Crafting compelling and effective messaging is crucial for engaging your target audience and driving conversions. To create impactful messaging, it's essential to draw inspiration from various sources and gather valuable insights from your customers, team members, competitors, and more. This exercise will guide you through a range of research methods and techniques to uncover inspiration for your messaging strategies.
Goal
The goal of this exercise is to explore different avenues for finding inspiration for your messaging. By leveraging testimonials, support emails, social posts, customer and team member interviews, competitor content audits, user testing, and visitor and customer surveys, you'll gather valuable insights and ideas to enhance your messaging and connect with your target audience more effectively.
Instructions
Review the list of research methods provided below.
Choose at least three methods that are most relevant to your business and objectives.
Conduct the selected research methods and gather the necessary data and insights.
Take notes and highlight key findings, unique perspectives, and impactful messaging examples that resonate with your target audience.
| Company or website | Message or call-to-action | Highlighted benefits |
|---|---|---|
Analyse the collected information and identify common themes, pain points, desires, and preferences expressed by your customers, team members, and competitors.
Use the insights gained from the research methods to refine and optimise your messaging strategy.
Incorporate the compelling elements and language discovered into your marketing materials, website copy, social media posts, and other communication channels.
Continuously monitor the impact of the updated messaging and iterate based on feedback and performance data.
Research Methods:
Testimonials:
Leverage competitor customer feedback
Support emails:
Support emails refer to the communication exchanged between a company's customer support team and its customers. These emails are typically used to address customer inquiries, provide assistance, resolve issues, or offer technical support. By reviewing support emails, you can gain valuable insights into the specific pain points, challenges, and needs of customers. It helps you understand the common questions or problems customers encounter and identify areas where your product or service can be improved to better address their concerns.
Social posts:
Social posts refer to the content shared on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. These posts can include a variety of content formats, such as text updates, images, videos, links to articles or blog posts, and more. Analysing the social posts of your competitors allows you to understand their social media strategy, the type of content they share, the messaging they use, and how they engage with their audience. It provides insights into the topics they focus on, their brand voice, and the level of audience engagement they achieve.
Interview customers:
Interviewing customers involves conducting one-on-one conversations with individuals who have used your product or service. The purpose of customer interviews is to gain direct feedback, insights, and firsthand experiences from your target audience. By conducting interviews, you can uncover their pain points, understand their needs, gather feedback on your product or service, and identify opportunities for improvement. Customer interviews provide qualitative data that goes beyond analytics and allows you to develop a deeper understanding of your customers' perspectives, motivations, and challenges.
Interview team members:
Interviewing team members refers to conducting structured interviews with individuals within your organisation who have insights into your customers, market, or product/service. This could include members of your sales team, customer support team, marketing team, or product development team. By interviewing internal team members, you can gather valuable information about customer interactions, market trends, competitive landscape, and product knowledge. Their perspectives can help you identify patterns, validate assumptions, and gain a comprehensive understanding of your target audience and market dynamics.
Competitor content audit
During a competitor content audit, you typically examine the following aspects:
- Content quality: Evaluate the overall quality, relevance, and depth of the content produced by your competitors. Look for gaps or areas where they might be lacking in providing valuable information or addressing customer pain points.
- Content topics and themes: Identify the main topics and themes that your competitors cover in their content. Determine if there are any specific areas or niches they focus on and whether they are addressing the same target audience as your business.
- Tone and messaging: Analyze the tone, style, and messaging used by your competitors in their content. Look for patterns in their messaging approach, whether it's informative, educational, entertaining, or persuasive.
- Engagement and interaction: Assess the level of engagement their content receives, such as comments, shares, likes, or any other relevant metrics. This can give you insights into what resonates with their audience and what types of content generate the most engagement.
- Content distribution channels: Identify the platforms and channels where your competitors distribute their content. This can include their website, blog, social media profiles, email newsletters, or other channels they use to reach their audience.
UserTesting.com on competitor sites
UserTesting.com is a service that allows you to gather feedback and insights from real users as they navigate and interact with websites or digital products. In this exercise, you would use UserTesting.com to set up user testing sessions where participants would explore your competitors' websites. By observing and analysing their interactions, feedback, and usability issues, you can gain valuable insights into how your competitors are designing their user experiences, messaging, and overall website performance. This can help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement within your own messaging and user experience strategy.
Visitor surveys
- Written response: What are you hoping to find or do here today?
- Multiple choice, one response: Which of these best describes you?
- Multiple choice, multiple responses: What do you most want from a [insert type of business] like ours? (Select all that apply.)
- Written response: What one thing would you like to see us improve on our website?
- Multiple choice, one response: Do you think [product or site name] can help you save time or money?
- Multiple choice, one response: Are you planning to purchase from [site name] today?
Customer surveys
- Multiple choice, one response: How long have you been using [product name]?
- Written response: Please think back to when you first started looking for a solution like [product name]. What was going on in your life that made you want to seek out such a solution?
- Written response: If you had just 10 words to use to explain [product name], how would you describe it?
- Written response: How would you feel if you couldn't use [product name] anymore?
- Multiple choice, multiple responses: In your opinion, which three of the following elements most set [product name] apart from other similar solutions?
- Written response: What two or three words would you use to describe [product name]?
- Written response: What, if anything, would you say is the most unexpected benefit or outcome you've realized thanks to [product name]?
- Written response: What one feature or tool in [product name] could you not live without?
- Multiple choice, one response: If you had to choose, would you say [product name] saves you time or money?