Find exactly what your customers want to hear, before you have any customers

on August 6, 2015 at 15:49

Want to hear when the product is released?


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One of the biggest challenges in content marketing and for every copywriter in existence is not just coming up with the right headline, but coming up with headlines in general.

It is impossible to just guess at a headline and a call to action. You need to have expertise not only in the product you're attempting to write copy to sell, but in why your prospective customer wants to buy. What does the customer need? How will this product help them?

As you and most people in content marketing and UX know, the best content comes from the customer. The traditional methods of getting this rich customer-driven copy include:

Do you know what the number one problem with these tactics is? You need a significant customer base. What if you don't have any customers to interview yet? If you are launching your product for the first time, how can you find the real content that will actually appeal to your ideal customer?

Online reviews

You can rummage through forums and various review sites on a product similar to yours. Or find reviews on books that cover the same topic as your product on Amazon. Whatever your product is, there are likely to be at least a dozen books on Amazon that are related.

For example, if the one thing your product aims to achieve is helping people manage their time, you would search books on Amazon that are related to time management. There are nearly 150,000 related books on Amazon, each with dozens if not thousands of reviews.

Now that you know where to find insight, how do you actually find the content that will attract your customers? This is where the real work is. You'll develop your own formula for recording the best content, but to start, you'll want to create a customer review sorting spreadsheet.

Create three separate columns:

  1. What people want

    Look for customer review comments that directly state what they really need. For the time management example, one customer review stated, "After all, we each know that the way to stop procrastinating is to just do what we dread… What we seek is some motivation and some reasoning for doing what we dislike doing."

  2. What people are upset about

    Find customer review comments that address the pain and problem that your product could solve. In the time management example, a customer said, "helped me to take control of my constant procrastination."

  3. Memorable lines

    When a particular subject has a lot of reviews you'll find phrases that customers tend to repeat. Any phrase that appears more than once is something to note. You'll also come across overall good phrases that directly speak to what the customer wants or needs. This is a great place to note those phrases. In the time management example, one customer commented, "it continues to determine my daily priorities ever since… what a way to get what matters done!"

Sifting through reviews can take hours, so plan to spend some time, but know when to quit when you have a full spreadsheet full of great lines. Between all of these various customer reviews, you will have all the customer content you need to get started with phrases and content that will directly speak to your customers' needs.

 

Last modified: Tuesday, 01-Dec-2015 09:57:03 GMT