Finalize your research doc

In today’s lesson, we’re going to finalize your research document.

By now, you should have completed all the research lessons, including:

• ​Google Analytics​
• ​Email surveys​
• ​Website polls​
• ​Heatmaps​
• ​Funnel review
• Journey mapping
• Competitor analysis
• User testing
• Social proof
• Analyze your research
• Speak like your audience

If you missed any of these lessons, click the link to review it.

By the end of the lesson, you’ll have a completed research document.

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Video:

Next steps:

1. Finalize your research document

Notes:

There are no notes for this lesson.

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Video transcript:

Congratulations. You’ve gone through all of the research and now it’s time to finalize your research doc. Now just as a quick recap, here are the items that you should have in your research doc already.

Analytics, email surveys, website polls, heat click and scroll maps, all your notes from becoming a customer, journey mapping, your competitor analysis, the user tests that you’ve run, as well as all the social proof that you’ve gathered along the way.

Now the last step is to go through and finalize your research doc. So you go ahead and add all of the research to your document that you haven’t added already, summarize what you’ve learned from each research segment and or tool, and then keep an eye out for those overarching themes. So you can cross reference things that you’ve noticed from perhaps a website survey, a heat map and a poll.

So if you’re like, wow, people have this question that we’ve noticed in the surveys and the polls, and the answer is actually on that page, but it’s further down the page and the heat map shows people aren’t seeing it because they’re not scrolling down far enough or they’re not clicking on the element.

Then you want to consider moving that content up. Once you’ve done all this research, this is how you can start generating a lot of really profitable ideas to help you grow your business.

So what I’ll do now is I’ll show you an example of a finalized research doc so you can see for yourself how this looks.

Research Document Example

Here we are in a research document example. So keep in mind everything in here is just dummy data. I just wanted to show you what this will look like once you’ve gone through the entire process yourself. You may have seen parts of this throughout the course, but this is a chance that you can actually walk through and see the whole thing.

Also, be sure to click the link so that you can see a copy of this going forward.

Deep Dive into Research Document

You’ll notice here on the left hand side, we’ve got the table of contents. So we’ve got the Google Analytics section first, and this is where you can put screenshots in for all of these items. Refer back to the course lesson on analytics to see how to go through and get all of this data. You can see we’ve got user attributes, the acquisition, engagement, the purchase journey, the checkout journey, as well as the e commerce purchases, and the different tech that people use.

You can go through all of these and add content, when you’re going through the analytics, you also have your email surveys. So you’ll notice here that we’ve got all of the questions that are on the left hand side that you’ve asked your email survey, and then just go ahead and list the top three to five themes.

Remember the purpose of this doc is to act as a single source of truth, both for yourself and your team to refer back to whenever you’re looking to come up with ideas to improve the website, your offer, or your UX.

So having a quick high level summary of the common themes for each of these questions is incredibly valuable. It’s great for you to remember. It’s also easy to share with the rest of your team.

You can do something similar with your website polls. Here, we’ve got the pages that the polls would appear on, so the home page, product page, or the checkout page, the questions that were asked, and then the top themes for those responses.

So for example, if you’re looking at the product page question and we ask what info is missing or would make your decision to buy easier, you have a whole list of common themes of what people are literally telling you would make their lives easier and make your life easier because you can start addressing these concerns, these questions and creating content that speaks to it and ultimately increase your sales.

Next up would be the heat maps. So same thing, we’re going through page by page. We’re showing each of the pages that we were running the heat maps on. And then we’re answering the following questions. So like what elements are getting the most clicks and engagement?

What are you getting? The least amount of clicks and engagement, how far down are the average users scrolling and any other key takeaways.

You can learn a lot from this section alone. You’ll know the elements that people like, the elements that they don’t, how far down the page they scroll, and all of this is vital when you start thinking about redesigning your page or your site.

We also have notes from the funnel review. As you recall, this is when you’re becoming the customer and going through the funnel yourself and jotting down your notes. As you go through and just fill out these questions, you’ll again have a nice table full of data that shows you exactly what you were thinking as you were going through the funnel yourself.

And you can share that with the rest of your team.

It’s also really important to make these notes for every key page in the funnel. That way you can cross reference what you’ve experienced with what you’ve seen in the website polls or in the email surveys or your user tests.

Next up, we have the section for journey mapping, and this is showing before somebody buys the different touch points, the emotions they may feel, questions they may have, additional thoughts that they have about you, your company, your product or service. 

And a key part here at the very bottom would be internal ideas for improvements. As you’re going through the journey mapping process, ideas will naturally bubble up. Hey, these are the objections that we’ve noticed. Here’s some ideas that we have that could help address them.

And there’s also sections for the time at purchase, as well as after purchase.

You want to do something very similar with your competitor analysis. Going through each of the competitors and writing down what they’re offering, what their angles are, and again adding it to this doc here.

The competitor analysis is going to be very similar to running the user tests. And here you’re going user by user, and you’re asking them various questions, and getting takeaways from each of those questions or the actions that they’re taking as they’re going through your site. 

Here’s a pro tip, as you’re doing those usability tests, ask them to go through one of your competitor’s sites as well. You get two for one that way. You get the user test on your site, you also get to do a competitor analysis and see where your strengths and weaknesses are.

And of course, as you’re going through this entire process, you want to be gathering any and all social proof that you can. So, for example, you can start putting in copies of testimonials. Here are just some things that some people have said nice things about us in the past, so we included them.

You can also have your customer reviews, user ratings, total number of customers, your social shares, likes, mentions, case studies, any influencers or expert endorsements, media mentions, partnerships, any awards that you’ve won. Go ahead and put all of them in here. They’re going to come in handy whenever you’re creating marketing materials.

This could be your website or a brochure or even a slide deck that you’re going to be presenting. You can always go back to this document and say what type of social proof would be really fitting. And another question to ask is how can we use this social proof to overcome the objections that we’ve seen from other parts of the research?

The last bit is the speak like your audience. In order to speak like your audience, as we learned in a previous lesson, you want to ask your audience a lot of questions and then take all of those phrases and put them into word clouds so you can visualize the most common words and phrases that people are using.

This is dynamite when you’re writing copy. In fact, I would recommend that if you have a copywriter on your team, before they start to write copy for a new page or a new campaign, to go back and refer to this section. to ensure that they’re actually using the words that your market is using.

So as you can see, this doc is huge and it’s basically the culmination of all the work that you’ve been doing so far in this course. Every time you’ve learned something in a lesson, you’ve conducted the research and then filled out this doc. And by the end of it, you can see you can get a very large resource that you can use for years to come.

And you can also share with the rest of your team. So I urge you to take some time and fill out this doc. And of course, if you do have any questions, feel free to let us know in the comments.