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yeppeojiwrites · 5 years

Text

beauty and a beat (unofficial chapter)//bang chan

warnings: a little bit of swearing but like twice so don’t worry

pairings: bang chan x female reader (she’s a little bit of an oc)

word count: 2,499

yo!

so this isn’t an actual chapter of beauty and a beat but it serves as a kind of informational (??is that the right word??) chapter about the relationship between the reader and chan and why chan likes her. there will be more unofficial chapters like this in the future for different characters.

(previous / next)

plain text is english

bold text is korean

bold italicized text is korean with honorifics (noona, hyung, unnie, oppa, etc.)

Chan has had feelings for you from the first time he talked to you.

In the first video call the two of you had back in May 2018, he found himself enamored of you. He found you so beautiful, with your then chin-length dark brown hair and your milk-chocolate skin and pretty eyes, and the way you talked and explained things...he knew that you would be not only a great musician to have helping his group with their next few albums but a great person for him to have a romantic relationship with.

The romantic relationship thing fell flat when he found out that you were 17 years old turning 18 while he was 19 years old turning 20. That’s fine, he figured. We can be friends.

His impression of you only grew when he found out that you were basically fluent in Korean. “Why did you learn it?” he asked in genuine interest.

“I got into K-Pop when I was 10 years old in 2011. My first song was ‘Hot Summer’ by F(X) and not too long after ‘Hot Summer’ was released, ‘Be Mine’ by Infinite came out and by then I was sold.” you started.

“Ah, I remember when those songs came out! I was 13 years old and it was my first summer in South Korea after I became a trainee,” Chan reminisced. “But continue, sorry.” You smiled and waved off his apology.

“Don’t worry about it. But as I was saying, in my tween obsession, I took it upon myself to try to learn Korean so I could understand what the artists were saying in their songs. So, I started by watching lyric videos on YouTube and writing down the Hangul and the English translations and then I watched dramas like, um, Boys Over Flowers and The Heirs. By 2015, I could understand and read Korean but my pronunciation was weird so I joined some language exchange apps where I met some really nice people, as well as some really weird older guys, but the really nice people and I exchanged information and we would video chat and after a while my grammar and my speech improved.” you said. “That was a lot, I’m sorry.” you apologized. This time he waved you off.

“Don’t worry!” he laughed. “So how did you get into music?” he asked you.

“My parents have had me in piano lessons since I was 5 years old and vocal lessons since I was 7, but I stopped after I turned 14. My dad was very involved in music production. He used to write jingles for commercials and he helped make some demos for music made by smaller artists. I think my mom told me that he proposed to her with a song he wrote himself.” you laughed.

“But when I was 14, my dad got into a really bad car accident and he was stuck in a coma and was basically brain dead, so we...you know. That was a tough time for me but music, especially K-Pop helped me through it. My dad had a small home studio set up in a room in my house and before he passed, my dad taught me how to use everything. So I would do little projects where I made songs that I wanted to hear. The first project that a company decided to use was called ‘Eclipse’ and it was something I made in October 2016 and posted on a website where producers share demos or instrumentals, and production companies can buy them to use in songs. I was contacted in January 2017 by a newer company called Blockberry Creative who wanted to know if they could use my song for their upcoming girl group and I agreed.”

“Do you know what the song is now?” Chan asked. You nodded.

“It was released in May 2017 for the debut of the Loona member Kim Lip. They decided to keep the title the same.” you tell him. “Have you heard it?” you asked him. He shook his head.

“I’ll play it for you,” you said, pulling out your phone.

“Wait, no.” he says. You look back at your laptop in confusion.

“What?” you asked.

“Sing it.” he says.

“It would be better if I played it,” you say shyly. A smile spreads across Chan’s face.

“You can’t be shy now. We’ve already started the partnership and I’m going to need to hear your voice anyways, so why not start now?” he asks. You bite your lip in hesitation before sighing.

“Fine, but only because of your dimples.” you agree which causes Chan to laugh.

“My dimples?” he asks.

“Yes, now do you want to hear me sing or not?” you ask him in a fake serious tone.

“Go ahead,” he says.

“I’ll sing the Korean version since I forgot the lyrics to the demo. Are you ready?” you ask him, a little nervous.

“I can feel your nervous energy through the screen. It’s fine, don’t worry okay!” Chan reassures you. You sighed one last time before you began.

“It begins eclipse

In the shaded shadows where you and I meet

It happened in the fate

The light which is lighted by mind of us

Come closer to me

This is eclipse

I can’t keep my eyes off, so will you be with me continually?

Unforgettable eclipse, it’s destiny.”

Chan felt himself in even more awe. You were nervous for no reason. Your voice’s timbre was beautiful and your breath control and technique had to have been professionally learned.

