ABOUT HANNAH: LinkedIn | Aperture 

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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🧚‍♀️ When did Hannah understand the importance of customer feedback

🧶 How qualitative research can turn into winning copy

👔 Looking for the why beneath the why

🎒 Structuring conversations with customers based on the requirement

👑 Quotes over notes: Reviewing what your customers say

🩰 How a user’s language can change depending on where they are in the user journey.

🐡 Finding reviews that matter in unconventional places

🌳 Ads that work with people vs. ads that work with algorithms

🍀 How to deal with resistance from teams

KEY QUOTES

Become the most interesting person in the room

It wasn’t about being more interesting or becoming more educated, it was they really wanted to tie this to their ego and they wanted to seem more interesting to these people around them so that they could kind of get more social kudos, and so on.  So, after this, we started playing around with messaging around that. Ultimately, we ended up with this line of copy that said, “Become the most interesting person in the room.” We started then running this line of copy on lots of different ads. We wrote that line of copy in 2017 – 2018 and it still hasn’t saturated now. It’s scaled worldwide. 

Looking for the why beneath the why

I like to call that looking for the why beneath the why. I’m sure everyone’s heard of the five why’s. When we’re looking for the why beneath the why, at some point, it stops. Why is that? And it’s important to just keep on asking how things how things came to be.

Having conversations as opposed to interviews

Whenever you have lots of people together in a group, what happens is people don’t really feel like they can be as honest as they want to be sometimes or as honest as possible. So what happens is someone will follow suit of someone else.  What I do now is have one on one conversations, or along with another member of the team. What we do is we just go in there, reframe these conversations away from being interviews to being conversations, because it puts you in a different mindset going into the conversation.

Take quotes, not notes

 I always say, “Take quotes, not notes.” The reason I say that is because it’s really important for us to write down exactly what the customer says, rather than just taking notes of what we think they mean. Sometimes we put our own spin on things, and it’s really important for us to be able to kind of look back at them, but look back at these conversations objectively and say, “okay, now I can look at what they’re saying in a different way.” 

Importance of using the right language

Something really important for me, when we’re going through these conversations is understanding the language that customers use. So you’re going to start seeing patterns throughout. While people who are brand new to the product are going to use specific words and phrases, we want to build out word banks of words they use and phrases they use right at the beginning and words and phrases they use when they’ve just been using it for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of years and how they communicate with us and how they describe the brand and the product and so on and the exact words they’re using. Because then we can basically mirror that back to them through the app, or through the product, or through the copy that we’re using, or through even the marketing campaigns. 

Insights are always available if we’re looking for it

We’re looking for words and phrases that people really use that we might not have otherwise thought of ourselves. Another thing that I look for when I’m looking at testimonials or reviews or any piece of kind of written content is an opportunity to talk to that person. One review came through for Uptime, from someone saying that they had a chronic illness and they’re using the app because they can only concentrate for short periods of time, and they physically aren’t able to hold up books.  We just replied on the App Store saying, “Are you available for a quick call? We’d love to chat with you a bit more and they were.” We managed to have a call with them and got so many interesting stories from them, and understood a whole new use case and a whole new piece of positioning, which we were then able to share with the world, which was really amazing.

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shamanth 

I’m very excited to welcome Hannah Parvaz to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Hannah, welcome to the show.

Hannah 

Really glad to be here. Nice to see you again. 

Shamanth 

Very excited to have you on the show, especially as you’re going to talk about aspects of marketing that we haven’t really dwelled on too much, and yet can be super critical. 

I particularly liked that you have a very structured approach to looking at what can sometimes seem to be the qualitative aspects of marketing, which is something I like about how you approach these things. So let’s dive in. 

To start at the beginning, how did you first understand how valuable customer feedback can be?

Hannah

It’s a great question. Customer feedback is one of the most valuable things that you can have as a business, and building customer relationships as a whole is one of the most valuable things that you can do. 

