How Does Consumer Research Drive Content?

Ben:
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Claire. Claire, welcome to the show.

Claire Hastwell:
Hi, Ben. Thanks for having me.

Ben:
Yeah, excited to have you on the show. Well, Claire, before we dive into the subject and the topic for the day, let's get to know you a little bit about your career and background. And also I love to ask what you love about content and marketing.

Claire Hastwell:
Yeah sure so I'm Claire Hastwell and I lead the content marketing strategy at Great Place to Work. I really started my marketing career working in the arts and for non-profits and then I had a short stint working for Yelp, which really helped me through my content marketing career. So after my stint at Yelp, I worked for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, where I led the digital marketing campaigns there.

And at that time, content marketing was really static images on Instagram. So that was a large part of my role there, running the social media and the email channels. And then I worked for the city of Sydney, where I led the promotions of the cultural and environmental programs for the local government area in Sydney, Australia. And that was really where marketing started to shift and have a big focus on content. And so the through line throughout my whole career has really been content and culture, whether it's been the arts or psychology. And that's really what led me to Great Place to Work. So Great Place to Work is the global authority on company culture.

And if you haven't heard of Great Place to Work, maybe you've heard of the Fortune 100 best companies to work for. So Great Place to Work is the data scientist behind that list, as well as many other best workplaces list. And so we help employers measure and improve their employee experience so that they can create a great culture for everyone and also get recognized for that culture.

Ben:
I love it. I love it. That's an awesome background.

Claire Hastwell:
Thanks. Yeah, and why I love content marketing, I feel like it's the fun part of marketing. And I like that it's really about adding value either through education or entertainment rather than just cold selling. And I like that it's about building trust and like a long term sort of relationship with your customer.

Ben:
Perfect. Yeah, that's great. So today we're going to talk about a subject that I think a lot of people are excited to do, but they may not know where to get started or how to grow this area of their business. And that's really consumer research and how we can do consumer research to reveal content opportunities that may not otherwise be really visible and really discover the best things to produce for our clients and customers and market. So, first off, very get-go, Claire. Why is consumer research so important specifically for content? What's your why when you think about consumer research in that space?

Importance of Consumer Research

Claire Hastwell:
Well, I think it's very easy to make assumptions about what our audiences want and what they're thinking. And by doing consumer research, it really keeps you focused on the here and now. And also things change. I mean, we saw through COVID, like all of a sudden people wanted sourdough starter. And the only way that you can understand what your customers want right now is by doing the research.

And I think it's really critical for finding topics for content that are both important and urgent, but maybe not widely discussed. And it enables you to have more empathy with your audience or your readers. For example, have you ever read an article where it just made you feel so sane? Because you're like, my God, this is exactly what I was thinking. So that's my goal is to basically create content that makes people feel like their pain points are really recognized. And also it just helps you stop wasting your time on things that aren't resonating with your audience.

How to do Consumer Research for your Content

Ben:
I love that. And when you mentioned the article, I was thinking immediately every single parenting article where they're like, my kid struggles with this. I'm like, it's not just me. Thank you. Like, I'm so interested in this conversation. No, I love that. That's a really cool standard for saying this is when you've hit the mark when someone's like, I feel heard. I feel seen. And I think that that's a great standard. I love that. So, all right, I'm convinced I've got to do consumer research for my content. What do I actually do to collect that consumer research? What's the how in this whole process and how can I get better at it?

Claire Hastwell:
So I have a few different kind of scrappy but very effective ways to get those insights on your consumer. So the first one would be to stay really close to your customer success or sales team or both. So something that I like to do is regularly shadow sales calls where customers or prospects are literally talking through their pain points on those calls.

And also even the language that they use. So I shadowed a sales call a while back and I found that our prospects weren't referring to our best workplaces list as company awards, but as employer of choice awards. So just that simple change. I started to incorporate employer of choice into our marketing messaging and customer success. So we have a really great customer success at Great Place to Work.

and they work with our customers to improve how they're surveying their employees and help them get on the list. And we also have culture coaches who are coaching our customers through their pain points they have around the employee experience and improving culture. So my advice is to have a really good relationship with people on your sales and customer success team.

because they have their finger on the pulse of what's happening and keep those lines of communication open. And this was really successful for us in, I think it was back in, yeah, 2020, like April 2020, where people all of a sudden were freaking out because everyone was working from home all of a sudden and people wanted to know how to survey their employees during COVID.

So we actually created a blog post, how to survey your employees during COVID, because one of the product solutions we have is employee surveys. And that blog post got so much organic traffic. And we had so many marketing qualified leads through that, because we were listening to our customers through our customer success team.

Claire Hastwell:
The other tip I have is to get into the comments. So something I also love to do is read comments in LinkedIn posts, which are related to your target audience or LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Reddit, and also the comments on articles. So another example I have, there was an article that the New York Times published on menopause, which is a topic that's not widely discussed, and it's also very much misrepresented. And I was reading the comments about all these women who had had to leave their jobs because they had these crippling menopausal symptoms, and they didn't realize that's what it was. And I was like, well, this is something that obviously needs to be addressed in the workplace and

So we created an article about how to address menopause in the workplace. And that was about a year ago. And I still get messages today from people on LinkedIn like, this is a great article. It really resonated with me. And it was one of those topics that was, again, has enormous impact because obviously it affects such a huge part of the population. Yeah, it was very under-reported and under-investigated. So it helped us find that sweet spot there.