“How would you feel about joining JYP Entertainment as a trainee?” Chan joked which caused you to laugh.

“I’ll think about it,” you laughed.

From that night in May, you and Chan created a great friendship.

You’ve both seen each other at your worst; Chan seeing you at your worst first. Finals week sucks.

Time differences were very hard. With Seoul being 14 hours ahead of Chicago, someone was always going to bed late while someone was waking up early. Each day that you had school, you would spend a couple hours doing homework before videochatting. Both of you were fatigued for a while but when school ended for summer break, you had much more time to work.

“Hey Chan?” you asked one night while the two of you were working on “M.I.A”.

“Hmm?” he hummed as he played a beat over and over again on the computer.

“Have you heard of this rap group from SoundCloud called 3RACHA?” you asked him. He smiled a bit.

“Yeah, why?”

“They’re pretty cool and they have really good songs.” you sighed.

“Yeah, I think they’re really good too,” you said.

“They haven’t made a song since like 2017 though,” you said before groaning. “They need to comeback so they can save the South Korean rap industry again!” you exclaimed. He laughed.

“I’m sure they’ll come back soon.”

“I wonder if they’re handsome,” you tell him, leaning back in your chair.

“I think they are, especially CB97,” he said, moving a sound clip to a part of a song he was recording.

“Oh, have you met them before?” you asked, leaning forward in your chair.

“Yeah, we’re pretty close,” he said.

“I’m gonna Google them to find a photo,” you declare.

“Hm, alright,” he responds.

“Th-ree-ra-chaaaa,” you mumble as you type in the search bar. “Oh, a ‘P.A.C.E’ lyric video!” you say excitedly. Suddenly, your eyebrows begin to furrow.

“CB Ninety- Chan you motherfu-You’re the fakest person I know! You’re literally the fakest person on the planet!” you yell.

“So are we hot?” he asks, a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Choke,” you say flatly, to which Chan laughs.

“Hey Chan, I got an email from this company called KQ Entertainment,” you told Chan one day via FaceTime in September.

“Oh, Ateez’s company! Changbin knows one of the members.” Chan says. “What did they email you about?”

“They want me to come to South Korea to work as a producer for Ateez’s next few albums. KQ will pay for my living expenses and everything.” you tell him. Chan’s head snaps to face you on his phone screen.

“Like...this South Korea? The one I’m in right now?” Chan asks dumbfounded.

“Uh, yeah,” you tell him.

“Have you talked to your mom about this?” Chan asks, trying to tone down his excitement in the event that you tell him that you can’t go.

“She says that I can go and my sister thinks that it’s a great idea...” you trailed off.

“Then why do you sound so sad?” Chan asked you.

“I visit my dad’s grave every two weeks. I have money saved up from birthdays, Christmas, Easter, royalties, the money from JYP for helping you guys out with I Am Who and I Am You and other odd jobs that I’ve taken up over the years and I can afford to fly to Korea but...I don’t know. I know that some people think of this as a job of a lifetime...but I just...I don’t know, Chan.” you sigh. “What should I do?” you ask him. Chan felt his heart hurt at your facial expression.

“I don’t know what I would do. If you want to come here, maybe take something of your father’s like a shirt or a photo of him,” Chan suggested. “Wouldn’t you be able to work from your house?” he asked.

“KQ feels like it would be more efficient if I lived there so I could be easily accessible and so time zones wouldn’t be an issue.”

“How badly do you want to go?” Chan asked you. You laughed slightly.

“It’s been my dream since my demo for ‘Eclipse’ was first used,” you tell him. “I hadn’t thought about it prior to my demos being used.”

“Follow your heart, (Y/N),” Chan tells you. “Do you hear me?” he asks you. You nod.

“I have to go soon, we have to start filming the music video for the title track that YOU helped me work on in SOUTH KOREA,” Chan said.

“Are you trying to influence me?” you laughed.

“Maybe a little bit,” he said. “Bang Chan, we need your for filming!” you heard a voice off-screen.

“I’ll be right there,” Chan said to the source of the voice.

“I’ll let you go, Channie. Thanks for listening.”

“Anytime, (Y/N),” he replies.

“Chan, one last thing!” you tell him.

“What?”

“You look really handsome with your curly brown hair.” you tell him.

“What what-” “See you later, Channie!” you say before hanging up.

He sighed, his cheeks reddening. Minho came up next to him. “Who were you talking to that has you so flustered?” he asked.

“No one,” Chan replied, sliding his phone into his pocket.

“Oh, it was (Y/N), wasn’t it?” Minho said, leaning closer to Chan.

“No,” Chan said unconvincingly.

