Latest / Content, Briefly / Forget the Funnel: Gia Laudi's Masterclass on Knowing Your Customers

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Forget the Funnel: Gia Laudi's Masterclass on Knowing Your Customers · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [laughs] Like nine out of 10 companies who reach out to us, we say, "What's your biggest challenge?" "Leads."
• 0:06
  It's not actually leads, because if you're bringing the wrong people through the front door, then what the hell are you doing? All you're doing is adding burden to your customer support team.
• 0:15
  All you're doing is confusing the hell out of your product team, because they're solving for customers who are not an ideal fit. Hey, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. We're off to a pretty good start.
• 0:25
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• 0:33
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• 1:31
  We encourage you to try it for yourself. Just go to usefathom.com to get started. Hey, everybody. Jimmy here with another episode of Content Briefly. Really happy to have my friend Gia Laudi here today.
• 1:41
  I was trying to remember when our paths first crossed, so I searched my email for your name, and I found some kind of funny stuff. Oh. The first contact I have is a webinar invite back from your Unbounce days. Whoa.
• 1:54
  The five Ps of copywriting conversion. This is March 2014. So [laughs] Oh. That was a pretty long time ago. My God. I... Wow. 2014. That is an eternity ago.
• 2:05
  Well, I brought that up just 'cause, you know, I- we've known each other for a long time, and, uh, I'm, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some interaction even before that.
• 2:12
  But I'm happy that we get to connect again- Me too... this time in sort of a, a public way, um, where folks can learn a few things about customer-led growth and content specifically.
• 2:21
  Tell us a little bit about yourself, and tell us about Forget the Funnel too. You're the co-founder and CEO. Can you just kind of like paint the picture of what/who is Forget the Funnel?
• 2:28
  Uh, I mean, it's evolved [laughs] over the years, for sure. So, um, I'm the w- co-founder, um, along with Claire Suellentrop, and her and I in 2017 both left our in-house roles.
• 2:39
  We were both, uh, heads of marketing inside of, uh, SaaS companies, and we both just left our in-house roles.
• 2:46
  And I had started consulting, and she had started consulting, me in a more like consultative sort of advisory way, and her in a more project-based way.
• 2:54
  So Claire's background is, um, in, on the customer research side, and I always fell a little bit more to, like, the operationalizing and strategy.
• 3:02
  And, and we launched a content series together of which you were on, and it was one of our all-time, like, favorite episodes. It was like- Oh, yeah... yeah, that was a- I remember... that was another thing- Yeah, yeah...
• 3:12
  we did together. Um, it was amazing. It was, like, really, really strategic content. Marketing, uh, especially at the time, and it's still true today, sort of lives and breathes around content.
• 3:22
  And so a lot of our audience, uh, very, very focused on content, but most of the time their titles were, like, heads of marketing, some heads of product, things like that.
• 3:31
  So we s- ran a, ran a content, uh, series, that workshop series for a number of years, and then eventually what we realized as we ran that content series together was, like, hey, we actually...
• 3:44
  Our ways of working together actually should probably be combined. And we ended up working with a couple of, on a couple of actual, like, client projects together, one of which was Rand Fishkin's new startup.
• 3:57
  Well, I say new, but this was, like, 2019 or something. His new startup, SparkToro. We sort of tried on this, uh, way of working together bas- basically in operationalizing customer research.
• 4:08
  And so we call it customer-led growth for that reason, and it's basically a process to follow to help marketers, but also, I mean, people in content roles, product marketing roles, you know, acquisition-focused roles, customer marketing, sort of think about what is the, what is the ideal experience for our best customers.
• 4:29
  And when I say ideal, I mean from an experience standpoint, but I also mean from, like, a messaging and, and, and positioning standpoint as well.
• 4:36
  And so we have this methodology that we use, and it's basically operationalized customer research, and that's what we do with the companies that we work with today. That's what For- Forget the Funnel does.
• 4:44
  Like, 90% of what we do is focus on that framework, and we work with primarily B2B SaaS companies to do that.
• 4:50
  And, um, then the other part of what we do is we have a, a community sort of behind the scenes of in-house folks really focused on, um, growth for SaaS companies.
• 5:01
  Um, some are in-house practitioners in, like, product roles or growth roles or marketing roles, and some are also consultants, and we also have some, uh, founders in there as well.
• 5:11
  Um, and then of course we have the book, which is a- all about the process.
• 5:14
  It's this very sort of practical step-by-step guide on how to basically do this type of work internally, like, with your team, um, how to run the research, how to parse the research, and then how to operationalize it for your team.
