Leveraging Customer Research for LinkedIn Content Excellence with MJ (Peters) Smith

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] A global greetings to everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Good for Business Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond, and I'm joined by an MJ as well. MJ Peters. Welcome to the Good for Business Show.

MJ Peters: Thank you for having me. I saw that you have quite a few female guests based on the little intro like B-roll and I think that's really cool.

Michelle J Raymond: I do. And it's deliberate. It's because I have so many amazing conversations with people all around the globe, just like yourself and I follow their content. And I keep saying to them, I wanna share this. I want other people to know the kinds of conversations that I'm having. Your content is absolutely that for me, I've always learnt a lot. I come from a sales background, yours is very heavily into the marketing space, so I'm always on the lookout for things that make me grow, make me learn. And so I appreciate your content.

For anybody that is not connected with MJ Peters as yet, I suggest you go to her profile, on the top right hand corner, just under the LinkedIn [00:01:00] banner is a little bell go and click on that and click all posts so that you get notified when she posts. Cause I assure you, you too will learn just as much as I have.

And we've come full circle. My very first podcast appearance was on your show and so I appreciate you coming back and I can pay back the favour. So you are on my show this time. So how cool is that?

MJ Peters: It's pretty cool. And it's my second full circle podcast appearance in a couple of weeks here, so lots to catch up on.

Michelle J Raymond: Now for those people that don't know you quick intro, who are you? What do you do and who do you help?

MJ Peters: I am MJ Peters. I am an industrial marketer at heart and I defected to B2B SaaS recently, but it's industrial SaaS, so hopefully I get a pass for that. I am a VP of marketing at CoLab Software. We make a collaboration software for mechanical engineering teams. I help product marketers primarily on LinkedIn and through my content. I dabble in demand gen as well. And then through my role in my company, [00:02:00] we help mechanical engineering teams speed up time to market. So they bring life changing products to market years sooner.

Michelle J Raymond: And you've done some pretty amazing creative projects and grown things, almost out of thin air into these amazing big, well known products.

And so one of the posts, sorry, one of many posts that you do is all about customer research. And I think as subject matter experts on LinkedIn, quite often, we think just our knowledge on a topic, is more than enough for us to win business. And we skip this step called customer research. So why should businesses that are business owners that are listening into this show, why should they actually focus on and do customer research?

MJ Peters: So I often one of my top reasons to do customer research is because if you don't do it then your alternative is to use the hippo method of deciding what creative projects to prioritise. And hippo is H P O. It stands for highest paid person's opinion.

And so if you don't do customer research, the customer [00:03:00] research method is the scientific method. And your alternative is just to go with the highest paid person's opinion. And in general, I have found that the scientific method always prevails over the hippo method of prioritising your creative and messaging.

Michelle J Raymond: I love that. Or it's the loudest most extroverted not necessarily the correct opinion. I think for me, as I said, I come from a sales background and so it's probably something that I do intuitively after 20 years of experience. But for a lot of other business owners that are subject matter experts, they don't come from backgrounds like sales or marketing where they've been involved in this process.

So what do you think actually, stops companies from doing their own research?

MJ Peters: I would say probably the number one culprit is that they feel like they don't have enough time, which is probably the number one culprit for not doing anything in business. And then, one layer deeper, why do you feel like you don't have enough time? It's because businesses don't make it a priority.

And I think that is probably because you can't have a numerical [00:04:00] KPI for customer research. So in the beginning to be totally honest if you're starting a customer research journey for the first time, you do just have to trust the process.

But having been through that process many times in many different companies, I can say uh, that it is truly transformative to your business and you will feel the improvement in the quantitative KPIs, if you trust the process and you carve out the time to really do it.

Michelle J Raymond: Do you get a lot of pushback from senior people within businesses when you want to go out and tell them, just trust the process.

MJ Peters: I personally have not had a ton of pushback on that, but that is because I deliberately have chosen to work for senior leaders that already trust the process. Two roles ago when I was brought into Fire Trace as director of marketing and later promoted to VP. I was brought in by the CEO because he wanted someone to come in and drive customer insights into the business. That was the number one reason he hired me to lead marketing. So no pushback there.

I did have to do some internal education for the [00:05:00] rest of the team. And I actually chose to bring in a consultant to do that rather than doing the education myself. So even though I knew how to do this Um, I chose to work with someone better than me at educating and building a buy in for customer research.

And that was probably one of the smartest things I ever did in that role. It really bought me a lot of credibility because that consultant did a great job and got the ball rolling from like week three in my role there.