“Yes, it was, you cradle robber!” Minho exclaimed.

“Are we talking about Chan having the fattest crush on Lav?” Jisung comes over, taking a sip from a bottle of water.

“No, we aren’t, and no, I don’t have a ‘fat crush’ on Lav,” Chan groans.

“Oh he totally has a crush on Lav, he’s a cradle robber.” Woojin said, standing up next to the forming group around Chan.

“I’m not a cradle robber!” Chan exclaimed.

“That’s totally something a cradle robber would say,” Jisung whispers to Minho who nods in agreement.

“I heard that,” Chan warned.

“What did (Y/N) say?” Changbin asked, coming up from behind Chan. Chan shifted a little bit, knowing his younger member’s feelings towards you.

“KQ Entertainment emailed her about coming to Korea and working on a few albums for their new boy group,” Chan said.

“So she’s coming here?” Changbin asked, excitedly. Chan relished in knowing he had the ability to change Changbin’s mood with a single phrase.

“She wants to but she isn’t sure if she can,” Chan says. Changbin’s happy mood changes into a dejected one. Jisung throws an arm around Changbin.

“Here’s the other cradle robber,” Jisung teases, poking Changbin’s cheek.

“I’m not a cradle robber,” Changbin exclaims, pushing Jisung off of him.

“That’s something a cradle robber would say,” Minho whispers.

“You guys are annoying, I’m going to go film,” Chan says, standing up from his chair.

“Make sure your scene looks nice for Lav!” Minho yells. Chan ignores him.

“Hey, Binnie, did your scene look good for Lav?” Woojin asks Changbin.

“Chan’s right, you guys are annoying,” Changbin says as he walks away in the opposite direction as Chan.

“I hope their rivalry doesn’t split us up,” Woojin says, crossing his arms as he looks between the two boys.

“Me too,” Felix agrees.

“Channie?” you say into your phone, your speech slurred from sleep. It was two in the morning after all.

“Lav? What’s wrong? Is everything okay?” Chan asked worried.

“I’m gonna go to Korea,” you tell him, your pronunciation a bit off.

“What?”

“I just had a dream that I went to Korea, and it was great and I feel like things would be just as great in Korea as they were in my dream. I’m gonna go to Korea.” you tell him.

“What about your dad?” Chan asked you. You sighed.

“I’ve gone four years without him. It’ll be tough, but I’ll be able to go four more years if I have you and the rest of the guys by my side.” you tell him. Chan smiled.

“Why are you telling me this in Korean?” Chan laughed.

“I wanted to see if I could speak Korean while half-awake and I feel like what I’m telling you is more meaningful when it’s said in Korean.” you slur.

“Go to sleep, (Y/N). We can talk later.” he says. You hum in agreement.

“Good night, Channie. I love you.” you tell him before hanging up.

“Wait Lav-” the line beeped.

“I love you too.” he whispered.

“Cradle robber!” Jisung sang as he passed the doorway to Chan’s dorm room.

“Shut up!” Chan yelled.

Chan received a text from you on November 17, 2018, at 1 PM in Seoul, before a variety show appearance.

1 new message from lav <3

lav <3: channie!!! look!!! it didn’t hurt that much!!

attached image

Chan clicked on the image and his eyes widened. You had gotten a small-ish tattoo of a stalk of lavender on your left forearm.

chan: SDKLFSJLKFJ what did you do??????

lav <3: are you blind?? i got a birthday tattoo!!! i’ve been 18 years old since the 10th!!!

chan: (y/n) it looks really nice! it complements your skin tone!

lav <3: thanks!! it stings and i’ll have to put the tattoo solve on it for a while but it’s TOTALLY worth it. i’m getting another one next month!!

chan: where?

lav <3: don’t worry about it, channie

chan: what do you mean???

lav <3: not like that!!! the odds of you being able to see it are VERY slim though

chan: ???? that doesn’t worry me any less but go ahead i suppose

author’s note:

here’s something that describes the relationship between the reader and chan and a little bit between chan and changbin!! i have yet to start working on the third part of the actual fic BUT i’m going to start tomorrow. alright homies, its 10 pm and i have school tomorrow so i’m going to dip!! see you guys in the next one!

ellie <3

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#stray kids #stray kids scenarios #bang chan #bang chan scenarios #chan scenarios #kpop scenarios #yeppeojiwrites

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anywhereconsulting · 3 years

Text

Episode 2 - How user testing can improve your business

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Zsolt is the founder of Ping Pong, an online UX research platform. They make simple UX research possible by streamlining the process from tester recruitment to payouts. Ping Pong is being used by startups and enterprises from all over the world.

Connect with Zsolt on LinkedIn.

