Your Customers Are Writing Your Ads (Are You Listening? 🎧

Listen Up! Where to Find Your Customer's Exact Words 🎧

Hey everyone Happy Monday!

Last week, we dove into making your product features sing by turning them into compelling benefits. But here's a crucial question: how do you know which benefits will truly resonate and make someone click "buy"?

It's easy to think we know our customers inside and out. We build personas, we have our ideal customer avatars... but are we truly listening to the exact words they use to describe their problems, their frustrations, and what they really want? Often, there's a gap.

Today, we're shifting gears into Module 2: Customer Research. We'll explore where to find this "voice of customer" gold and how to start spotting the patterns that will become the bedrock of your most effective ad creatives.

Uncovering Voice of Customer Gold – Your Customers Are Writing Your Best Ads – Are You Listening?

Imagine having a team of copywriters who know exactly what will make your target audience stop scrolling, pay attention, and feel understood. Good news – you probably already do! They're your customers.

Your customers are constantly telling you what they want, what they love, what frustrates them, and what they wish for, in their own authentic language. The problem? Most brands aren't systematically listening or capturing these golden nuggets. When you learn to tune into these conversations, you unlock a source of ad copy that is infinitely more powerful and persuasive than anything you could brainstorm in a marketing meeting. Their words are your direct line to their motivations.

🧱 The Framework: Your "Customer Listening Posts"

Think of these as locations where your customers are openly sharing their thoughts and feelings. Your mission is to tap into them:

1. Reviews (The Obvious Goldmine):

   • Where: Your own product pages, Amazon, Capterra, G2, Yelp, Etsy – wherever your product or service is reviewed.

   • What to look for: Don't just skim star ratings. Dive into the text. Look for detailed reviews where customers describe:

     • The situation before they found your product (their problem/pain).

     • What made them choose your product.

     • Their experience using the product (specific benefits they experienced).

     • The outcome or transformation they achieved.

     • Any hesitations they had.

2. Surveys (Direct Questions, Direct Answers):

   • Where: Post-purchase feedback surveys, customer satisfaction (CSAT/NPS) surveys, onboarding questionnaires.

   • What to look for: Open-ended questions are your best friend here. Questions like:

     • "What was the biggest challenge you faced before purchasing?"

     • "What's one thing you can do now that you couldn't do before?"

     • "If you could describe [Product] in one sentence to a friend, what would you say?"

3. Support Tickets & Customer Service Logs (The Problem Solvers' Diary):

   • Where: Your Zendesk, Help Scout, Intercom, email support inbox.

   • What to look for: Recurring issues, points of friction, frustrations, questions that indicate confusion or unmet needs. The language used here is often very direct and problem-focused. "I'm struggling with X," "I wish Y could do Z," "Why doesn't it A?"

Across all these listening posts, you're hunting for:

• Pain Points: What specific problems, frustrations, or annoyances are they articulating?

• Desires & Aspirations: What are they trying to achieve? What does their ideal outcome look like? What are their dreams related to what you offer?

• Recurring Language & Phrases: Notice the exact words and phrases customers use repeatedly. This is their natural vocabulary for this topic.

• Objections & Hesitations: What made them pause before buying, or what concerns do they raise?

💡 AI Assist: Spotting Themes Quickly

Once you've copy-pasted some raw customer quotes using the checklist above, it can be helpful to quickly categorize them to see patterns emerge. While nuanced human analysis is key, AI can help with an initial sort.

Try this prompt with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini:

Act as a Market Research Analyst reviewing customer feedback. I will provide a list of direct customer quotes about [Your Product Name or Type, e.g., "our smart coffee mug"].

Your task is to categorize each quote into ONE of the following themes:
- Pain Point (Describing a problem/frustration before or related to the product)
- Desire/Aspiration (Describing a want, goal, or ideal outcome)
- Positive Feedback (Praising a specific feature or the overall product)
- Objection/Hesitation (Expressing a concern, doubt, or reason for not buying/liking)
- Question (Asking for information)

Present the output as a list, showing the quote and its assigned category.

