According to a study by CoSchedule, 65% of marketers do little to no audience research with having limited budgets as one of the reasons. Fortunately, review mining is an effective strategy that helps you understand customer sentiments without breaking the bank. You can look for customer reviews on social media, brand websites, and e-commerce platforms to improve the quality of your copy and research on what language your audience is using. By doing this, you’ll also build a stronger connection with them.
Audience research is important in copywriting as it helps you understand your customers—who they are, what their needs and pain points are, and how you can reach them. By knowing all these, you can adjust your copy to match your audience’s interests, increasing the likelihood that they engage and convert.
Read on to learn more about what review mining is, why it’s a valuable audience research method, and how you can do it to improve the quality of your copy.
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What is Review Mining?
Review mining is the process of analyzing customer reviews to gain insights into who your customers are, what they look for in a product, and what influences their purchasing decisions. This process will help you improve your copy because it’s an effective way to listen to your customers.
You can think of this as a way to reverse engineer your customer’s brains by understanding their thoughts and feelings about a product. Here, you’ll identify their important needs or pain points, what they like or dislike about the product, considerations they made in their purchase, and others. Then you’ll use these on your ads. It’s almost like stealing your copy from customer reviews, and taking all that information to influence your strategy.
To better understand what review mining is or how it works, consider this example of a high-frequency massage gun from Rlaxyoo, which has a 4.8-star rating, 476 reviews, and has been purchased over 2,000 times.
As seen in the reviews, several customers are satisfied with the brand’s service and product’s performance. Fast delivery times from different locations are frequently mentioned, along with the affordable price and the product inclusions, such as the attachments and storage case. Multiple reviews also highlight positive user experience, noting the massage gun’s noiseless operations and warming effect.
Based on these reviews, you gain some idea of what customers look for and find important in the product. These insights, in turn, allow brands to improve their product development stage, enhance the customer experience, and adjust their copy to match the audience’s needs. By closely analyzing the language used in reviews, you can extract specific words and phrases that customers themselves use, making your copy more relatable and effective.
Value of Review Mining for Copywriters
Review mining teaches you what language to use to position products effectively and address the audience’s needs by adopting the same language they use. Whether this be through your tone of voice, choice of words, or key message, working with direct customer feedback removes the guesswork from copywriting. It provides you with a concrete basis to structure and write copy in a way that personally addresses your readers’ pain points and desires.
To add to this, the beauty of review mining is that you can do it for free and apply your learnings to several marketing strategies, which makes it a great choice for small brands. In fact, even new brands without reviews or testimonials can analyze reviews from competitors as a starting point.
That said, the key to successful review mining is knowing how to uncover the right insights. Doing this requires knowing how to analyze and segment your reviews to identify patterns in the type of language used by your customers. If you’re not sure where to begin, here are three key categories that you can use to group your customer reviews.
Product Characteristics
This category contains language that consists of features of the product, specific ingredients or information about how the product is intended to be used. Depending on the customer’s experience in using the product, they may identify specific characteristics that they like or dislike in their review.
For example, when reviewing skincare products, customers often point out specific ingredients or features like formulation or texture based on their experience. From here, you get a sense of what appeals to them and what doesn’t, allowing you to spotlight the desired features more in your copy.
Towards Pleasure
This category contains language that explains what your prospects want to gain by having your product. It also explains any important “guidelines” that are crucial considerations for them when they are searching for products. This type of language hinges on part of the pain and pleasure principle, which states that customers can make decisions in order to move closer to pleasure.
Analyzing customer reviews can help you pinpoint the particular benefits or advantages that best appeal to the audience and fulfill their needs. With this insight, you can then position your products in a way that conveys what they are looking for and provides satisfaction.
Away from Pain
This category contains language that consists of pain points people suffered from before owning the product, things they’ve tried that didn’t work, and things that have gotten in the way of your prospects hitting their goals. It hinges on the other half of the pain and pleasure principle, where customers can also make decisions in order to move away from pain.
Where the previous category was about identifying customers’ motivations and desires, this category focuses more on their pain points, problems, and challenges. Knowing these allows you to position your product differently—that is, as a solution that addresses the readers’ pain points and relieves them of discomfort, frustration, or inconvenience.
How Does Review Mining Work?
Review mining may sound tricky at first, but once you nail down the process, you can easily replicate it and do it regularly to create more insightful copy. Generally, the process involves gathering data from your chosen sources, organizing and segmenting the reviews, analyzing the reviews, and pulling out insights to write copy.
To better understand how it works, the steps are discussed in more detail below. Additionally, you can check out my e-commerce product research course, which offers a deep dive into the product research process – otherwise known as review mining.
