Copywriting research is an important element of producing world-class copy. It’s what separates good copy from remarkable copy.
This can only happen when copywriting research is taken as seriously as the writing process itself, a task that many rookies and shortcut merchants are erroneously skipping.
Here are the most powerful copywriting research methods to supercharge your copy.
1. Examining Last Year’s Top Posts in Relevant Subreddits
Reddit is a trove of knowledge, a place where both enthusiasts and experts gather to discuss topics, share ideas, and solve problems that are plaguing their respective areas of interest. As of June 2023, Google’s search algorithms have been prioritizing forum-based queries and answers over traditional articles, which led to a surge in traffic for, you guessed it—Reddit.
Another hypothesis is that, due to a deterioration of Google search results quality, on top of an emerging branch of AI-powered search that’s slowly eating into the existing search engines’ market share, people have been adding the keyword “reddit” at the end of their queries to narrow down their search. So, according to the same hypothesis, this trend resulted in an organic boost for the social platform as a second-order effect from users trying to get a better answer to their online queries.
Either way, Reddit is now more popular than ever, and here’s how to leverage this fact to your advantage.
First, you need to identify the most relevant subreddits for your industry/niche. A subreddit is a Reddit page dedicated to a specific topic, theme, hobby, or industry. The simplest way to discover relevant subreddits is to come up with niche-related keywords and try them out one by one by typing /r/relevant-subreddit after the top domain in the URL.
However, this manual approach is tedious and very time-consuming. A more cost-effective method would be to use Vizit’s Reddit map, and here’s how.
1. Go to Vizit’s Reddit map, type your industry/niche in the search field, and press Enter.
2. The tool will create a visual map of the subreddits that are related to your topic, with some exceptions. You can check the visual map, or go to the right-hand side and pick a relevant subreddit from there.
3. Next, click the link to visit the subreddit.
4. Click the first dropdown menu, located under the subreddit’s name and logo. Choose Top.
5. A second dropdown menu will appear next to the first one. Click it, and choose Last Year, or, if it’s unavailable, choose This Year.
Scroll through the top posts to kick-start your new copywriting project. Use the three dots next to your favorite posts to save the ones you like, or create a personal swipe file on your drive to save them locally in case some posts go down—which tends to happen a lot on Reddit.
Note: Occasionally, Reddit will serve a different site version to different users, depending on their device, operating system, location, browser, whether they have a Reddit account, and whether they’re logged in or not. Try to experiment with different approaches to get the results you want.
2. Looking at Viral Posts in Your Niche
If you’re a beginner marketer, a small blog owner, or someone who doesn’t have the budget to perform comprehensive market research without spending a fortune, you can explore the best-performing posts in your niche.
How? We’re going to use BuzzSumo, a tool dedicated to content ideation, content exploration, and market research.
Method #1: BuzzSumo
1. Go to BuzzSumo and start your free trial. Typically, you’ll get 7 days of BuzzSumo’s full capabilities from the Suite plan. The tool might require you to connect your Facebook account to prove that you’re a real person.
2. Next, enter a topic, or choose a feed from the existing topics like Tech or Business.
3. The great thing about BuzzSumo is that you can apply advanced filters to get the results you want. You can filter by the posts’ recency, country, state, and language, and then sort your results by trending score, total engagement, Facebook engagements, X (Twitter) shares, Pinterest shares, and Reddit engagement. We’ve picked total engagement to filter the best-performing posts across all supported platforms.
Additionally, you can also perform similar market research with tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, but you’ll be severely limited in what you can do without subscribing to a paid plan.
Method #2: Google Search
Another method to discover viral posts is by simply typing your keywords in Google Search and looking at the top results.
Use advanced search operators like “inurl:” and “intitle:” to narrow down your search.
Advanced search operators won’t always give you better results. In our example, we were closer to our goal with a simple broad keyword search compared to using advanced search operators.
You can combine any of these steps and methods to discover the most popular posts in your niche and use them as idea nuggets in your future content.
3. Studying Industry-Related Product Reviews
Customer-written product reviews offer an insightful peek into how people use, interact, and think about a wide range of products and services. For copywriters, product reviews offer a unique angle where information and utility intersect, informing about which features to include and which item properties to omit in the final draft.