For me, it might sound obvious, but it was always kind of instinctual to ask customers what they thought about a product. So when I was working with my first mobile app, about eight-nine years ago, now called Dice – a live music recommendation tool and ticketing app, I looked after the marketing, and so I looked after talking to the customers. 

I hadn’t exactly got everything figured out then like I do now, but what I knew was that talking to customers and finding out what they thought was really important. I used to bring people in and I would invite people in, order pizza, have a big group sit around, drink some beer and chat about their experiences, and who they are. 

We would write notes, figure things out, understand exactly when to use the product, how we should be talking about it, and so on. But it wasn’t really until I joined the next company, which was a nightlife app called Dusk, where we went through the accelerator 500 Startups, that I really began to understand more of the kind of methodology behind these things and the exact types of questions that we should be asking. 

For example, don’t ask leading questions and you might not necessarily even know what a leading question is when you get started with customer feedback.

Shamanth

Sure. When you talk to folks about qualitative research, one of the sticking points that I have seen is, we do all of this qualitative research, so what? 

Can you share examples of how you have been able to translate a lot of this qualitative research into messaging copy? Or any other outcomes you may have come up with?

Hannah 

A couple of years ago, I was working with an audio journalism app called Curio. What they do is they take pieces of content, and then humans narrate them. So you can listen to articles. When I joined, they had some taglines flying around. But whenever we’d been using them in ads, we just weren’t getting positive engagement. They weren’t resonating very well with people as a whole. 

So I started speaking to some of the customers and I was asking them, why do you use this product? And they were saying, I’m really busy, and I want to keep learning things while I’m on the go. I asked, “Okay, why are you busy?” “I’m working, I’m always on the go. And I’ve only got time to listen on my commute.” And I said, “Why do you want to learn? If you’re always so busy, and your mind is so occupied? Why do you want to learn while you’ve got this little bit of mental space?” They started telling me all these stories, like, “I go around to my mom’s house, and her partner is always talking about stuff, and I just don’t understand what he’s talking about. He’s always so up-to-date. So I’m trying to understand the world a bit better so that I can talk to him.” 

Or they or they’d be saying, “I’m a lecturer at university, and my students are talking about stuff and I need to stay up to date with them so that I can be respected.” 

I’d ask them, “why is that important for you? Why is it important to talk to this person?” They’d say, I want to have better conversations. And I’d say “Why is that important for you? Why do you want to have better conversations?” 

Time and time again, what would come up is that they keep saying this word “seem”. And they just keep saying I want to seem more interesting. To me, that really stood out.

It wasn’t about being more interesting or becoming more educated, it was they really wanted to tie this to their ego and they wanted to seem more interesting to these people around them so that they could kind of get more social kudos, and so on. 

So, after this, we started playing around with messaging around that. Ultimately, we ended up with this line of copy that said, “Become the most interesting person in the room.” We started then running this line of copy on lots of different ads. We wrote that line of copy in 2017 – 2018 and it still hasn’t saturated now. It’s scaled worldwide. 

The company is still doing amazingly. It resonates with pretty much every geography, definitely with the UK and US audiences. It really ties into that deep, intrinsic need that people have to prove themselves. 

Shamanth 

That’s impressive. What’s also impressive is just your persistence and keep on asking why and keep on going deeper. Because I think it’s easy to settle for the surface-level answer, which is I want to have conversations with my mom’s partner, which clearly wouldn’t make great ads.

Hannah 

I like to call that looking for the why beneath the why. I’m sure everyone’s heard of the five why’s. When we’re looking for the why beneath the why, at some point, it stops. Why is that? And it’s important to just keep on asking how things how things came to be.

Shamanth 

Yes, what’s the underlying cause, the root cause If you will. 

Is there a specific structure you use for some of these conversations? I know you said you brought people in to have pizza. So is there a specific structure to these conversations? Can you share what you find the most valuable?

