Finding the Right Message

by Jennifer Havice

  Chapter 4

  Tapping into Your Research

  You’ve asked your customers and prospects questions. You’ve figured out the best places to learn where people are seeking out solutions like yours and what they are saying about them. Now what? How do you take all those survey responses, interviews, and bookmarked web pages and decide what will be the most helpful for your copy?

  This is where we dig deep into the heart and soul of locating your key messages.

  Compile customer quotes

  Go through your survey responses and all those reviews and comments you bookmarked online one by one (yes, don’t skip any because you never know when you might come across a compelling insight you can drop into your copy word for word). You’re looking for the following content to highlight:

  Phrases that tap into the respondents’ needs or wants

  Phrases that reference the respondents’ biggest pain points

  Phrases that key into their hesitations or concerns about purchasing

  Phrases that tell you what triggered the respondents to seek out a solution

  There are numerous ways you can keep track of these customer quotes. Again, it’s a matter of deciding what tool works best for you and how dividing up the information collected makes the most sense. I use a table of four headings and place the phrases in the appropriate column. It looks something like this.

  You can get a copy of all of the sheets I reference in the book by going to http://www.findtherightmessage.com/sheets

  Wants or needs

  These are the phrases and sentences that will tell you what your prospects want your product or solution to do or achieve for them. This can also include how it has made your customers’ lives better. Examples: “I’m interested in becoming more competitive in my niche with the skills from this course.” or “Your custom logo designs have made my brand look so professional I finally feel like people will take me seriously when they come to my site.”

  Pain points

  Think of your customers’ pain points in terms of the driving forces behind seeking you out. If you were able to conduct a survey, you’ll want to look at the responses to the question asking people what was going on in their lives that compelled them to search for a product or solution like yours. Example: “…trying to find a pair of jeans that looks flattering and feels comfortable shouldn’t be so hard.”

  Hesitations or anxieties

  Pull out responses that give you details about why people considered not buying. These responses will help you understand if you need more copy to alleviate concerns or if you need to modify your existing copy. Example: “I’m not sure if I have to give my credit card information to sign up for the free trial.”

  Motivational triggers

  Look for places where your customers or prospects talk about what spurred them to take action to find a solution to their problems. This will give you insights as to what event or series of events made them recognize they have a problem and why finding a solution was important to them. Example: “After spending hours searching online for caterers, florists, and photographers for my wedding, I felt totally overwhelmed with all the choices. I needed someone to give me the pros and cons and just spell out my options to me.”

  Think of these four categories as buckets where you can dump the various pulled quotes for later analysis. Don’t worry about how they all fit together at this point. Once you’ve gone through your bookmarked web pages, surveys, and interview responses, you’ll be ready to pull apart the contents of each bucket for assessment.

  List frequently used words

  Along with pulling out phrases and sentences, you’ll want to keep a running tally of individual words that repeat. Open a new document, and start copying and pasting in it the words you notice multiple people using to describe your product or solution, how it makes them feel, or what prompted them to seek you out in the first place. Add a tick mark each time the same word appears in a response. Once done, rearrange the list from most used to least used.

  Is this a tedious exercise? Why, yes…yes, it is. Can you skip it? You can, but I’d recommend you don’t. Here’s why. This exercise is a simple way of providing you with an at-a-glance priority list of words to plug into your copy and helping you tap into the mind-set of your customers.

  Paint a picture of your customers with the words they use

  Fear, confidence, frustration, self-doubt—these were a few of the top recurring words pulled from a message-mining exercise for a recent client. You might expect these words to show up in comments about online dating or searching for a job, not learning how to market yourself better as a photographer. But this was exactly what I found both from the client’s own customer survey responses and sifting through relevant blog and forum comments.

  The more I read, the more tally marks these words received. When it came to talking about themselves during their search for answers to solve their business marketing problems, many respondents and commenters were consumed by fear and frustration. They were having a tough time turning a profit and feeling their work was valued.

  Between the frequently used words on my list and the customer quotes, it became clear the group searching for a solution like the one my client offered needed strategies they felt confident would work and help them feel supported. This was exactly where the copy on my client’s course sales page missed the mark. The copy neglected to spell out exactly how gaining the skills from the course could alleviate the very real pain these people were feeling. The fact that it didn’t meant visitors to the page had a tough time understanding not only the value of taking the course but also if the person selling it understood their needs. By simply asking a few targeted questions, we learned the key reasons why prospects weren’t buying and the way they described the biggest roadblocks to being successful in their businesses.