Michelle J Raymond: I'm guilty of not doing enough customer research. When I book these live events in, it sparks something in my mind and brings it back up to the surface. Cause as a business owner, I have, so many competing priorities and juggling my time and spreading myself, trying to keep all those plates spinning. And so when I booked this one in with you, because I saw a post that really resonated. One of the simple things that you mentioned about customer research was just knowing where your customers come from.

And I was like, I think they come from LinkedIn for me, but I have no idea if my podcast is [00:06:00] generating, my YouTube, my website blogs, is it from somewhere like a referral? I literally had no idea. And so I was like, what can I do about that? That's not gonna cost a ton, but I can start to build some information.

Because I am making some huge assumptions about my clients, what they're searching for. I had no idea what they were looking up, if they Googled looking for LinkedIn trainers, if they used LinkedIn search. So just something really simple that I did, which I have full credit to you MJ.

Cause you don't know about this, but just a little thing. Like I have booking buttons all over my website that you can book some time with me and I have similar ones that were sitting in different places on LinkedIn. And all I did was put in an extra box that says, tell me how you found me and so is it a referral? Is it LinkedIn? Is it those things?

And just by adding that little question in which takes the other person no time at all, has opened up my mind because what do you know? Some [00:07:00] people are finding me because of this podcast. And I thought nobody was listening some days, and so I wanna say thank you, because it doesn't have to be big, right?

It can be little things that you can find out. What are some of the other little things that you think people can do easily?

MJ Peters: Yeah. And full credit to Chris Walker for that tactic. Cause that was something I stole from him, but it's brilliant, super easy to do. Add it to all of your forms, we do that. Our sales team after the first call oftentimes they will ask for a little bit more colour around, how did you hear about us?

And sometimes that'll change how we bucket things in our marketing automation system. If you have a marketing automation system, such as HubSpot, what HubSpot will do is it will basically tell you all the pages that somebody browsed around while they were looking at your website before they submitted your form.

Assuming that they submitted a form on the website and I will, for every person that raises their hand and says, I wanna speak to you. I'll just do a quick peek on the HubSpot timeline check out which pages they looked at. And that's not necessarily an indicator about the source, right? [00:08:00] How did you hear about us is the source? Where are they coming from to find you?

But that is an indicator of what messaging was resonating with them, because I have seen over and over again, like a pattern of which pages people look at before they convert. And so those to me are the pages with the messaging that is resonating the best with customers right now.

Michelle J Raymond: I've never even thought about something along those lines, and I think what I'm getting present to, and we were just talking about how I'm creating a business from scratch, and I don't have a huge team, but there are things that I can do and questions that I can ask of people to say, what were you looking at?

You can have a conversation, and I think, whilst there's a lot of tech, it may not be accessible if you've got it, great, use it. There's so many cool programs out there, but for others, it's just a conversation. It could be just ask a question, which I think people are reluctant to do.

So I would encourage people to ask questions because like you just said, I would imagine when you understand the importance of those pages, they get tweaked, they get focused on and they convert more [00:09:00] often after that. Is that how it works for you?

MJ Peters: For sure. And sometimes we, create entire new pages that are like a drilling down deeper into something that people really catch onto.

I would say in general, on the topic of tech, small business, low tech versus larger business, maybe lots of tech I think you honestly sometimes get to a point where there's so much tech that you're losing the first principles, right? So like CoLab has plenty of tech, but like I'm using most of our tech in pretty simple ways still.

And for that reason, right? The tech makes it a little bit easier, but to your point, if you're a small business and you don't have a ton of tech, like most of this stuff can be achieved just by asking a question.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah and keeping it in a spreadsheet, or keeping some kind of note of it. And that's a system that I'm gonna look to start building for my business just to keep an eye on it and HubSpot's great. It has a free CRM, so if you're not using it, it's one of my favourite tools that I've used to keep a track of clients, tag them, group them. And I think, you know, the ultimate aim of this, if I understand you, and from my [00:10:00] opinion, is that we're trying to be highly targeted, which is more effective than spray and pray. Would that be a fair summary of what you've just shared?

MJ Peters: Definitely. I would say the reasons to understand your customer is to be targeted, not spray and pray, and also just to be understood. I think businesses tend to use a lot of jargon, especially businesses that sell to other businesses.

And like at the end of the day, a very simple principle is people just don't wanna expend a lot of mental energy, trying to understand what your product does and if you force them to do that, they will be upset with you and they will leave. They will give up. And so what you wanna do is you wanna understand what it is they're looking for and then in the simplest terms, connect the dots for them. So they don't have to connect the dots themselves between what are they looking for and what does your product do? In the ways that your product can actually serve them. And then just ignore everything else. Cause it's not something you can do for them anyway.

