- Author:: Jennifer Havice
- Full Title:: Finding the Right Message – How to turn voice of customer research into irresistible website copy
- Source:: Kindle
- My Rating: 4/5
Why::
Finding the Right Message is a concise and practical book on why you need to invest time and effort in understanding your customers better. There are useful tips on how to conduct surveys, how to ask open-ended questions to get illuminating answers, and most importantly actionable steps on how to translate the insights into good copy.
Short Summary::
Self-absorbed messaging focused on just selling things doesn’t strike a chord with the customers. With people having very little time and attention today, finding and using the right message in marketing is critical. And to find the right message we must start with developing a deeper understanding of the customers and their struggles in finding the right solution.
A Jobs To Be Done approach to building personas provides a clear understanding of what the customer is trying to accomplish and how your product can play a role in that journey. Effective messaging therefore includes 6 key elements that the author identifies – Struggle, The Fix, Hesitations, Awareness Level, Differentiators, and Success.
Define clear goals and objectives before starting the customer research. These will drive the questions you need to ask and ultimately get the insights you need. While there are different ways of doing customer research, this book focuses on surveys and customer interviews. Some useful tips on how to conduct surveys and interviews are provided.
When you don’t have customers, the best places to look are reviews of competitor’s products, Quora, community forums, subreddits, and review sites like G2.
Analyze and determine your key messages by identifying messages that frequently reoccur, put them into a Prioritized Messages List for each of the 6 messaging elements. Get top 10 quotes from your data set that are insightful, well summarized, and where customers are raving about something.
To understand what makes a customer tick, build a map of the customer’s mindset. This map represents the intersection of the customers’ thoughts and your product’s features. Make a table with the left column based on the messaging elements:
- How does your business solve your customers’ problems? (struggle + fix)
- What stops them from becoming your customer? (Hesitations)
- Where is your prospect’s state of awareness?
- What pulls the customer in? (Differentiators)
- What are the customers’ desired outcomes (Success)
Applying the same JTBD framework, look at the website and your other marketing assets as one of your employees that you’ve hired to get a job done. Once your goals are clear, you can then set about aligning them with the customers’ goals.
Using the insights from the priority messages list and the customer mindset map, you should be articulate your positioning statement which should address what is the biggest pain point, how do you solve it, and why is the customer motivated to solve it.
Applying Voice of Customer (VOC) insights to features and benefits:
- For each feature you’ve listed down, write down its most compelling benefit
- Look at the priority messages list, in particular the fix and success categories where you will find features and benefits that customers care about the most.
Long Summary::
6 reasons why your company hasn’t done audience research yet (and what you can do about it):
- No leadership buy-in: Business leaders and senior management don’t believe audience research is a good use of resources. This could be because of a lack of understanding of how modern targeted marketing works.
- Lack of internal resources: Audience research is resource-intensive and takes time. And amidst all non-stop marketing activities that are immediate and urgent, you don’t have the time to do it.
- Siloed thinking: Product teams feel they know who the customers are. The marketing team believes their assumption-based personas are on the mark. And sales teams feel they know best.
- Expertise gap: Not only is audience research resource-intensive, but it also requires expertise and preferably some prior experience.
- Inertia: You don’t have any of the above 4 problems, or you’re able to address them, but there is a lack of drive because the internal processes slow everything down.
- Creativity: You rely on your assumptions and creative thinking to determine how and why your customers are deciding. It’s also the route of least resistance.
Quantitative research tells you the “what”, qualitative research tells you the “why”
Buyer Personas are based on emotions and stories behind the “why”.
People short on time will settle for “good enough” answers to their questions. (Satisficing = satisfy + suffice)
Jobs To Be Done Personas
JTBD framework puts a JTBD framework on traditional buyer personas. Every action and decision of the customer is viewed as a job they need to get done using a tool/solution to solve their problems. The customer is “hiring” your tool to make progress in their journey from experiencing problems to achieving their desired outcome. A key principle in JTBD is that tools come and go, but the struggle people seek to overcome in their lives always remains.
JTBD buyer persona seeks to understand what role does your tool plays in the lives of the customer. It focuses on why customer makes certain choices and document it in their own words.
6 Elements of Effective Messaging
- Struggle – This represents the pain the customers experience when they are faced with a problem. In Adele Revela’s book ‘Buyer Personas’, she refers to them as Priority Initiaitives
- The Priority Initiative insight explains the most compelling reason that buyers decide to invest in a solution similar to the one your organization offers, and why others are content with the status quo.
- The Fix – The solution that a client is looking for that specifically solves their problems. The solution as they see it and not usually described in terms of features and benefits.
