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How to perform deep meaningful research

• Spend more time researching than anything else. Heavy hitting research is the foundation of every successful campaign.

Introduction

“Never sell something just because you want to sell it, or indeed, never advertise something simply in the way that you want to advertise it” - Gary Bencivenga

In other words… Most marketing underperforms because agencies are taught to write for their client, not for the prospect.

• 80% of the results of a wining ad campaign come from the message.
• 80% of the message success comes from the research.

"Let’s get to the heart of the matter. The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself*, and not from the copy. Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product*. This is the copywriter’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it. - Eugene S"

What's the point?

The goal of the research is to find the most powerful desire of the market and connect it with your product. So we can sell the product and make money.

Every desire has 3 dimensions:

1. Urgency: Intensity, and degree of demand to be satisfied.
2. Staying power: Degree of repetition, inability to become satisfied.
3. Scope: The number of people who share that desire.

We need to find the desire that has power in all 3 dimensions.

We need to tap into an overwhelming desire that exists today.

Tasks

• Research the product, get to really know it.
• Research the competition.
• Have an extensive log of raw opinions from the market.
• Summarize them and made a note of how frequently and intensely they come up,
• Link these issues to the potential benefits of your product

After our research, in our ad copy we are going to acknowledge that desire-reinforce it- and offer the means to satisfy it- in a single statement in the headline of the ad.

Tools

In this process, you will use one Google Docs and one Google Sheets for dumping all the information.

• This is the Google Sheets 👉🏼

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fQkGoBvSlPP-V_MPvMh-LGmy1V0blEOp/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=101133535819067299949&rtpof=true&sd=true, where you will write about the product, competitors, and market research.

• This is the Google Doc 👉🏼 , https://docs.google.com/document/d/15lBB-uduZL-s1rCWY-ACSBjRrbTah9Nm/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=101133535819067299949&rtpof=true&sd=true where you do the IVOC market research (I'll explain in a minute)

Let's begin! Start by knowing the market's stage of awareness.

Understand Target User Level of Awareness

Why is it important to understand the stages of awareness of your target audience?

Knowing how aware your target user of the problem or solution impacts on how you can approach copywriting.

The user’s awareness can easily shift with just one sentence, a paragraph, or even a whole document. Once you identify how aware is your target user, it serves as a guideline on what your copywriting should focus on.

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What is the current stage of awareness of the market?

💡 Remember: While it's useful to have guidelines and checklists like this to do research, you should prioritize flow and intuition. Go with the flow of where your research takes you. This checklist should act as the minimum things to consider when doing research. Don't become too mechanical. Allow yourself to use your instincts. But also use these fundamentals.

Product Research What are you working with

Become an expert of the product. Understand the product/ service you are working with. You should know the product/ service inside out, understand all the facts, features, benefits and what makes it unique.

The Product:

• Facts and features: list any cold hard stone facts that you learn in your research process.
• Benefits: From the facts and features, what are the benefits of that feature.
• USP: What makes it unique? Is it something that no other product on the market has?

☝🏼 Before you continue. Know that you will and must come back to this and every other section— keep feeding it, as you keep learning in your research process.

The Ideal Client (Choose Option 1 or Option 2):

1. Existing Audience Profile Links (15 best clients of the past)

Look at the people who buy most frequently. If you already have an existing audience. (link the profiles of the best clients, (linked in, Instagram, etc.) investigate each person as much as you can and see what do they have in common. We want to know who is already buying and who can you already appeal to.

*If you don't have an existing audience, then go to option 2.

Or…if you don't have an existing audience…

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The Existing Brand / Product.

Here, you need to find out whether the actual image of the brand is doing a good job at appealing to the ideal client.

Does the public image of the existing brand align with the (IC) Ideal Client? Why?

Do they have reviews testimonials? Note down anything about the existing business that you can view it as a reason to trust them. Have proof. Note down proof elements. Qualifications, years of experience, sales figures, satisfaction percentages, feedback.

What aspects of the business (or individual client) could be viewed as a reason to trust in their expertise?

Competitor research. What others are doing

Understand what they are doing and what their approach is. Go with the flow.

The best way to find competitors is to act as the ideal client. Go and search, click ads, what are the concerns of your Ideal Client. Act like him. This is a free flowing exercise. Have fun, see what your audience is being exposed to. Take Screenshots. What kind of messages are they using?

• Competitor

Market Research. What does the market desire

💭 Remember: Your copy should connect your product to your prospect's dominating desire. This is where we discover the best message to use in our copy. To write a winning campaign, you need to have a profound understanding of the market.

Rely on the indirect voice of the customer (IVOC)

We need to source voice of customer data from places where people have no idea they are being probed for market research…

• Places to look. Tools to use to help you in this process.
  • Google
  • Organic social (Client and competitor)
  • Existing Audience Data (CRM, comments, profiles, reviews, emails, surveys)
  • Facebook Groups (niche-specific and problem-specific)
  • Facebook Ads (competitors and target market-specific)
  • Subreddits (niche-specific and problem-specific)
  • YouTube Videos (niche-specific and problem-specific)
  • Amazon Listings and Reviews (niche-specific and problem-specific)
  • Online Forums (niche-specific and problem-specific)
  • Feedly (to see content consumption)
  • Quora (for specific questions and answers)

Indirect Voice of Customer Data (IVOC)

The information that will give us the best idea of what will work for our market and our audience comes from the prospect themselves. It's their desires and beliefs and emotions that really matter. It's from those words that they use to express their desires that we are going to find out how we should approach copy. The best way to know what a market wants is to get them to tell us what they want.

“The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't ****do what they say” - David Ogilvy

So… The only kind of research you can always rely on is indirect.

📂 Use the Google Doc for your market research. Copy and paste comments from users in this doc. Follow the instructions outlined.

After that, you digest all that raw data and translate it into clear messages to look back on. Whatever sentiment you find coming up most frequently are the ones you summarize. Put the sentiments into a summary. This should take no more than two hours. Record around 3 to 5 per category. This will be the source of our copy. These are the golden Nuggets that we can repurpose into ad content and copy for the landing page.

It will look like this:

Now you will take the IVOC summaries and rank them in accordance to their intensity and their frequency.

Which ones come up most frequently and in the most intense way in the raw data that you recorded?

Now match those to an associated benefit of your product. Go back to the benefits list.

Which benefits satisfy support or agree with the summaries? Here is where you connect your product with the prospect's desires

Not every summary has an associated benefit, don't sweat it.

✅ RECAP: So now by this point you know the product better than the manufacturer. You researched the competition. You have a giant log of raw opinions, you have summarized them and made a note of how frequently and intensely they come up, and you have linked these issues to the potential benefits of your product and how they can satisfy them.

And your copy is not written yet… But now you are better prepared than easily 95% of any other copywriter.

Why? You know the market inside out, you know their thoughts, you are not relying on blind logic or tainted research, you have the resources to make the prospect see themselves in your copy and be relevant to them.

Now, grab a tall coffee and let's write some good copy!

Lets continue with The Rule of One (RIOA), its a method to help your copywriting to be as specific as possible.  RIOA

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