Hannah

I don’t really do the pizza thing anymore because one thing I found is, whenever you have lots of people together in a group, what happens is people don’t really feel like they can be as honest as they want to be sometimes or as honest as possible. So what happens is someone will follow suit of someone else.  What I do now is have one on one conversations, or along with another member of the team. What we do is we just go in there, reframe these conversations away from being interviews to being conversations, because it puts you in a different mindset going into the conversation. And it depends on the purpose of why I’m speaking to the customers as well. 

Am I trying to find out how they use the product? Or am I trying to find out who they are deep down inside? What are their fears, anxieties, hopes and their dreams? 

You have to go in with different mindsets based on all of these different things. But ultimately, we follow the same kind of process. One of those most important things is, I always say, “Take quotes, not notes.” The reason I say that is because it’s really important for us to write down exactly what the customer says, rather than just taking notes of what we think they mean. 

Sometimes we put our own spin on things, and it’s really important for us to be able to kind of look back at them, but look back at these conversations objectively and say, “okay, now I can look at what they’re saying in a different way.” 

If you’re just taking notes, you won’t necessarily be able to do that. We should also, where possible, be able to record the conversations themselves too so that we can transcribe them later or just listen to the enunciation and how people are speaking through things. 

Something really important for me, when we’re going through these conversations is understanding the language that customers use. So you’re going to start seeing patterns throughout. While people who are brand new to the product are going to use specific words and phrases, we want to build out word banks of words they use and phrases they use right at the beginning and words and phrases they use when they’ve just been using it for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of years and how they communicate with us and how they describe the brand and the product and so on and the exact words they’re using. Because then we can basically mirror that back to them through the app, or through the product, or through the copy that we’re using, or through even the marketing campaigns. 

Shamanth 

I think that’s a very important point, you take quotes, not notes. It’s just very easy to have your preconceived notion of what they may be meaning to say, rather than what they actually say. I’m curious if there are any examples that come to mind of exact language or exact language patterns that you took away at the beginning stages of the customer journey, and the later stages of the customer journey that maybe weren’t so obvious.

Hannah 

Yes. There are loads of examples, one thing that comes to mind immediately is with a company I was working with called Uptime. They basically take books, courses, and documentaries, and then condense them down into five minutes. We call those summaries knowledge hacks. Whenever we speak to customers right at the beginning, and we say knowledge hacks to them, they did not know what that means. 

So we started to listen to how they were describing it and so we didn’t use that phrase with them right at the beginning. They see it in the app. As they become more and more familiar with it, we introduce that word throughout.  We put it into newsletters and pieces of comms and things like that. But we don’t, for example, use it in our paid ads as much as we could have otherwise, because people will just see that and say, what’s a knowledge hack? I don’t understand what that is. 

So another thing that we did with that is when you download the app, actually, you get a tooltip, which highlights a knowledge hack, and then says, this is a five-minute summary. So people are kind of educated throughout the process of what that could be.

Shamanth 

Yes, if you have internal language or jargon, people don’t always get it if they’re outside of where you are. It’s interesting because I noticed something very similar managing a fully remote team. Our team’s fully remote, and when we onboard new folks, we’re like here’s a resource or here’s a document, and we realized, it’s important to have very, very clear terminology on what we mean, because when I say document, that means has this very specific connotation. 

Hannah 

It’s important to have internal shared language too. Sometimes companies I go and talk to, I talk to the CEO, and then I’ll talk to the marketer, and then I’ll talk to the product person, and they’re all using different words for the same thing. I actually work with lots of companies on implementing a growth process and aligning companies as a whole around these internal bits of language. It helps a lot in internal politics and things like this, where some people don’t like specific words, so we just try and reject everything. So everyone can use the same mindset and the same processes and the same language.

Shamanth 

You don’t always get to have one on one conversations or focus groups or are able to listen to folks live, so sometimes you just have testimonials of pre-recorded quotes if you will, or reviews or what have you. In these cases, how does your approach differ in terms of your being able to glean or distill insight out of this?

