Audience research
Nothing gets written before this. conversion-page-build refuses to write page copy until a
Conversion Brief exists for the client. conversion-page-audit can run without one, but an audit
without a brief has no register to check the page against and no ranked problem list to check the
argument against — run this first when either is missing.
Research modes
Three modes, in cost order — cheapest first, escalate only when the cheaper one is exhausted. See
references/research-modes.md for what each yields, what it costs, and the signal that means it's
exhausted and the next mode is warranted.
The brief
Fill assets/conversion-brief-template.md — copy it, don't summarize it. Ten sections: ICP,
Personas, Problems (ranked), Voice of customer, Competitive landscape, Differentiation, Objections,
Proof available, Register, Open and unconfirmed. Each section in the template states what it
establishes and the failure mode of leaving it thin — read those before filling, not after.
Three sections have their own reference file, because getting them wrong is expensive and the reasoning doesn't fit in the template margin:
- Voice of customer —
references/voice-of-customer-mining.md(where the verbatim language actually lives, and how not to paraphrase it into marketing register on the way in). - Register —
references/register-profiles.md(the five archetypes, their seven dimensions each, and which one this client's buying situation actually signals). - Choosing which market or sub-market the ICP even is —
references/market-selection.md, and once the market is chosen,references/persona-and-jtbd.mdfor who inside it the page is written to.
Where the brief goes
By convention in this vault, the file lands at
03 Projects/<Project>/_Research/[C] Conversion Brief — <Client>.md — or your project's research
folder if you're not running this inside that setup.
NOT ESTABLISHED
A section you cannot fill is written as NOT ESTABLISHED — <what it would take>, never deleted or
left blank. A missing section reads as "not researched"; NOT ESTABLISHED reads as "researched,
here's the specific gap" — the one that actually gets closed. See the template's opening note for
why this is the rule rather than a suggestion.