Michelle J Raymond: And that's something just on a basic level that I've started to look into a bit more for myself this week. So I [00:11:00] specialise in LinkedIn Company Pages. That's what most people know me for. But I wondered if people off LinkedIn, do they call them LinkedIn Business Pages, LinkedIn Pages, LinkedIn Company Pages, Business Pages, nothing to do with LinkedIn.

And so just understanding what is the words that they use to describe what I do, not, what do people on LinkedIn, describe what I do. And it's been interesting depending where I go and who I ask, they get called different things. And so just for me personally, to try and be conscious of that, because yeah, how do you build things based on what people are looking for, if you don't even know what words they use?

So it's such a simple, yet powerful thing that you taught me to just understand how they would describe it, in its simplest form, how do they describe the problem that you solve? And it's so profound, even though it's so simple.

I was with my mentor yesterday and I said, look, there's a particular market that I wanna go after, but I have no idea how they describe the problem that I solve. [00:12:00] I know there's a need, but I don't know their language. It's new to me. So I've got a special project on the side to go and find that out.

So what I love about you MJ is you created this really great framework for customer listening, and I'd love it, if you could take a moment just to explain to the people that are joining us about your four step framework for customer listening, can you take us through that?

MJ Peters: Sure. Number one, I would say great to have a framework for customer listening, because it just helps you hold yourself accountable. So we were talking earlier in the show about the fact that customer listening is often just pushed to the side because you don't have a KPI for it. It's sort of qualitative. Um, but it's still really important. So if you have a framework and you have an output that you're going to generate and then talk about on a specific day, it just forces you to be accountable and it gets you to actually do it. It's much like exercise in that way where we all know that it's important, but like if you sign up for the half marathon, then you're probably gonna do all the training runs cause you paid for it, right?

Have the framework, the way my [00:13:00] framework works is you start with a hypothesis. Then you have a bunch of conversations, you document those conversations, and then you validate what you've heard based in your hypothesis. So the hypothesis is this is what I think about my ideal customer and what they care about.

There are lots of different formats you can use for a hypothesis. One that I use very often is customer problem solution. And that sounds really silly when you think about it. Of course I know my customer, my problem, and my solution, but you would be surprised how often companies don't know this. Write down in detail. You need to write it down.

Who's your customer, what problem do they have and what is your solution to that problem? And if this is a group project, right? If you've got sales, marketing, and product, all involved, for example, everyone needs to agree on the customer problem, solution, hypothesis, and then you go out and you do a handful of conversations doesn't need to be a ton. Like six to 10 would probably do the trick and what you're doing in those conversations is you wanna start with very open-ended questions and you wanna zoom in very [00:14:00] gradually.

Some of the first questions you might ask are like, what does a day in the life look like for, let's say for your target market, Michelle, maybe business owners. For a business owner in whatever this new market you wanna break into is right. Maybe it's like textile manufacturing. What does a business, a small business owner in textile manufacturing even do every day, cause most businesses that sell to that kind of business actually don't know what the owner does every day.

Um, So you start there right then it's easy, easy questions. Get the conversation going and then towards the end then you wanna start, asking about pain points, right? What's less than ideal? What's frustrating? And then maybe you get into specific stuff at the very end of the conversation.

Let the conversation go where it may. Do not ask leading questions. Don't lead the witness to the uh, to the answer that you want. You need to ask open questions if possible. And then you document what you learned in a call report. You can document, you can have a template for this, or you can just write open ended notes.

Some of the things when I've built templates for this in the past that I've included are was there anything that surprised you? What were the pain points that you uncovered? And can you quantify [00:15:00] any of those? And then suggested actions that you might take as a result of this call.

So you wanna document everything and then you go back to your hypothesis. You've got, now you've got six to 10 call reports and you go back to your hypothesis and you go down the list. Is this true or false? All of the assumptions I made you're gonna have some that are true. You're gonna have some that you've disproven and then you're gonna have others that you can't really say either way.

So then the outcome from that is all of the validated stuff that the customer's validated for you. That's what you're gonna take action on. Whether it's, um, redefining your ideal customer profile and making it more specific. Coming up with a new list of target accounts, changing your website messaging, whatever actions you feel are necessary to take as a result of the validated stuff.

You do that. And then the question mark kind of stuff then you would leave that and say we'll come back and maybe do another research project to validate or invalidate anything we're still unsure about.

Michelle J Raymond: That is so cool because I would imagine in businesses we make a lot of assumptions. When you come into a new business and you put [00:16:00] this process in, do you find that there's a lot of assumption that maybe doesn't align with what you're getting this feedback from customers? Or is it pretty close and just some refining?

