How to Use Voice of Customer in Your Brand

Presented live on Tuesday, March 9, 2021

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You should use Voice of Customer (VoC) in your brand or tagline…

Because everyone wants to believe in the brands they buy from.

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E.

Even people in your audience who:

Are against you but are in need of you
Feel unloved but are in need of you

There IS a way to help these people see themselves in your brand…

In this tutorial, jo’s going to show you how to do just that.

Transcript

Introduction [00:00]

Joanna Wiebe: We are talking today about positioning, really when it comes down to it, and the reason that I want to talk with is because i’ve been having a lot of conversations about positioning in this particular way lately.

Since we like a Tutorial Tuesdays to share things that we’re working on, not just like random templates and stuff, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I wanted to share this with you today.

What to Expect in This Tutorial [00:37]

Joanna Wiebe: Let’s start this off with a question:

In your audience, who are most against you, but in need of you? Who would identify themselves as your enemy, but they actually need you? Shockingly this happens in markets, a lot.

Who is most unloved and in need of you? Okay, so this is not the only way to come up with taglines, branding or positioning statements, this is one way in. Oftentimes it can be difficult to know how to position yourself or position your clients.

And there are lots of ways April Dunford teaches on this a lot, so if you’re interested in positioning check out more from April Dunford. But we’re going to talk a little bit about this one today, because we have a couple examples of it today now.

How To Use Voice of Customer in Your Brand [01:34]

Joanna Wiebe: An insight, of course, is that, as a lot of us do know, but sometimes forget, especially when it comes to positioning. Everyone wants to believe in the brands that they buy from.

Okay, so if that’s true, how can that help us? Because we just said, there are people who are against you or unloved and they are inside of your market. What can you do with those people if they are a big opportunity, in particular inside of your market?

Or even if you’re coming up with something to say to them. They’re a small part of the market, but you’re landing them on a page or you’re writing an email that’s just for them. This will help to get you to a place of understanding, basically, what I call your way into the conversation your way in with them.

Create a Brand / Tagline Using Their Voice [02:18]

Joanna Wiebe: We want to create a brand or a tagline for those people. The ones who think they’re against you, but they actually need you. Or the ones who are unloved but they actually need you.

And importantly that’s an “or” it’s, not an “and,” both of those things do not have to be true. However, if they were both true, probably extra powerful.

Taglines for Tribe-Building [02:38]

Joanna Wiebe: So we’re talking about taglines or positioning in order to get to a place of building your “tribe.” We don’t talk about tribe-building that much anymore because it’s been like seven years since Seth Godin published anything about tribes.

However it’s still a big part of actually growing your business. So we want to make your voice, their voice. And this is often one of my challenges or problems with people who lay voice on really thick.

Is it’s often the writer trying to sound like something. When in fact we have this huge opportunity in positioning, in branding, in brand voice, in the work that we do, of helping people see themselves in not just the copy that we write.

Where they see themselves in the words we use, but actually in our brand overall. So when you’re coming up with a brand voice, it’s important to think about how you can make your voice, their voice.

The more you make your voice, their voice, the more likely, you are to actually find a way into a conversation with them. And that doesn’t mean pandering, that means actually thinking through how you can be the voice of X group of people.

How to Reach The People Who Are Against You? [04:09]

Joanna Wiebe: People want to believe in something right, they want to believe in the brands that they buy from. How can you be the voice of X group of people?

So when it comes to this “against us, but in need of us” group, here’s an example of what’s one way into this. So it works GitPrime, I’ve talked about this inside 10x Web Copy, I also talked about this example at a few different conferences.

One of them in London, if you were at that London conference, hi! And this will be familiar to you, a little bit. So GitPrime is the company that builds a platform, they’re now called Flow by Pluralsight.

But they built a platform designed to help the best engineers get the recognition that they deserve in large organizations. Cool I’m an engineer. I’m good at my job. I feel under-recognized in my job. And I have no real way to speak up and say, “Hey, look, I’m super dope.”

I’m doing all this great stuff. I’m a great team member, but if I raise my hand and say look at how good I am, people are gonna think what’s wrong with that person? So they had this problem that GitPrime was solving for.

