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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about five customer insight generation machines for your blogging business. We discuss why these insights are important, what a customer insight machine is, and the three benefits of putting these strategies in place.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #30 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics change the world through online business. We’re giving you the tools, tips, tricks, and strategies you need to build a blog, podcast, or video, monetize them, and build a business that you can use to change the world.
Chris Cloney: 00:36
I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about five customer insight generation machines for your blogging business. We will be discussing:
- Why generating insights about our customers and readers is important
- The definition of a customer insight machine.
- The three main benefits of putting these processes in place
- Five different examples of things that I’ve used in my business to generate insights about the people reading the material that you’re putting into the world.
Chris Cloney: 01:10
If you want to get straight to the material, we put together a cheat sheet with these five different techniques. You can get it at the show notes at gradblogger.com/30. As always, you can download the transcripts for this episode there as well.
Why Do We Care About Generating Customer Insights?
Chris Cloney: 01:24
So why do we care about generating insights about the people who are coming through to our website?
In the last episode (Episode #29), we talked about understanding where your audience’s at and then creating content geared towards what they’re currently doing. We talked about a simple segmentation framework, with oblivious, informed, and afflicted as the three different categories.
- Oblivious people don’t know they have a problem.
- Afflicted people know they have a problem but don’t know the solution.
- Informed folks know they have a problem and know the solutions that are out there.
You need to mould and shape the material you’re creating to apply to these different groups. In that episode, we also talked about monetization options for these different groups.
Chris Cloney: 02:06
Back in Episode #20, we talked about the value ladder for your blogging business, which is the logical progression from creating content to providing value to teaching solutions to getting a result.
In that episode, we discussed how building the ladder before understanding your customer is a critical mistake that a lot of academics make. If we combine these two topics, you want to know where customers are at and then how you can take them on the journey to a better result at the end of the day.
A big key component here is that you need to know what your readers and customers are looking for. This is where generating insights about the problems that they’re having every day is critically important.
Chris Cloney: 02:47
One way to do this is to have a customer who is very similar to yourself. You have the problems that they may have had, but they probably have other ways of looking at it. They may be from other regions of the world. They have different backgrounds, so they’re going to have a different set of problems and a different take on those problems.
It’s important to get their insight and their feedback on what you’re creating. You’ll develop a much stronger blog if you integrate systematic ways to be generating insights about those folks as you’re going along. That way, you can feed that back into the content you’re creating, the products you’re creating, and the service that you’re putting out into the world.
Chris Cloney: 03:22
I want to make a note here. I did refer to people who are coming to your website and potentially spending money on your solutions as customers. There is a good definition by Jay Abraham in his book, I believe it’s [Affiliate] Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got. He distinguishes between a customer and a client. A customer is someone who buys something from you, whereas a client’s someone who is under your guidance or somebody whom you’re trying to serve.
Chris Cloney: 03:47
I think of people who are coming to your website as clients, or people who are under your control or under your protection, I think is the word that Jay Abraham uses. I called them customers in this episode because it fits in with the line. ‘Customer insight machine’ sounds a little bit better than ‘client insight machine’.
What Are Customer Insight Machines?
What is a customer insight machine? If you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’re probably familiar with content generation machines. These are repeatable, scalable processes to create unique content and get it out in the world in a way that’s repeatable. We talked about these in Episodes #8, 11, and 23 of the podcast. We talked about random topic blogging; three-minute papers, and content curation and repurposing.
Chris Cloney: 04:37
So an insight generation machine is similar to this concept. It’s a repeatable, scalable process to create unique customer insights, This is critically important. If you want to build a long-term business from your blog, you need to get into the mind of the people for whom you’re creating the material for, so you can word it correctly and know you’re not climbing the wrong ladder, as we talked about in the previous episode. You will know that you’re providing something that’s of value to the world.
Three benefits of customer insight machines
Benefit #1: Continuous stream of input to your business
Chris Cloney: 05:08
Three benefits of generating customer insights systematically and repeatedly while building your blog include having a continuous stream of input for your blog and your business.
