Voice of Customer Research - your secret weapon
"This is so powerful! It feels like cheating, but it's not!" - a client after first getting into customer research
It’s crucial to engage your readers' emotions, and to put yourself in their shoes, write from their point of view and use their exact words.
But how exactly do you go about doing that?
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of Voice of Customer Research - the secret weapon of any copywriter worth their salt. In fact, VOC is so fundamental to good copy that many great copywriters say that they don’t write copy at all, they simply assemble a patchwork of great phrases that they’ve swiped in the course of doing their VOC research.
In the words of the man often described as the father of copywriting, Eugene Schwartz:
Copy is not written. If anyone tells you ‘you write copy’, sneer at them. Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. You do not write copy, you assemble it. You are working with a series of building blocks, you are putting the building blocks together, and then you are putting them in certain structures, you are building a little city of desire for your person to come and live in.”
Voice of Customer Research blends quantitative and qualitative research methods to allow you to read your clients’ minds. Essentially, it’s a process of digging in order to discover the exact words and phrases your customers use to describe their top of mind issues.
Books have been written on the topic, and many agencies do nothing other than VOC work all day long, but here’s the quick and dirty version for solo business owners.
Five great ways to use VOC research to get inside your ideal customer's head.
If you offer a service and have an intake form for new clients, this is GOLD. It will give you the precise words that the specific people who go on to work with you use to describe how they feel about the issue you solve - and crucially, this is the language they're using before they've worked with you (once they work with you, they may start using your terms instead of their own). For this reason, intake forms are even more fabulous source material than feedback forms or testimonials - but those are great too. They're all fantastic evidence that you can take and reuse - almost effortlessly writing your Sales Page for you.
Go into Facebook Groups (and any other online forums where your ideal customers hang out) and either ask questions relating to your service, or just do a search for other people's questions and comments on a couple of keywords related to your topic. Again, make sure you use people's exact phrases in your copy. The only caveat here is that you need to be sure that these people are actually your ideal clients (obviously, if you have your OWN FB group or other forum/community then that's by far the best place to start).
Send out a survey to your list. Try to keep it brief (unless you have a very engaged list, it's better to have a 3 question survey that people will actually answer than a 15 question survey that nearly everyone will ignore). Keep questions open-ended - you're trying to elicit their language, not get them to agree or disagree with statements you've made.
The ideal thing to do is to actually talk to some favourite clients or customers - invite them to a short call (and by all means offer to do something helpful for them in return to thank them for their time). If possible, record the call - if not, then take notes like crazy!
If you don't yet have clients or customers (or not ideal ones or not people who are right for a new service) you have a couple of options. You can search Amazon reviews of books solving the same issue (particularly any where you resonate with the author's take on the topic) - you'll get real people's actual words to use describing the problem in their own terms. Or you can do some SEO keyword research to look for how people are phrasing questions related to the issue you solve or the product you sell.
Customer research is a central part of all my services - I wouldn’t attempt to write (or assemble!) copy without a strong foundation of VOC.