In yesterday’s article, I explained 6 different ideas to read your customer’s mind and use the language/words that they use. I missed one important source of your customers – your competitors. Where else can you find new customers, other than your competitors?

Your competitor’s websites are an important place to understand about the product you are building and how your prospects use the product. Checking out the landing page and seeing what kind of words that your competitors use is an important step in your copywriting process.

Here are 3 ways to use your competitor’s websites to write great copy.

Testimonials

Most SaaS products have testimonials from existing customers on the home page. Unfortunately, most of the testimonials don’t tell any story about how the product helped solve the customer’s most important pain point. But on some rare occassions they do tell a story – of how they were struggling before, and their life transformed after using the product.

In the above example, you can see how important the automation rules are an important feature of Convertkit. And the takeaway here is that all other competitors have very limited rules or its too overwhelming. If your product solves the same problem, but better than ConvertKit, use these exact words to drive home the point.

Social Media

If you don’t get enough good testimonials from the competitor’s websites, then you have to look at social media – especially twitter or linkedin. Do a search for the competitor’s name and see what people talk about. Check out the problems they tweet about and the praises too. This kind of research is very important even before you build the product, but will also prove to be useful when it comes to writing copy too.

If you take this tweet, it shows how a normal user became a designer overnight. This uses the hopes and dreams of your user to show a world where they can design things without anyone’s help. Me beind a non-designer, copy like this would really make me want to sign up.

Case Studies

Most products publish case studies on their blogs – on how their customers use their products. They are usually an interview with the customer with detailed questions and answers about how they used the product and what problems it solved.

Case Studies are much more detailed than a simple one line testimonial. They give you more information about how actual customers use the product than any kind of research you could do with mockups/prototypes. What were their struggles, fears and uncertainity they felt, how the competitor helped solve all those.

One great page I would use as an example here is HubSpot’s customers page. It has a short blurb as a testimonial from the customer, but each testimonial in that page has a link to a detailed case study. One example I just picked randomly has the following text.

[CRYO] now has seven stores across the UAE. It has also moved into the manufacture and sale of cryotherapy equipment and the supply of cryogenic gas, and it has inked deals with franchisees in the US, Australia, Argentina, Kuwait and Turkey.

“We wanted to pitch to our potential clients in a more targeted and data-driven way.”

…

“They either weren’t user-friendly enough or they didn’t have all the features we needed to produce truly integrated campaigns.”

This shows how a customer expanded to 7 stores in a country and soon had to deal with franchisees all over the world. This opened up the problem of “pitching to clients in a more targeted way”. Also the customer talks about how existing tools “weren’t user-friendly enough” or “didn’t have all the features”. These kinds of words and phrases are what needed to be used in your copy.

These kind of information is an important tool in your copy. Even if you look at 5 competitors websites and go through 3-4 case studies and in each case study, get at least 4-5 such phrases, then you easily collect a nice corpus of copy which reads your customer’s minds.

These are the three ways you can use your competitors to understand your customers and get great content for your copy. Do you have any more tricks? Leave them in the comments below.