Copywriting is hard... IF you don't do what I'm about to show you. 

Well-written sales copy is an underrated skill and it's probably the most important skill that you can develop as an online business owner. 

Great copy is what causes your target audience to take action. Whether that's to buy your book, buy your online course or digital product, or just to book a call with you. 

I'm talking about writing in a way that gets inside their head and causes them to think, "I feel like this guy is reading my mind!" 

Now understand that I'm not a freelance copywriting "expert" but I can tell you that I have attempted many times to write sales copy trying to sell digital products and ended up getting 0 results. I was trying to find the "perfect sales copy formula" that was magically going to sell my course. 

Understand that it's not so much about the formula because there are many different ways to write great sales pages. Great copy lies in understanding and taking the time to study your target audience's deepest desires, frustrations, beliefs, and interests. 

Once I understood that sales copy became so much easier for me. 

Once I did that, I was able to create a sales page that actually converted. 

Today, I'm going to share with you a few simple ways to find your target audience's biggest challenges, hopes, and dreams, capture them, and then apply them to your sales copy so that you can become a better copywriter today. 

Let's dive in!

 

The first step to effective customer research is to create a document.

 

Now, personally, I love Google Docs but it doesn't really matter what tool you use. The most important thing is that it's easily accessible for you anytime anywhere. So what we want to do is create a Google doc, and we'll call it customer research.

 

 

This document is going to be home base. This is where you will put everything that you find, whether it's conversations with people, scrolling on a blog post, watching a YouTube video, etc. Anything that relates to your core offer, you want to bring it on to this document. That's why you want it to be easily accessible.

 

Once your document is ready, It's time to start digging.

 

The goal is to look for both external and internal barriers that your audience could potentially have. For example, if you're a fitness instructor and your target audience's goal is to lose weight, that is considered an external barrier or goal. 

 

The real gold we want to find is in the internal barriers. To find the internal, we just want to think WHY.

 

Why do they want to lose that weight?

 

Is it so they can feel sexier while they're walking on the beach? Maybe it's because they're battling some health issue where they actually need to lose weight otherwise they could die.

 

Those are the internal barriers.

 

Both are extremely important, but anytime you find an external barrier, which is kind of surface level, get curious about why that is important to your target audience.

 

Research YouTube Comments & Amazon Book Reviews

 

So now we want to do some research, and two of the greatest resources of this are YouTube comments and Amazon book reviews.

 

Now for me, I teach people how to build online courses and an online business and I know that one of the biggest books in my niche is The 4-Hour Workweek.

 

On Amazon, this book has over 16,000 reviews! And inside of those reviews are pieces of copywriting gold for me to capture and us inside of my sales pages. 

 

Now, when you're studying through Amazon book reviews, it's very tempting to go to one-star or five-star reviews, and there is some value in those, but I find the most valuable reviews are the 3 & 4-star reviews.

 

Those middle star reviews aren't going to be biased about either end of whether the book is great or whether it's a terrible book. They're going to share with you, great information about how the book is helping them and what the book is missing and those are all great things for you to copy and then paste into your document.

 

Now, if we go onto YouTube, I know that Sunny Lenarduzzi is a great person for me to go study in my niche because she has a huge community backing her.

 

When you click on a video that relates to your topic, you want to scroll down to the comments section

 

For example, here is a comment I found on Sunny's channel...

 

 

 

 

This tells me that people want o know how to cultivate authenticity and that it's important to them.

 

So what I'll do is copy this, go over to my customer research document and I'll just paste it.

 

When you're using Amazon or YouTube, just think about the biggest creators or the biggest books in your niche or that are related to your target audience and take the time to go through the comments and reviews and see what you can pull out anything that you find interesting or valuable put into your Google Doc.

 

 

Social media platforms are awesome because it allows us to have conversations with people anytime from any part of the world. The key to great customer research, other than looking at reviews and comments, is in having genuine conversations with people.

 

One of my favorite things to do on Facebook is going into groups, related to my offer, and seeing what I can find there.

 

Most commonly, I work with coaches. So for me, I will go into a group like online coaches and consultants. Obviously, you'll have to find groups that relate to your offer whether that's in relationships, health, business, etc.

 

Once you get a list of groups, go into their page and use this amazing button known as the search function in the group.

 

 

Type in a keyword related to what your offer is (i.e. Online Course) and you'll find a list of posts people have made using the same keyword.

 

 

From there, you can go through posts and extract your audience's pains, frustrations, questions, and desires then put them onto your Document.

 

Are you seeing how valuable this is to do before writing any kind of copy?

 

We want to attract the right kind of people when we go to write our sales page, emails, or social media post and this customer research sheet will be the go-to resource that you can use anytime you need to extract some ideas.

 

And what I even like to do is copy those responses from the customer research, and paste it into my sales page in whatever section I'm writing for my copy.

 

I will embed their specific words into the page and that's how you're able to cause that person to think you're reading their mind. I one person, or group of people, is thinking the same exact thing, many many other people are as well. 

 

 

You don't need to be a professional copywriter to do that.

 

 

The best method for customer research is to have real conversations.

 

Who do you know that's maybe struggling with a problem that's related to what you offer?

 

For example, let's say that you want to help people build more lean muscle and you're going to create a course around that's going to walk people through the whole entire process step-by-step.

 

Who do you know that would be willing to sit down and maybe talk about the challenges they have?  Maybe a close friend who's been skinny their entire life? Maybe it's a family member?

 

Regardless, connect with those people and leverage in-person conversations. 

 

If you don't know those people for your offer, then have a phone call with someone, direct message on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, just talk with people.

 

When you talk with these people, ask them these two questions.

 

 

That's going to dig into the pain that these people are facing or the challenges. The roadblocks that they're facing as well. 

 

 

Go as deep as you can with people by asking them "What else?"

 

Remember, this is just casual conversation. You're not selling these people anything. 

 

What you're going to do is collect all that information and put it into your Google Document.

 

Anything interesting from these people or that you get a natural sense inside of yourself that you should probably write what they said down, do it. 

 

For example, if they just shared something about why they can't get any sleep because they're feeling anxiety about whatever their situation is you should probably write that down!

 

Over time, you're going to start to notice a couple of trends in your Document. Always be looking for the Common Thread that people keep bringing up. Once you find that, then you can build your product, course, or tailor your offer to that specific situation. That's going to be the core focus of your sales copy.

 

And if you're not getting any responses to these questions when talking with people, move on to a different idea, or it could just be that you need to have more conversations.

 

Once you have your document filled with pieces of copywriting gold, build out your sales page, and then what you want to do is create a system that brings hot qualified leads to that sales page automatically. That's exactly what I show you in that last post I did on my evergreen content strategy.

 

Moving forward before you build a sales page, or any kind of copy, do customer research and take your time with it because that is how you're going to create way better copy that actually sells.

 

I'll see you in the next one!