GitPrime built this to help engineers. GitPrime was built by an engineer who was going through this and thought, I can solve this problem. But then when it went out into market, engineers pushed back, because at its core GitPrime was about measuring the engineer.

The engineers needed this solution, but they were against the solution So what do you do there, do you ignore it? Do you say, well, forget it, because the person who buys the product isn’t an engineer.

The person who buys it is the CTO or the product lead, or someone higher up in the organization, and isn’t even an engineer, and as long as they bring it in it’s fine. But that’s not good enough, because we know about adoption.

If the engineers are all like you just wasted X amount of money because we’re never going to get behind you using this. That’s a problem. And this is where positioning helps. Positioning solves problems. It doesn’t just say something in an interesting way, it’s there to help solve problems and talk to your market.

So, we had this real dilemma to deal with. Then in doing a founder interview, love founder interviews. If you don’t love interviewing your founder, do it. This is not an intake call which i’ve seen it called, this is you sitting down and talking to the founder.

Like, take me back to what brought you to even think about building it. And then go back and back and back and back to really get to the heart of the problem. So one of the things that the co-founder Travis said is, “Engineers love building cool shit.”

This came up in an interview that I did with him, just the two of us, one on one. And this is a line that he said. So we have this group, where they’re against us, but we believe fully in them. What do we do?

And this little insight is just one of many things that Travis said that proves we’re really behind engineers. Why don’t they get that? And that brought us to this positioning statement, “Engineers build business.”

Everybody, other organizations could buy into, and engineers can now see themselves in the brand. And they believe this is true, yes I build business. So it’s a way in for those people who are against us, but in need of us.

How to Reach The People Who Are Unloved [07:16]

Joanna Wiebe: Now there’s the other route, what about unloved and in need of us? So for us, we built Copy School to help everyone get really good at copywriting. So Copyhackers started with ebooks that were meant for startup founders.

In particular, technical founders, even more specifically technical founders who didn’t know how to market themselves, or actually put on the page what people needed to see. So we wrote these ebooks to teach them.

And then we built out training and that turned into Copy School and a bunch of copywriters took it and marketers and still startup founders too, but it was really about getting really good at copywriting.

As it’s grown and as Copyhackers has grown, more and more copywriters have taken Copy School and used it. These copywriters feel invisible in and unloved at organizations. So we did a bunch of jobs to be done interviews and other interviews as well, but one of the interviews we did with an in-house copywriter.

We identified that she felt invisible in and unloved at organizations. And the line was something to the effect of, “I used to feel like nobody in a room – my whole team is made of PhDs.” So there’s the sense of being unloved but in need of us, which was a way into a conversation there.

So after muchos discussions brainstorming all of that great stuff we developed this tagline or this statement that we can put on stickers, put on socks, put on T shirts, put in different places, that is insider love for that person who feels unloved.

Who feels like, gosh I took a course to get my skills, other people took eight years of training, how do I feel confident in a room with them? And then “Most Aware,” of course, is a bit of an insider thing for copywriters.

“Most Aware” has played with different levels, but the idea here is that, then we can go take that out, and these are the socks, and this is of course why the email today was about a thousand pairs of socks, we might need more socks than that I don’t know.

So the idea here is that we have something else, they can buy into, this isn’t necessarily a tagline. It’s not going to live anywhere like at the top of the page, or something like that. It’s just going to be part of our brand building, sending these things out to those people who may have felt unloved so they can see themselves in here.

And when they put on a pair of “Most Aware” socks and they walk through their office and sometimes they feel inferior or insecure, and then they remember, they know what the hell they’re talking about.

Just because they didn’t take eight years, they took Copy School, and now they know, they get it. They can feel that confidence, and we can know that Copyhackers helped them get there.

Summary [10:28]

Joanna Wiebe: So what I want you to think about when you’re positioning, one way in, there are some other ways in, but one question to ask when you’re positioning yourself, your clients, talking about this just doing it for fun, if you like, doing that.

In your marketer audience, who are the most against you, but in need of you? And are they an opportunity then for you to get them on your side by being their voice? Or unloved and in need of you. And again, you are going to turn your brand voice into their voice, you are their advocate, you are what they buy into, and also buy.

so that is today’s Tutorial Tuesday – 15 minutes and we’re done. Bye, everyone. See you next week. Bye.