ABOUT THE EPISODE

This episode focuses on user testing and user research. We dive deep into the why, when, and how. We discuss why you need user testing, why you need to validate your ideas with testing. We provide insights on when you need to do it and what preliminary research you need to safely start user research. We provide the 3 most important steps you need to do when doing user research on your own.

Listen it on Apple Podcast or Soundcloud.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE

LISTEN THE EPISODE

Listen it on Apple Podcast or Soundcloud.

My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere. We are a specialized performance-based marketing & design consulting company, helping our clients to get more leads. To read our case studies & learn more about our work, click here.

We work through a unique subscription-based service called Roam. It is flexible, predictable, and modular. To learn more about Roam, click here.

Connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line by clicking here.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Peter: Welcome to the 99 challenges show. I'm your host, Peter Benei. Today we will focus on user testing and how to validate your product or service when you pivot. Throughout the 99 challenges series we record episodes in a random order, though I believe testing your product or service before market is an essential step at the very beginning in your business. Today, we gonna dive deep into user testing with Zsolt Kocsmarszky. He is the founder of Ping Pong, a cutting edge user testing site, where he helps companies to validate their ideas with targeted users. Zsolt, welcome to the show.

Zsolt: Thank you for the introduction, Peter, and welcome everyone on this episode. Yeah, I'm the founder of Ping Pong, which is a user research or, a user testing platform .

Peter: So how are you helping your clients with Ping Pong?

Zsolt: All right. So h ow Ping Pong works is quite interesting. It's almost like a marketplace where we have on one side testers or people from all over the world who signed up for Ping Pong to earn some money with these sessions basically, which are one-on-one video calls. And another side, we have our clients : startups bigger and smaller companies who would like to get connected with c onsumers, users and relevant people from their audience. And we just make this process very streamlined and easy. So they can do their user research and user testing related activities.

Peter: Cool. So for starters for those who don't know what user testing is and what are the possible, useful use cases, can you provide a bit more insights, please? How you are doing user research, what is user testing in general and why you should even care?

Zsolt: I would ike to take a step back from user testing itself because it's just a subcategory of user research and user research. It's very important when it comes to building products, not just digital, but any kind of product. Specifically in user testing, you would like to talk to your target audience or your actual users to test or digital interfaces. This can be like apps and websites, landing pages to get real feedback from your users. So this is especially useful. And Product development phase or like early stages of the of the product development, because you don't want to build something that only works fine in your head. You want to get feedback from people that build of buy your product o r thinking of using your service. So that's the most important bit that you just want to get other people involved in the product development. So we make sure that the end result is going to be something that's usable and actually useful for everyone.

Peter: so when you say that other people will get involved in the product development, it means that these are l ike strangers that you gather based on a target group, that would be using the product anyway or service. And they are collaborating with the product development team or the client that you have.

Zsolt: So yeah. Yes, that's correct. So there are, based on people are testing their products with their friends and family, which is not really ideal because it would like to get people who are not attached in any way to your to your staff or to your products. There are two types o , two levels of detail that you can go into defining your audience. One is the demographics, like one, they are specific age, gender, location, and the other one is related to behavior and the way they think. So that's that can be achieved through screening, when you ask specific questions from users and you make sure that you are talking to people who actually use specific products.

Peter: In the previous episode of 99 challenges we had a guest from Launch Mappers, David Odier, and we talked about go-to-market strategies. And one of the key insights that, that he provided was asking feedback from your, if you're an established business, of course asking feedback from from your current clients and customers on the new product or service that you're going to market later, because they can provide the most valuable feedback first. So in terms of like user testing it is really helpful for those who market a product that is totally new so they need a new target group to provide feedback, not their own customers or already existing customers, or the company itself is pretty much early stage startup company.

Zsolt: So it depends, but usually if you are launching a completely new product, like you have no existing customers, you're going to go with the ones you can find, if you already have users or consumers on the market, you probably want to mix. So you want to talk to people who are currently using your product or use your product in the past, and also people who never even maybe heard about your product or your brand.

Peter: What can be a typical use case for users testing? Can you provide an example, maybe how a client used your platform within their product development cycle.

