Review mining is the process of analyzing voice of customer data to find out how people — real people — describe our product, talk about its benefits and points-of-value and the problems it helps them solve, the things they love/hate/are skeptical about, and to collect specific phrases, stories, and analogies those people use.

Why?

So you can add it to your copy, of course.

Voice of customer can be found just about anywhere:

• Reviews

• Surveys

• Focus groups

• Product studies

• Market research

• 1-on-1 interviews

• Usability studies

• …and more

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can do your own review mining to find high-converting copy instead of writing it.

Review Mining: Steal this copy!

I was first introduced to review mining by Jo Wiebe of Copyhackers (because of course I was). I think it was a Tutorial Tuesday, but it could have been through Copy School.

Either way.

It was eye-opening, illuminating, and a number of other positive and overused adjectives that you generally find on a movie or book cover.

I’d done the first part of review mining for clients that didn’t have any customer research. But I was missing the very important part where you don’t actually change the copy you swipe from those reviews.

You literally just steal them and use them as they are. Whole cloth. This mine now.

Plug it right into your sales page, email, website.

That’s right, folks. Copywriters don’t actually write. We use data and frameworks and knowledge of consumer behavior to take the words others have used to describe their pain and joy and then put those words together into an order that inspires people who read it to do something.

In short, we’re thieving little monkeys.

Like this

And this

Okay. There’s actually a lot of writing involved. But mostly? We steal shit.

And you can, too!

Review Mining: The How-To

Okay, my greedy little monkeys. Here’s how review mining works…

1. Start with these important questions.

• Who are you talking to? Who’s your audience?

• What do they want from you? What solutions are they looking for?

• What are they doing right now to solve their problem?

• Where do they go to get those solutions?

Here’s what that might look like…

• Who’s your audience?

  • Online business owners

• What do they want from you?

  • Audience intelligence

• How are they solving their problem now?

  • Reading books about market research, manual research, using customer research and survey tools

• Where do they go to find those solutions?

  • Amazon, G2

2. Head to where those solutions are found and search.

From our example, that would mean heading over to Amazon or G2 and searching for what they want from you:

Next, choose one of the solutions and head to the reviews:

3. Swipe the copy you find interesting.

The next step is to swipe the copy you find interesting and useful. You can just copy and paste this into a Google Doc.

Pro Tip: It will be a lot better for you, in the long run, to organize the copy in your Google Doc based on where your customer is in their journey and what copy will resonate with them at that stage.

4. Plug the copy into your marketing.

Now that you have tons of voice of customer copy, plug it into your marketing wherever it works best.

You can use it anywhere: headlines, subheads, subject lines, ads, sales pages — anywhere!

Related Content: Harnessing the Power of Social Media to Understand Your Customers

How will you use review mining for better-converting copy?

Review mining is an easy way to get that all-important voice of customer data when you don’t have your own research into your ideal customers to fall back on.

As always, I recommend split testing to make sure that your copy is optimized and performing as well as it possibly can.

Ready to level up? Let’s talk! I’m happy to handle all the research, strategy, and writing for your website copy, email sequences, or your next launch!