And then the last tip that I'll share, which is my favorite one, is to simply survey your customers or your subscribers. So we have a company culture newsletter that we send out twice per month, which goes to prospects and customers. And every year we send out a survey to ask our customers, what are your pain points going into the next year?

And recently we changed that to include a few more questions where we asked not only about the topics they want to learn about and the pain points they have, but also what formats they want their content to be in. We also asked them who they want to hear from, like who are the thought leaders that they want to get advice from. And we also had open-ended questions so we could get more nuanced answers and also

maybe discover things that we hadn't put into our presets, multiple choice questions, because the other ones were multiple choice. And it was really enlightening when we did that exercise, because we found that in terms of topics, by far and away, the biggest topic that people wanted to hear about was employee retention, followed by leadership.

And so what we did is we created a webinar on which kind of combined those two topics together. It was called the leadership behaviors that drive employee retention. And that was our most attended. It was a webinar, but it was our most attended of any event we've done both online and in person. And since we've started using this consumer research to create the topics for our content. We've had a 632% increase in webinar registrations.

Ben:
That is incredible. Like that is the data point that this works. And so that's tremendous. I love that.

Claire Hastwell:
Yeah, it was very successful for us. And the other things that we found out is that a lot of our audience were kind of like a wearer of many hats. So a lot of HR teams, unless you're in a very large company, are kind of like a one person or two person team. And we found that they were using words like, I don't have enough time or like, I can't convince my leadership that culture matters.

So we created a persona around this group, the wearer of many hats, like a quick guide on how to convince leadership that company culture is important. And yeah, we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't done this reader survey. And the other thing we found is that with formats, the most popular format that people preferred to consume their content in was short video.

And we weren't doing a lot in short video because I think it's one of those formats that people kind of shy away from unless you have like a dedicated video team. And we found that blog posts, which we were doing a lot of, was actually lower down the list. So it really helped us shift our strategy away from putting so much resources into formats that were maybe not as popular among our target audience.

And then the last finding that we got from the survey that was really interesting was we asked them, who do you want to hear from? Do you want to hear from other thought leaders in HR? Do you want to hear from CEOs? And we also put in, do you want to hear from Great Place to Work staff? And Great Place to Work staff was the most popular. So it was very validating for us. We're like, okay, wow, like our audience see us as thought leaders.

And so we don't need to always go outside for experts. We can put our staff front and center. So that was also a really great piece of insight we got from doing that survey.

Ben:
And I think all these insights are amazing. And I mean, there's a lot to digest in just like the last 14 minutes of this podcast. And I think there's so, so many things, but really to me, it sounds like you've embraced this idea of let's stop guessing what people want or their format. And let's just ask them, is that kind of the culture? Do you feel like that is something that's been shifting where it's just like, Hey, let's just.

Let's go ask people what they want and what they need and then let's provide it to them. Is that kind of how the shift has happened?

Building a Culture that Supports Consumer Research

Claire Hastwell:
Yeah, definitely. I think I've always found like consumer behavior and what makes people tick really interesting. So I'm like known as the person that's always asking, but why, why do they care? Like why, why, why does our target audience care? And so I think if you can keep asking those questions on like meanings and you know, if a brief comes your way, like let's, I think it's really important to bring it back to the, the why, why do they care?

Because it is very easy to kind of get set in your ways, make assumptions or think so much about what message do you want to put out rather than what is the message that the audience wants to receive. So yeah, I think, yeah, just keep reminding your teams that and show them the results, right? Like what I did with these results is I put it together in a report and I distributed it.

throughout the whole, like basically the whole company. So not just marketing, but also we have another kind of content department. And we also have, you know, our sales team, our customers success. So it was also helpful for them because they then knew what, you know, what talking points to come in with in their sales calls or even when they're doing their customer success sessions. So if you can get buy in across the company, that can be really powerful.

Ben:
That's amazing. That's amazing. I love that. So, and I love, I think it's a great way to end the podcast today. Get to the why, focus on the why, ask people really dive into the research. And like you said, there's some incredible results that you've seen just by finding those hidden opportunities. And, I also love how you didn't just like say, great, we had a win. You shared that and you carried that momentum internally.

so that everyone can build off of that, the sales and success teams and say, great, these are subjects we can lead with that resonate that are really impactful. So I think it's so great that you've kind of addressed all your different audiences in the process as well. So I love it. Claire, these episodes go by so fast. This has been amazing. If anyone wants to reach out, connect with you and further the conversation online, where do they go? Where can they find you?

Claire Hastwell:
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Yeah, Claire Hastewell, great place to work. Yeah, I always love collaborating and talking with other people in content marketing or in company culture space. So yeah, find me on LinkedIn.

Ben:
I love it. Again, Claire, thanks for the insights and your time today.

Claire Hastwell:
Thank you for having me.

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