Here are the customer quotes:
[Paste 5-10 raw customer quotes you collected here, one per line or upload a PDF file with all the reviews for particular product).

Example AI Output:

• "I was so sick of my coffee getting cold by 10 am." - Category: Pain Point

• "Wish the battery lasted a bit longer for back-to-back meetings." - Category: Objection/Hesitation

• "Being able to set the exact temperature is a game-changer for my green tea!" - Category: Positive Feedback

• "Now I can actually enjoy the entire cup without rushing or reheating." - Category: Desire/Aspiration

• "Is the app compatible with older Android phones?" - Category: Question

• "It felt a bit expensive at first, but it's worth it." - Category: Objection/Hesitation (with positive resolution)

• "The spill-proof lid is amazing, saved my keyboard twice!" - Category: Positive Feedback

Why this helps: This simple categorization gives you a quick overview of the types of comments you're collecting and helps you group similar pain points or desires together for further analysis, making your manual review more efficient.

🧠 Real-Life Application: Start Your Listening Tour Today

1. Pick ONE Source: Don't try to boil the ocean. Start small. For example, choose the reviews for your single best-selling product on your website or Amazon.

2. 30-Minute Deep Read: Set a timer. Read through the reviews not as a marketer, but as a detective. Have a document open.

3. Highlight & Copy-Paste: Specifically look for:

   • Phrases describing problems before they bought (e.g., "I was so tired of X," "My biggest struggle was Y").

   • Phrases describing their feelings/outcomes after using the product (e.g., "Now I finally feel Z," "It's such a relief to A").

4. Meta Ads Test This Week: Find ONE powerful pain point phrase or one compelling desire phrase you've directly quoted. Use it as the opening hook in a new ad variant this week. For example, if customers repeatedly say, "I was overwhelmed by the clutter," your hook could be: "Overwhelmed by clutter? Imagine a [your product category] that..." See if that direct customer language improves your hook rate or engagement.

🧰 Bonus: Quick Customer Language Audit Checklist

Use this to guide your first dip into customer language:

• Chosen one primary source of customer feedback? (e.g., Product X Amazon reviews, recent support tickets)

• Spent at least 20-30 minutes actively reading/scanning?

• Copied down 3-5 recurring words/phrases customers use to describe their problems or challenges?

• Copied down 3-5 recurring words/phrases customers use to describe their desired outcomes, positive feelings, or benefits received?

• Identified 1-2 direct quotes that vividly express a common pain point? (e.g., "I wasted so much time trying to...")

• Identified 1-2 direct quotes that vividly express a common desired outcome/benefit? (e.g., "This has been a total game-changer for my...")

💣 Value Bomb

The 3-Star Goldmine: Don't just bask in 5-star reviews or get defensive about 1-star ones. The real detailed insights into fixable pain points and nuanced desires often live in 3 and 4-star reviews. These customers often explain exactly what was good but also what specific issue or unmet expectation held it back from perfection. That's actionable gold!

🛠 Tactical Tip

This week, dive into your customer support tickets from the past 30-60 days. Search for keywords that indicate emotion or problems like:

• "Frustrated"

• "Confused"

• "Wish it could"

• "The problem is"

• "Struggling with" Note down the exact phrasing your customers use around these keywords. These are often incredibly potent, raw expressions of pain that can be directly (or slightly adapted) used in problem-aware ad hooks.

✨ Tap into the unfiltered voice of your audience (and your competitors' audiences)

Use Vibe9’s Instagram Comments Downloader. You can scrape all the comments from relevant Reels or posts. This allows you to quickly see what questions people are asking, what excites them, common objections, and the exact slang or phrasing they use when talking about products like yours – perfect for your customer language research.

👋 Closing

Your customers are leaving breadcrumbs—no, entire loaves of bread! That lead directly to more effective advertising. Learning to actively listen at these key posts and identify their exact language is a foundational skill in creative strategy. It’s how you move from guessing what they want to knowing.

This Friday's AI Edition will explore how we can use AI to help us analyze and categorize all this customer language we're finding. Get ready to scale your insights!

What's one "listening post" you're committing to checking out this week? Reply and let me know!

To the next one, Tomasz.