• 5:27
  I love it. I love it. We're gonna make sure we link to the book. So the book is c- also called Forget the Funnel. It is. [laughs] If you go to forgetthefunnel.com, there, there's a link. You can't miss it.
• 5:34
  Sort of fascinating, like, from a meta perspective for the content folks because there's, there's, like, a content play baked in there for you and Claire, right? But also just, like, it's good information.
• 5:44
  Like, I would imagine that, like, the target, target reader is head or VP of marketing, but I would also imagine that it's quite useful for, like, a, a head of content or a VP of content too. Y- yeah.
• 5:53
  What we're kind of imagining is likely to happen is a... I mean, th- there will either be, like, a practitioner who's in-house o- on a team that's, like, been asked to run projects or, like, be more strategic.
• 6:07
  That's, like, that's my favorite, right? Like, "We need to think more strategically. We need to be more strategic."
• 6:11
  And they pick up the book, and then they're like, "Holy shit, this is something that we should probably do.
• 6:17
  Oh, I need cross-functional partners to run this type of projectUm, and so they, you know, if it is a head of content or a head of marketing, they'll be reaching out across the aisle, so to speak, to like the product team- Yeah...
• 6:27
  and maybe the sales team and the customer success team.
• 6:29
  The more likely scenario though, or just as likely I should say, would be like a CEO or a founder going like, "Something's off here," like, "Our growth is inconsistent or has slowed."
• 6:41
  Um, you know, a lot of founders will say that like they haven't actually nailed or figured out what their, what their most scalable sort of marketing strategy should be, and they need to sort of figure it out for them, for themselves.
• 6:53
  But then there's also this like messaging and positioning piece that I think a lot of founders sort of clue into that they're like, "We're not putting our best foot forward here.
• 6:59
  We're not articulating what we do well enough." Um, and so they recognize this sort of what, you know, we know is like it's actually product marketing.
• 7:08
  Larg- largely what it is is that the product marketing is kind of off. But those founders look to marketing to solve that, right?
• 7:14
  And a lot of marketing teams are responsible for product marketing and, and product, uh, positioning or the... I shouldn't even say product positioning, just positioning and messaging.
• 7:22
  Let alone how that positioning and messaging is then sort of executed across all teams, uh, you know, content being a huge one.
• 7:30
  So it could be at the founder level, or it might be at the practitioner level, but the goal is that customer-led growth is best sort of executed and implemented when it is cross-functional and you can involve, you know, uh, stakeholders across not just marketing, but product and sales and customer success ideally.
• 7:45
  Yeah. That's cool. That's really interesting. I think we're past it now. I think we're past it, but there was this trend over the past couple years where SaaS websites were all sort of converging. You know?
• 7:54
  Like, they were all blue. And orange. Yeah. And there was like a big tagline would say like, "Collaborate." Like, increase productivity with- Save time... with collaboration. It's like what if it- Yeah. What do you do?
• 8:04
  [laughs] I'm curious, can we dive into the customer-led growth framework?
• 8:09
  I'm sort of curious, like obviously this is an important part of your business, so no need to share anything that, like, you wouldn't share with anyone else, but- Oh my God, we share everything, Jimmy. Like, everything.
• 8:18
  Okay. I guess you wrote a book about it. Yeah. [laughs] We... Oh, wow. And not only a book, but we also have a, a h- it's 110 pages so far workbook of like templates and checklists and oh my- Oh, wow... it's ridiculous.
• 8:30
  It's a ton. So yeah, it's all on the table. [laughs] Okay. Cool. Let's do it. Okay, so here's... Maybe I can just throw like a common content marketing scenario at you. Mm-hmm.
• 8:38
  Because I feel like sometimes the content team m- may be the one that sniffs out this like, "Something's off here"- Yep... thing. Or they...
• 8:46
  It may be, it may be a symptom of other problems, but like it does trickle down to that content team. Yeah.
• 8:51
  And then, or their, you know, their boss n- who maybe would be the director or VP of marketing is saying like, "We need to create more content," or, "We need to increase our page views," or whatever.
• 8:59
  We, we need more traffic. We need more signups. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, um, kind of silent, uh, anxiety about metrics. At least in my experience, like a lot of teams are like, "We need more traffic," but why?
• 9:11
  Yep. Like, it's not even clear why. Or they might say something like, "We need to double our traffic." Maybe that is the right thing, but like, but probably not. So- [laughs] Yep...
• 9:19
  sort of curious, like where do, where do you start? Where do you dive in?