Having that input coming in and knowing what topics are resonating with people will make a major difference. We had talked about this in Episode #25 with Toyin Alli. She started in the field of personal productivity and using Trello for grad students, and found out that their real issue is feeling isolated and alone while they’re trying to do grad school. So she switched into that field with her business and with her blog. Tat’s an example of how having this continuous stream of input is critically important to guide where you’re going.
Benefit #2: Feedback is in the exact wording your audience uses
Chris Cloney: 05:59
The second major benefit is that the feedback you get is in the exact wording that your audience uses. You can now get the right wording for sending your message back out. When you’re creating headlines and titles and writing copy, you’re using the words that your audience uses, which allows it to resonate a lot more.
Benefit #3: Allows you to test hypotheses in an ongoing manner
Chris Cloney: 06:21
The third benefit, which is a major benefit of a repeatable, scalable customer insight machine, is that it allows you to test the hypothesis in an ongoing manner.
I’m constantly doing this. What’s resonating with people? What struggles are they having? What’s my hypothesis on something that might help them? I test that back out. I might do a poll in the Facebook community at GradBlogger Connect. I might do something on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If I’m talking with customers about the struggles of building a business, I’ll test this hypothesis on them. Oh, they have this struggle, what about this solution? Oh, they have this struggle, what would this solution? See what lands and what hits, and then take the ones that work and move forward.
Chris Cloney: 07:03
So those are three big benefits of customer insight machines. One is having a continuous stream of input for your blog. The second one is that the feedback’s in the exact wording that your audience uses, and the third is that it allows you to test the hypothesis in an ongoing manner. If you’re from a STEM field or a scientific research background, you know all about setting hypotheses and testing them. This gives you the framework to be able to do that within your blog and within your business. Let’s get right into it then.
Five Customer Insight Machines
Chris Cloney: 07:28
I outlined five different customer insight machines that you can use. Again, these are scalable, repeatable processes that won’t burn you out and that you can start doing today to get insights about people coming to your blog.
Coffee chat phone calls
The first of these is coffee chat phone calls. These are either scheduled monthly phone calls or reaching out on a set basis to make connections and have discussions with people from your community. This isn’t necessarily scalable, but it is something you can start today.
Send an email to your email list or people who read your blog. Say, “Hey, would you like to jump on Skype or jump on Zoom and have a coffee chat about what you’re doing or what struggles you’re having?” I’ll talk about my business and you talk about your business, and it’s a great way to facilitate getting insights and what’s going on in their minds and also helping them.
Chris Cloney: 08:19
I got the idea of these coffee chats from Dr. Caitlin Faas. She did this for a long time. Every month she set up four or five coffee chats with different members of the academic entrepreneurship community to talk about their business.
I know because I got on the phone and talked about this with her. It helped us both hash out where we’re stuck and where we’re going. It also helped us to better understand what people outside of our own businesses are struggling with.
Free coaching and community help
Chris Cloney: 08:59
The second customer insight machine that I use quite a bit is free coaching and community help. We did this with the GradBlogger Accelerator program earlier in 2019, and we also do this in a lot of communities that we’re part of, such as the Self-Employed PhD group, which we’ve talked about on the podcast before.
For years, I’ve tried to show up at every meeting because it’s a great way to help people, to get help for yourself, and talk through problems that you’re having. But I might say something about the struggle I’m having and it’s in a new wording that I’ve never used before. I’ll write that down and be like, “Oh, that’s a unique way to look at it. That’s a unique way that I’m having that struggle.” That helps me understand different ways that I’m struggling and I can take that and use that into the content that I’m developing as I build a business at GradBlogger.
Chris Cloney: 09:44
This is a great way to do deep dives into the struggles. You may say, “This is a struggle I have” but what is the mental block that started it? Then, what’s the emotional block that might behind that? You dig in.
The free coaching side is a great way to get testimonials, to help people, to get case studies. We had Gaius Augustus on the podcast in Episode #14, talking about how to grow a brand and generate freelance income. That was from one of these free coaching programs we did at the GradBlogger Accelerator program.
These aren’t necessarily scalable. You can’t deliver free coaching forever, but they’re a great way to get insights about your actual customers and your actual clients today and also create a lot of value and put a lot of help into the world.