Zsolt: Yeah. So there are many use cases. I'm going to go with two, which are like very common. One is discover the early stage testing and you have either like a product landing page or a concept, maybe it's on a, just a mood board or a Miro or Mural board. And you would like to get feedback from users. You're just showing them ideas and you just talk to them. It's more like an interview so it's not about actually testing an interface, but this is also massively valuable because you get external insights and like hour a half an hour or one hour session, and you can really collect a lot of thoughts that you haven't even thought of. And the other one is just more like a user testing type and you are actually testing a digital interface, or a user for a UI like a software as a service product that say you have you have a website. You want to improve the onboarding. And that there are problems or you have a couple of ideas that you want to validate or invalidate. So you get people, potentially people you've never used their product and ask them to perform specific tasks and thus would be like, go to the website, read what it does, please think out lou d, tell me what you read and then sign up to our product and start using it. And this is like a very simplified example, but basically that's the core of it. You get people just, start using your product and you're going to see they gonna channel their thoughts, and you're gonna, you're gonna see where they fail or where they succeed better than you expected. And that's going to be like massively useful for your research. And you're going to know where to actually improve your product or varied works better than you expected.

Peter: Cool. And what is the process? What would be the first step that I should do or should figure out before I go over to you or any other user research sites or research solution.

Zsolt: Okay, so that's actually a good question because we had some clients in the past who are like smaller, bigger agencies and they were testing the landing page and offering with marketing managers or chief marketing officers. And basically the process is you'll you build the website, you maybe had the research before or not, but now you're going to have some assumptions about your website. It's good to write them down. It's worth writing down your assumptions because it's going to help you to figure out okay, like this might work, this might not work. You're going to have a couple of ideas. For example, you want to figure out like, if your copy works here, if they understand what you wanted them to understand in that point of the upside from there it's usually or what I usually recommend is to start writing down some questions, which are like very open-ended and vague. And these are like a very weird question. It's usually, brings down the user to a rabbit hole and they're going to start giving you all kinds of different thoughts. And from there, usually the conversation goes further, so usually a good user testing Session is like a good conversation with someone that can share their thoughts very well. Of course, you're going to get all kinds of people who can channel their thoughts, like in a very high level, and they are very thoughtful and you're going to get people who cannot, and then you have to do more work asking questions, but that's absolutely normal.

Peter: Is it always done through interviews, by the way, so interviews with the users?

Zsolt: That's a good the question because there are different kinds of users test. What does, or what we are advocating is like moderated user testing. When you are on a call moderating the session basically, which is like a one-on-one video call. And there is unmoderated when you are writing down questions for the tester and the users are going through these steps and questions and they are just talking to the microphone and the camera. And you just watch the recording. Both has its own pros and cons. But we, what we prefer is the moderated one, because you can get so much out of it.

Peter: So pretty much you or someone from your company attends the call as a moderator and facilitates the conversation between the user and the tester.

Zsolt: With Ping Pong it's always the client who provides them, the facilitator or moderator or researcher, and we just provide the platform for this. Yeah, but there are other ways of going to, so there is a lot of, there are lots of companies are outsourcing this, which I'm not sure if it's the best approach, because one of the biggest benefits of user testing and user research is it bridges the gap between the customer you, so that's really the most important bit.

Peter: And once the testing is done I guess these are all qualitative data that testing produces. Or usually I guess, it is up to the client to gather some insights or evaluate that data or Ping Pong provides any other solutions?

Zsolt: So exactly. So basically it's up to your understanding and you have to have some kind of way to get to synthesize all of this data and make sense of it. That's actually, that can be quite tricky. After you done the session you get a recording, you can transcribe the recording, you can add notes to that. You could also mark the most important parts of the session, so you don't have to watch the entire recording again, but basically after the session is done, you have to, what I recommend, just call out the most important bits in headlines into sticky notes there surely or on the paper. And this can be like five to five to 20, different thoughts or interesting ways that you took out. Each session and then wants to have four or five sessions, four, five, six sessions. You can look at them together and do like affinity mapping, which means that you organize them in similar groups that make sense to you. And from there, you can go on figuring out which areas are the most important bits. It requires a bit of exercise, a few hours to spend on it. I think on the last research I did which was last week, it took me like. Two free hours to properly go through all the learnings and map them and figure out which are the most important bits. And it was for four or five areas that we had to focus on

Peter: What should be, or what can be the possible outcomes from a research like this, A, maybe you need to refine the product or service or B, you're on the right track or any other options that we can imagine.

Zsolt: Yeah. So let's focus on this onboarding example that I told you before, because that's quite typical. So the outcome of this research can be something like copy is not straightforward. It's not really telling you wha t, what the offer is is. So that's very...

Peter: I don't understand what you're offering here. That's the outcome.

