Your customer's customer - what's up with that?

Season 7, Issue 3: B2B's hidden content niche

Feb 07, 2024

An overview of what I call “leap frogging” content, what it is, how to find your topics, and how to distribute it
Three examples of leap frogging content

Salut Mehketeers,

I once worked at [redacted] and we had this really… not good boss. And one really fun team member was alone with the boss, in complete, and just slipped out “I quit”. The next day the rest of us showed up for work and the boss was acting like he’d never existed. A few weeks later one of us got this cryptic message, we met up with him for dinner, he told us the story and we all bonded over how crazy that job was.

Anyway, this is all to say that some people leave certain mannerisms with us, and that guy used to always text okokokokok and wowowowow instead of “ok” and “wow”, which I picked up, and now actually passed it on to quite a few friends.

And wowowow is my response to the response to this LinkedIn post where I announced that I’m looking for someone to join me on this Mehdeeka journey and take over the social media side of things since it’s just not my fave thing to do, and there are other bigger projects I want to reallocate that time to.

Mehdeeka issues will still be 100% written by me, so no change there.

Onto “leap frogging”!

Leapfrogging your customer

Look, I know using keyword research and search trends to figure out what your next content is going to be is the industry standard - but hear me out. What if we just talked to our customer’s customers and asked them what was difficult about our customers?

This is the premise of what I call leapfrogging content. Leapfrog over your customer, go to their customer and find out what the word on the street is, then work your way backwards.

An easy way to do this is not to read customer reviews, but forums. You’d be surprised how many consumer forums exist. I’m a big redditor so I’ve always known about niche communities, but did you know actual chat forums still exist? Then you’ve got Facebook groups, meme accounts, and other weird and wonderful depths of the internet.

Here’s a little step by step to finding your topic:

Look into who your customer sells to (is it a team, an industry, a business owner vs employee? It could also be that they give the output of your product to another team in their company if it’s more of an internal tool)
Find out what the customer’s customer painpoints are, which could be:
a) There’s a customer experience/journey piece missing
b) When they hand off the output of your product to someone else, that person doesn’t know what to do with it
c) They actually just use the product themselves and struggle to get budget signed off on it because no one else knows what it does
d) There’re changes (like regulation) happening broadly that affects their industry and there’s a link to your product
e) Many more!
Find a link to your product, which could be
a) The topic is complementary to your product
b) The topic is in line with your emotional sell
c) The topic is directly related to your value proposition

Here are some practical examples of how I’ve personally used this across three different products/industries

When the output of your product is given to someone else, and they don’t know how to use it

When I worked at Perkbox, we had this product called Insights (which got sunset, so it’s no longer available). Essentially it was pulse surveys sent out to employees to get a vibe check, and it would rank performance and culture over 10 categories.

The top feedback we got was people loved to know what the ranking was, and when they wanted to “do more of what’s working” they felt really empowered by knowing what to double down on.

But when something ranked poorly, they were under-equipped to bring that score up. So essentially, our customer was a HR leader, and their customer was team leads throughout their company.

The HR manager would get a report that was like “finance sucks at communication, people aren’t happy” and also “IT is really unsatisifed with the quality/training of their managers” - but now HR is pulled in too many directions, they can’t organise this training for all the teams that have different problems.

So we built out content that acted as “how to improve X score” guides, which the HR manager could distribute to team leads as it was needed or relevant.

Perkbox’s emotion sell at the time (it’s been a while since I worked there, so this could have changed) was “we’re your partner in a tough world”.

So, we used this as another way to support our customers, and also as content that the sales team could send out as “we actually give a lot of value and support in addition to the platform” and build rapport.

When there’s industry changes happening

This one’s a current example. I’m working with Adiona, which optimises last-mile delivery. The ACCC is introducing new mandatory climate regulation, starting from July 1, where large orgs will need to include reporting on scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.

Guess what, at minimum, is classified as scope 3 emissions? Logistics and delivery!

So, we’re currently building out content that’ll help prepare our customers for when their customers start requesting these emissions reports. There’s an extra bonus that the platform is already working to improve efficiency based on things like fuel consumption, so there’s a really nice synergy there.

When there’s something missing in the customer experience

As marketers, we’re placed to give a fair bit of advice across different topics. We’re collaborators who work across the whole business and have research skills. If your typical customer is a small business, or they’re the founder/owner, you can really be a trusted voice for them on topics like:

Growth and marketing tips to attract more customers
Making it easier for customers to choose them (i.e. differentiation)
The follow up and retargeting experiences

Alt mediums for Mehdeeka

I recently read that articles that offer audio formats are on the rise, and allegedly consumers like them. Substack does actually offer the ability to record and include audio in posts like this one.

Would you listen to me talk through an issue? If you’re interested, click here to let me know (and see a surprise gif), otherwise:

Everyone gets a unique gif, please only click one unless you want to ruin my voting system.

Ciao,

Kayla

P.S. sneak peek of one of the Mehdeeka related projects 👀👀👀