Finding the Right Message
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Praise for Finding the Right Message
“Most books about voice of customer research cover why it’s important and the outcomes you can expect from implementing it, but they don’t cover the ‘how.’ Finding the Right Message breaks VOC research down into a doable, step-by-step process that you can implement immediately.”
—Jules Taggart, Jules Taggart Marketing Strategy
“Jen’s framework for discovering, understanding, and applying your customer’s voice in your copy is nothing short of brilliant. She’s managed to distill the work of an entire, multi-disciplinary agency into a process that any ONE person can learn and use over and over. As someone who does not enjoy the ‘online business’ hustle, having a website that can essentially be my sales wingman is a pretty big deal to me. So I am beyond excited (and grateful) to have such a simple plan to use to confidently put my site to work for me!”
—RM Harrison, business alignment and growth strategist, www.rmharrison.com
“I can totally attest to Jen’s remarks that she understands the quantitatively challenged brain. I am a creative, but Jen makes understanding this stuff so simple and totally doable. Follow this process and you will not only feel smarter but your ideal customers will be knocking on your door!”
—Melissa Penton, business coach, www.melissapenton.com
Finding the Right Message
How to Turn Voice of Customer Research into Irresistible Website Copy
Jennifer Havice
Copyright© 2016 by Jennifer Havice
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Limit of liability/disclaimer of warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.
ISBN: 978-1-4951-9104-6
Editor, Jennifer Zaczek
Cover design by Chris Tompkins
Author’s Note
Any resource recommendations are meant to be suggestions only. While I have used many of the third-party applications I cite (such as SurveyMonkey and MailChimp), some I have not. None of these companies has compensated me in any way. I’m including them as resources either because I’ve found them useful or others I know have.
Contents
Praise for Finding the Right Message
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Get the Audience Core Messaging Sheet
Introduction
Part I: Getting Your Voice of Customer Research
Chapter 1: Understanding Your Customers’ Why
Chapter 2: Asking the Right Questions
Part II: Analyzing the Research
Chapter 3: How to Do Customer Research without the Customers
Chapter 4: Tapping into Your Research
Chapter 5: Determining Your Key Messages for Those Ideal Buyers
Part III: Applying What You’ve Learned to Your Website Copy
Chapter 6: It’s Time to Talk About You
Chapter 7: Nailing Down Your Value Proposition
Chapter 8: Tying Together Your Features and Benefits
Chapter 9: Closing Thoughts
About the Author
Notes
Get the Audience Core Messaging Sheet
I’ve found that pulling together your messaging insights is a whole lot easier when you have worksheets at the ready to help guide you through the process. As a way of saying thank you for getting a copy of the book, I’d like to give you the worksheets referenced and illustrated in the book bundled together for free.
Visit http://findtherightmessage.com/sheets to grab your copy.
Introduction
It’s time for a reality check. When was the last time you thought about why your customers come to your website?
If you can’t remember, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. Most people focus on what they find most important when they are putting together their website. Today, that ends.
Instead of thinking about your copy as just words on the page, words that communicate information, I want you to start thinking about it as the key to helping your customers achieve their goals. Because your copy—make that, your entire website—has less to do with you than you might think. It’s about what your visitors need to get from Point A to Point Z, and everywhere in between.
You’re probably thinking, Yeah, but what about my business goals? How am I supposed to be making those happen if I’m just thinking about what my customers want?
Therein lies the secret. Your goals are tied to those of your customer.
The question you need to ask yourself is, How do I help my customers achieve their goals on my website while still achieving my own?
Let’s just say that what your customers think—their motivations, hesitations, and fears—has everything to do with how you frame your copy and the words you use. Giving your website visitors the information they need at the right time, and using the words that most resonate with them, makes it far easier for them to make the decision to buy into what you’re selling.
And if your potential customers can easily make that decision, your conversions and revenues will go through the roof.
Where you should start
The only problem is that you either need to know how to get those words from your customers and turn them into persuasive messages yourself or hire someone who does. Unfortunately, well-trained copywriters who do customer research are few and far between. Copywriters who have been trained in the ways of optimizing websites for conversions are about as easy to find as unicorns.
