo? How it cuts us off from insights, ideas, knowledge… yadda yadda.

Well, uh, the same is true within marketing teams as well.

That’s right, marketing teams are often operating in their own mini silos and it’s making it hard to even reach the station let alone launch from it.

One of my clients last year was a capital example of this:

🤔 Community doing their own thing

🤔 Podcast running without a schedule, without topics, and without any structure at all (often leading to totally useless information), and no one outside the company listening at all

🤔 Branding being completely ignored, even when they uncover that the persona they’ve been chasing is the wrong one

🤔 Email hardly in use by marketing at all, but CS and sales bombard them with requests.

Why is this critically damaging to the journey of collecting insights (and of course, to our ultimate journey of building an effective content strategy)?

Because all of those people were excellent at what they did.

So, they collected their own insights.

🤐 Community had created a social listening doc 3 years prior and was still keeping updating it regularly.

🤐 Branding had physically visited the offices of their customers to shadow them and see how they were using the product.

They’d also conducted dozens of very thorough interviews.

🤐 Email was privy to the kinds of questions CS and sales were trying to answer by creating templated responses.

But because they operated in a silo, they didn’t know the other bits of information (beyond their own) existed.

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Of course, because of the broader silo that most marketing teams operate within, they also missed this:

🤐 Sales and CS had conducted surveys internally of all the common questions and issues their prospects/ customers had brought up during calls.

Obviously, this meant they were missing out on a lot of direction.

And I know it’s happening in a lot of other companies too.

Heck, while I worked on a contract for SaaS Academy, I’d started creating a knowledge bank of organized insights broken down from their podcast and social videos.

I even captured screenshots of comments from customers within their FB channel and on their podcast.

No one else knew about it until the very end of our relationship.

Lesson: You might not know what you already have until you start breaking down silos. But once you do, you have some of the most valuable insights in your pocket. You might have to fight a few dragons, but they only spawn if you have dark forces at play in your company.

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Where the rest of the insights are hiding

I will always recommend collecting the insights that are closest and most readily available to your first, such as the social listening docs, surveys… all the existing stuff your employees/ coworkers have collected.

THEN, you can find additional insights by searching in these hovels:

🛖 Interviews

There will never be anything better than speaking directly with your audience.

However, we must make two distinctions here.

A lot of companies that do, in fact, interview customers often speak to existing customers. That isn’t far enough. It’s like existing in a bubble. Your brand’s impact and market perception are incredibly limited.

You need both.

Existing customer interviews and prospective or even competitor customers.

🛖 Sales and CS meetings

If you can’t speak directly to your audience, this is the next best thing.

In my example above, my client conducted a survey to collect those insights. That’s one simple way to do it.

But I’d argue that you'd get far richer insights if you speak to CS and sales directly and use it as a means of breaking down the silos. There are a few ways you can go about this.

1. If you’re a big company that meets in person, you could just hold a meeting in a large room to speak to everyone at once about the broader marketing goals, your content strategy or goals for the quarter… etc. Then you could spend time asking the room for their own insights.

2. Meet with only the CS and sales managers. Have them collect insights from their team to pass on to you.

3. Link with individuals on either team randomly over the month to get their insights.

I personally like the last idea, since you can speak to them longer and get more thorough answers. You’re also not putting anyone on the spot in a crowded room.

In these interviews, you want to figure out:

• What are the most common questions your customers and prospects are asking?

• What are their biggest hesitations/ objections with becoming a customer?

• What were they doing before they had your solution/ or what workaround are they using now that they’re trying to solve?

• What was the trigger that made them decide to change?

Reviews are highly underrated as a source of content ideation. This is even more true if those reviews are on G2, because they ask what you like and dislike about the product.

This can give you insights into questions you need to answer and features you need to talk about more in articles, on your website, or otherwise.

Let me show you an example of just how helpful reviews can be for content ideation:

In this Monday.com review, the reviewer mentions that there are workarounds to solve for Monday's missing financial management features, including creating custom columns for cost tracking.

If you can’t fix this in-product, you absolutely can use it as a content idea.

Maybe you don’t want to call attention to the lack of features. But you could create how-to articles to showcase these workarounds (without calling them such).

How about another from the G2 reviews of ClickUp:

Gosh, that text is small. Here, let me make it bigger for all the people that are just as blind as I am:

This one is interesting. It mentions how many people outside of IT don’t know the value of a shared checklist (or what it even is to begin with).

That should trigger an article on that exact topic.

The review also mentions how the free plan for ClickUp, and how it includes sufficient features for newbies to project management.

That could spark an article on vital features for project management newbies.

Of course, this doesn’t work for every brand… but it’s an avenue you could take if you’re really digging for some idea gold.

🛖 Online communities (from social media to Slack groups to forums)

I don’t think it’s much of a revelation to say that online communities are packed with content ideas. I think most people know that already.

Yet, few teams actually collect those insights.

Even fewer do something with them.

But take a look at this post in a Facebook entrepreneur’s group:

This post asks two very vital questions:

1. How do you figure out where your client engages online

2. How do you decide where to market your business

These are two separate but related ideas. You could create at least one piece out of this, and two if you want to go into the finer details of each (because they are, indeed, separate ideas).

🛖 Events

Companies seem to have returned to their normal cadence of event attendance since COVID.

Most see it as an opportunity to market their business, connect with audiences, and even test out new products.

… and also collect emails.

But these events are also a great opportunity to collect key insights about your audience and the types of content they want and need to be able to make purchases.

The client I’d mentioned in the beginning of our scavenger hunt is a prime example of how vital these insights are.

They learned from events that the audience they’d been pursuing for ages (and were dead set on), wasn’t correct. Their product was better suited to a completely different persona.

Shifting their focus would dramatically change the messaging of their marketing.

If you or anyone in your company is going to an industry event, make sure they have a set of questions to ask attendees, in the very least. At most, send someone who understands the goal of asking these in-depth audience research questions.

The Prize

🦄 The insights you’ve collected through scavenging ( walked you through it, but you have to do the plucking)

🦄 Audience research template, to store all of these insights

🦄 Audience Research: In-Depth Methods For Learning Pain Points

🦄 The tool I use to write this newsletter

Did you enjoy your journey?

Should I write more about insights? Or would you rather hear about how to apply them? Right now, we’re on the path to turning insights into a real, fire-breathing content strategy.

See you on the next leg of this journey!

Your Contentlandia Mayor and tour guide,

Sarah (Colley) Taslik

(p.s… I only recently changed my name, in case you’re wondering why there’s flip-flopping. I’m still getting used to it).