HackEDU: consistent, research-based messaging to drive effective lead gen for a rapid-growth-mode startup
Using surveys and customer interviews to develop messaging that will resonate with key ICPs
HackEDU is a fast-growing secure coding platform helping developers write better, more secure code.
As the HackEDU marketing team was getting ready to update the website and marketing collateral, they realized that existing sales & marketing messaging was inconsistent and based on team members’ perception of ICPs’ pain points and priorities, rather than customers’ JTBD.
“We didn’t have any consistent messaging and what we did have was not hard-hitting enough to reach our target audience in a meaningful way. I believe that these issues prevented conversions.”
Challenge: finding consistent, resonating messaging to help accelerate HackEDU’s growth
In addition to new website copy, HackEDU needed to make sure that all of the marketing collateral, from ads to content, was aligned with the messaging hierarchy that made sense to prospects — and that website content supported prospects on their journey from first visit to becoming a customer.
One of the goals of our work together was to create reference documentation with information about ICPs’ pain points, desired outcomes, hesitations and motivations, plus research-based messaging hierarchy.
Some of the questions we needed to answer:
What are the outcomes that ICPs hope to achieve — and how do they make purchasing decisions?
What are the hesitations they have — and how can we address them?
How do customers perceive the brand, which features do they perceive as the key differentiators — and why?
Finally, what information is missing from the current website — and how can we improve conversions with optimized copy?
Finding answers to those questions would mean going from assumptions to research-based data with the power to inform decisions around funnels, website structure updates, content planning, features hierarchy for different ICPs and more.
“Ekaterina is terrific at what she does. She seeks to understand and makes no assumptions about buying audiences. Her project management, attention to detail and expertise are stellar and she gives each customer great attention.”
Solution: messaging hierarchy survey and interviews to ground messaging in voice-of-customer research
During internal interviews it became clear that different team members had different thoughts on what mattered to HackEDU’s ICPs. To eliminate the guesswork around messaging, we set up and ran a survey to validate those assumptions.
In addition to multiple-choice questions, we included open-ended questions, both to start gathering voice-of-customer data and to validate the closed question responses. And, to make sure that we catch possible differences in ICPs’ motivations, we added a self-segmentation question.
The next step was developing an in-depth understanding of buyers’ journey — and mapping out the website changes that would support buyers and help improve conversion rates.
To achieve this goal, we scheduled follow-up interviews with survey respondents representing different ICPs. These interviews helped us understand buyers’ research process and selection criteria — not to mention challenges they were facing in their work lives and hesitations they had around adopting a solution.
“I really loved Ekaterina’s process for collecting information, understanding buyers’ decisions, and using that information to create messaging content that will convert interest into leads. Ekaterina works hard, fast and with great attention to detail. She’s a terrific problem solver and always keeps the main objective as her guiding light.”
Outcome: research-based messaging to drive lead generation
The qualitative data we gathered provided a framework for the next step of our project — website copy. And, it provided data to fuel HackEDU’s growth-related initiatives:
Sales enablement content ideas to shorten the sales cycle
Content clusters based on prospects’ stages of awareness
Possible demo structure updates to align demos with prospects’ JTBD
Case study angles to address prospects’ hesitations
In short, getting to know ICPs — and learning more about their journey from prospect to buyer — helped create a shared understanding across teams, a data-based foundation for HackEDU’s growth and a blueprint for website updates.
“I think the understanding we gained about our buyers and what motivates them to buy was incredibly enlightening and debunked internal myths. Working with Ekaterina has given us the data to back up the changes we need to make to our messaging to drive effective lead gen.”