I’ve written this book as a guide to help you start conducting your own customer research and then put your findings to good use when writing your website copy or coming up with an overall messaging strategy. As one of those elusive conversion copywriters, I have seen the difference using voice of customer research can make to a business’s bottom line.
Who this book is intended for
This book is for every small business owner who wants to stop guessing which messages will turn prospects into customers online but has no idea where to start.
While there are loads of resources on how to conduct surveys and analyze customer research, very few walk you through the process of how to get the right data, tear it apart, and then apply it to your online copy. This book will give you the tools to do just that.
If you are a creative and you just shivered after reading the words data and analyze, fear not. As a closet creative myself, who constantly feels quantitatively challenged, I understand your pain. Tha
t’s why I’ve kept the book as straightforward, jargon-free, and actionable as possible. There are no complex matrices or unintelligible frameworks to decipher. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive textbook on customer research, filled with talk of reaching statistical significance. Instead, think of this book as a guide to get you started on the road to finding out what your ideal customers care most about. My goal is to help you communicate more effectively with the people coming to your website who are most likely to buy, so you can sell more.
How this book is structured
This book is split into three parts:
Part I: Getting Your Voice of Customer Research
Part II: Analyzing the Research
Part III: Applying What You’ve Learned to Your Website Copy
At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a “What to Do Next” section. This will give you some actionable steps to follow as you begin your own voice of customer research.
I suggest you read through the entire book once to get a clear understanding of how the whole process works from start to finish. Then go through it again, with an eye toward gathering your own research.
Finally, you’ll need to experiment and test. Some questions and messages work better than others. While I provide you with examples and scripts to use, remember that your business, website, and visitors are unique. Try different things and learn from the results. If one pop-up survey question doesn’t bring in the amount of responses you were hoping for, tweak your question and move on to round two. Keep testing, continue learning, and never stop talking with your customers.
Part I
Getting Your Voice of Customer Research
Chapter 1
Understanding Your Customers’ Why
If you read the introduction, you’ll know the best messages come directly from your ideal prospects and customers. In fact, the starting point for every piece of copy you write for your business’s website must be the thoughts swirling around in the heads of those people.
You’ve only got a few seconds to draw someone in once they land on your site. Based on a study by Microsoft, the folks over at the Nielsen Norman Group1 say that you have all of ten seconds to clearly articulate your value proposition to keep people engaged longer. There’s a high likelihood that without a compelling reason to stay within those first few seconds, people will click away.
With so little time to keep people interested, you better know what they want.
Call it dwindling attention spans, information overload, impatience, or simply laziness, the reality is that people don’t want to be made to think when they first land on a web page. What they want is to immediately know if they’re going to find what they’re looking for on your site.
Which brings me back to the importance of knowing not only what your customers want from your website but also the kinds of words they use when they think about your product.
Let’s do a little exercise. Imagine trying to decide between grabbing a meal at two different burger joints operating side by side with only thirty seconds to make a decision. To make things more interesting, you’re a vegetarian. Eating organic is important to you, as well as steering clear of processed foods.
You quickly glance at the menus for both restaurants and find a veggie burger option on each one. Phew! you think to yourself. At least I’ll have something to eat.
With a few seconds left to make your decision, you notice a sign above the menu on one of the restaurant’s windows that says, “We only use organic ingredients harvested from sustainable farms and ranches.”
The words organic, harvested, and sustainable leap out at you. They are words you actively seek out when shopping at the grocery store. As if by magic, they have appeared in exactly the right spot at the right time to catch your attention. Decision made. You walk into the restaurant without so much as a second thought.
It may seem like a silly hypothetical situation (and not just the vegetarian part if you’re a lifelong meat eater), but this is what happens every minute of every day online. Posed with multiple websites selling similar products and services, most of us will keep hitting the back button and resuming our search for what we want until a compelling message gives us a reason to stop looking.