Hannah 

Not all quotes or testimonials were created equal, first of all. Some of these are going to come through, you’re gonna get an app review that just says “good” and you can’t really do much with that. But sometimes you’re gonna get some reviews coming through and they’re going to be unbelievable gold mines for copy and for content. I said the word gold mine there because I must have thought of a review that we had at Curio, in which someone said, this is a real gold mine for learning. We took that quote and used it in our ad copy and it performed super well. 

So we’re looking for words and phrases that people really use that we might not have otherwise thought of ourselves. Another thing that I look for when I’m looking at testimonials or reviews or any piece of kind of written content is an opportunity to talk to that person. One review came through for Uptime, from someone saying that they had a chronic illness and they’re using the app because they can only concentrate for short periods of time, they physically aren’t able to hold up books.  

We just replied on the App Store saying, “Are you available for a quick call? We’d love to chat with you a bit more and they were.” 

We managed to have a call with them and got so many interesting stories from them, and understood a whole new use case and a whole new piece of positioning, which we were then able to share with the world, which was really amazing. We love to find out the stories of people too. That’s what makes me so passionate about working with these kinds of products. Being able to positively impact people and find out how exactly, it’s impacting them. 

Shamanth 

There’s no way you would find that out if you wouldn’t be talking to them. Something else I think about with a lot of these qualitative research-based insights, that translate into ads, I can absolutely see how they would resonate with consumers. Sometimes I wonder if those would necessarily resonate with algorithms. 

To give a concrete example, let’s just say there’s a fake ad or an overly sexualized ad. Those tend to get a lot of clicks, they are very clickbaity. It doesn’t always have to be that extreme. Sometimes I’ve seen ads that are like, “these are Elon Musk’s favorite books.” 

I don’t think if you survey a customer, they’ll say I would like to see Elon’s favorite books that I could get. I don’t think that could be the case. So if you have Elon’s favorite books, or an overly sexualized ad, versus something that’s actually based on research, I would imagine the algorithm would favor either Elon’s favorite books or the overly sexualized ad. Some marketers just say, “Look, because the algorithm favors that, the price is just going to be so low, it might just make sense to run the clickbaity ad.” What do you think about that?

Hannah 

It’s a really good question. And it’s one that I’ve thought about and spent a lot of time talking to branding people about too, because a lot of the time, it can be tempting to use these kinds of sex sells ads or use fake things that are like honey pots to people. But what you have to think about is, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for that click? Because at times, yeah, of course, one of these ads might get better clicks. 

But is that relevant to your App Store listing? Is it congruent with the journey as a whole? And what you’re going to see is that if these ads that you’re running aren’t performing better post click, the algorithm won’t favor them in the end. So you might find that you’re getting a really high click-through rate on this ad or something, but then no one’s installing. It’s not working, or people are installing but then they’re not signing up or making a purchase. If you’re optimizing for purchase, it will then go, “Okay, this isn’t successful for this unit conversion metric” 

You’ll see sometimes that the highest click-through rate ads aren’t the ones that are delivering you the best CPAs or anything like that. So I think that you have to think about the brand as a whole. You might be getting really good top-of-funnel events, or even further down-the-funnel events for a short period of time, but how is that going to impact the brand? 

What you don’t want to do is kind of tie your brand to something like that where it cheapens it or it misconstrues what people’s opinions of it are. It might cost you a little bit more in the long run for that install or for that purchase. But those costs do come down when people start to understand your brand message a bit more.

Shamanth 

 I’m reminded that somebody I was talking to, they’re talking about the daily fantasy sports space in the US and they said there’s just a lot of advertising and everybody hates the brand. It’s more common than you would think. I’m not saying necessarily that the Elon Musk folks, people necessarily hate that. But certainly, this is definitely something that interests somebody who works on the inside of the daily fantasy space. That is also just because it’s a very monetary thing.

Hannah 

I think that Elon Musk’s example is a really great example from Blinkist actually because they don’t usually actually run ads out of their app store. They spend a lot of time doing content marketing. So they direct a lot of people to their website, and then they kind of pixel everyone or target everyone and don’t really read the market. So what they’re doing is like looking at a holistic approach to the funnel and saying, “maybe we’re getting really cheap clicks, maybe we’re not expecting all of these people to convert obviously, or a lot of them to convert, but we’re getting them in, we’re getting them familiar with the brand and then taking it from there.” 