• 9:22
  And I have a bunch of content specific things to pick your brain about as well, but sort of curious like more broadly, like like where does your work begin?
• 9:28
  What tends to happen there is that people start to suspect, you know, that something is amiss somewhere, especially when we all kind of understand inherently that like more traffic, traffic is not what keeps us in business unless you're, you know, a- an actual publisher.
• 9:44
  But if you're, you know, if you run content, if you're responsible for, for marketing for a, you know, a product company, for example, um, traffic doesn't pay the bills.
• 9:54
  And so it's when we set targets around traffic, I'm not saying we shouldn't set targets around traffic, but if it's not rooted in like that traffic actually converting to business, then like what the hell are we doing?
• 10:05
  And I think that a lot of content teams, particularly when they're asked to like... Wow, this is gonna be the second time this week I say pump up the volume. I don't know where this is coming from.
• 10:14
  [laughs] I mean, I've got a '90s mindset for some reason in my head. But when they're asked to like pump up the, the, the content, you know, we tend to be like, "Well, is that the most valuable thing for us to do?"
• 10:23
  And so those are absolutely the right questions to be asking, and it's very common.
• 10:27
  And I can, I can see it coming out of content, I can see it coming out of marketing, and I can also see it coming out of the sort of executive team or the founders.
• 10:33
  Like as I was saying before that like are we actually bringing the right people through the front door?
• 10:41
  We can talk about it i- in terms of the ads we run, or we can talk about it in terms of the content we distribute out into the world. Like, is it actually for a somebody who has the problem that our product solves?
• 10:56
  I mean, it seems like it makes perfect sense, but we- Yeah, when you say it like that... really lose sight of that. It is so easy to lose sight of that. That is what we address.
• 11:04
  That's our, our whole MO with the, the research that we do and the insights that we try to pull is like, you know, are you actually bringing the right customer to the front door?
• 11:13
  And if you are, are you saying the right things? Do you understand their problem space?
• 11:19
  And are you articulating your solution through the right sort of lens for them and in the most advantageous way so that your solution becomes the inevitable like must have thing?
• 11:31
  And there's so many ways that content can do that.
• 11:33
  But if I just think about the lens of like the homepage just because it tends to be the most straightforward asset that is often off, if you fix the sort of, the messaging there, then would sort of seem a little bit more straightforward that like, okay, the content sort of follows if we get that narrative right.
• 11:50
  And a lot of times what we find is that these companies don't actually know who their best customers are. And they're...
• 11:55
  Not only are they running ads, but they're producing content for customers who are not actually their best sort of target market.
• 12:03
  As we help them hone and cr- and understand who is that segment of customers who they should actually be doubling down on and bringing in more of, how do they articulate the problem, what is their job to be done, you know, what should we be doing and how should we be articulating our, uh, solution for them so that it is obvious that we have the solution to their problem, while by the way simultaneously deterring people who are not a good fit.That's a...
• 12:27
  Why do you think that happens that we chase the wrong customers? Is it keyword research and- Vanity... search volume? Ye- yeah [laughs] yeah.
• 12:35
  Is it, yeah, is it like the top line metric, like the page view, the- I think it's kind of vanity, and it, I hate saying that because I, I don't want to accuse.
• 12:43
  I, I, I would hate to come across as accusing, like, marketing teams as chasing vanity metrics, 'cause we're all very aware d- of vanity metrics. It's not like it's, it's not a new term.
• 12:53
  But I think we fall prey to that often because there's just so much pressure coming at marketing to, like, do something, like fix this, especially right now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we got a lot...
• 13:04
  There's, there's record cancellations happening right now, and the, the team that is often looked to to fix inconsistent growth like that is marketing. Like, "Oh, we just need more leads."
• 13:16
  Like, our company is called Forget the Funnel. We literally say all over the place, like, "Leads don't matter." And still, I shit you not- [laughs]...
• 13:26
  like nine out of 10 companies who reach out to us, we say, "What's your biggest challenge?" "Leads." They all say l- everybody. Like, leads, leads, leads, l- l- l- l- leads.
• 13:34
  Like, if I never hear the word leads again, um, I wouldn't care, 'cause it's not actually leads. Because if you're bringing the wrong people through the front door, then what the hell are you doing?
• 13:45
  All you're doing is adding burden to your customer support team. All you're doing is confusing the hell out of your product team, because they're solving for customers who are not an ideal fit.
• 13:54
  But how we get into this situation, I think it's often because marketing is looked to to solve a lot of the business problems- Yeah... that are not being addressed elsewhere.
