Product Research Techniques
Let’s start with research techniques related to your product.
Number one, you’ll want to get a product demonstration or trial. There are a couple of ways to do this. First, if the product you’re selling is something like a software application or an online community, ask your client if she or someone on her team can demo the product for you. And record the call. Often they’ll have a sales team that demos the product for prospective buyers. If you can’t sit in on a sales call demo, ask your client to record one or two of these calls so you can see how the team sells the product.
If what you’re selling is a physical product, ask the client to send you one to try on your own. You’ll want to take it out of the package, touch it, and use it. Notice how it feels, what’s easy about it, and how it works. If it’s a vitamin or health supplement and you’re comfortable tying it out, do it. How does it make you feel? Does it deliver on its promise? How?
If the product isn’t physical—a service or something like coaching, ask to try the service out yourself if you can. In some cases you may not be able to be the direct beneficiary. In those cases, your interviews with clients will be that much more important.
Make sure you note the features and benefits. Notice any objections buyers might have before they purchase, and any issues that might come up after they have bought. You might want to rank these so you can address the most important ones once you start writing copy.
Research technique #2 is a Marketing Audit [2]. To do this, you’ll want to get a hold of as many of the marketing materials as possible that your client has related to this product and their brand. Get sales pages, emails, ads, webpages, funnels, and anything else you can find related to the product you are writing about. Opt in to everything. Go through the purchase process if you can.
What do you notice as you go through it? Is it clear who it’s for? What problems does the marketing focus on? Is this the big problem the prospect has or is it something else? What promises are made? What is left out? What can be improved?
Make a note of the current headlines and subheads. Is the lead compelling? Does it attract attention? Induce curiosity? What are the features and benefits? How do the benefits show up in the customer’s life? Note any objections. What about the call to action?
Most copywriters do audits differently from each other. And depending on what you are writing, the specifics of what you are looking for might be different. Take your time to identify what’s working and what can be improved in their existing marketing. Then create your plan to fix it.
Next up is Product Research Technique #3: Scholarly research [3]. This is a must for any nutritional or health product. Ingredient stories and research are critical for these products. But many other products designed to help fix a problem for your prospects also have related research… from time management to coaching.
There are a few websites that make finding research articles easy… my first go to is Google Scholar. Once you’re at Scholar, just search for your product topic like you would run any normal google search. You will almost certainly have to sift through a bunch of studies that don’t apply to the product you’re selling, but when you find one that works, it’s a gold mine of proof to add to your copy.
Other sites like Scholar include: Deepdyve, Sciencedirect, Researchgate, Jstor, Science.gov, and PubMed. And there are several new AI driven tools that may help you find the research you are looking for as well. But when using Artificial Intelligence to find research studies, make sure you double check what the models give you, as they often hallucinate and make things up, when it comes to scientific research.
Another product related research technique is keyword research [4]. This is less important for sales copy, but often critical for content and copy at the top of the marketing funnel.
Keyword research is primarily focused on creating content and other assets like web pages that rank in Google for specific terms to attract organic traffic. And there are dozens of tools to help you do it. SEM Rush, AHREFs, Moz, Ubersuggest, Keywordtool.io and others are among the variety of tools that help identify keywords and estimate how easy or difficult it will be to rank for them.
These tools will also help you identify keywords that competitors rank for and estimate the likelihood of ranking your own content for these terms. It’s not as simple as writing good content with keywords sprinkled in the copy. But it’s the first step.
When doing this research, you’re looking for words that prospects might be searching for… related to the problem, solution and specific product you are writing for. If you are writing copy that leads to a sale, think specifically of terms related to the urgently felt pains your customers want to fix. You’re also looking for terms with significant volume. There’s no point in targeting search terms that no one is looking for.
Start by creating topic buckets related to the product or service you are writing about. Next you’ll identify specific keywords and phrases that fit in those buckets. Also think of related terms. Bonus points if you can find terms your competitors aren’t using, but this is usually difficult and time consuming. Then try to identify the user’s intent when they look for these terms. What you find could become the basis for several content projects related to the product or service you are writing about.
In the next section, we’ll talk about research techniques related to your prospect or user.