A quick way to identify industry-related products is to search for your product/service on the biggest online retailer globally—Amazon.
Let’s assume you’re in the pet care business, selling freeze-dried dog food for senior canines.
1. To start, go to Amazon.com, and use a broad keyword or set of keywords to find related products to what you’re selling, like “dog food.”
2. Technically speaking, all these products are your competitors, but the idea is to come up with specific, long-tail keywords to identify your closest competitors and study their products and product reviews to gather data.
Go back to the search bar and type “freeze-dried dog food.”
3. This is better, but we can be even more specific in our Amazon query. Search for “freeze dried dog food senior.” From the right-hand side, you can sort your results by featured, low-to-high, high-to-low, average customer reviews, newest arrivals, and best sellers.
4. At a quick glance, you can tell there are few competitors selling freeze-dried dog food for senior canines. This might lead you to believe there’s either an untapped market gap, or there’s simply not enough demand to support this ultra-specific type of product.
Either way, it seems like Dr. Marty is the only brand that sells exactly the type of product we’re trying to research. Let’s click it and scroll down to examine the customer reviews.
Excellent. These reviews are exactly what you’re looking for. You can also incorporate the Amazon AI-generated customer reviews summary into your research, but don’t rely on it too much as it can occasionally be misleading.
4. Reverse-Engineering Magazines and Newsletters in Your Niche
Magazines, although a dying breed, are typically of a higher quality than your daily, run-of-the-mill articles from a click-baity publication. They can be a great source of inspiration, as well as helpful data points to base your future marketing campaigns on—depending on how comprehensive you want to be in deconstructing your resulting observations.
To access existing magazines, you have to either borrow your favorite magazine from someone, buy it, or read it from an archive. The Library of Congress curates a valuable archive of historical advertising resources, with the unfortunate caveat that most of them can only be accessed on-site.
Popular contemporary advertising, copywriting, and business-related magazines include:
On the other hand, newsletters are particularly useful for ad-oriented copy and direct response copywriting, allowing you to surgically target specific markets by borrowing, adapting, and replicating proven copywriting systems (AIDA, PAS) to create powerful messages based on the psychology of consumer spending.
To gain access to the most popular, high-converting newsletters, there’s no way around it: you must subscribe to that specific publication’s newsletter.
Popular marketing, copywriting, and advertising newsletters include:
- Startup Spells
- Zero to Marketing
- Hubspot Community Newsletter
- Neil Patel’s Blog
- The Gary Halbert Letter (older, but still considered one of the best sales letters in recent direct advertising history)
Or, you can circumvent subscribing to newsletters but still get the knowledge anyway by systematically monitoring top social media influencers in your niche, such as Jon Davids and Joanna Wiebe.
5. Interviewing Your Direct Customers
Crunching numbers in a platform like Google Analytics is considered quantitative data and is the most prevalent type of data marketers, campaign managers, and direct response copywriters rely on.
This leaves qualitative data, or the non-numerical information about customers’ thought processes, underdeveloped, undervalued, and underused. Qualitative data (subjective reasoning) is just as valuable as quantitative data (objective information) because the former delves into the psyche behind every purchase and turns an otherwise dry representation of numbers into captivating, human-centric stories.
In other words, if you don’t spend some time addressing your customers’ concerns, this approach will reflect negatively on your business’ reputation, your online reviews, your sales, and your copywriting initiatives. So, instead of writing about the real problems customers face, you’ll end up addressing a non-existent audience, adding fuel to the fire and angering even those who were previously vehemently defending your brand.
Thankfully, the solution is straightforward: conduct customer interviews. To paraphrase Steli Efti, Close’s CEO, organizations that understand their customers best are often the ones who come out on top.
Note this step-by-step breakdown on how to interview your direct customers, divided into three stages.
Stage #1: Preparing the interview
1. Set up your interview goals and metrics. What will a successful interview look like?
2. Rally your team of interviewers, copywriters, and customers. If you work alone, outline the interview’s structure in a document.
3. Compose the interview questions to touch on your customers’ main concerns. They can be open-ended to allow a more elaborative discussion/answers, more limited to encourage direct answers, or a multiple-choice questions/answer system to identify the most prevalent roadblocks in your copy.