Onboarding ‘Ask’ style questionnaire
Chris Cloney: 10:34
The third customer insight machine is onboarding. I call that an ask style questionnaire. This is a deep dive survey. If you read [Affiliatea] Ryan Levesque’s book ‘Ask‘, you’ll understand what a deep dive survey is. He has a very systematic process in place about how to do that. The front end of the book is a little bit long-winded- it’s a big story. But the back end is full of technical how-to for structuring these deep dive surveys.
You do a big one, with multi-layers, and depending on what answer they select, take them to a different set of questions and that sort of stuff, or you do a simple three-question thing that helps you get insights from your customers. We do this simple version.
Chris Cloney: 11:18
When people join the GradBlogger Connect Facebook group, they’re asked three questions. I believe there’s something like what struggles are you having today? Where are you at? Are you getting started? Are you making X amount of dollars per month? Or are you building a team? In order to join the community, you have to answer this questionnaire. You can leave it blank too: we don’t block people out.
We get a ton of great insights from people and their exact words about the struggles that they’re having building their business. You do this as part of the front end of a content upgrade where you’re asking this short questionnaire or even a longer questionnaire if you want.
Chris Cloney: 11:57
This is helping to generate insights about the people who are coming to your community. I pulled up the short questionnaire we have at the GradBlogger Connect community, and I’ll read it out, to give you an example of what the questions might be.
Question number one is, “Are you interested in making money from your website using blogging, podcasting, or video? What is your single biggest challenge in moving forward?” This does two things. One, if they’re not interested, then it’s not that helpful to get insights from them because they’re not necessarily part of our audience. They may be joining the community for some other reason. It’s a binary thing. If it’s a no here, the feedback goes into a different pile. If they’re interested, then encourage them to say what the struggle that they’re having today is.
Chris Cloney: 12:38
The second question is, “What is your field and which of the following best describes you? I’m getting started online. I’ve made more than $500 online. I make more than a thousand dollars per month.”
This is a way to segment that audience, and it all comes from Ryan Levesque’s Ask book. This segments the audience, so we can see things. Okay, are people in bucket A having the same struggles? Are people in bucket B having the same struggles? Take that data and get into it more.
The third question is, “Your email address if you’d be interested in chatting.” This is an optional step where we invite them to further dive in and have a coffee chat to see more about their problems.
Chris Cloney: 13:17
I’ll give you a pro tip on question number three. Again, this is from the Ask book.
It’s great to get their information. We don’t add them to a list or anything, but I do follow up and talk to the people who put their email there. Even more important than that, it gives you another way to segment the audience. It tells you who is serious.
They say, “Yes, I’m interested. I have this one big struggle. I’m that category A, B, or C, and I’m willing to give my email address in the hope of talking about that.” You know that’s a committed person. If the same person did all those different steps but didn’t provide their email address, you can weigh the response a little bit lower because you know they’re not as committed to getting a solution to that problem.
Chris Cloney: 13:57
That’s a pretty detailed customer insight machine. It’s got a lot more moving parts than the first two. But it’s another way to go. It’s something we’re using every day at GradBlogger. Again, it creates this continuous stream of input, gives you feedback on what exact wording to use, and allows you to test your hypothesis in an ongoing manner. So that was three of the customer insight machines then. Let’s get into number four and number five.
Social media polls
Chris Cloney: 14:20
Number four is social media polls. This is a great way to get feedback from the broader community. You won’t be able to segment the feedback into different buckets like you do with a questionnaire or a survey, but you can get a wider view of what people are responding to.
Chris Cloney: 14:36
The polls are very engaging for getting information. They’re a good way to generate insights, but they’re also good for your social media presence in the first place. I ran a poll when we were designing a logo for DustSafetyScience, and it was one of the biggest and most viewed posts that I had on LinkedIn at the time.
People like polls, they like to have their thoughts be heard. It’s an engaging thing to do on social media and it generates insights, so it plays double duty. If you’re doing this in a systematic framework, I suggest that you do a different poll each week, either inside a community that you’re part of or on social media.
