Do you know what separates successful and unsuccessful businesses?
The successful ones understand their customers and their wants and needs, while the unsuccessful ones don't.
The only way to understand what your customer's true pains are and find the ideal solution is by simply asking them.
Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers explains how to use voice-of-customer (VoC) data to make your copy stronger, more persuasive and connect better with your customers.
Video Transcription
First things first, if you're sitting at your desk, trying to figure out what to say in your email or on your page or in your ad, you're doing it wrong. Instead, look to your customers to find out what to say. Your customers can actually write your copy for you, at least your first draft. Copywriting starts with message finding, and message finding starts with collecting what's called Voice of Customer data or VoC. The world of marketing and copywriting is filled with ways to collect VoC, like surveys and interviews, and user tests. But most of those methods take tons of time, and when you've got to write that email ad or page, you rarely have the luxury of time.
Here's what to do when you're short on time, but you want to write copy based on VoC. Use these shortcuts in Google. If you're selling something online like a digital product, software apps, clothing, type this phrase into your Google search. Replace the keyword with a keyword associated with whatever your solution or product is. Google will then serve you up pages and pages of VoC on what your prospects and customer lookalikes are likely to be struggling with in their own words.
If you're selling services like plumbing services, type this phrase into your Google search. Replace the word category with whatever your category is. And just like before, Google will serve you up pages and pages of VoC. All that's happening here is we're asking Google to search through customer reviews on Amazon and Yelp to help us quickly figure out what problems drive people to us in their actual words. If you were to search Amazon or Yelp manually for this stuff, you could lose hours, only to turn up a few great insights. Trust me. I've been there. The shortcut is way better. Now, once we've captured a bunch of VoC on the problems our prospects may have, we can plug that copy into a copywriting framework, like Problem, Agitation, Solution, or PAS.
So, write the word Problem on your page. Then hit enter a couple of times. Then write Agitation and hit enter a whole bunch and then write Solution. Now find the biggest problem you saw in VoC. What one thing did most people mention they were tired of? Type that problem under Problem, and for best results, use the actual wording you saw in VoC. Don't summarize it. Then, under Agitation, paste a bunch of the specific ways that that problem came to life as you saw in VoC. All you're really doing is copying and pasting exact snippets of reviews from Google to your page. That'll bring you to the solution area where you can write about how your solution solves that agitated problem. And voila, you've got a first draft of copy that uses VoC and a persuasive framework, and it only took you five minutes. You can do this any time you need to write anything, same process, same PAS framework.