- Hesitations – Buyer Personas calls this Perceived Barriers. It categorizes customer responses to questions that show their hesitations, friction and barriers to them buying the solution. We need to watch out for the ‘ambiguity effect’ behaviour where a customer prefers to choose an option with a known favourable outcome versus one that is unknown.
- A common barrier cited by customers is price, but if you dig deeper, the reason might lie with the uncertainty of value.
- Awareness Level – There are 5 states of customer awareness on a continuum as they go through the journey:
- Eugene Schwartz in his book, [[Breakthrough Advertising]], a prospect’s state of awareness of their problem, the solutions available, and a brand all play into what words they need to see as they move towards becoming a customer.
- Most aware: Your prospect is already sold on your product and just needs the facts.
- Product aware: Your prospect is familiar with your brand, but has not decided if your product is a good fit.
- Solution aware: Your prospect knows what they want to achieve, but not that you can help her.
- Problem aware: Your prospect is pretty sure there’s a problem, but has no idea if there’s a solution.
- Not aware: Your prospect has no idea about their problem, solution, or anything to do with your brand.
- Differentiators – This refers to the key product features and aspects of your product that attract and retain your customers. Your USP.
Positioning comes first, differentiation later - Success – In Buyer Persona, this is referred to as “Success Outcomes”. This reflects the progress the customer has made in their journey. And so the product has to “fix” their problem and also help the customer reach their imagined version of the future. It is therefore, both personal and professional outcomes of success.
Questions to Ask Customers
To find the right message, we need to ask the right questions to customers. Their answers will then be revealing, insightful, and in some cases unexpected. These are the insights we’re after.
There are many ways to get inputs from customers on the buying process. This book focuses on surveys and customer interviews.
Surveys
Questions to ask in surveys:
- “What was happening in your life/business that made you realize you needed a product/service like ours?”
- “What problem does our product/service lessen or fix for you?”
- “What alternatives did you use before buying from/working with us?”
- “What concerns or hesitations did you have before you decided to buy from/work with us?”
- “After you finish your course/working with us/using our product, what personal/professional goal are you hoping to achieve?”
- “How aware were you of (the type of products/solutions) before you purchased/signed up for our product/free-trial?”
Pop-up surveys can be run on the website at critical points in the visitor’s journey to collect valuable information. For example, a popup on a thank you page after a visitor has bought something or when a visitor is leading the website without doing anything.
A simple yes/no question can be a quick way to get the visitor to answer, commit and then ask the more important question next.
Based on website data, popup surveys can be at potential points of friction to understand what is causing it and how they’re feeling at that point in their journey.
How to get audience insights when you don’t have customers?
Review mining – scanning for customer reviews from competitor websites and other 3rd party sites and collecting the most compelling snippets that correlate to the 6 elements of messaging.
Where to look:
Putting yourself in the shoes of the customer faced with a problem and answering the question “where can I find answers to my problems” can help you narrow down on sources of your information.
Here are several other places to search for gold:
- Community forums: Try searching for the problem your product or service solves, and include the word forum in your search.
- Reddit: This site contains forums called “subreddits” on just about every subject imaginable.
- Quora: Go here to find answers to just about any question. Search for a product or topic, and you’ll find people writing about it.
- Competitor blog posts and testimonials: Look at the comment section of blog posts and the testimonials on competitor sites. These can give you clues about what questions and praise people have for your competitors.
- G2 and Capterra: These sites provide aggregated reviews for software companies.
Compiling Your Research
By the end of the research phase, you will have lots of data from many different sources. Organizing them so that they will serve as a repository for the future and also help mine for insights is critical.
The simple rules to follow are:
- Organize them based on the messaging element categories in a document or spreadsheet
- Make a list of commonly used words and phrases. Keep a count as well.
- Rearrange the list from most used to least
Finding The Key Messages
Priority Messages List
Bucket the messages into the 6 categories of messaging identified earlier:
Top 10 Compelling Customer Quotes
Using the customer words to build your insights is key so that your eventual marketing copy can use the words that the customers use to describe their fears, hope, and desire.
Shortlist quotes that are insightful, well summarized and when customers are excited about something.
Customer Mindset Map
This is the intersection of your customers’ thoughts and your solution’s features/benefits.
Website Copy and Value Proposition
Value Proposition
Look through the messages from the Priority List and the Customer Mindset map and answer the following questions:
- What is the biggest pain point of the customer?
- How does my product solve that pain point for the customer?
- Why are customers motivated to solve the pain point and what are they hoping to achieve?
Website Copy
- Make a list of your solution’s features
- Write down a compelling benefit for each of them
- Look through the Fix and Success categories in the documents to find features and benefits customers care about the most
- Use this understanding to write customer centric and conversion optimized cop y
