Transcription:

We know what you want. You want to reach more customers and grow your business.

But the marketing and PR landscape is murky and confusing.

Now, you can gain clarity with straight talk on the latest marketing and fundraising trends in technology from two agency pros.

Bryan Earnest and Mark Mathis from Amperage Marketing and Fundraising.

Now, amp up your marketing with the Amp Up Podcast.

Bryan Earnest: Well, hello, I'm Bryan Earnest, and this is the Amp Up podcast. Our topic today is research after COVID. Mark Mathis is away today. So we're bringing back a previous guest, Erin Bishop, Amperage's Director of Marketing and Research to join me today. Well, welcome back, Erin.

Erin Bishop: Thank you, Bryan. Happy to be back.

Bryan Earnest: So Erin, our world has certainly changed in the past year as our society is still dealing with the effects of COVID-19. For many organizations and businesses, the dynamic of how their business operates and the mindset of their customer has certainly changed. For many organizations, their assumptions are certainly being challenged.

Let's just jump into some questions. Erin, I think you would agree that the business world has certainly changed over the past year. What are some of the things you're seeing that are changing so dramatically?

Erin Bishop: The short answer to that question is everything. Everything is changing dramatically. We went through a period last year of a lot of change, and organizations needed to pivot very, very fast in order to adapt to those changes. And then I think as the COVID crisis calmed down a little bit, it certainly didn't go away, but vaccinations became available and things calmed down, people started going back to some of their old habits. But now that things are escalating again, everything is changing all over again.

So when we're looking at what that means for businesses and organizations in periods of such rapid change, number one is what you thought you knew before COVID, you don't know anymore. Even if you had research to back up what you thought you knew, the behaviors of your consumers have changed, their thoughts and feelings have changed. How they go about living their daily life has completely changed. And if you've done research since COVID or during the COVID crisis, I guess at some point, now that things are escalating again, all of those thoughts, feelings and behaviors have probably changed again.

And in order to stay away or stay in front of, not away from, we want to stay in front of our consumers, but in order to stay in front of our consumers, we need to know what they're thinking. And in order to know what they're thinking, we have to do research.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah, absolutely. You know, there are so many organizations that I think their basic assumptions about their business have been challenged. Hospitals thinking that patients were just very comfortable and safe coming to the hospital, that may not be true anymore. That students want to be on campus and be together or the inverse, students were interested in online learning. Well, maybe after doing a year of online learning, they're not so interested in that anymore. So just basic assumptions that organizations have had have certainly been challenged. So if an organization is looking to do research to better learn the mindset of their customers, what type of research might we be talking about?

Erin Bishop: There's a lot that we can do. Probably the most cost-effective and efficient would be to do some sort of online survey. You can start by surveying your current base of customers. Let's figure out what they want, what they're thinking, what they're feeling, how they prefer to interact with your organization, all of those things are a great barometer to figure out then how do we message and market to them? What do we need to be saying in order to meet them where they're at currently. An online survey is also great because you can repeat it multiple times. So perhaps an administration goes out now, and then in a few months we do it again to see how things have changed, if at all, and maybe they haven't and that's great, but that's good information to know.

This is branching into the planning side a little bit, but before we used to write marketing plans for one to three years, and that has changed as well. Now, we're looking at months to a long-term plan right now is a year because these are changing so fast. It's the same thing with research. So if we could develop a good online survey instrument that's short and start by surveying your current customers, that's something that can then be repeatable every few months, as we continue to navigate COVID-19 and then beyond that.

The other form of research that I would throw out there is a journey map. And if you go back and listen to one of our past podcasts, we talk about a journey map a little bit more. The customer experience has completely changed and continues to completely change. But I don't think a lot of organizations have taken some time to take a step back and figure out what that full customer experience looks like right now. What does your patient experience look like? What if you're a bank, how are they interacting with your bank when all the branches were closed for so long. People figured out how to do it differently. So how much of that is sticking and how much of that might go back after the pandemic "ends", whenever that might be. A journey map can help navigate those things as well to ensure that the right message is getting in front of customers at the right time.

Bryan Earnest: Erin, that's a great point. When you go about doing a journey map, at a high level, give me the process a little bit. Do you just make that up? Do you do some kind of secondary research? Do you interview customers? What do you do to figure out that journey map?

Erin Bishop: Well, it would be a lot easier if we just made it up, but we don't. We don't at all. There's several different forms of research that go into ultimately developing that journey map. If we can do it safely, the preference is to do an onsite journey workshop that would involve several key members of the customer journey.

So for example, we're working on one right now for a college. Several weeks ago, we went and had a group of about 16 people in the room. And we map out that journey and the people in the room for that college example is everyone from marketing to admissions, to the registrar, to someone from IT, because your website is your front door. So what are they experiencing when they get there? All of those different touch points are the people that we want in the room. And we actually work through with them for each stage of the sales cycle. What are they doing? What are they thinking? What questions are they asking? What touch points does the organization have in this case with the student and their parents or teachers and guidance counselor at that stage? And what are our ideas for touch points that would continue to enhance that experience? So that's one part.

If we can't do a journey workshop safely, we can also use that same concept and do one-on-one interviews. You don't get to group think in that case, which can be so beneficial, because it builds a lot of organizational knowledge. A lot of times organizations have no idea what happens when a student leaves their part of the process and goes to the next one.

So with the one-on-one interviews, you do lose some of that group think, but it can still be a very, very effective way to do a journey map by doing some one-on-one interviews that can be done over the phone or via any video conferencing platform to keep people safe.