MJ Peters: It depends. I've been in businesses where the assumptions are completely wrong, right? For example, when we were at Fire Trace we had a project to try to break into a new market. This is often where you make bad assumptions. When you're trying to break into a new market, there's no knowledge in the business about it.

We were trying to break into this new market, ground support equipment, which is all the equipment that helps airplanes when they're on the ground. So refueling, baggage handling, stuff like that and we thought that the customers that would buy our product were employed by the airport. And it turns out that the customers are actually employed by the airlines.

And so we were literally making a completely false assumption about who the customer even was. So if you're breaking into a new market that is often the case, like it's not something to be ashamed of. That is very often the case and that's actually how you add value and build a moat by having more information than the competition about this segment over time, you can only do that [00:17:00] by failing at the beginning.

Other times there is a lot of knowledge in the business. And so some people are making the right assumption, but what you find, especially when you get larger businesses. And when I say large, I'm not talking that large, like over 25 employees. Some people have a lot more knowledge than others, right?

So maybe that one person knows all the right information, but the fact of the matter is they are not doing all of the work every day. So you need to document your market knowledge so that it can be used by everyone in the business, rather than people who are less knowledgeable having to make assumptions as though they are someone who has all the knowledge internally.

Michelle J Raymond: I would imagine this has come to the fall with the great resignation or the quietly quitting or all of this stuff where we've seen a lot of movement of staff. A lot of people that are skilled, maybe moving on to other industries, other roles and then you're left with a business, has huge knowledge gaps.

And this is where having all of this documented, I think really would come back and pay off in the end because the fact is, in businesses, people come and go. So the more that [00:18:00] we can get this stuff documented, the more it's gonna help.

Where I found this really tricky in my own business is I wanted to get a new website. I knew my old one, wasn't doing the trick. And so we come to that very first page, the landing page that everyone comes to on the home. And then they say, okay, here's the format that we've gotta fill out. What are you doing and who are you doing it for? And in my head, I'm like, I'm saving businesses time. And I'm like, is that actually the problem that they've got out there?

So mine's kind of in a holding pattern right now while they have to go and find out what am I helping you with? Do you really wanna save time? Is that the problem that I'm solving? Or is it that you just really don't have internal resources? What is it that you need me for specifically?

I understand you wanna know more about Company Pages, but I don't actually understand what it is that drives you to reach out to me. And so I've left it, as it stands sitting there. You know, I'll save you time. And I don't think that's right. And my [00:19:00] gut tells me it's not right, but I have gotta go away and do the work and actually ask some people why is it that you reached out? What was causing you grief? You knew I could help you solve it but I don't know what the answer is.

There's so many different ways this can pay off. For me and for any other business owner, the more you understand it, and we're gonna move into how I think it really pays off on LinkedIn, using these customer interviews and the answers to generate LinkedIn content ideas that actually perform. And you wrote a post that really just hit me straight between the eyes, because what I understood that post was that if I could write content, in that customer's language, solving the problem they describe in their own words, that's just gonna stand out like the bat signal here I am.

So talk me through that a little bit more for people that, wouldn't have seen that post. How do you think that this customer research helps create better LinkedIn content?

MJ Peters: I think if you [00:20:00] know what, what the kind of problems, that are the most painful for your customers are, then you can mobilise the knowledge that you have, that maybe they don't have, to illuminate solutions to these problems.

And I, I call those point solutions. Um, but if you can, if you can illuminate a problem and describe point solution that resonates, it will attract people to your business as a whole. And the great thing about testing content ideas on LinkedIn is you actually create a feedback loop where people will comment on it and then you'll get further basically customer research just from the commentary on your LinkedIn post. I think LinkedIn is a great second step after you do customer research to use as a lead generation tool, but also to use as a flywheel for more customer insights.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, cause I feel like it could, you could refine it further. You could almost do a test run on LinkedIn and see what resonates and what doesn't. Do you use LinkedIn like that?

MJ Peters: Our business uses our CEOs LinkedIn profile to test messaging and insights. And then we also use [00:21:00] LinkedIn advertising and our Company Page to test messaging insights.

Michelle J Raymond: Good to see you using the Company Page as well.

MJ Peters: Yeah.

Michelle J Raymond: Otherwise there'd be problems.

MJ Peters: Be a lot me on the company page.

Our target audience is engineers and they like memes, so we often do post all of our memes on the Company Page, and then the best ones we will re repost to paid social.