• 14:03
  And also, another part of it is that marketing tends to... We don't wanna be accused of being like the arts and crafts department, and- [laughs]...
• 14:11
  we need some metrics, and we need to sh- prove that we're doing something. And traffic isn't, is e- really easy to measure, and so we just rely on that as the barometer.
• 14:22
  It's like the proxy for, like, we're doing something, and we're making progress, and our traffic is growing, or- Yeah.
• 14:28
  So I think that's w- why we fall prey to it, but it's also that divide between marketing and the rest of the organization [laughs] like sales, customer success, and product.
• 14:38
  And this happens even at the m- best intentioned companies. Even mature companies, still somehow there is this divide between acquisition focused marketing and what the [laughs] rest of the company is doing.
• 14:49
  Building those bridges is really difficult, and that's actually part of the reason why customer led growth can be a little bit challenging to roll out. Because it is cross-functional, but it's cross-functional by design.
• 14:59
  Like, the whole point is we all serve the same customers. We're all in the same business. We're all looking to help customers solve a problem and get value from our product.
• 15:09
  Whether or not we're in marketing, customer success, sales, or product, we're all focused on the same thing, and so we need to, we, we should be looking at the customer with that same holistic view with KPIs that make sense across the board and that build on each other.
• 15:23
  Not just traffic that isn't tied to actual signups, not just signups that isn't t- that aren't tied to actual product activation, not just product activation that isn't tied to actual product engagement and, you know, high LTV, uh, customers.
• 15:37
  So they all need to relate to each other. Do you think that there's, like, a single kinda true north metric that most content teams ought to be using?
• 15:46
  My answer to that, i- it typically is product activation, because it is one step removed.
• 15:53
  It's not perfect, but if you take for granted that the product team or the, the customer marketing team or w- or the product marketing team if you have one, is taking into account that your activation leads to meaningful product engagement, if you take for granted that your activation to engagement is being taken care of, then I think the marketing team should be foc- the whole marketing team should be focused on product activation.
• 16:17
  Does it have to be, like, primary? Mm, no, I guess not. Like, I think marketing teams would be really well served if their, if their measure of success was actual product activation.
• 16:29
  The problem is that most marketing teams don't have that visibility. Yeah. Oh, yes, that was the next thing I was gonna ask you about, is like, where's the data? Yeah, yeah, and how do you get it? Yeah.
• 16:38
  Um, so getting product activation, and, and like just to clarify for a second, product activation doesn't have to necessarily mean they did all these sophisticated things inside of the product.
• 16:48
  In fact, I think product activation should mean they did something meaningful that shows us that they are on the path to, like, actual value realization. Mm.
• 17:01
  Which means even if it's, like, they created their first asset with your tool, whatever, a landing page or generated an invoice or something like that, they've taken some sort of meaningful action inside something post-acquisition.
• 17:13
  It's not just about the lead signup. It's like they did, they took meaningful action.
• 17:18
  As a head of marketing, as somebody responsible for c- for content, I'd be bugging the hell out of my, like, CMO or VP of marketing to get me that data. Yeah, yeah. That's super interesting.
• 17:29
  Many years ago, I was running content for this company called Vero, which was like a transactional email tool, and we were getting lots of organic traffic, but it was not leading to signups. Yeah.
• 17:38
  And so we, you know, kinda like went through the rigmarole of all the things you do to try to figure out what's going on, and there was a few things we found. One was that we were chasing keywords. Mm.
• 17:46
  And we went for like the, the highest volume email related keywords, which were like email marketing keywords. Whoa. It just, it didn't line up with the product. Yeah.
• 17:55
  And then the other thing we found is we went through this exercise where we found some of our best customers and then tried to work backwards to trace, well, how did they get here? Yep.
• 18:03
  And almost all of them came through word of mouth referrals. Yep. It was like, "Oh, my friend said it was good." And we were like, "I mean, that's nice, but, like, how do... Okay, now what?" [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 18:12
  Like, what do we do with that from a content perspective? I wasn't there long enough to figure out, like sort of see the end of that journey, but I have to imagine that's fairly common, right?
• 18:21
  That, like, you look at your best customers, and it's like, is there something to extrapolate there that you can apply- Yeah... in, in a marketing function to, to get more of that? Yeah. I de- I mean, it depends.
• 18:32
  So I see content as being so much more than just an awareness play. LikeContent plays a critical role at every single milestone of our customer's relationship with us.
