Get to Know Your Audience

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain what user research is and what you can learn from it.
Conduct research to learn about your audience.
Create research deliverables to share with stakeholders and content teams.
Map the customer journey.
Identify customers’ needs.

Talk to Your Customers

As you learned earlier, content strategy helps you provide the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time. That means no matter which phase of their journey a customer is in, you must be able to swoop in at the perfect moment and deliver a beautifully wrapped package of content right into their waiting hands.

So how do you anticipate your customers’ needs in those moments? Do you use a crystal ball? Maybe develop your mind-reading skills?

Nope! Thankfully, sorcery isn’t required. All you have to do is talk to your customers.

The Importance of Research

When we say “talk to your customers,” we’re not recommending that you invite them to tea and chat about the weather. We mean that it’s imperative for your organization to conduct user research.

User research is a set of tools and methods for investigating the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the people who interact with your content. It helps you understand who your customers are, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they use your product.

Some companies think user research is too costly, but nothing could be further from the truth. The success of your content strategy hinges on how much you can learn about your customers. Those details will empower you to craft rich, valuable content experiences.

And here’s something else to consider: User research actually saves you time and money in the long run. Why? You won’t waste valuable resources creating content that ultimately fails to meet the customers’ needs.

Where to Start

Grace is a firm believer in research, but unfortunately Ursa Major Solar hasn’t done much yet. So Grace knows the organization is basing its content decisions on an informal set of assumptions and guesses about its customers. Even worse, every team and person at the company has likely accumulated a different set of assumptions.

And although that’s not a solid foundation for a content strategy, it’s actually a great place for Grace to start. After all, a lot of research begins with a hypothesis—an educated guess that you can test.

To form that initial hypothesis, we recommend organizing a discovery workshop with stakeholders to foster thought-provoking conversations about the audiences who rely on your company’s content.

Test Your Assumptions

After conducting a discovery workshop, Ursa Major has formed a hypothesis about its audiences. And now they can test those ideas through user research.

It’s sort of like taking a picture with an instant camera. When the photo pops out, the film is undeveloped, and all you see is the blurry beginnings of the picture to come. That’s your hypothesis. User research is the dazzling chemical process that gradually transforms the photograph, filling in all the rich details and vivid colors, bringing the image to life.

A series of Polaroid pictures at different stages of the development process

Choose the Right Methods

When it comes to gathering those rich details, not all research methods are created equal. Like many companies, Ursa Major has prioritized quantitative research, such as surveys and web analytics.

Numerical data is useful, but it falls short when you need to learn about customers’ behaviors, thoughts, and feelings at specific stages of their journey. Be sure to supplement quantitative research with qualitative research, like interviews and observation.

To learn more, check out the UX Research Basics module. Another great read is Just Enough Research by Erika Hall.

Conduct the Research and Capture Insights

Grace manages to secure funding for a user research study, which is conducted by Ursa Major’s user experience (UX) specialist. Grace observes as many interviews as possible to develop a more thorough understanding of Ursa Major’s customers.

Once the research is complete, it’s time to synthesize and communicate the insights. Typically that’s accomplished by creating a set of research deliverables. Here are a few that are particularly useful when developing a content strategy:

Deliverable	Description	Where to Learn More
Personas (or Jobs-to-Be-Done)	Both personas and jobs-to-be-done capture data about customers and identify their needs and goals in specific contexts. This information is the key to creating personalized, customer-centric content.	Personas Versus Jobs-to-Be-Done
Top Tasks	Top tasks are the ones that matter most to customers. It’s important to provide stellar content that assists customers with the completion of those tasks.	Focusing on Top Tasks
Journey Map	A journey map is a diagram that illustrates all the stages and touchpoints in the customer’s journey. An effective content experience delivers the right set of information at each stage of that journey.	How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Grace reviews the research findings, and she’s blown away. Ursa Major now has a goldmine of information about its customers!

A Fully Developed Picture

One major benefit of running the research study is that Grace finally has a complete, holistic view of the entire customer journey. Here are the journey stages that Ursa Major defined for each of its personas.

Awareness
Consideration
Decision
Installation
Onboarding
Usage
Advocacy

With that new framework in mind, Grace can begin figuring out how to support each stage of the customer journey with the right content.

A circular lifecycle diagram depicting all seven of Ursa Major’s customer journey stages

Identify the Customers’ Needs

Now comes the fun part! Grace sits down at her desk to capture all the nitty gritty details about customers’ needs at the different stages of their journey. Those needs will inform Ursa Major’s content strategy.

Grace picks one of Ursa Major’s user personas, then she creates a spreadsheet that lists the stages in their journey. Next, she documents the customers’ needs during each stage. To do that, she asks herself:

What problem is the customer solving? What are their motivations and goals?
What is the context that triggers them to act?
What do they need to understand, learn, or achieve?
What tasks do they perform? What decisions are they making along the way?
What are their expectations, questions, pain points, and concerns?
What channels and touchpoints are they using to interact?
What emotions are they feeling? Are there mental hurdles to overcome?
What happens after they achieve their goal? What happens if they don’t achieve it?

Grace finds the answers to those questions by reviewing the results of the research study. She also adds insights from other sources, such as Voice of the Customer surveys, online reviews, and so on.

You can turn the journey mapping exercise into a group activity with stakeholders or representatives from content teams. Instead of a spreadsheet, use a whiteboard and sticky-notes. It’s a great way to build empathy for customers and promote the value of customer-centric content.

Actionable Insights

Grace can’t wait to share what she’s learned about the needs of customers. She distills all her insights into a presentation she can deliver to each department when Ursa Major rolls out the new customer journey maps.

In that presentation, she includes key takeaways that identify areas where Ursa Major can significantly improve the customer experience while also making progress on its business objectives. Let’s take a look at one of those key takeaways.

Billing Confusion

After Ursa Major’s solar customers are connected to the power grid, its systems start producing energy and the customers start receiving solar bills. Unfortunately, many customers don’t know how to read those bills, and they become confused and frustrated when they can’t figure it out.

Thanks to user research, the organization has now identified a previously unknown customer goal: “I want to understand my solar bill.” And because Ursa Major took the time to talk to its customers, Grace knows exactly what concepts, questions, and concerns need to be addressed.

That customer goal stood out to Grace because it aligns with one of Ursa Major’s primary business objectives: reducing support costs. In her presentation, she includes support metrics to show that billing questions are a top driver of support calls at Ursa Major.

Find the Gaps

Now that Ursa Major Solar is more attuned to its customers’ needs, Grace is wondering whether the organization has content that meets those needs.

In the next unit, we follow along with Grace as she audits the organization’s existing content assets so she can turn their content problems into content opportunities.