The Art of Listening

So much is changing. There are huge disruptions at play – some accelerated by circumstance, some driven by education. Homeworking is displacing long commutes and crowded offices; data is fast becoming the world’s greatest commodity. Increasingly audiences are choosing exercise over cigarettes, electric over diesel, re-usables over single use plastics, second-hand purchases over fast fashion, plant-based diets over meat, inclusivity over exclusion, long locks over short hair (maybe not the last one!)

The thing with change, is that what we used to know about our audiences, may now be contextually invalid. Clearly what our audiences want from us (as brands) is changing. And if we don’t deliver, their opinions on us can change rapidly too. With accelerated change, even word of mouth (both positive and negative) seems to travel faster, so, never have the stakes for brand reputation been higher. But how can we keep up with what our audiences really want?

There’s a reason we were given two ears and one mouth (so the saying goes). If our audiences are using their mouths (alright more likely fast-typing emotional fingers, but ignore the details), we should be using our ears (yes okay, and our eyes). My point is, we need to listen.

We can listen in a number of ways. Hell, we could just outright ask people what they want right!? Pick up the phone, whack out a survey, organise some focus groups. There’s definitely some value in that. That’s what the industry has been doing for years – market research in its traditional sense – when done well it creates really valuable insights. But there are other techniques we should be leaning on too. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but below are 3 techniques – the value of which are sometimes underestimated – which I believe can help you to hear what your customers really want.

The trouble with asking people what they want is that they don’t always know what they want until you place a solution to all their problems in front of them. A gazillion years ago (history’s not my strong point), Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they want, they would have asked for faster horses”. Yeah. People think they know what they want, but they don’t really.

People do however know what their problems are. Are they going to tell you what their problems are? Maybe, but probably not (unless they consider your brand to be the cause of their problems – we’ll leave that for another day).

I only talk about my problems to trusted friends…. Oh, and Google. I’ll ask Google anything. How do you cut a man’s hair? (First world problems), How do you tame a fox in Minecraft? (Asking for a friend. Nephew actually.), Can you die from lack of sleep? (Don’t judge, I have a baby!). It’s estimated that Google processes 70,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.8 billion searches every day. Chances are, your audiences are querying Google regularly. So, if you want to know what’s on their mind, an understanding of search queries should be top of your list. And remember if your audiences aren’t talking to Google, they’re probably talking to Alexa* (*insert virtual assistant of your choice) so the need to understand their search queries still stands.

Listening approach number 1 – understand your audience’s search queries

The theory here is simple. If you listen to your audience’s questions, you’re better placed to spot brand relevant opportunities to become a part of the solution to their problems. But beyond that you’ll get an understanding of what’s important to them and how that changes over time. It’s with this understanding that you can stay relevant to them.

Thankfully there are a lot of free tools out there that can help you with this. To give you a few ideas, firstly, you could look at what search terms are trending (using tools such as Google Trends). Next, look at your website analytics – specifically which keywords are bringing in organic traffic to your site. This will help you to understand your audience’s motivations. Combine this information with data from the search query section of Webmaster tools to see how you rank for those terms and where your click through rates might need improvement; this will help you to understand where you might need to focus your efforts. You can enhance this information by using Google Keyword Planner (this is a popular tool for keyword research for SEO purposes but) by identifying related keywords and getting a feel for the search volume against each keyword, you can start to look at the user intent: Split popular keywords into the categories ‘do’, ‘know’ and ‘go’. ‘Do’ queries are when the user is looking to complete a specific action, such as purchasing a specific product. ‘Know’ queries are informational – when the user wants to know about a specific subject. ‘Go’ queries are typically brand queries where a user wants to go to a specific website. By understanding the most popular user intent, you can start to position your content to meet the requirements of both known and potential audiences. 

Whilst we’re not there yet (as far as I’m aware), I don’t think it will be long before we can use search queries to give an indication of the searchers mood too. If you consider the feelings that a user may go through when conducting research (uncertainty, optimism, confusion, frustration, doubt, clarity, confidence, relief – as defined by the Kuhithau Information Search Process model), you can start to see how a clear understanding of a user’s position in a search journey might help us to understand their likely mood, enabling us to create the right content (for their mood) targeted at the most appropriate keyword (used during that emotive state) enabling us to respond to their needs faster.