Consider this: Those same researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group have found that 79 percent of their test users scanned any new page they came across, with only 16 percent reading word by word.2 With limited time and cognitive resources, people will settle for “good enough” when looking for answers that meet their essential needs. Psychologists call this “satisficing,” a combination of the words satisfy and suffice.3
As in the restaurant example, website visitors latch onto the chunks of information that make it easiest for them to reach a decision. Your task is to figure out which words and phrases will get your visitors to stop dead in their tracks and move them to take a desired action.
To do that, you need to find out who your ideal customers are and what makes them tick.
What affects your customer’s mind-set?
You’ve probably heard the old adage “If you sell to everyone, you sell to no one.” When it comes to writing copy that converts visitors into customers, your goal is to tap into those messages visitors need to hear before making a decision. How you do that requires understanding their particular motivations, pain points, hesitations, and triggers.
Before I take you knee-deep into the weeds of conducting customer surveys and finding your key messages, let’s start by talking about these aspects of your customer’s psyche that affect not only the copy on your site but also how much of it you need.
Motivations
Visitors come to your website for various reasons. They may be searching for answers to questions, looking to purchase something, or wanting to connect with you. Whatever the reason, they’ve been motivated to do so by their own thoughts and emotions. That motivation comes from within and drives action. It’s not something you can manufacture with your copy. Instead, the best your copy can do is tap into what’s driving your customers and connect their motivation with your solution.
If you’re starting to think in terms of the benefits your product or solution offers, you’re on the right track. Except most people don’t dig deep enough when talking about how their offering has the potential to make their customers’ lives better. Pull up any random sampling of websites and you’ll notice copy like “Saves time” or “Get more cash in your wallet.” I like to call these the “surface motivating factors.” Ask just about anyone if they’d like to save time or have more money and you’ll probably get a resounding “Yes!” The problem with not looking beyond these factors is that you miss out on the bigger why behind the motivation.
Let me give you an example. The way I figure out how to get to the heart of what customers want is to keep asking “Why?” until there’s no more whys left.
For instance, let’s say you’re selling a weight-loss and exercise program designed specifically for young, college-aged women. Why would these women be interested in your program?
They want to lose weight.
Why do they want to lose weight? Because they want to get rid of the Freshman 15 they put on.
Why do they want to get rid of those fifteen pounds? Because they can’t fit into their skinny jeans anymore.
Why do they want to get back into their skinny jeans? Because they feel more attractive and look healthier when they can wear what they want to wear.
Why do they want to feel more attractive and look healthier? Because they will be more confident.
Now we’re getting somewhere. The real benefit from your program isn’t weight loss; it’s confidence boosting. Here’s where the deep-down why comes to light. How the customer truly wants to see her life improve is the ultimate motivation. This expressed desire is what you want to be looking for in the voice of customer research I’ll be showing you how to do.
Pain Points
Whether you’re deciding on a place to have di
nner or which web hosting service to switch to, you’re looking to solve a problem. You’re hungry, or your website server sucks. You have a problem and need someone to fix it.
The distress experienced without a fix is your pain. Successful products and services address their customers’ pain points and go about alleviating them. If you have ever tried to sell something that no one seemed the least bit interested in buying, chances are it either didn’t solve a real problem or you weren’t marketing it to the right audience.
Bottom line, you need to know what pain your ideal customers want taken away and how your business does that for them so you can address it in your copy. Instead of continuing with our weight-loss example from before, let’s look at this piece of the puzzle from the perspective of a totally different business model: contemporary handmade jewelry.
You’re probably thinking, What kind of pain does a necklace solve? It’s a necklace, not a cancer drug.
A necklace or a pair of earrings can solve a pain point. You simply need to view the situation from your customer’s perspective. Let’s say you’re a high-powered executive woman who needs to look professional in every way while in the office and out with clients, except your tastes run a little edgy. You’re no Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Your jewelry is one place where you feel like you can exercise a bit of freedom. The challenge, or pain, becomes finding an accessory that allows you to express your chic personality while remaining professional.
What’s motivating you to do that may be a desire to show more of your authentic self or simply feel more attractive. Whatever that motivation is, it fuels the need to alleviate that pain.