Email signature postscript
Chris Cloney: 15:12
The fifth and final customer insight machine that I use all the time is in the email signature postscript. I add a call to action. For DustSafetyScience, it’s a call to action for people to join the industry directory. For GradBlogger, I highlight coaching services, but it’s a great place to ask things like, “What are you struggling with today?”
That goes out on every email you send out. I do it on all my personal emails as well, but it can also be put in your autoresponder. It’s a way that people can continue to reach out and give you feedback.
Chris Cloney: 15:57
We do these on the content upgrades on the cheat sheets for GradBlogger. We have a nice cheat sheet, which is a one-page framework. In this case, this episode has five customer insight machines and bullet points on how to implement each one. At the end, it says, “Are you still struggling to build a business or generate customer insights? Email me at chris@gradblogger.com and tell me where you’re stuck.”
I personally reply to all the emails that we receive and I love helping. It’s good to help put that into the world. I want to see academics build big businesses and make big changes in the world. It also helps build customer insights about the people who are reading and connecting the most with the content that I’m putting out.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 16:40
So that’s it for this episode of GradBlogger. We talked about what a customer insight generation machine is: a systematic, scalable process that you can put in place to start generating insights about the people who are reading your blog or your podcast or watching the videos that you create. You can feed that back into your content moving forward.
We talked about the three benefits. One is developing a continuous stream of input to guide your blog and your business. The second one is feedback on the exact wording that your audience uses. The third is that it allows you to test hypotheses in an ongoing manner as you’re building your business. If you’re doing one of these ask surveys and tweak the wording in one of them to see whether people respond more to it, it is a great way to get feedback on what your customer’s thinking.
Chris Cloney: 17:27
We talked about five different examples of things that I’ve used in both DustSafetyScience and in GradBlogger to put these systematic processes in place. Some that are more hands-on than others. Some are more complicated while others are more simple. But each one can be started today. That’s why I put these five exact ones in this episode.
Those five machines were…
Coffee style chats, which can be on Skype or over Zoom.
Free coaching and community help. Either do free coaching with your current community or find a community where you can go help people. The first key here is to provide value. Help them along and you’ll learn about the struggles they’re having and you may find that you’re having some struggles that you haven’t even acknowledged yet.
Chris Cloney: 18:12
The third machine was onboarding ‘ask-style’ surveys. These are powerful, especially if you have them in a place where people come through quite often and you generate a lot of insights there.
The fourth was social media polls and the last one is the postscript line for email. The postscript line for email is one of the most underrated or underused ones, but it gives a ton of feedback. You have people emailing you directly about material that they’re struggling with today and you know what message they were responding to. These are the people who are trying to implement what you’re doing and have a question about it and want to reach back out.
Chris Cloney: 18:49
So as always, you can grab the transcripts of this episode at gradblogger.com/thirty. We created a cheat sheet with these five different customer insight machines and some bullet point notes and how you get started on those today.
Chris Cloney: 19:03
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please rate and review the podcast. That helps us get out in front of more people. If you like the material as well, you can go on social media and share it. You can tag @GradBlogger on Twitter or Instagram and give me a shout out and let me know that what I’m creating and putting into the world is helping you get started, helping you grow, and helping you build a business and make the change you want to put in the world.
Chris Cloney: 19:26
I hope you have a successful week ahead building out your blog and building your content. Keep your head up. I know it can be a struggle sometimes, but over time, you’ll be able to build a business, build a blog that can have a big impact on your life and a big impact on the world.
Resources
Companies:
DustSafetyScience
GradBlogger: Twitter | Instagram
People:
Dr. Caitlin Faas
Groups:
Self-Employed PhD group
Books:
[Affiliate] Abraham, Jay. Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got
[Affiliate] Levesque, Ryan. Ask
Previous Podcasts:
GBP029- A simple audience segmentation framework for your blog
GBP025-How to publish a book on Amazon with Dr. Toyin Alli
GBP020- Understanding the value ladder for your business and blog
GBP023- Content curation and repurposing (The Content Machine Series)
GBP011- Using three-minute papers to drive traffic to your site (The Content Machine Series)
GBP014- How to grow a brand and generate freelance income with Dr. Gaius Augustus (Accelerator Program Case Study)
GBP008- Using random topic blogging as your first content machine (The Content Machine Series)