  The FAQs of voice of customer research

  Once you start this process for the first time, you’re bound to have questions. Each time I’ve written or spoken about some element of this process, a new question pops up. So let’s tackle the most obvious, along with a couple you might not have considered.

  How many survey responses or reviews do I need to mine?

  There’s no set number. More is definitely better when it comes to sifting through this kind of qualitative research. Reading two or three reviews and a handful of survey responses may not give you a representative view of what’s most important to your customers. In fact, it may skew your assessment of what messages need to be focused on.

  This is not the place to cut corners. Aim to read through all your survey and interview responses. If you’re supplementing your own customer responses with things like Amazon reviews, shoot for at least ten to twenty to mine. If you’re relying on outside sources (Amazon, Yelp, forums, etc.) for your research, make twenty your starting point.

  What if I have thousands of survey responses? Do I have to go through all of them?

  You will hit a point of diminishing returns. Peep Laja, conversion rate optimization expert and founder of ConversionXL, caps on-site pop-up survey responses at two hundred.12 He has found over the years that enough repetition crops up after a few hundred responses to make reading through more unnecessary. You’ll be able to pull out the key themes and customer quotes that are worth sticking directly in your copy.

  If you have more responses, by all means read through them. You might find a particularly well-said comment that sums up how a majority of your customers are feeling. The point is you should be able to get what you need without reading the equivalent of a Tolstoy novel.

  What if no one will respond to my requests for interviews or surveys?

  If you’ve made multiple attempts to engage with your prospects and customers and you’re getting no response, continuing to reach out may very well only irritate them. I suggest sending out the first e-mail and giving people at least five days to respond. If you haven’t received a response by that time, send a quick follow-up e-mai
l that simply reminds them of your request with a way to take action. After two to three requests, stop. Dive into the review mining and do your best to find out what other businesses’ customers are saying.

  How do I know what’s worth copying and pasting into my document?

  There’s no way around it. You’ll have to make some judgment calls. Not every comment you read will either provide much insight or sound particularly compelling. For instance, “I loved it!” doesn’t tell you a whole lot. If you find dozens of people using the word love to describe how they feel about your product or solution, make note of how many times that word appears (as described previously). Forget adding the rest of the sentence to one of your categories.

  Refer back to the descriptions for each category and the examples given. As you get more practiced at pulling copy from your research, you’ll have an easier time figuring out what makes sense to keep.

  If I have plenty of my own customer research, is it necessary to look at reviews or comments about other products or solutions?

  No, it’s not necessary. If the questions you asked fit your goals and you received a slew of meaningful responses, mine what you have. The benefit of looking to outside resources is you can compare how your competitors’ customers view their offerings. Are their customers raving about a particular feature you didn’t think was important? Do their customers express hesitations about buying that mirror or seem in opposition to your own customers’ comments? Additional mining puts your messaging into a broader context and helps you see where your competition may be falling down or doing exceptionally well.

  What to do next

  Pull together your survey responses, interview transcripts, and your bookmarked web pages so that you can start mining messages. To streamline the process, take the following steps:

  Set up a document in Google Docs or Microsoft Word following the example shown at the beginning of the chapter. Alternatively, create notes in Evernote or cards in Airstory and group them under the four headings shown in the template.

  Create a separate document, note, or card for a list of frequently used words.

  Remember to copy and paste whole phrases and steer clear of summarizing in your own words.

  Chapter 5

  Determining Your Key Messages for Those Ideal Buyers

  Now that you’ve pulled out and categorized the most insightful phrases and sentences from your customers, you’re ready to start analyzing what you have.

  Think of this process going forward as a way to distill all of those words, phrases, and sentences and put them into a usable priority list of messages for your website. In this chapter, we’re going to focus on putting together a messaging cheat sheet that you’ll be able to keep by your side when you move on to tackling the copy on your website.

  It’s where you’ll plot out the messages your buyers care most about, keep track of the most compelling quotes, and document your key insights into your buyer’s mind-set.

  Sift through your buckets to find the top messages

  The first place to start is with the customer quotes that you categorized in Chapter 4. You’ll want to focus on one category at a time. Read through each of the quotes with an eye toward recurring themes. The goal is to find the top messages your prospects or customers are saying and prioritize them based on how often they appear. To do that, you’ll need to summarize each of the recurring messages you find, then make note of how many times they repeat.

  For example, let’s say you develop online health coaching programs for women. You’re looking at the quotes you placed in the “Motivational Triggers” column after mining all your research. You find two similar messages spoken by two separate women:

  “I don’t want to spend my days worrying about my body image.”

