We’ve run dozens of customer interviews, analyzed our competitors, tracked our customer lifecycle, and aligned with the company vision: now we’re finally ready to write copy.
If you think I’m being extreme, just wait until you read the rest of this post. copywriting, while often thought of as something creative and inspired, is a technical craft. It’s absolutely rooted in the empirical data that gives an objective understanding of your customers’ paint points and desires. It’s a product unto itself.
And just like a product process, you need data to create something great. From customer research to monitoring and iteration, good copywriting is rooted in data.
I consider myself a “conversion-copywriter.” Coined by Joanna Wiebe, conversion copywriting is “data-driven copy that gets prospects and visitors to say yes.” It’s a scientific study in human psychology and empathy, the science of knowing what words will help people understand and connect with your brand and product. You wouldn’t build a product without doing customer research and validating your idea. Don’t write marketing copy without understanding the customer and their pain points.
To get it right, you’ve got to run research to figure out what needs to be said.
If you know a thing or two about product development, you’ve heard of the “a-ha” moment. It’s the “pivotal moment when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it,” according to Appcues. It’s also a moment when someone is likely to signup and/or buy your product. Product and growth managers often buildonboarding flows that get users to this moment fast. The same is true with marketing collateral.
Since conversion copywriting “gets to a yes,” it has to keep in mind one specific goal. That goal is the “a-ha” moment. If I’m creating a funnel for a product (ad, sales page, email follow-up) the goal of every word on every piece of collateral is to get readers to this one moment because it’s also the moment of conversion. Conducting interviews with users on what “aha” could be for them is a good starting point.
As I’ve seen it applied, most Keyword research is used to create a laundry list of blog posts to create words to fit into a sales page, so Google Search prioritizes your work. And while this isn’t bad, it forgets that keyword research is a study of language.
Keyword research answers an important question: What words do people use to describe the pain point your product solves—at scale? It can be incredibly insightful for early-stage companies to establish their positioning and product-market fit.
For example, if you’re a company like doola, it’s important to know if your audience is searching for “start a US bank account” or “form an LLC” as you build your initial inbound funnels. While doola does both, understanding how customers think about their paint point and what they type in Google to find a tool like yours is key.
Another way to quickly understand how your customers talk about your product and what they care about is to analyze all the places they talk to you. Think TrustPilot reviews, customer support tickets, and ProductHunt comments.
I often sort through these and copy and paste repeated phrases into a voice-of-the-customer database. Through this, I start to understand how people talk about products, what they like, love, or aren’t aware of.
Depending on the project, I might also pull keywords from competitor pages, look at Google Trends, or dive deeper into online communities to learn more about a customer.
I like to say that quantitative research tells you what’s going on while qualitative research tells you why. When focusing on the quantitative aspects of copywriting, I like to use funnel data in Mixpanel to understand where customers engage and break off during their lifecycle. Paired with the research you see above, you can get a sense of what people do and don’t understand about your product when they hit certain pages.