Michelle J Raymond: That's a classic example of creating the content that resonates with the audience, not just the kind of content that you wanna create, because someone likes to particularly write long form or short form or video, that your audience, they like memes and so you double down on that and it's, I'm gonna guess, effective because you've given them what they want in a format that they want. And that for me is what I try and explain to people. I can't give you a prescription to do anything on LinkedIn because my audience is different to your audience. My goals and my business are different to your [00:22:00] goals. Resources are different.

And so we've gotta find the right balance between all of these things, but ultimately I think social selling is all about, you know, flip it around. What does the person on the other side want? And I think if you've got them in mind at all times, that's where success comes from, be it on LinkedIn or your website or paid advertising, whatever it happens to be.

So is there anything else on this before we move on to your cool little product that you developed, but is there anything else that you think people should know around customer research that you wanted to add that we haven't covered?

MJ Peters: I think we've touched on quite a few different topics. If the four part framework was interesting to people, you can actually find a link to a different podcast episode I did, where I went in a lot of detail about that four part framework and used a bunch of examples. If this is Customer Research 101 and you'd like to check out Customer Research 102, you can find the link to that episode on my profile, the podcast is called Stacking Growth.

Michelle J Raymond: And I will add that into the show notes as well, just to make it really [00:23:00] easy because I've listened to it and it's definitely worth investing your time. It's like a mini Masterclass in customer research, so I appreciate you putting the effort into that MJ.

There's been lots of things that we've covered. So tell me you kind of took this like one step further and created your own App. So what is the CAB Concierge App?

MJ Peters: What I have found is that customer research can be challenging. In fact, the probably one of the most challenging parts about it is what is in it for the customer. A lot of companies have started customer advisory boards to kind of make sure that there is something in it for the customer in exchange for their insights. And they do various things to incentivise participation in these things, whether it be granting them stock options or paying in cash or giving people gifts, or some combination of like gifts / compensation and like an invite to an exclusive community.

But this really incentivises customers to not just give you feedback one time, but to give you ongoing insights and [00:24:00] ongoing feedback on a continuous basis. But most of that stuff is managed just like in spreadsheets and stuff and very manually. And I thought it would be quite interesting to create a platform that allowed people to actually reward the customers that participate the most often in their customer advisory board and to really kind of gamify and further incentivise participation, so you can maximise the insights you get.

So I created a very simple little software tool. It's called Cab Concierge and it basically allows you to set up a point system where if somebody shows up to your monthly customer advisory board meeting, or they sit for an interview or they give you feedback via a survey, then they can get points for doing all those activities and then they can redeem points for whatever reward is most enticing for them.

Maybe it's having a meeting with your CEO, having lunch with your CEO or something like that. Or maybe it's uh, maybe it's just having you send them a bottle of wine or what have you. So customers get to earn points based on participation and they get to redeem those points for the reward that is most interesting to them as an individual.

Michelle J Raymond: [00:25:00] And I'm thinking in my mind that when there's an incentive in play, that people are more likely to participate. Is that true of most things? Is it true of this situation?

MJ Peters: I think it's absolutely true that most people will participate more when they're incentivised. And it's also true that certain incentives work better on different people. That's why I think customising the incentive aspect is a good unlock for a customer advisory board.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah. What's in it for me? I love the gamifying as well. I think that's really cool. So we will put the links for where people can find that app as well in the show notes. So that uh, yeah, if you wanna download that and support MJ, that would be amazing.

So MJ, every week I end the show with one tip from my expert guest about what's an action that you think people could easily go away today and start to do to really get them started on the journey of customer research.

MJ Peters: I would set a goal for yourself to send 20 [00:26:00] emails or 20 LinkedIn messages or 20 text messages. However, you keep your customers contact information, asking for 20 minutes of their time to not sell them anything, but just do some market research. If you send 20, I think you will get at least one yes. So step one, just send the 20 emails.

Michelle J Raymond: Sounds like a perfect way to start and we will give the details for that so that people can actually formalise that template. You've given people a really great place to start, and I appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge with the audience today.

I've got more homework for myself to go and do. I appreciate you really sharing generously so that people in business can level up, that we can get better, that we can be more targeted and get better results. I'm all about business growth. So this is such a great way to build a solid foundation and make sure that you're on the right path.

I appreciate you coming on the show this week.

MJ Peters: Thank you so much for having me.

Michelle J Raymond: No worries. And next week I'm actually moving on to how do we use TikTok for business? So I've got Sev [00:27:00] coming on and he has 1.2 million followers on TikTok at last glance generated around 35 million impressions of his content and is focusing on TikTok for business.

So if anyone's interested, join us next week we'll share some of his insights on how to use TikTok for business. So MJ, I appreciate you and everyone that's joined us.

We will catch you next week. Cheers.