Zsolt: Yeah. There can be also like positive outcomes that, okay, this is the website looks clean, straightforward. I understand what the offer is. So that's also a good encouragement and it's good to know that 'okay we have nothing to do actually there'. There can be things like pricing. I'm confused on the pricing. That's very typical. Pricing tables usually are not very easy to understand. So that's worth testing regularity because people are changing it a lot and companies are doing a new pricing once in a while. Other things like onboarding is not like no clear next step provided. So they, they sign up on that. But then you just, leave the user there. Yeah. The other bit was also related to pricing that because of the pricing is not clear, you are likely churning a lot, well not churning, but losing people on the signup because they don't even consider signing up. Because of how your pricing pages are structured . What else we have? Usually also like people call out unclear button labels. So if a call-to-action or something is not straightforward, they just, they get confused. There are also usability issues can come up very quickly. Let's say a critical piece of information is hidden below the fold. That's very usual. You don't want to hide critical information below the fold. People scroll are not saying that they are not scrolling. A lot of people can still find it. You just want to make sure that it's as easy as possible. So you want to have them to, most of the next step in the activation and not get stuck even for a second on that bit, that just improves the user experience. The user is happier. They're going to like the convert a bit better than without it.

Peter: Sure. Thank you. What if I'm an early stage startup company? Just about to start. I do have an idea or at least an MVP in the pipeline, but I have no clue on who would be the good group as the potential customers of my product or service. As far as I understood so far , user testing is all about talking to the relevant people about your product or service through an organized format from which everyone can learn and come up with insights . However, what happens if I don't know, who are the relevant people?

Zsolt: I think it's it usually, it's quite rare that you don't have any clue or any idea because you have competition probably. And if you have competition, you can define your target audience from there. But we had people who were running research online completely on a generic audience. So let's say they had a specific product on a specified audience, but they didn't care about that. They just run research with all kinds of people. Their target audience was, I think it could have been defined properly, but they just didn't do that. So they just run the research with anyone. And the point of that is basically that you want to be the product that's as easy to use for anyone and do it on the and the, specific knowledge, even though you actually gonna have a accountant or some kind of training behind you. So there is some cases when people do that, but generally speaking, it's not very common, I would say.

Peter: So most of the clients do know what the targets are, or at least they have a vague idea.

Zsolt: They have a vague idea. I don't know, they have to be very tech, heavy people because it's some kind of related technology, or VR or AR kind of thing. So they expect people are more like the early adopters, not anyone. Than they can... You can actually narrow down your audience. Are they early adopters? And then if you can, you have an idea about that? You can find those people.

Peter: Can you learn any insights from those who are not in your target group maybe?

Zsolt: Yeah, I think, yeah, not related to the field. So they, won't give you industry insights because usually when you are running an interview or test session, you get all kinds of insights, including industry insights and like very specific niche knowledge. But you can still get insight s related to u ser experience, to have it feel, to how easy it is to use your product and things like that.

Peter: Is it possible to have a target audience discovery? What I mean by that, that you don't know that certain people or different demographics would be within your target group, but you include them anyway in the user research and the typical target group that you have defined previously, and you suddenly find out that your product or service can be marketed to a different target group that you never felt about before. Have you had any kind of experience that or can you see it would be possible?

Zsolt: I think it definitely possible, but it's not that kind of information that doesn't necessarily come from qualitative insights like this. From what I see, so I think that's a bit more complex topic. It's not, it doesn't necessarily come from from any research, but it can come with a mix of research methods, qual and quant, both, and also your own experience or a domain knowledge that you have in a topic. And then you can, if you have an idea about that, you can validate it with qualitative research with interviews and testing.

Peter: We always touch the fact that different companies are acting and producing processes differently. Meaning if you are an early stage startup company you, yeah. You create processes differently compared to other companies who are already established businesses, but small or medium-sized and there is a whole another line for enterprises. In terms of user research , do you have any distinction between a startup or a small or medium size business or enterprise? Are they coming more or differently prepared to a research session like this? Do they have like different needs for example?

Zsolt: That's a very interesting topic. It's funny because we have really all kinds of clients from freelancers to Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 companies using Ping Pong. And there is there's a lot of, lots of things in common, even between the smallest company and the biggest one. So there is not much difference in the process and how they do this. And many times what we see that bigger companies. Take this more seriously than small ones. So they are more rigorous about the research. They are driving it more often. However, you would think that small companies would be more lean and agile and they will do this, but it's somehow the opposite for some reason. I'm not sure if I'm looking at the entire market trends here, but what I see, we have they have big companies doing a lot of research and we have small companies doing very random timing must be also small companies doing this record already and very often. So I'm not sure if I have the entire if I say this corrected, but I can tell you for sure that there are very big companies. I would never expect to be this research heavy and agile and assigned to their customers, but they do which is very interesting for me. And they also have small companies who are like sub 100, or 20 people. You still have a dedicated person for research or design, but they are doing it very rarely. So there are all kinds of things on the spectrum.

Peter: For those who want to start a user research right now and validate their idea or product or service with a service like yours, what would be your, I don't know, top 3 suggestions or advice is that you can give them how to start.

