Ekaterina Howard 3/10/22 Ekaterina Howard 3/10/22

4 mindset traps that prevent you from running effective customer interviews

“Talk to your customers,” they said. But how do you actually get to those mind-blowing insights everyone’s talking about?

Yes, interviewing customers is complicated. But not the way you think.

Scheduling interviews, coming up with incentives (or choosing not to incentivize), deciding on the questions, and challenging yourself to turn on your camera are all table stakes. The biggest challenge: overcoming mindset traps that make you a crappy interviewer, without you even noticing.

Ekaterina Howard 11/16/20 Ekaterina Howard 11/16/20

Launch optimized website copy overnight (and actually get more conversions)? Yes, if you've got reliable feedback loops to run in the background

Setting up surveys and forms in advance can help you master rapid updates and iterations, for example: figure out what should replace the "Insert you value proposition" here placeholder, how to turn product features into customer benefits, describe the problem your product is solving in the words that make your audience gasp in recognition — and sign up.

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[S2E6] How to build a content ecosystem to convert and support users

Content and copy are frequently treated as separate skillsets, and sometimes content gets broken down even further by channel, fragmenting messaging and making it hard to align on how to talk about the brand, the product, and its benefits.

But what if instead we treated all of the content, from ads to knowledge base articles, as one ecosystem?

This is how Erika Kramarik and Daniel Prindii approach this task in their work. In our conversation, they’ll take us behind the scenes of helping Omnivore (now acquired and shut down) go from speaking predominantly to early adopters start attracting, converting, and retaining early majority users.

[S2E5] Practical Guide to Wynter Messaging Tests

If you want to use Wynter for optimizing your website messaging, this episode is for you. I break down how I set up tests to validate copy before launch, explore messaging for new audiences, and make sure my clients’ homepage copy speaks to their target customers. I share tips on prepping your pages, what questions to focus on, and how to actually analyze the results to find blind spots and boost conversions.

[S2E4] How to: message testing on a budget

Alex Atkins, VP of Marketing at Sturdy, walks us through the process of continuously optimizing the homepage variations by combining message testing, reaching out to target ICPs for feedback, and (sometimes) asking for help.

In this episode:

How Sturdy messaging changed with the rise of "AI-powered" messaging everywhere
How Alex combined outreach and running messaging test
His approach to increasing messaging stickiness without sacrificing clarity

[S2E3] How to: positioning

Before you start building a category of one (please don’t), listen to this conversation about positioning against incumbents. It’ll save you a lot of sweat and tears.

In this episode:

How B2B buyers think about shopping (hint: they don’t think it’s fun)
What startups can do to go against “big guys” and win
Examples of great positioning in the wild

[S2E2] How to find winning angles for your competitor pages

Competitor comparison pages are a must-have for every startup that’s ready to grow. Or are they?

In this episode:

When startups should consider building competitor comparison pages
How to think about framing the conversation
How competitor research can help with future differentiation and product development
Pros and cons of 2 popular frameworks: “Us vs everybody else” and “Why we’re better than {X}”

[S2E1] How to make research (like JTBD) a part of your company’s business processes with Eric White, ponder*

4 mindset traps that prevent you from running effective customer interviews

Launch optimized website copy overnight (and actually get more conversions)? Yes, if you've got reliable feedback loops to run in the background

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A newsletter for B2B SaaS marketers and founders who want to fuel their growth with customer research data, not best-practice templates (and are tired of doing things the hard way)