4. Select the customers you’ll be interviewing. You can use a banner on your website, or send an email to your customer base asking them to participate in exchange for something like a gift card or a free download.
5. Schedule the interview with your selected participants.
Stage #2: Conducting the interview
1. Begin the interview by building rapport with the customer. Give more room to the talkative personalities to explain your brand’s pros and shortcomings, while, at the same time, encouraging the more introverted participants to share more about their thoughts.
2. Lead the customer through the interview, introducing slight nudges to create a productive conversation. Ideally, the customer should do most of the talking, while the interviewer should do most of the listening.
3. If applicable, record the conversation, take notes during the interview, and drive the interview to a close while being respectful of the participants’ time.
Stage #3: Examining the feedback
1. Organize your qualitative data into actionable tidbits for later use. Are there any repeating patterns customers often express? Make sure to address these pain points in your next copy.
2. Create a long-term copywriting strategy based on your new observations. If needed, change the writing style to accommodate your customers’ main concerns.
3. Save your insights and create backups of the interviews in case you need to look at them again.
Here’s a list of tools to help you conduct great customer interviews:
- Gsheets—to organize your data into spreadsheets
- Whatsapp—to recruit participants and arrange interview logistics
- Google Meet—to conduct moderated video sessions
- Grain—to take notes and record your interviews
- Pen and paper—plan B to fall back onto if technology breaks during the interview
6. Going Through Sales Call or Support Call Transcripts
There’s no doubt that customer interviews are an invaluable tool in the copywriter’s resource set. But, knowing they’re being interviewed and rewarded for their time, people will act nicer or downplay recurring product/service drawbacks to avoid offending the organizers.
For example, game reviewers who are being flown to game studios, given a tour, and whose expenses are being paid for by the event coordinators, typically tend to give more favorable scores than independent reviewers who purchase games with their own money.
This is where sales and support call transcripts come into play. When customers are facing an immediate problem, they are as straightforward and as blunt as they can be until the problem gets solved. In other words, it’s more likely they’ll provide you with an honest take on your product’s shortcomings when speaking with a customer care specialist than when interviewed by the business owner.
The best way to get unfiltered customer feedback is through reading sales and customer support transcripts if they exist, and if you can get a hand on the archives most relevant to your niche.
To record and transcribe customer calls, you need to install and configure a specialized customer support system such as Zoominfo Chorus.
Chorus is an AI-driven conversation intelligence platform, offering to record, monitor, and summarize all customer interactions from one central dashboard. You can identify keywords, patterns, and competitors, including tailoring your next copywriting piece to reflect those key takeaways.
Alternatively, if you’re only working with a handful of calls each week (for example, 10 or so), you can record and transcribe them manually. But for larger enterprises, this approach simply won’t work. It’s impractical and far too time-consuming, even with a dedicated team entirely committed to monitoring customer interactions.
Either way, reading customer transcripts will bring you one step closer to better understanding your audience, resulting in a superior copy.
7. Reviewing Competitor or Adjacent Brand Copy
Let’s assume you’re a brand copywriter, actively trying to improve your client’s woodworking copy to drive more traffic and surpass your closest competitors in the industry.
Here’s how to identify competitors in the woodworking branch and review their brand copy.
1. Go to Semrush and create a free account if you don’t have one.
2. Once you’re logged in to your account, choose Organic Research from the left-hand side of the Semrush dashboard. Then, enter your URL in the search bar.
3. Select the Competitors tab and scroll down to get the full overview of your organic competitors.
4. Click the arrow icon next to the top competitor or any other competitor from the list to visit their site.
5. Look around your competitor’s site to identify their copywriting approach, and to examine their headlines, subheadlines, fonts, and formatting style. Are they successful because of their copy, or irrespective of their copy? Take screenshots of the paragraphs you find the most relevant to your research, and use a tool like Express Scribe to transcribe it into readable text.
Alternatively, simply copy and paste the paragraphs of interest into Notepad (Windows), TextEdit (Mac), or a .gdoc document to save them for later use.
If you’re strapped for time, just bookmark the pages and let your browser assume the ultimate copywriting swipe file cabinet role.