• 18:47
  A, a wildly, wildly important post-acquisition, uh, let alone- Yeah... the opportunity for content to come back in at the customer education or customer marketing phase. So, so valuable.
• 18:59
  For every piece of content, I mean, if it were up to me, and it's not always, but when, [laughs] when it is, I'm like, "What is the goal of this piece of content? Is it product activation?" 'Cause sometimes it is, right?
• 19:10
  Is it awareness?
• 19:11
  Sometimes legitimately it's just about building awareness, and, and our job if in the case of it just being about awareness is to make sure that it plays to the sort of larger sort of narrative that we're going for, and that it is as strategic as possible.
• 19:28
  And sometimes we're not always gonna have the perfect sort of measure of success there, but, you know, you mentioned word of mouth. Like, well where does word of mouth come from?
• 19:36
  How did that first person find out about you?
• 19:38
  It's possible it was from, you know, some sort of like thought leadership or, you know, content basically built around like articulating the problem space, um, and really meeting people where they are in the problem space.
• 19:53
  Like, that's strategic content. And maybe the...
• 19:56
  I mean, I- in an ideal world, we'd be able to track that all the way through to product activation, but even in cases where we can't, as long as we know that we're being as strategic as possible and that our goal is around awareness for a piece of content, then that's fine.
• 20:08
  We use our best judgment. We're never, we're never gonna have like the perfect measure and performance and report, and reporting on this stuff. Well, I say never.
• 20:16
  [laughs] I mean, hopefully we s- we crack this nut one day. Yeah, yeah. We're definitely getting closer than we were, you know, 10, 15 years ago. It is, uh, it's often a miss, I think, to be as strategic as possible.
• 20:28
  I would imagine a lot of content teams, like if you're in the position I was in at Vero or like you're sort of in the position today where your efforts are not quite lining up with the results the company needs to get out of content- Hmm...
• 20:39
  what then, you know? I mean, ideally, I guess, you get like top-down buy-in on like a deeply customer-led approach, not just to the marketing, but to the messaging, to the product itself, you know? Yeah.
• 20:50
  Are there other smaller things the content team could be doing, chipping away to get a little closer to that if they, if they don't get that top-down?
• 20:57
  Yeah, I mean, generally I have found that there is some level of customer research probably already going on inside of your company that you can tap into to even- Hmm... I mean, ideate.
• 21:09
  And I'm saying stuff that I know like people listening to this already, already know, like the, the classic like FAQ document and like what are our customers asking, and, you know, produce content around that.
• 21:18
  The gong sales call. Yeah. Exactly. But if you think about, you know, maybe some research that the product team is doing, there might be something there if you go to the actual VOC.
• 21:28
  Like if you can go get right to the voice of customer, to those interview transcripts, there's probably gold in there for you.
• 21:35
  I say that because product teams, they're not looking for the VOC, they're looking for the patterns. They're gleaning something different from that research.
• 21:43
  So if you've got anybody in your company running customer interviews, if you can get ahold of those tran- interview transcripts, I would wager there's like gold in there.
• 21:52
  I would just try to make sure that it, that it rolls up with what I probably should've started [laughs] by explaining, with the job to be do- with your best customer's job to be done.
• 22:00
  So I, I, I should probably like back up a little bit. There's a couple of things. There's like we wanna understand what are our best customer's job to be done, and we need research in order to do that.
• 22:10
  But the reason that I was r- or that I was referencing leveraging existing research is because sometimes getting a win based on either research that is already in play or that already exists, and you get a win under your belt, like we based this research, this content project, I'm sorry, based on customer research.
• 22:28
  If you can show a win, like this shit works, then you might get buy-in to actually run a dedicated research project- Uh-huh... for identifying that larger sort of job to be done.
• 22:39
  So I can talk about the process a little bit at a, at a higher level, and I, I definitely have a lot of examples of, of companies who have done this well.
• 22:46
  But basically if we think about taking our best customers, so our existing customer base, there are happy, paying, and recent customers. In general, that's the group of folks that you wanna talk to.
• 22:59
  Happy because obviously we want happy customers. Paying because they need to have a high, high willingness to pay. So those two criteria seem, are very, very obvious.
• 23:07
  Like, if you're gonna learn from your best customers about like what do people even like about us, right? What happened in the world that led them to seek out a solution like ours?
• 23:16
  What are they, what solutions are they firing in order to hire ours? You know, what does that problem space look like and feel like?
• 23:23
  You know, we have to go back to like our best customers to find out what w- their life was like before, like you were describing that you did at Vero.
