Customer Research: How to Find Customer Questions to Level-Up Your Blog Posts
You write blog posts for multiple reasons—building a search presence, driving qualified traffic to your website, ranking high on Google, establishing yourself as a thought leader in the industry, and so on. But it all boils down to and will only translate into results if you address the customer’s problems and give them the answers they came looking for.
How often have you opened a blog post seeking a solution and ended up disappointed because it either lacks complete information or doesn’t address your pain point? We’ve all been there.
The solution? Conduct deep customer research, find the most pressing customer questions around your topic and address them in your blog posts.
“Customer Research is the best way to understand the pain points and delights of your customers. When you hear something your customers love, turn that into a ‘how we achieved this’ blog post or if you hear repeated questions turn those into step-by-step guides. Use their words and answer their questions and you'll find that your content strategy and individual pieces come together much easier and perform better in the long run.” - Adrienne Barnes, Founder of ANB SaaS Consulting and Content Marketing
But how exactly can you do this? In this blog, we’ll look at five ways to conduct customer research and find burning customer questions that can take your blog posts to the next level and provide immense value that translate into leads and conversions.
5 ways to find customer questions for your blog posts
Blog posts are a part of a larger content marketing strategy. And the ultimate aim for any content marketer is to answer the customer’s questions. But to do this, you need to know what answers they’re looking for, the concerns and context behind those questions, and ways in which you can best answer them.
Eventually, all of this comes together and helps you produce more thorough and original articles than your competitors, which offer highly targeted solutions. Besides, it enables you to spotlight your product or service in the best way to convert your readers through a benefit-driven and pain point-led solution than promotional plugs.
Here are five proven ways to conduct customer research and find questions you’re customers are actively seeking solutions for:
1. Customer interviews
Interviews give you a first-person insight into the problems your customers face, which acts as the sole source of truth about relevant customer questions in the “now.”
“People are complex and often contradictory. We say one thing, but do or mean another. For rich insight that will shape and sharpen your blog post, you want the level of nuance that only an interview can capture. But make sure you ask follow-up questions! Interviews are only useful when we leverage the fact that they’re not surveys.” - Hannah Shamji, Customer Research Consultant
However, finding interviewees, structuring interviews, and converting the information into customer questions isn’t a piece of cake. But, here’s a structure you can follow:
Finding the right people to interview
Tap into your company’s customer archives and make a Google sheet with the names and contact details of frequent customers and even those who regularly get in touch with customer support.
Additionally, you can leverage the power of social media search to find passionate customers for interviewing. For example, simply search for the company or product name on Twitter, and you’ll get a host of UGC content from your customers.
Compile all these names and contact details in a Google Sheet, and you’ve got your customer interviewee list ready!
Reach out to customers and request an interview
You want to interview people for your benefit, so you need to respect their time and keep the request message short, as will be the interview.
The best way to reach out to your customers is via email, with a simple message that states:
Why you’re reaching out
How they can help
How much time this interview will take
What they’ll get in return (attaching an incentive to it might increase the likelihood of them agreeing to do it)
When you want to do it along with your Calendly link
Here’s a great template Ming Yang followed to book customer interviews and got an 84% “yes” rate.
If you don’t get a response the first time around, don’t feel disheartened. Try again after 3-4 days. However, know when to stop following up and avoid sending another email after the second one to respect their choice and avoid coming off as spammy.
Prepare your questions and conduct the interview
The most important part here is preparing the customer questions to give you insights into the article you’re writing. So, prepare open-ended questions about:
Your product/service
Potential areas of improvement
Which problem led them to buy from you
Which problems do they still face
You also want to ask connector questions like:
“And so?”
“Now what?”
“What did you do then”
“What happened after this”
It’ll help you get more context on what they’re saying.
Lastly, don’t forget this golden tip by Jake.
While conducting the interview, ensure you’re in a quiet space, wear headsets for voice clarity, record the interview, and conduct with a smile on your face.
Once your interview is done, thank the interviewee for their time, convert it into a transcript and take insights from it directly for your article—fresh from the oven!
2. Public forums
One of the most popular ways to assess what your customers are looking for is to search for your product, brand, or topic-related keywords on public forums and gather all the latest raw data to use as the foundation for your blog post outline.
Many great public forums like Quora, AnswerThePublic, Google Trends, Reddit, and Discord communities.
You can also check out public customer forums of your competitors like this one by Apple by simply searching for the keywords.
Your work doesn’t end with a simple search on these forums because it’s likely that you’ll find many customer questions—all of which might not be the most useful for your topic or addressable in a single blog post. So, once you have your questions ready, highlight the most relevant ones.