  “I’d love to take my kids swimming in public this summer.”

  While they say something different, the motivating factor behind seeking out the solution is the same: feeling comfortable in their own skin. This is where you create a summary description of that one message (i.e., the desire to be confident with how she looks) and keep track of how many times you come across it being expressed.

  You may notice a particular message showing up only once, while others crop up multiple times. That’s okay. At this point, you simply want to distill those messages so that you have a workable list to prioritize.

  For our women’s online health coaching business, here’s what the summarized messages might look like in order of priority.

  Priority Messages

  After going through the pulled quotes in each category, you may find that you have more than the above example does. Or you may realize that you’re easily filling your list of hesitations but struggling to get more than two on your wants list. It all depends on the amount of mining you did up front and what came out of your customers’ and prospects’ mouths.

  Remember, the whole point of this process is to find out what people actually think and the words they use to express themselves. Don’t be tempted to add items to the list that you believe should be there.

  Identify your top ten most compelling customer quotes

  I hope you didn’t think we would just toss out all of those quotes you worked so hard to mine. Those phrases and sentences are going to come in handy when you’re ready to write your copy.

  We’ll get into the how in the next section, but right now, your task is to make a list of your top ten. Go into your existing document with all of your customer quotes and place an asterisk next to your top ten, or copy and paste them into a separate document. These top ten quotes can be from any of the four categories, but your focus should be on the ones that match at least one of the following criteria.

  Particularly insightful

  These are sentences and phrases that get straight to the heart of how your customers view or feel about their problems or your solution. They do it in a way that may not have occurred to you before or seemed obvious. Example: “I can be my own biggest obstacle to getting the results I want.”

  Well said or sums up a point nicely

  Sometimes you’ll come across a line that perfectly captures the tone and sentiment of what many of your customers are trying to say. These are the gems that are worth highlighting and testing out in your own copy. Example: “I don’t want to just turn heads with my designs. I want to make them spin.”

  What people rave about

  Knowing the words your customers use when they’re talking about how much they love your work is helpful when it comes time to write about what makes your business special or attractive. Example: “You bring the whole process of making widgets to life with colorful, detailed graphics and videos filled with examples.”

  Map your customer’s mind-set

  After taking all this time to gather your research, distill the messages, and pull out the most compelling customer quotes, your next step is to come to some conclusions about what makes your customers tick and how you’ll go about using that knowledge to tailor the copy on your site. Think of this step as the intersection where your customers’ thoughts meet your business’s offerings.

  The following table is an example based on the coaching business we’ve been using. The left-hand column mirrors those four categories you’ve come to know so well. The right-hand side summarizes what’s going on in your customers’ minds, based on your cumulative knowledge of the research you’ve done, and lists what you’ll want to include in your copy.

  Customer Mind-Set Analysis

  It’s all about connecting the dots

  The customer mind-set analysis exercise forces you to pump those mental muscles and tie what drives your customers’ behavior directly to how you’ll need to write about what you’re selling. Each row summarizes the recurring messages and then provides a hypothesis for what sort of copy will be needed to address those messages.

  If you’re wondering whether there’s some overlap between rows, you’d be correct. In our previous example, some of what the pote
ntial customer sees as her problem is also what fuels her doubts and hesitations. Not being able to find a coach who will tailor a program to her lifestyle and needs is a problem that gives her pause to hit that buy button or could cause her to become a lead on another mailing list. Your copy solution to address both that pain and the hesitation may be a testimonial—or several.

  Once you start looking at your business and its products or services from a customer’s perspective, you can begin to see where your copy needs to fill the gaps.

  What to do next

  Create three documents using either Microsoft Word or Google Documents. You can refer back to the two tables in this chapter to help you organize your priority messages and customer mind-set analysis:

  Priority messages: A list of the most recurring messages in each of the four customer quote categories

  Top ten most compelling quotes: Particularly well-said or insightful comments or what people are raving about

  Customer mind-set analysis: A summary of your findings, along with how your copy can address them

  Once you’ve done the hard work of filling these in, you’ll be ready to move on to writing your copy.

  Part III

  Applying What You’ve Learned to Your Website Copy

  Chapter 6

  It’s Time to Talk About You

  If you’ve gone through all the steps to gather your voice of customer research, mine it, and analyze it, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re light-years ahead of most businesses, big and small. Unlike business owners who set out to build a better mousetrap and market it without any clue about what their customers are thinking, you’ve done the hard work to set your website copy up for success.