Why research isn't optional—stand your content writer ground

Watch the same movie dozens of times and you’ll memorize the lines. I did this with Star Wars as a child and I promise it will make you a terrible nuisance to watch with. Now I’ve begun to enter that space with content writing—some patterns are clear as a script—and I know I’m starting to pester colleagues by repeating myself.

The core of my admonition is this: There is no way to write clear, credible copy without ample time for research. None at all. For the past year and a half, we’ve provided an offering to clients where we conduct research—we first find prospective buyers and ask them what they want to hear. Only after synthesizing their feedback do we write.

Some clients elect this service and some don’t and it’s created an interesting split test. Those that pay for and follow this research are more successful at content marketing than those who don’t. So much so that as of August of this year, we no longer allow companies to purchase our writing service without first hiring us to conduct research—what we call an Insight Report.

For us as writers, to do anything less is our version of malpractice.

What is an Insight Report?

An Insight Report is a 10-15 page report where we study someone’s audience to provide guidelines on how to find their prospects and what to say to them. It is something of a content writer’s bible, full of quotes from actual prospects who’ve never heard of your company candidly sharing what they do and do not like.  

It is astounding to me how quickly we begin to explore virgin territory, even for companies that have long been in contact with their customers. We ask questions like: Where do you get your news? What’s the last email from a business you’ve opened and liked? Can you send it to me? What companies annoy you? Does ‘conversational platform’ mean anything to you? How would you explain this product to a colleague with that problem?

This is where many of our most powerful writing insights have come from. For instance, knowing that mechanical engineers don’t have some secret subreddit where they all gather. They just Google things. Which means, there is no strategy but a long-tail keyword SEO strategy.

We learned that our customer, a firm named Baton, didn’t need to worry about having chosen the wrong name—11 out of 12 interviewees used “a baton handoff” as an analogy in explaining their problems. We learned that developers tend to distrust a case study unless it mentions something negative about the product. If it’s all positive, they know it was written by a marketer and so they ignore it.

We’ve learned that homeowners buying solar panels underestimate the cost of upkeep, that financial advisors and their compliance teams despise one another, that salespeople don’t recognize their data quality issues as data quality issues, and that CTOs don’t want to get too technical on a call. (They are executives first and engineers second.)

If it sounds like a reboot of the focus group, it’s really more of a confessional. Conversations happen one-on-one and rather than collect generic, group impressions, we give each person an opportunity to spill their concerns, obsessions, and frustrations. In four weeks, we introduce and retire dozens of marketing experiments that’d otherwise require six months of expensive trial and error, and emerge with a firm plan.

From these conversations, we build a report that details a full content strategy, including:

• What readers and prospects want to hear
• What they don’t want to hear
• Who our content competitors are (not necessarily the same as competitors)
• Places we should publish and market
• Things to do
• Things not to do
• A content calendar
• Discrete tests to run

Plus, a grab bag of quotes, anecdotes, content ideas, taglines, and whatever else comes up. The results are empathic:

One company’s SDR sequences grew 17x more effective

They saw increases in an open rate of 4% to 72%, and a click rate of 1% to 34%, simply because we interviewed prospective buyers and asked them to rate our emails.

One infographic and article netted $15,000 in opportunities on the first day

Insight Reports give us better questions to ask. We turned one we could finally answer— “What’s the value of better imagery?”—into an infographic and article that, on their first day, netted two new opportunities worth $15,000.

A client realized their ICP was the end user, not the buyer

Most sales and marketing advice tells you to start at the C-suite, especially when there’s no free trial. But through conversations, we learned that bottom-up pressure was in fact the best way to do business, and reoriented all the marketing around it.

We have a small library of these anecdotes. Yet despite all this, new, prospective clients often say they don’t want it.

But Is It Necessary?

That’s the number one question we get from clients when I explain the research report. It’s usually couched in, “I get the value, but … it’s expensive … we don’t have time … and we’ve already done something like it.” For the past year and a half, I accepted this reasoning. Even I was unsure. Is it actually necessary? Maybe. Is the research their team has already conducted sufficient? Only one way to find out. Is the time pressure really too great? I have to trust them. But now I’ve seen it play out a few dozen times and know for certain. The research is not optional.