That's part one. The second part is we do do some secondary research and go look at industry trends, reports from reputable sources to, in this case, figure out where are our students getting their information? What is their preference? When we're looking at that stuff, doing a journey map is a little bit harder right now because I don't look at anything that's over a year old because it's completely irrelevant right now. Anything pre-COVID is irrelevant. I don't want to rely on that. So there's that. We do look at industry knowledge.

And then the third piece of that is talking to students or patients or customers. We interview them. Those are all one-on-one interviews. We'll sit down with a student and ask them about their journey. What steps did you take? What questions did you have? Was there any point in the journey that was hard? Where'd you get stuck? Where did you need information and you didn't have it? We want to uncover those friction points. So then we can address them when it comes to not only marketing, but that whole experience, because it is all about that whole experience.

All of that information gets synthesized down into a visual description of the map, along with some recommendations on how to improve that experience marketing and messaging.

Bryan Earnest: Thank you for describing that. I think that could be a really powerful tool for a lot of organizations. It's interesting what you said about secondary research and looking at some of the trends that are happening right now. I think one of the things that's been eyeopening for the clients that we work with is how media consumption has changed over the last year. We're seeing more time spent with television. And I'm using air quotes, you can't see me on this podcast, but whether that's television, as in from a streaming perspective, like the Netflix's and the Hulu's and the Disney+, et cetera, or even that's broadcast television that is OTT cable, the time spent doing that now, do we have many, many, many, many more channels and options to watch than ever before? Absolutely. But people are spending more time doing it.

The other thing is even a platform like this that we're conversing over today of a podcast, it is the fastest growing audience for podcasts are those 55 plus. Older Americans are tuning into podcasts and consuming content that way and that has picked up greatly over the last year. And so just paying attention a little bit to the mindset of an organization's consumers, how are they consuming information, how are they getting content, how are they spending time with that content, is really, really important. You talked about online surveys as maybe a quick, easy way. If there was another way to do a real deep dive into what customers are thinking, what would you recommend?

Erin Bishop: There are a couple of different ways that we can do that. One is in-depth interviews, which I mentioned was a piece of the journey map, but is also a really effective tool on its own to do a series of in-depth interviews, whether that's 15, 20, 25, 30 interviews where we're really sitting down. Sometimes this is with consumers, with the target audience. Sometimes this is with internal stakeholders as well, depending on what the goal of the research is. And sometimes it's a combination of both of them. But there is a lot of power in sitting down and having a deep conversation with someone about their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about them in an organization.

Now this is purely qualitative and scope, but the beauty of it is you can really dig deep. In an online survey, the benefit is you can talk to a lot of people in a short amount of time. With one-on-one interviews, you can't necessarily do that, but the insights that you get are much, much deeper, and you have the opportunity to ask them why. The data that you get in an online survey is limited to the questions that you ask. In a one-on-one interview, your interviewer is trained to think on their feet and ask follow up and probing questions that will help us get to that why behind the data. That's one way.

The other way is focus groups. Focus groups are great for ideation, brainstorming, that group think, testing messages and having conversations around topics. Those types of conversations are excellent to do in a focus group. Focus groups can be in person. Absolutely, we can do those safely right now, pending that circumstances don't change. We do put safety precautions in place to do those in person, but we can also do it virtually. There are pros and cons of course to both of those methodologies, but the greatest benefit is you can have that group think and you can have the group conversation that can provide some really, really rich insight into some specific topics.

The other thing I want to go back to really quickly, when you were talking about all of the different ways that we consume media right now, that's also where research can really, really help us. We have a lot of data available to us through our media buyers and some the subscriptions and whatnot. But if you really want to get into what that means for my customer, that's where research can help you out as well, because we all have limited budgets. And I know sometimes research is something that gets eliminated from the budget because there's not enough money, but ultimately it can save you a lot of money if you figure out where are those key platforms that our customer is getting their information from, and let's focus on those and not do everything else.

Bryan Earnest: That's a great point about the research investment and how important that is to do any organization, to really listen to the voice of their customer to get into the mind of their customer and to really influence their strategic decisions. We'll move off of research just for a moment. Any other thoughts you have, Erin, about organizations now positioning them themselves or thinking strategically as we are coming out of the dramatic changes over the past year? Anything else that you're seeing or anything that you would recommend to organizations?

Erin Bishop: I would definitely recommend that organizations pause and take a step back and look at you don't ever want to appear tone deaf in the marketplace. So is how we're positioning ourselves right now relevant. Does it need to be adjusted? Do we need to completely reposition ourselves and rebrand? Our rebrand doesn't always mean designing a new logo. That might be an element of a rebrand, but a complete repositioning and redefining of your message could be a rebrand. And that is something that I think every single organization should be taking a look at right now because what your customers, clients, members, patients, students, whatever you call them, what they want from you is different. And do you know what that is? And are you speaking to those wants and needs? Because if you're not, then you are going to become irrelevant and that's going to be a tough road to walk down if you aren't taking the opportunity to press pause and reevaluate.

Bryan Earnest: Great advice as always. Thanks for joining me today, Erin. Thank you. I'm sure we could talk for much longer about the needs for research and strategy to improve an organization's overall marketing efforts. Great information today. That's it for today's Amp Up podcast. If you like what you've heard on our podcast, please share it. Go to amperagemarketing.com to check out some of our other episodes. Also, if you get a chance, please rate and review us. We appreciate any feedback. On behalf of Mark Mathis and myself, thank you. Check in on another podcast sometime, and we will help you move the needle.