Dani Woolf

Vulnerability and authenticity matters. While understanding our audience's needs and pain points is foundational, a compelling brand story often hinges on the vulnerability we weave into it. This vulnerability fosters relatability, drawing the audience into an emotional connection. People or companies trying to be a "thought leader" or "influencer," often overlook the power of sharing our challenges and transformative moments. True resonance comes from letting people see the journey – warts and all. That's the heart and soul of a brand story.

A simple but powerful message: You don't need to be on all social media channels to effectively use social media to grow your business. Be where your audience is. Master one channel. Then expand to the next best channel.

To effectively analyze customer feedback: 1. Group feedback into themes or topics to identify common areas of interest or concern. 2. Score or rank responses to understand the frequency or intensity of particular comments or sentiments. 3. Look for recurring trends, such as common pain points or frequently mentioned features. 4. Highlight unique or unexpected feedback that may offer fresh insights or indicate potential issues. 5. Use tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau, or Power BI to create charts or graphs for a clearer view of feedback trends. (You can use tools like Dovetail or Userbit too). 6. Prioritize the insights based on their potential impact and relevance to your product demo strategy.

Moderated usability tests are also a great way to validate products AND gain some trust and credibility. I've seen this first-hand with communities of B2B, hard-to-reach buyers. The nice thing about these tests is that you don't need a massive population for statistical significance. You can start with 5 test subjects and get the majority of what you need to optimize your product. The value for product owners AND those test subjects (potential buyers) - this feedback session is more intimate, which makes your participants feel like they contributed to your success. That feedback session leads to relationships which leads to potential business.

Market research is not one and done. Consider continuous qualitative research on a regular basis to validate priorities, goals, challenges, experiences of buyers. By regularly conducting qualitative research, companies can gain fresh insights into changing buyer behaviors and needs. If the positioning is based on outdated understanding or assumptions, the company risks becoming irrelevant. Without frequent validation through research, companies can become complacent and make strategic decisions based on assumptions. This could lead to misallocation of resources, missed opportunities, or investments that make buyers disgruntled and growl. I've seen it first-hand. And it ain't pretty.

Before you define your user journey, you need to define the ideal customer. I've seen companies - both early stage startups and scale ups - double down on content creation only to realize later they were creating content for the wrong audience. Two key pieces of advice as you define your users' journey: 1. Validate that you are targeting the right people by looking at sales and conversion data, conducting some interviews for customer feedback (8 should be enough), looking at churn data. 2. Don't get caught up spending hours and hours in the creation of user journey maps. User needs change frequently.