To find unique subject matter expertise beyond the C-suite, interview engineers and technical staff. They possess nuanced, in-the-trenches knowledge of customer problems. This approach consistently produces the most technical and highest-engaging content, even if it requires more effort to create.
Related Insights
To create high-quality content without constantly chasing internal experts, conduct a single, intensive knowledge extraction upfront. Consolidate insights from sales, customer success, and product into a central dashboard. This allows the content team to operate autonomously while staying aligned with core business knowledge.
Keyword tools are useless for identifying the ultra-long-tail queries (often 60+ words) that drive Answer Engine Optimization. The best source for this content is your own first-party data. Analyze support tickets, sales call transcripts, and Reddit threads to discover the highly specific questions your customers are actually asking.
Marketing teams can become echo chambers. To generate unique content, actively invite people from other departments and diverse demographics (e.g., a Gen Z employee) into your ideation sessions. They provide fresh perspectives that marketers often miss, leading to more resonant content.
To create resonant content, move beyond guessing customer problems. Analyze transcripts of past sales calls with an AI tool to identify recurring pain points, common questions, and the exact language your audience uses to describe their challenges.
Instead of asking AI to generate generic blog posts, use it for strategic ideation. Prompt ChatGPT with a detailed description of your ideal client and their transformation, then ask it to list their top 25 problems or questions. This provides a roadmap for creating highly relevant, problem-solving content.
Before an innovation workshop, focus interviews on employees and customers who interact with the product daily, not just executives. Their ground-level insights are essential for defining the strategic 'white spaces' that will guide the workshop and ensure it addresses real problems.
The only reliable way to understand a customer is to "forward deploy"—work alongside them in their actual environment. This direct experience of their job closes the context gap that interviews can't bridge, revealing unspoken needs and frustrations.
To truly understand a B2B customer's pain, interviews are not enough. The best founders immerse themselves completely by 'going native'—taking a temporary job at a target company to experience their problems firsthand. This uncovers authentic needs that surface-level research misses.
When you're not a subject matter expert in the audience you're selling to (e.g., marketers selling to developers), the most effective strategy is to rely heavily on your customers. Use qualitative interviews to deeply understand their world, which provides the authentic language and positioning needed for your messaging and campaigns.
Bypass C-suite gatekeepers by interviewing lower-level employees who experience the problem daily. Gather their stories and pain points. Then, use this internal "insight" to craft a highly relevant pitch for executives, showing them a problem their own team is facing that they are unaware of.
