Research

How to Swipe Killer Copy From Customers When You Don’t Have Any Yet

O. Sentrec

• 1 min read

Turn your customer words into persuasive messages. That’s how you write high-converting copy. By doing customer research you uncover your customer’s pains, motivations, hesitations, and needs.

But what happens when you have zero customers? Message mining to the rescue.

What is message mining? It’s using the sites where your target audience goes to talk about their problems or look for solutions to identify key messages and “swipe” relevant copy. E.g. Amazon, forums, blog comments, Reddit, Quora, competitors’ websites…

Message Mining Step-By-Step Using Amazon as an Example

Step 1. To identify the places your target audience used to talk about its problems or look for solutions, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What are their goals?
  • What solutions are they using today to achieve those goals?
  • If those solutions are online, where can you find them?

Step 2. Go to Amazon (or any place you’ve found in Step 1). Look for books or product reviews addressing the problem your customers need to solve. Choose 5 to 10 books or products.

Step 3. Keep track of your online sources with a spreadsheet or a bookmarking tool.

Step 4. Create a table with these three columns: ‘Memorable Phrases’, ‘People Want’, ‘People Pain Points’. Memorable phrases are any phrases catching your eye.

Step 5. Read every review. Focus on the products that have more reviews. Start with the reviews people found more useful. Read both positive and negative reviews.

Step 6. Copy-paste on the corresponding column the phrases you think are relevant.

Step 7. Analyze the information. Look for the frequency of the messaging. The more an idea, a thought, or a feeling comes up, the more important it is. The ‘People Want’ column tells you what your prospects need from your product/service, what they are looking for. These are messages you need to include in your copy.

Step 8. Put the information together using a copywriting framework such as PAS (Problem Agitation Solution) or others.

Online message mining is not flawless but it gives you a starting point when you don’t have customers yet.