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How to identify your audience through customer research
Executive overview
Most copywriters guess who they're writing for. Guessing wastes time and produces copy that misses.
Customer research — surveys, on-site popups, message mining, and interviews — is the only reliable way to find out who your audience is and what actually motivates them.
Methods for audience research
- Email surveys with open-ended questions surface the exact words customers use
- On-site popup surveys (one question) catch visitors at exit points, including abandoned checkouts
- Message mining on Amazon reviews and forums reveals how people describe problems in their own language
- One-on-one interviews allow follow-up questions that reach deeper emotional motivations
Applying research to copy: a case study
- A/B test on a developer training site: popup survey asked visitors to self-identify as beginner, intermediate, or advanced
- Customer surveys revealed the primary motivation: getting a first developer job
- That insight became the main value proposition headline, immediately confirming relevance to visitors
- Adding a video addressing common concerns above the fold lifted conversions by 60%
- A second survey found that a course curriculum graphic — confusing to the copywriters — was clear and meaningful to the actual audience; they did not change it
Why research beats guessing
- Surveys can be launched within a week and yield usable results within seven days
- Guessing can run indefinitely with no improvement and actively harms the business
- Writing for yourself, not your audience, risks optimising for the wrong person
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