When you set up research for a business, you need the reports to reflect its actual offer, customers and competitors. Every report in a campaign selects its results against the definition you write at the start. Write a vague one and every report goes vague at once. Spend the hour.
Before a campaign will lock
A campaign will not lock until it holds a business description of ten to fifty words, three personas besides the neutral one with a description of ten to fifty words each, and at least one owned brand with one site.
That barrier is deliberate. A campaign with no described market produces research about nothing in particular, and every report downstream inherits it.
Locking cannot be undone. After the lock, the campaign label, segment and description are permanent, and so is every persona label and description. Organizations stay editable, so you can add and change competitors later. A campaign that needs different core text gets copied, not edited.
Write the descriptions as though they were permanent. They are.
The business description
Ten to fifty words on what the business does, who buys it, and what separates it. This text goes into the research. It is not a form field.
Weak, because it fits a thousand companies: We provide innovative marketing solutions for growing businesses.
Better, because every clause narrows the market: We sell scheduling software to independent restaurants with 10 to 60 staff, replacing paper rotas and group chats. Sold direct, month to month, no contract.
The second one produces research about a market you can point at. The first produces research about marketing.
The personas
Three buyers, described in the first person, ten to fifty words each. The model answers as that person, so whatever constraints you name are the constraints the answer responds to.
A persona earns its slot by naming what the buyer is responsible for, what they do not have, what limits the decision, and what would rule an option out. A job title on its own changes nothing.
Spend the three slots on buyers you would advise differently. If you would tell two of them the same thing for the same reasons, they are one persona and you just got a slot back.
Brands and competitors
Your own brand and its site are required. Competitors go in as organizations and stay editable after the lock.
Pick the competitors your buyers weigh you against. Not the biggest names in the category. Compare yourself to companies your buyers have never considered and you get research about a market you do not sell into. It hurts the link gap report worst, where entering much larger sites returns a long list of placements earned by being large.
Labels get applied when a report is drawn, not when the data was collected, so adding a competitor later rewrites how your existing history reads without collecting anything new.
Writing it from evidence
Both descriptions are easier to write from evidence than from memory, and you already have the evidence.
- Recent sales calls. How the buyer described the problem in their own words, before you reframed it for them.
- Lost deals. Who took them and on what basis. That names your real competitors.
- Support tickets from wrong-fit customers. They describe the buyer you should stop targeting.
- The objection you answer every week, written as their question and not as your rebuttal.
The application gives you a prompt to paste into your own assistant, which drafts this text off your website. Correct whatever comes back. The whole point of the description is that it describes you and nobody else, and a draft written from your own marketing copy is the furthest thing from that.
How reports use the definition
One definition selects results across tracked prompts and keywords, brand and competitor mentions, prospect searches by opportunity type, link gap analysis, contact lookups and content comparisons.
Setup is not overhead you get through before the real work starts. It is the input that decides whether the reports come back about your market or somebody else's.
Before starting the campaign's research, review the definition against what you know about the business. A specific definition gives the subsequent reports a relevant basis.
See campaigns, how persona context changes the answer, or researching a new client market.