Zsolt: I think the most important bit is just to start, don't thin,k because it's very easy. Especially with the research and design your search and user testing to get paralyzed by the process and what's ahead of you. And that's what we are trying to have with Ping Pong, we made this very streamlined. You don't need to recreate it, don't need to schedule it, just get people tomorrow, 3:00 PM on the call and you do it and you're done. So that's what we have there. But even if you just decide, if you decide to do it in person, because you are working in office, it's not very common nowadays, but it's going to come back when the lockdowns raised. But if you just start doing it in person getting people, getting users in your office, or start talking to someone in a coworking or an office environment for a half an hour dedicated to a specific thing, that's already very useful. You have to think about research is like a muscle, you have to train it. And the best way for training is to have a consistency. So if you start doing one session, two sessions every week, every second week, that's very useful. That's the one that's the first one. Second one is to get your team involved. People say that research is a teamsport. Everything is a team sport actually. So you don't feel to do this as a silo just for yourself. You want to have product managers, software engineers, your peers, your co-founder, whoever get involved, not necessarily by sitting next to another session, but just looking at the data together that you that you collected our passing them, the recordings and things like that. And the third one is make sure that you are using the, that there's an output. So it's not just like you're talking and it's nice summaries and insights, but make sure that these are getting implemented. And that's why the regularity is useful to have, every second week, every month have a researche day because it forces you to close the previous research. Get it done, get it implemented or somewhere in the backlog or in your product development and move on to the next one.

Peter: Thank you. Cool. I think we learned really great insights on user research. If any of our listeners or audience members want to get in touch with you where can they reach you?

Zsolt: so I have my websites or our website hello ping pong dot com. It's very easy to reach me there because I can respond to the chat message or I'm also quite regular on LinkedIn or even Twitter.

Peter: Cool. Thank you Zsolt for being here. Thank you for being on the show.

Zsolt: It was my pleasure.

Peter: Great. So thanks again for coming. This was the 99 challenges show episode two. It was about user testing. We will be back with another challenge. And until the next episode, please subscribe to our podcast and follow our journey with more content at the 99 challenges that come. Thank you and speak soon.

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ministraight · 4 years

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TikTok for Business: Why it’s so important for marketers

TikTok for Business

So you’ve heard the buzz about this new platform TikTok, but you might be feeling a little bit skeptical. How am I going to leverage this platform for business growth? The app downloads of TikTok surpassed 1.5 billion in 2019 making it the second most downloaded app, Which I think is kind of mind-blowing.

In fact, it’s estimated that by the end of 2020, TikTok will be the number one social media app, crazy right? We’re gonna dive into some of the demographics and unpack the behind the scenes of TikTok and where and when and why and how businesses can and should leverage this platform for growth.

I know the fear that you may have is thinking there is no way your audience is on TikTok. Let’s talk a little bit about demographics and you can decide for yourself.

Best Tiktok bot in 2020 to gain 10k+ followers on autopilot?

Tiktok demographics Is this the right platform for you and your business? Now one of the things that really surprises most business owners to learn is that nearly 30% of TikTok users are over the age of 30. 30% of one billion is a lot.

There are currently 150 different countries represented on TikTok, 65% of TikTok users are female. But when I spoke with TikTok Corporate recently they actually said that they’re working to get that balance as close to 50/50 as possible.

Why use TikTok for business

So you may see a real surge of athletes in an attempt to win over the males that are still hanging out on Twitter. TikTok is actually learning your interest and until you’ve followed quite a few profiles and engage with people, it’s going to be difficult for TikTok to know what to serve you.

However, if you keep engaging with content that you like, and skipping the content that you don’t, you will quickly discover that you have an entirely different experience.

In recent years there’s been a surge of consumers begging for a real look at the authenticity behind the scenes of brands, celebrities, businesses. We found that consumers were falling in love with brands all over again instead of the perfect photo like Instagram.

Suddenly you’re able to show the culture behind the scenes. Maybe you’re super fun, maybe you’re super snarky or skeptical, that can show on TikTok, it allows your consumers to say yep!, I always knew I liked that brand and now I understand why.

Now, quite possibly one of the coolest reasons to use TikTok is that unlike any other platform right now there is unlimited untapped viral potential. In fact, stars are being made literally overnight and businesses are blowing up.

For me, the first signs of potential virality were this time when I had about 60 followers on TikTok and I put up a video, overnight it reached 9000 views. It opened my eyes to the potential for virality for any business.

I wanted to test it in my industry and see how it could work. So I created another video that was breaking down false beliefs in the marketing industry.

