Your Customers Help You Make Better Content ( If you talk to them ) - Teacher: Callum Armstrong

Hello, useful content creators today on the podcast. We're going to be taking a detailed look. A customer interviews. And to help us with that, we'll be talking with marketing coach and social entrepreneur, Callum Armstrong, Callum, and I had a great conversation and he shared his process on conducting successful customer interviews. including understanding the purpose, identifying the right audience, setting up the mechanics, and then using the data for content creation. This will be a very useful episode for any small business who wants to attempt to conduct customer interviews for themselves. So enjoy the conversation, and let's make useful content. Any Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom, Callum. Armstrong. Hi Callum. Hello, Juma. Thank you so much for having me here. Yeah, it's good to have you on Callum. Um, I know we discovered each other on matchmaker. fm for all the people who want to know that is a podcast, a matching website with a very funny name. Uh, and so I know you reached out to me and, uh, you know, and we kind of had booked this for a while. So it's, it's really great to have you inside to talk about, uh, content marketing and customer interviews. So could you please tell the people. Uh, what you do and how you help your clients make useful content. Yeah, definitely. So I'm really excited to talk about our customer interviews, but my background in content marketing started about six years ago. I. Had this vision to use business to bring more resources to the environment. I've been through a various iterations of different businesses over the last few years. Um, and that, that evolved from creating content for clients as a freelancer, uh, blogs, websites, emails, newsletters, that kind of thing into a content marketing agency. We built a team around the COVID lockdowns of 2020 up until about mid 2022. And since then I've been a coach. So I help B2B businesses to, to, uh, turn their websites into 24 seven customer getting machines and also use those skills to help environmental projects to get more awareness and more airtime so that they can make a bigger impact because you need to be known before people can care and take action. Right. So you run a content marketing agency and then you transition to, to coaching. Why the transition? What was the, what was inside of there that made you transition? Well, there are a few reasons. Uh, the first one was knowing where your identity is, your place in the world. Um, I found that in running the agency, I've got a lot more joy out of coaching my team of writers on how to perform doing strategy with clients, training the client staff, then actually delivering the work. And obviously the work was great, but part of it was where do I get joy? The other part was about setting up foundations for longevity. One of my promises as an agency owner was we will set up your business and your marketing so that if we keep working together for a long term, great. But if, if we stop working together at any point, you're set up for the future. And I felt that when we got results for clients, the scope would grow and grow and grow as we got better and better results. And that would mean that we will become very reliant on the client and the client will become very reliant on us. It's sort of too much of a good thing. And I saw that the logical ending here is, is not an ending that I want. And if I can focus more on building the capabilities of clients, businesses, Then it's just a lot more resilient, long term for the clients. And I get a lot more joy out of building people's capabilities and then, and seeing them thrive rather than owning the whole process myself. So I guess that's in a...