Every time we make an exception and accept a client’s argument for why we should forgo research, we both regret it. The project never quite goes as far as it could. Rather than save the six months, we spend them. They rack up tens of thousands of dollars of articles and ebooks, some of which work, some of which don’t, and they spend too much of their time managing our work because no one is quite certain what “good” looks like. Some pieces get edited in circles for months and then shelved.

If the stories below feel twinged with judgement, I suppose it’s my coping mechanism at having to watch the same movie over and over:

• We were hired by one client to produce a white paper but told we couldn’t talk to their internal experts. They were too busy, the client reasoned, and they trusted us fully to produce it. I took a shot. Their feedback? They said it lacked details about the product.

• Another client promised to provide extensive persona research. Digging in, it was all several years out of date, but that didn’t matter, they explained, because the CEO wanted to go after a new, aspirational persona—the C-level executive. Armed with nothing, I gave the ebook a try. The CEO said it wasn’t quite there and spent several months of his weekends editing it. They chopped out entire sections to get the length down—sections full of concrete, usable advice—and in the end, reactions to it were muted.

• One services firm asked for an ebook that was already planned out. The bullet point outline alone was four pages. I asked if they were certain they wanted all of this material included. They were. The result was 10,000 words. Their feedback? Too long, and not directed enough toward the buyer. What did that buyer want to hear? They didn’t know, but they were hoping I did.

• At a sales software firm, I was told that they didn’t have research, but it didn’t matter. They just wanted to conduct a trial to see if they liked my writing. In the document I produced, however, four people I’d never met began tearing the article apart saying it wasn’t right—but they disagreed about what “right” was. Two executives dueled it out about what to even call the soon-to-be-released product. Suffice to say, nobody was happy with it.

Without any sort of rubric, these clients tend to involve more and more people. They bring in a sales leader. An executive. A client account manager. Feedback from so many directions tends to chip away the interesting points and blunt the writing. It loses its voice. Jargon and passive voice creep in. The piece is stretched and pulled and grows less and less intelligible, and all the while, the finish line that we have all lost sight of grows farther away.

In each of these situations, our Insight Report is precisely what would have saved the project. It would have helped our marketing colleagues front-load their effort, where it could have been most useful. It could have helped them transcend their short-term objectives and pursue the true purpose of the piece—to interest, educate, and entice prospective buyers in terms they want to hear on the channels they expect.

All else—all of that effort to ‘correct’ things after the writing—is a hopeless errand, and all those hours, deadweight loss.

Research? It’s required

Our Insight Reports are not infallible. But they do confer a reliable advantage: They get everyone curious about the customer again. I’m a close student of psychology and endlessly impressed with how much we tend to think we know until we ask. Our research pursues questions—many of them new, some of them old, and all of them worth asking repeatedly—about who the buyer is and what they want to hear. Then, rather than boil the ocean, we chart a definite course and do fewer things exceptionally well.

Marketers appreciate it. Our writers appreciate it. Your CFO will appreciate it. Because, who doesn’t want to save six months of content marketing budget when you could know what to do right now?

Below, reactions from those who elected the Insight Report.

“It’s impossible to market well if you don’t have a deep, objective understanding of your customers and the market. The Insight Report provided us with a foundation that helped shift our focus and provided real feedback on how we improve and package content so buyers can evaluate on their own.” - Tara Panu, VP of Marketing, Movius

“This was the most useful artifact I had when I joined the team and was trying to figure the product and our customers out.” - Anonymous

“I’ve never seen SDR sequences like this. They were human and humorous, and seemed like they would stand out in a very saturated inbox. I thought they were good enough to share with peers and colleagues.” - James Winter, VP of Marketing, Brandfolder

“Chris helped us condense our thoughts, observations, and convictions about our market into understandable information. We now have an artifact we use for all our new hires, from marketing to engineering, that helps us skip multiple stages of educating new team members on our target customer, product, and mission.” - Josh Benamram, CEO, Databand.ai

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