What was so crazy is literally that video went viral in the course of a week reaching nearly a million views and generating more YouTube subscribers than we had ever had before, website traffic, and actual sales rivaling sales that we generate from our Facebook Ads campaign we pay for every month.

How to use Tiktok as a marketer Now if you’re feeling skeptical, head on over to the TikTok app right now and go type in the hashtag for your industry, #Home decor for instance or #entrepreneurs, check it out because if your hashtag is there, there’s viability for your business on TikTok.

Now the beautiful thing with TikTok is because it is a closed ecosystem, you can link your profile to your YouTube, drive people to your website drive them to lead magnets.

Another opportunity that is just emerging is TikTok Ads. I’ve had a sneak peek behind the scenes and the CPMs are juicy, the reach is incredible and the targeting is improving every single day.

Now a question we hear a lot about TikTok is,

What is the point of being on TikTok? There are four E’s that I look at every time that we’re diving into a TikTok strategy: Education, Entertainment, Engagement, and Emotion.

If you can tap into these four Es, you will have your loyal customers saying yes! and you will reach new markets from the audience reached on TikTok.

How to make money on Tik Tok in 2020

Education The first step with education is that you’re able to actually educate your consumers on this platform. For example, I’ve seen these videos that say, here is what a properly laid floor looks like. And they show examples of a great floor versus the shoddy work from one of their competitors.

It’s beautiful and businesses are able to educate their consumers on what they should be looking for. And in fact, that leaves consumers feeling, incredibly empowered, and trusting you as the right solution for whatever it is they need to buy.

Entertainment Number two is entertainment, we all love to be entertained, right? You go to movies, perhaps even Netflix binge each evening. Your customers are the same way.

TikTok is no different in fact, the average TikTok user is spending 61 minutes per day on the app sound up, and 75% that time is spent on the For You page searching for new content, new profiles to follow and that could be your businesses content that they’re binging in tonight.

Engagement Everybody loves to find people who are similar to them. So when people are scrolling on TikTok and they find content that makes them say ‘oh, I thought I was the only one’, they’re so excited to engage because suddenly you’ve given them permission to say, I feel the same way, or I’m excited to learn about this.

You can create literal engagement bait on TikTok and TikTok audiences are eating it up.

Emotion The most powerful of the 4 E’s is Emotion. When you can start to tap into stories, maybe it’s the stories of some of your customers whose lives have been changed by your products, maybe it’s a before-and-after that leaves someone feeling incredibly inspired.

Maybe it was that mission that your team took to another country to impact the world and you’re able to tell the story making people feel good, making them feel happy, making them feel hopeful.

When you can touch on emotion on TikTok, you’ll be amazed to see how audiences spring to life. People love to cry, they love to laugh, they love to even, as crazy as it sounds, get angry especially when something goes against their values.

And this is the perfect place to connect with them emotionally.

Now there are certain types of businesses that are most prime for TikTok and those are anything, that is B2C, especially E-commerce, physical products, anything you’re selling directly to a consumer is prime for TikTok, anything that has a beautiful aesthetic, Beauty, food blogging, luxury real estate that is ready for the TikTok market.

And any business that naturally has a hero or a spokesperson for the brand, it makes a lot of sense for them to be on TikTok. Now I’m going to blow your mind with several examples of big businesses and small businesses that are absolutely crushing it on TikTok.

First up we have Chipotle who launched a campaign on TikTok, all about avocados. It Increased their gross sales for the following week after their campaign by over 63%, Next up, we have Calvin Klein. Years ago Calvin Klein launched a massive traditional media campaign featuring Justin Bieber in Calvin Klein underwear.

When they launched their very first TikTok campaign within 24 hours, they surpassed the total number of engagements of that entire traditional media campaign with just their TikTok engagements alone.

In fact, just the other day I spoke to an influencer who is a popular blogger, she had 160,000 followers on TikTok with millions of views. And I asked her what her going rate was for a sponsored post and she said $25 per sponsored post.

So the ability to partner with influencers in a way, that’s more easily tracked, more cost-effective, and ultimately potentially able to even go viral is honestly unmatched by any other platform.

Influencer sponsorship Now I’m going to share with you guys a quick tip on how you can find and secure sponsorships with influencers even if you’re not on the TikTok platform yourself or as a business.

Search for a hashtag that your ideal audience might use. Next, find the influencers that are putting out top content within that hashtag. Now here’s the beautiful thing, you can go straight to their profile, click through to their Instagram and send them a message on Instagram asking them for their rates.

Now one of the best ways for you to decide if TikTok is a good investment for you and your business is to spend some time on the app, give it a go, test it out, shoot some videos and have fun.

https://socialtipster.co/tiktok-for-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tiktok-for-business

#Home #entrepreneurs

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clarityclaim · 4 years

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