• 23:30
  The best group of customers to go to are happy, paying, and also recent. So the recency factor is important for a number of reasons. One is we want them to remember what life was like before.
• 23:39
  We want the people that can articulate- Mm-hmm, yeah... how viscerally it sucked to not have our solution in their life, what it felt like to struggle with the old way.
• 23:51
  And so there's that recency factor, and there's also, like imagine if you go to a customer who signed up for your product like three years ago. Imagine, three years ago.
• 23:59
  Like what a different world they made a decision in, right? So you can't go back that far. Yeah, it feels like 10 years ago. Exactly.
• 24:06
  And the world they made that purchase decision in is a completely different world, so we can't go back three years ago.
• 24:12
  Not the least of which is the re- the, the world was different, but also they're gonna start filling gaps in their memory with shit they think you wanna hear.
• 24:20
  Um, so we wanna go to our recent customers 'cause they're the ones who will be like, "Oh yeah, like, I just started a new job," or, "My boss came to me one day and said X, Y, Z thing."
• 24:29
  Like, it's just gonna be fresher in their memory. That's kind of how we would narrow down, like, who should you even learn from.
• 24:35
  In a situation where we're talking about hundreds of thousands of customers, generally we would say like narrow down with a survey first. Super easy to execute.
• 24:43
  We got a template you can grab, so that you can narrow down to understand, like from those survey responses, like who should we actually reach out to for-Full blown like interviews, and then run basically jobs to be done focused interviews with them.
• 24:57
  Jobs to be done meaning like what is it they were trying to accomplish by hiring our product, firing another solution, hiring our solution, what that better life that they were sort of seeking out.
• 25:07
  That's what we use to guide our research is we're trying to find out like what was going on in their world, who did they go and talk to, where did they go to get that information, you know, what happened next, next, and next, all the way up to like finding us.
• 25:20
  Um, maybe if they discovered a piece of content, maybe it was that they were referred to us, maybe they went to a review site. Like, there's a number of ways that people will discover us, right?
• 25:28
  And then what was it about our solution that convinced them that we were potentially gonna be able to solve their problem?
• 25:35
  And then once they actually signed up for our product in this scenario, what was it about our solution that convinced them that to like to keep going?
• 25:43
  And that's what we look for in like the activation, like what sort of meaningful usage and value, like that moment of value. We're looking for these milestones in our customer's relationship with us.
• 25:53
  What did value realization look like for them? What are they able to do now that they weren't able to do before?
• 25:58
  Because if we can get those amazing customers to articulate that value that we've created in their world, we can take that voice of customer and bring it right back to not only our customers who are trying our product, but we can take it back to our homepage, and we can take it back to our content, where we go out in the world to meet these people where they are with our content.
• 26:18
  But basically paint a picture of that better life as articulated by our best customers.
• 26:23
  So that's why we root our research in that jobs to be done approach because it really paints a very sort of holistic picture of like what are people even trying to accomplish.
• 26:33
  What is the problem our best customers were trying to solve? We can live there and marinate there with our content. Yeah. Then we're gonna be bringing the right people through the front door. I love that.
• 26:43
  I like I, I feel like the persona is like SAS Sally and Mark the Marketer, [laughs] like- Yes, yes...
• 26:49
  I hope people don't like unsubscribe from this podcast when I tell this story because I've told this so many times, but- Oh.
• 26:54
  [laughs] When I was at Animals, I had this kind of amazing opportunity to run both sales and marketing. So like my main job was like book sales calls, get on calls, try to close deals. Mm-hmm.
• 27:04
  It was just such a remarkable experience getting to talk to so many different companies- Mm-hmm...
• 27:10
  about their content problems because all of them sort of brought these challenges I just would never have guessed myself, and no amount of keyword research was gonna get me there.
• 27:20
  And people would say things that, you know, that I bring back to the team so that we could, one, start thinking through like, "Oh, how are we gonna serve this customer?"
• 27:26
  But then two, like, well, I bet a lot of other companies have these problems. So I had this kinda like simple rule in my head that if a certain thing was mentioned three times, we wrote a blog post about it.
• 27:35
  Oh, that's so interesting. For me to kinda like validate like, okay, this is a thing. Yep. Like we ought to write about it.
• 27:41
  How many interviews with happy paying and recent customers do you think you need to get like a, a sample size large enough to start making decisions? You gotta get to the point of there being meaningful patterns.
• 27:51
  So you mentioned three. I would say in this scenario, you know, aim, aim to run at least 12, you know, 10 to 12 interviews, and hopefully you see meaningful patterns in those 12. But if you don't, keep going.