Gather reviews from relevant sources
It’s essential to gather data from relevant sources to find the best insights from review mining. Thus, the first step is to identify these sources, with some of the obvious ones being your brand website, social media accounts, or e-commerce platforms like Amazon. It’s also worth expanding beyond your usual pool and cross-referencing from personal blogs or forums and communities like Reddit.
By looking into a range of sources, you can diversify your data pool, which may result in more perspectives and richer insights. Even with a small sample size of reviews, there may be numerous extracted entries, providing you with a wide variety of insights to work with.
Organize the reviews into a spreadsheet
Once you’ve gathered enough reviews, you can start organizing them. Not all reviews will be useful, so it’s important to filter what’s most relevant to your product.
To start, identify key patterns in the reviews using a spreadsheet. The main goal is to segment your reviews into different categories. Generally, you should look for things like pain points, customer goals, concerns, or things that convince users to make purchases. As you find themes in your reviews, separate them into different columns based on category.
Organizing your data properly can affect the resulting insights, so if you’re unsure where to begin or how to filter your reviews, consider the three categories discussed previously: product categories, towards pleasure, and away from pain. These categories can be broken down further into sub-categories for more specific filters.
Product Characteristics
- Features. Explains unique characteristics and functionalities of the product or what the product does to get your prospects to their goals.
- Ingredients. For applicable products, these explain specific compounds or formulas that give the product its features.
- Process. Explains how to use the product for best results, any unique ways to apply the product, or how long it takes to get results.
Towards Pleasure
- Goals. Explains what your prospects want from having your product.
- Values. Explains any ethical or moral requirements your product must have for certain prospects to buy.
Away from Pain
- Pain Points. Explains what people are suffering from as a result of not accomplishing their goals.
- Challenges. Explains what is getting in the way of your customers hitting their goals. This often explains why they have pain points in the first place.
- Failures. Explains what they have tried in the past. Usually different products that promise the same goal accomplishments.
Once you’ve finished creating these categories, scraping through the collected reviews, and carefully grouping them in their respective categories, you’re all set for the next process.
Analyze the mined reviews
This step involves mining topics based on the language or content used by customers. These topics may include likes, dislikes, issues, objections, and other insights related to your brand or product.
To better understand the difference, categories and sub-categories focus more on the motivation behind purchases, while topics focus more on specific points mentioned in reviews, which give you insight into what customers are thinking or talking about.
Once you have all your reviews grouped accordingly, you can start gathering insights based on trends and patterns. You can use graphs, pivot tables, or other tools that can collect a large amount of data quickly and summarize them. For example, you can look at the main categories that the reviews fall under, which indicates your customers’ main motivations for purchasing.
Use the insights to write copy
Once you’ve gathered all the insights from your reviews and have a deep understanding on what your customers care about, it’s time to use these ideas to create effective copy. How you use your insights will depend largely on your objectives, the nature of the product, or the type of copy you are writing.
For example, if pain points appear dominant in the reviews you analyzed, you can position your products as the solution to these very problems. Address potential objections and use keywords that repeatedly show up in customer reviews to resonate with the audience. The same goes for more positive feedback—if customers frequently talk about how your product made their lives easier, focus on this point in your messaging.
Alternatively, if you’re writing product descriptions or other product page copy, take a look at the features or characteristics that customers highlight the most. This gives you an idea of what they look for in a product, allowing you to focus on these points when describing your product. This way, you capture your readers’ interest quickly since you’re zooming into the information they need.
In any case, the main goal of review mining is to use the insights you find to tailor your ad copy so that it better resonates with the audience. For added credibility, use testimonials directly from customer reviews to incorporate social proof in your copy. Different reviews provide different insights and angles to work with, which makes it extremely valuable to widen your data pool.
If you’re unsure where to begin or how to structure your copy using the insights from review mining, consider using a copywriting formula to guide you. One of the most well-known formulas is PAS, which stands for Problem, Agitation, Solution. It works by first addressing your audience’s pain points, “agitating” the readers by stirring their emotions, and finally presenting your products as the “ultimate solution.”
Remember that your ad copy might need adjustments based on platform or format, so you don’t need to stick to a particular set of rules in copywriting. The goal is to resonate with your audience with the insights you’ve gathered, and this can be done in many ways depending on the circumstances.
As always, remember to refine your copy regularly based on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and further feedback. Copywriting, as with any other marketing strategy, is a continuous process, so you shouldn’t stop after doing review mining and writing your copy once. Do this repeatedly to stay updated with customers’ sentiments, and use the insights to improve current and future copy.
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