Joanna Wiebe / Copyhackers · Customer insight
Take your words from customers
Joanna Wiebe and Copyhackers argue that copy starts with research: gather how customers themselves describe the problem, what they want to achieve and what makes them hesitate – then build the message on their words instead of your internal ones.
When it helps
When the copy is full of internal product terms, when you don't know what buyers are wondering about, or when you need a headline readers recognise themselves in.
Keep in mind
When you have no customer sources: don't invent quotes or call your own assumptions customer insight. Start by collecting material.
How to apply it
- Collect material where customers speak freely: interviews, surveys with open questions, support tickets, sales calls and reviews – competitors' too. Only use material you have the right to use.
- Copy exact phrases into one document and sort them by problem, desired outcome, objections and how customers describe the product. Note the source and context of every quote.
- Look for what keeps coming up and what stands out: expressions many people use, and vivid phrases that say something new. These often become headlines, subheads and answers to objections.
- Keep quotes, paraphrase and your own interpretation apart. A handful of voices is a hypothesis – test the message with more people before you build everything on it.
- Let customers' words shape the copy without erasing the sender's voice, and never use a real customer quote in marketing without permission.
Questions to work with
- How does the customer describe the problem before they know the product?
- Which questions and objections keep coming up?
- Which words do customers use that we never do?
- What needs confirming with more customers?
A fictional example
Fictional: the service lets users photograph receipts and keeps them in one place. In an invented customer conversation, a business owner says: 'Before I do the books, I'm hunting for receipts in my wallet and the car.'
Draft
Streamline your receipt management process.
Revised
Stop hunting for receipts in your wallet and the car. Snap each one as you get it, and they're all in one place when it's time to do the books.
The customer's own picture – the wallet, the car – makes the problem recognisable in a way 'receipt management process' never could.
Read the original sources
The application and example are our own. The example is fictional and has not been conversion-tested.