• 28:04
  There's even a lot that can be done with surveys.
• 28:07
  So pre hitting record, we were talking about that company where they learned that they had been bringing like two very different types of customers through the front door for a very long time.
• 28:17
  The learnings that we gained from running, uh, research for them were based on surveys. So we had a couple thousand customers to survey. I wanna say we got to about 50 some odd survey responses.
• 28:28
  From those survey responses, we identified two meaningful sort of groups of customers.
• 28:33
  And what we realized, and this was sort of the big aha moment for us in the research, was like, holy shit, we've got this big group of customers who are coming through the front door who have a very distinct need.
• 28:45
  In this scenario it was they wanted to build their audience. We're, we're in MarTech. And then we had this other smaller group of customers that were actually looking to start automating a lot of their sort of marketing.
• 28:59
  And these two customers, these two groups of customers, very different needs, very different initial sort of struggling moment, right?
• 29:06
  Um, one was like, "Holy shit, we should start doing this thing, uh, start looking for solutions." So all these like companies who were looking to build their audience on these channels were flocking to this product.
• 29:18
  Meanwhile, this quieter group of customers who had already validated these channels and they were looking to start automating some of this marketing, they were also coming through the front door, but they were a lot quieter, they were a lot happier, and they stuck around- Yeah...
• 29:33
  a lot longer. And so what we realized, and this was only in surveys, like if we had done interviews, probably it just would've validated it further because it was very clear.
• 29:42
  We had these two groups of customers, and this whole time this product, this company, had been producing content for this like vocal majority of like noobs, basically.
• 29:53
  And this other group of customers who were actually a way better fit, more product qualified, were actually just like flying under the radar unbeknownst to the content team whose targets were traffic, right?
• 30:08
  And so we, we recognized this. We're like, "Holy shit, uh, there's two very different customers coming through the front door here."
• 30:13
  Had to have a, a sort of come to Jesus with the team like, "Which one of these customers do you wanna focus on?" And everybody agreed, "Oh, it's the ones that are automating. They're our better fit.
• 30:21
  That's what our product was built to do." Uh, basically we identified that job to be done. We had two jobs to be done.
• 30:27
  We prioritized that, the automators, updated three pages on their website, and the conversion rate on their website increased 89%. But that's not the most interesting part of the story.
• 30:37
  The most interesting part of the story is the trial to pay conversion rate also increased 40%, and we didn't touch anything off the website.
• 30:46
  It was three pages on the website were updated, and the trial to pay conversion rate increased 40%. And that was just because of a-More highly qualified customer coming through the front door.
• 30:55
  So, you know, if you suspect that you might be producing content or building marketing campaigns for a customer that might be like slightly off or that you don't understand at, at that deeper level, you're probably right, and this type of project would go very, very far, and I would talk to either head of marketing or product marketing.
• 31:17
  Chances are they know [laughs] what's up. I would wager that if you can get your head of product on board with running cus- this type of customer research, you're in. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds so wonderful. I wonder like...
• 31:28
  I'm like imagining all the content implications down the road. Oh, yeah. So if you can figure this out, now you gotta figure out...
• 31:34
  Maybe you don't need a new content strategy, but at the very least you probably, your, uh, your queue of approved ideas to write about may need to be scrapped. Maybe. Maybe not.
• 31:43
  But it, uh, at the very least, uh, it could be validating that you are on the right track and make you feel a whole lot better that like you are, you have been, you know, sitting in the ri- in the right problem space, and what you're gonna get out of it is a whole lot of juicy VOC.
• 31:58
  But at the very least, you're gonna get amazing content ideas. Like, the...
• 32:02
  We have, um, voice of customer briefs that we, where we sort of, um, codify all of our transcripts and survey data into like one document, and it's organized by like these themes.
• 32:14
  What we sometimes do is we will highlight content ideas like throughout, and it sort of c- goes off to the, the content team, and they're like, "Holy shit, this is like gold." Like, there's tons of ideas in there.
• 32:26
  That's cool. That is awesome. You know, I feel in my experience, content teams don't typically have easy access to customers. Yeah. They gotta ask somebody else.
• 32:33
  You know, they gotta go to sales, they gotta go to support, or they gotta go to product. They gotta go to somebody else to get it. Mm-hmm. Um, which, you know, I get.
• 32:39
  Like, content doesn't necessarily need to interact with customers on a daily basis, but like you do need- Access... some way to- To that... yeah. Yeah.