It is a longer-term play. It is also kind of familiarizing people with the type of content that they have. And then they do a lot that makes their magazine fantastic. They’re getting people in there and then trying to get people to hang out and familiarize themselves too, which is brilliant.

Shamanth 

That content piece is congruent with the ad itself unlike an app store, which may not actually feature Elon, that landing page would actually have Elon.

Hannah 

It can definitely be a more interesting route to go down sometimes, sending people to content and seeing what happens then, or a landing page, but then the landing page obviously goes to the App Store, which might be generic. But I think it’s interesting when we think about custom product pages, and the opportunities that they give us as well for being able to kind of be in that journey a little bit more.

Shamanth 

Yes. I was going to say it was good to find that custom product pages have gone live on Facebook this week. 

Hannah 

Finally!

Shamanth 

They’re still testing. I don’t know if the algorithms are really playing nice yet. 

When you’re proposing a lot of these qualitative tests and research, do you find resistance to getting internal buy-in from teams? Because oftentimes, a lot of teams are product and tech-focused, they’re not necessarily wanting to go out and talk, or do user research in the kind of extensive way that you are talking about. 

Do you find resistance? How do you typically address these reservations?

Hannah 

The short answer is yes. Very often to always, there is resistance to this kind of thing, right at the beginning. You might be joining a company, or you might be consulting with a company, and you’re going to teams that think that they’re doing everything right. But ultimately, they’ve come to you because they have a problem to solve, and maybe you’re able to help them with that. 

A big resistance is that they think, we already know our customers, we know exactly what they think we know exactly what they want, why would we do more research when we already know? But the thing is, people change, the world changes, people’s needs change, people’s wants change, people’s lives change over time. 

An example of this is with Curio, again, the audio journalism app. We had been doing all of our advertising based on commuting. But then what happened in 2020, everyone stopped commuting. What happens then? You’re running all these ads about commuting and escalators, and so on. And it doesn’t resonate with people anymore. So we had to speak to people to understand where they were in their minds, what they were saying, and some of the things that they were saying was like, “using this app helps me feel like I can explore the world from my couch.” 

That helped us to reformat some of our creatives, redo some of our ads, and actually, some of the ads that we then ran were at home. I literally filmed my housemate on his phone, eating pasta and so on. We used these kinds of things that were more homestyle that were resonating more with people during that time period. Because of these conversations that we were having. 

So how we address these reservations really is just through saying, give it a go, take a shot. Here are some previous examples. These are other companies that we’ve seen success with. 

Another thing to know is that, of course, there’s always going to be resistance when you’re trying to change people’s mindsets. But whenever we’re thinking of things from a growth approach, we think about how marketing rolls into growth and product rolls into growth, and the business as a whole rolls into growth. Growth is a team sport. It’s not one person’s job. It’s everyone’s job to grow the business. 

So something that we do as well or like to do is actually have people from all different teams come into the calls. So we say, CTO, you come into some calls developer, you come in, customer service, you come in, CEO, you come in and have them really, engross themselves in those conversations and see how powerful they are. Because once you’ve kind of started to get into that process, and you see the information that you can extract there’s nothing else like it.

Shamanth 

Yes. Certainly. You’ve certainly given examples of what that could look like. As you said, that can be a goldmine of insights that you hadn’t known before.

Hannah 

Yes. Totally.

Shamanth 

I know we are coming up on time. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap up. But before we do that, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Hannah 

Absolutely. I’m Hannah Parvaz. I am a co-founder of a mobile-focused growth agency called Aperture.  You can find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s watching this or if you need any help with anything so you can just find me on LinkedIn or email me. Thank you so much for listening. 

Shamanth 

Wonderful. Yes, we’ll link to your socials in the show notes. But for now, thank you for being on the show.

Hannah 

Thank you for having me.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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