Module Overview: Customer Development is Your Unfair Advantage

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our Academy series welcome to the second module inside of this course that is all about customer development and when I say customer development all that means is you're listening to your target audience you're starting to understand them better so when it's time for you to write copy you know exactly who you're writing for and what message you want to deliver now this is your unfair advantage most people when they write copy they are not spending as much time as they should getting to know their readers and especially if we've interacted with our target market or target audience before we may think that we know what they want that we've listened to them enough where we kind of understand what they're going for but very often we can dive even deeper to into that we can ask more questions we can listen more clearly a little bit deeper and truly get to the essence of what pains they're feeling because then once we understand those pains deeply we can speak directly to those pains and this is your unfair advantage it really makes copy writing so much easier when you know at a deep level what your readers are experiencing so the most important thing here is don't guess what your readers want as much as possible we want to eliminate guessing which is just this thing that's coming from your minds and instead we want to know by listening directly to these people and the key to doing that is to ask the right questions ask powerful questions and to listen to their response we're not asking questions so we can check this off our box like okay we ask questions now I can actually write the copy we're asking because we're genuinely curious about the answers and that's the listening phase which is the hardest phase for most people once people ask their questions you want to truly feel into their answers what are they saying once we listen to them deeply then we have all the unfair advantage we need to write insanely powerful copy so the number one copywriting mistake is to think that we know what people want without a doubt this mistake comes more than any other mistake when you read other people's copy it's someone that just has an idea of what they think that reader wants so they just speak directly to that idea in their head instead of actually finding out what it is they truly want so you usually don't almost always unless you've interacted with your target audience a lot the idea that you have about what your reader wants is not in alignment with what your reader actually wants so customer development is the process of listening to your target audience and it does take time when you're either getting on the phone for these customer interviews or browsing these marketplaces online and reading their comments that's going to take up a decent amount of your time and to be honest it's not always worth it so if we have a sales page let's say for example for an online course that we've been working really hard on and we want to make the sales page as awesome as possible or if we're a freelance copywriter writing someone else's sales page and this is a very important part of their business then we're going to want to go through this process of getting on customer interview calls or at least going online to all the customer marketplaces and listening to what it is they have to say but for another example let's say you're a yoga studio that just wants to put out an Instagram post today that's not that important you're not going to get on the phone and interview your target market just to write this Instagram post so the reason why I include this is customer development is the best practice and it's a great way to understand your target market at a deeper level but it's not the one-size-fits-all solution you know maybe we get to know our target audio using these principles and asking the right questions and listening but for the daily activity of writing an Instagram post we're just gonna use the knowledge we've learned in the past when we interviewed our target market and we're not gonna keep interviewing people every day because that's just not practical so it really depends on what piece of copy you're writing but I think that by going through this section and understanding these principles no matter how you choose to write your copy whether or not you're actually interviewing your target market or not your ability and skills as a natural copywriter are going to increase so when you do decide to do these customer interviews or to listen to people in these marketplaces just know that it's very very powerful and I think you're not going to understand the full power of this until you actually do it but once you listen to your target market and then you write copy and you have people resonate so deeply because you're touching the exact pain point that's already the top of their mind right now it is an incredible feeling and you're gonna get hooked to it so in this module you'll learn exactly how to do customer development in this video I introduced what this module is all about and it's about customer development.