Perform a simple Google search about that question and start reading the articles to form the basis for how you should address these questions in the best way. You can also take input from internal experts and stakeholders to know their stand on these popular questions and how you can solve them best.
Finally, compile all your research, and you’ll have a juicy structure for your article, which you can then iron out to turn into an action-packed and takeaway-filled blog post that adds value to your readers and solves their problems.
3. Customer service analytics
If you want to find customer concerns and pain points as questions to address in your blog posts, you need to walk the customer experience and identify data touchpoints to pick insights from.
Visit your website and see which problems you face as a visitor
Speak to your customer-facing colleagues or the customer success/sales team and find out the most common concerns or objections they face
Go through your customer ticket and feedback survey archives to study their problems
Don’t believe this can work? Over 74% of marketers rely on sales team feedback to research their target audience.
If you can understand the “why” behind how customers act, you can use that to write data-driven blog posts that thrive on numbers more than assumptions.
“Analyzing customer service analytics can help you go from hoping your content and messaging will resonate with your audience to knowing your messaging and content will resonate and generate results.” - Jake, Market Researcher at YouGov
In fact, you can combine this method with the interview approach. Get data and understanding from your customer service tools and team, and then validate that data through customer interviews to gather more context for your blog posts.
Additionally, you can create a fresh customer feedback survey tailored to get the answers you’re looking for—around problems, overdue concerns, improvement areas, and pain points. This way, you can stop relying on guesswork and use real data to authenticate each piece of information that goes into your content, making your blog post authentic and credible.
4. Social listening
Social listening is the process of tuning into customer conversations to understand what they’re talking about, how they think and feel, and what they need from your business. It’s one of the most authentic forms of customer research where you can catch real-time conversations about your brand, product, or service and use it as inspiration to drive your content forward and address loopholes or concerns.
Besides, only 42% of B2B content marketers actually talk to their customers to understand their needs when it comes to content. So, social listening will also give you an idea about the type of content your audience wants to see, what they think about your previous blog posts, and what can be improved to help you double down on more of what they want from you—and in the process, get ahead of your competitors.
While you can always follow your brand-related keywords and hashtags on social media to track conversations, many social listening tools like Hootsuite and Buffer can make the job easier for you. These tools compile beautiful-looking dashboards from which you can directly pull insights for your blog posts.
5. Audience research tools
While all the above methods can help you extract the first layer of customer questions and use them as insights in your blog posts, it can be quite time-consuming and even expensive—especially if you want to dig deep.
A faster way to get customer insights and granular information is by using audience research tools like SparkToro.
These tools help you gather customer feedback, assess your competitors, filter your audience, see what your customers are doing and who they’re following, among other things. It’s an easy way to see how your audience interacts with everything online to extract useful information to use as research for your blog posts.
“Using SparkToro, we sharply defined a persona for a popular hair care brand, which helped us build an entire user journey and content strategy. Another one of our clients is a sponge manufacturer; we used SparkToro to help inform where to place advertising, how to best update messaging, and gain a better understanding of their reading/listening/browsing habits.” - Rebecca Wynne, Head of Search at Grey Group
You can search for your brand to find customers who create content mentioning your brand or product. Or you can search for your topic-related keyword and filter out people to understand what they’re talking about and what their concerns are around this subject.
You can also find out who your customers are following, engaging with, and even get tips on how to use this data in your strategy and campaigns.
Overall, it helps you get data that matters to understand your audience better and base your content strategy on who they are and what they need in the “now.”
The bottom line
There are over 600 million blogs globally, some of whom are creating multiple blog posts per week. However, not everyone puts in the time and research to understand their customers to the T and create hyper-targeted content.
By following customer research practices to find your customer’s most pressing questions around a particular topic concerning your brand, you put yourself in the top 1% on the internet. This doesn’t just add a lot of value to your customers, but it also helps build trust, loyalty, and retention, which is way more valuable than producing content just for the sake of it.
Use this article to take your blog posts to the next level and introduce a customer research segment in your content strategy to create better-targeted content that gets the best results for your business.
Ready to level up your research game? Create Better Content is a self-paced tutorial that walks you through the exact steps I take to create £1,000 pieces for the likes of Shopify, Hotjar, and CoSchedule.
By Komal Ahuja
Komal is a freelance writer specializing in creating blog posts around marketing, sales and eCommerce for B2B SaaS companies. When she's not freelancing, she helps freelancers navigate the business side of things with targeted content and masterclasses.