Search queries shouldn’t be our only source of information. An area where we can already get a feel for people’s moods’ is social media. Emoticons gives immediate visual indications to an audience’s reaction to a particular piece of content on a social media platform, enabling us to quickly sense check sentiment. Similarly, the character limits of microblogging platforms (such as Twitter) encourages users to respond rapidly to topics. Where you get rapid response at scale, you get trending topics – giving us a further indicator of audience mood or interest (dependent on the topic and the context).

This brings me on to the second approach you should be using to better understand changing audience needs…

Listening approach number 2 – Social listening

Social listening helps you to understand (via hashtags) what topics your audience is talking about the most, helping you to understand what type of content they want to consume. By using a social listening tool, you can monitor and analyse conversations about your brand, your competitors or a specific topic. By analysing data such as volume of conversation, rate of engagement, share of voice, sentiment, competitor metrics, and drawing on the insights from this analysis, you can then make better marketing decisions.

Unfortunately, social listening does tend to come at a cost with most of the main players in the market (Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Awario etc.) using charging models (often based on the number of mentions). But it can play a valuable role in enhancing your understanding of your audience (or even new audiences that you want to tap into).

The combined effect of listening to your audiences’ conversations on social media and understanding their search queries can be powerful in helping you to make strong marketing and content decisions. But I’m going to add a third technique into the mix, so that we not only understand what our audiences want before they get to our website, but we also understand what they need from us when they’re at our door, visiting our website. It makes sense right – you’ve done the hard work of getting them to your website, don’t lose them now. Listen to what they need from you in order to complete a desired action (retrieve information, make a purchase etc.)

Listening approach number 3 – User testing

User testing is the process of both talking to and listening to your customers while they interact with your product (or a prototype of your product), such as your website. You need clarity on what the most important things are that you’re trying to deliver through your product before you embark on testing. There are a number of methodologies that you could use. Here are just some of them:

• A pluralistic walkthrough – this is essentially where you get a group of UX professionals to walk through a scenario and identify any obvious usability issues associated with each step. It’s good for detecting generic design problems but remember that different audiences will interact with products in different ways, so there’s still value in testing with your specific audience.
• A/B testing (or MVT) – this involves testing two or more variations on the same design with your existing audience and monitoring which performs best. There are lots of tools available to help deliver this in an automated way, but they tend to come at a cost. This approach is great for creating iterative improvements to an existing product.
• Hallway testing – this is where you just head to a place where people (preferably similar to your target audience) hang out, ask them to interact with your product (you may have to bribe them by buying them a coffee) and ask for their feedback. A good approach when you’re short on time.
• Moderated user testing – This is where someone guides your participants (individually or in a group) through the scenarios that you want to test. The moderator will ask participants to perform a task (but will not tell them how to perform that task) and will take note of how participants are feeling as they move through the process, taking note of any pain points. This can often be enhanced with eye tracking technology. It’s an effective technique but can be expensive. For best results I’d recommend using a specialist agency, but when budgets have been low, admittedly I’ve run tests myself (rather than through agencies) in the past. The key is in defining a strong (unbiased) testing script upfront with clear goals defined.

Whichever methodology you’re using, (usually a combination works best), user testing can help you to remove friction and pain points, making interactions with your product an enjoyable experience for your audience, making them more likely to come back again.

So, to summarise, in this crazy world of change, you need to understand your audience’s current behaviours, needs and goals, and identify how those differ from the behaviours, needs and goals they had before. If you’re correctly understanding what your audiences are interested in (and how their interests are changing), alongside what’s likely to effect your audience’s mood and how that’s changed (social listening), what they’re looking for, and what their motivations are now and in the past (search query listening), and how your specific audience wants to go about reaching their goal (user testing), you should be firmly on the right track to deliver experiences that your customers will love. You’ll provide content that appeals to your audiences at the time that is appropriate to them, in a format that helps to solve their problems, and is easy for them to interact with. Get all these things right and your audience will love your brand. Get just some of these things right, and you’ll likely have an edge over your competitors.

But if you fail to listen to your audiences, you risk slogging away increasing the speed of your horses, whilst your competitors are building cars.