Your marketing message can make or break your business, quite literally.
It is meant to hook your customers and communicate your unique solution to their problems while knocking off all the objections they might have before buying your product/service.
But how on earth do you create a marketing message that does all that?
Steal! Steal words, phrases and stories directly from your customers.
And the whole process of stealing your marketing message is called message mining.
Message mining helps you understand what your target market wants, how they talk about their pain and needs, which you can then use to create your marketing message.
There are 2 parts to stealing your Marketing message:
- Understanding the customer: Here you try to get a better understanding of who your customers are and what their desires and pain points are. What special benefits are they delighted to get and what are the deal-breakers.
- Speaking their language: This is when you have to make a note of the common words and phrases they use to describe their desires and pain points.
Here is a step-by-step process of stealing your marketing message from your customers.
Competitor Spying
The ideal starting point in creating your marketing message is analyzing your competitors messaging. Not to take inspiration from them, but to get a better understanding of how they position themselves and their offerings which will later help you differentiate yourself.
You can do so by analyzing their:
- Website copy
- Email sequences
- Advertisements
- Social Media channels
Once you are done with analyzing your competitors, you should start mining your own marketing message.
Message Mining
The first thing you should do while mining your own message is to find out places where your ideal customers hang out on the internet. Here’s a small list to get you started:
- Forums like Reddit and Quora
- Facebook and LinkedIn groups
- YouTube channels comment section
- Reviews on marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and E-Bay
After knowing where your target customers hang out on the internet, you now have to look for their wants and desires, pain points, and how they describe them (Tone of voice).
Organize & Analyze
Now organize your finding in the categories listed below:
- Tone of Voice: Language style and commonly used words and phrases.
- Common Aspirations: Common wants and desires
- Desired Value Proposition: What’s the desired use case of the product that’ll increase its perceived value
- Special Benefits: Benefits that the customers will be delighted to get.
- Pain Points: What do your customers struggle with?
- Dealbreakers: What the customer cannot tolerate or will not buy without?
- Uncertainties: What the customer is unsure of, struggles to understand, or seeks to know.
- Perceived Risk: What customer fears might be an issue after purchasing the product?’
- Purchase prompts: key event during which the customer is likely to buy.
But what am I actually looking for? How do I know what’s what? you might wonder.
I know this is too overwhelming if you are just starting out, but you’ll eventually get an intuitive understanding of which message to place in which bucket and more importantly, what’s worth noting down in the first place.
Moreover, I might also add a case study showcasing the whole message mining process in the near future, so stay tuned!
The next question is often “What next?, how am I going to actually use all my findings?”
This brings us to the next step:
Putting Message Mining To Work
After all, the research is as good as the use you put it to.
To make the best use of it, you need to create a master file that you will always use to write all your brand communications. Be it website copy, advertisement script, social media posts, email, or anything else for that matter.
In this master file, you need to create messaging points for every stage of the customer journey.
Why?
Because the communication required for someone who has never heard of your brand when compared to someone who added your product to the cart but hasn’t purchased yet is going to be very different.
Stages of the customer journey
There are 4 stages of the customer journey called “stages of awareness”
- Pain Aware
- Solution aware
- Product aware
- Most aware
The ideal messaging required for all 4 stages of awareness is shown in the image below.
Then use it on all your customer touchpoints like email, social media based on the stage the customer is in.
