Letter #52: This could grow your CTR by 40%
Expert interview on how to use customer insights to inform content production.
Hey, hi, hellloo!
Reporting to you live from a tornado of client drafts where the air smells of deadlines and the aura is tense yet exciting.
Thankfully, things are productive today — they took a minor hit yesterday, delaying this letter. But progress is on track and so I present to you ways to use your customer insights in a zillion, useful ways.
Let’s be clear: most people think creating case studies is the best use of customer insights. But there’s much more to them.
Take it from Marpipe’s VP of Brand & Content, Jess Cook who lists the different ways she uses customer insights and you can too:
Test their exact language on your website
Add social proof to your website and social posts
Cut together a testimonial video or compilation
Grab quotes to support key points in your blog posts
Create a small-sample research report by asking many customers the same question
It took Jess some time to hone this muscle though — no one’s born a genius, right? (Except maybe Einstein 🤔)
So to understand how she got there, I asked her the 3 regular questions we ask all our fortnightly guests:
A mistake Jess made as she dug into gathering customer insights
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to better using customer insights
And, a secret tip to use customer insights to create high-performing marketing copy
Let’s dive in:
👉 Learn from Jess’s mistake: Not framing questions the right way.
“The longer I’m in content marketing, the more I realize this job is all about asking questions just the right way,” Jess admits.
“Close-ended questions are a huge no-no. You can’t get enough material to make any sort of meaningful content. The trick is to ask your questions in a way that gets your customers to tell a story.”
Jess also shares an example of framing questions the right way:
Instead of asking “‘Why did you seek out an ad testing solution?’” ❌
Jess frames her first question like this: “‘What happened the day you realized you needed a solution like Marpipe?’” ✅
The reason why she does this: “The answer from the [second] version of that question will be much richer in terms of pain points and failed attempts to do their jobs without our solution.”
👉 Do this today: Review your interview transcripts — using them to tell the best story.
“I use otter.ai to record a transcript. Later, I go back to highlight the best nuggets and organize my thoughts around them. I usually have an idea of:
What story I want to tell
The major tentpoles of that story
All the ways I can repurpose and distribute that story
… just by transcribing, and then digesting and organizing my transcript notes.”
👉 The secret tip to using customer insights to inform your content production: Use your customers’ exact language.
“Use your customers’ exact language. Even if it doesn’t sound like something you would say. Or the way you would describe your product. You’ll be amazed at how a customer's actual words resonate with other potential customers.”
“Prime example: I heard a prospect describe Marpipe as ‘conceptual testing.’ (We’d never described ourselves that way before.)
I tested six variations of her phrasing in the H1 on our home page for 3 weeks.
And whaddya know? The prospect’s exact phrasing blew everything else out of the water. 40% more people clicked ‘Book a demo’ than with our original H1.”
So today’s takeaways:
Ask open-ended questions in a way that they elicit interesting responses
Use interview transcripts to identify the story you want to tell
Use your customers’ language in your content (home page, ad copy, email copy, etc)
That’s all folks!
This is Masooma signing off as she heads back to the deadline tornado.