• 32:47
  I feel like content marketers over the last few years are talking about tools like Gong and Chorus. Yeah, 100%. It just opened the door. All of a sudden, you can just listen to a sales call. Like, how awesome is that?
• 32:57
  That's something that most teams can do like tomorrow is leverage- Right... sales calls. That's a, that's very, like, low barrier. You should be able to get access to that quite easily.
• 33:06
  I don't think that should necessarily be a replacement though for getting that, like, cross-functional alignment. It's possible that your company's been bringing in bad leads. [laughs] That's a great point.
• 33:16
  Yeah, no, actually I've never thought of that. I wanna be respectful of your time, Gia. I did wanna ask you about the process of writing a book.
• 33:21
  Because I feel like for the content marketing crowd, this is like a, like it is on my like life to-do list to write a book. I wanna do it one day. Was it a pain? Was it easy? Like, did it just flow out of you?
• 33:32
  I had this idea to get this process down, um, years ago.
• 33:38
  Like, Claire and I first started working together, and I was like, "There's this process, and it needs to be a book," and like, "It's got- I gotta turn this into a book."
• 33:46
  And she's like, "Okay, you should turn it into a book." And then her and I started working together, and I'm like, "Oh, wait a minute. This whole customer research bit just like 10 Xs."
• 33:55
  'Cause it was m- it was mostly about, like, this framework of customer experience mapping and milestones. I've got this whole, like, where that came from. It's a- it's in the book.
• 34:04
  I will get into it, but it's basically the origin story of like why I got obsessed with customer experience mapping and KPIs and these milestones that I was describing before.
• 34:11
  But then coupled with like research, we were like, "Oh yeah, we got like a real... This is a real process here. Like, even dare say this is a framework."
• 34:19
  And so we started, you know, using it over and over again, and as we got more and more wins, we were like, "Okay, legit, like there's a, there's a book here."
• 34:25
  So I would say we got serious about actually writing the book together 2021, but we basically spent two hours a week for a year writing. So this wasn't a scenario where we took a hiatus [laughs] and like- Yeah, yeah...
• 34:40
  or like flew down to Hawaii and did like a writing workshop over like a week or something. It wasn't, it wasn't that.
• 34:46
  Uh, as lovely as that sounded, we were like, "No, no, we gotta continue, like, running a business here." And so we sort of t- turned off all marketing and made sure that we, like, held this time sacred week over week.
• 34:57
  Truthfully, we could've probably launched in 2022, but we didn't wanna launch in December. We probably could've done it a little bit earlier. But I say all that to say, in the actual writing process, we did get help.
• 35:08
  We hired somebody to serve as like a forcing function to help us through the process.
• 35:13
  Writing does not come naturally to me, so we actually hired somebody to help us help manage the process for us, otherwise it never would've happened. That's awesome. That's cool.
• 35:23
  Well, kudos to you and Claire because I feel like a lot of folks have the ambition to do it, but it's just hard to make the time. It's hard to prioritize it, and you did that.
• 35:31
  I saw that you're coming out with an audiobook, which is totally my jam. I'll be looking forward to listening to that. Gia, thank you so much for the time. Honestly, it's a privilege to have you on.
• 35:40
  This is, uh, for listeners obviously, it's a little bit of a break from our normal format. I hope you dig it though. Like, we're looking to get lots of different perspectives on content marketing.
• 35:48
  Um, really appreciate yours, Gia. Encourage folks, one, check out the book, but two, there's so much good content on the Forget the Funnel website too.
• 35:54
  The resource library is a little bit, um, buried truthfully, but if you go to the footer and check it out, and check out Jimmy's, 'cause I mean, your workshop was amazing. It was so, so good.
• 36:04
  Um, I mean, maybe they, [laughs] maybe they kinda know [laughs] now that- Yeah, they know my shit, yeah... they're already pretty indoctrinated, I guess, your listeners into your stuff. Yeah.
• 36:11
  But yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in there. A lot of, um, sort of product focused stuff, uh, which is helpful context.
• 36:17
  It's like, you know, adjacent context for content teams, but a lot of, a lot is focused, a lot is focused on marketing strategy and content strategy as well, so. Cool. I love it. We'll link to that too for folks.
• 36:27
  Okay, awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun, and I cannot believe 2014 was the... I'm so glad you pulled up that little like piece of trivia. [laughs] I know. Such a long time ago. Wow.
• 36:36
  That seems like ages ago. Yeah, it was. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Gia. We'll, we will do it again soon. Okay, awesome. Thanks, Jimmy. Take care.