Looking for the magic words to boost sales and win market share? The answer’s simple. Steal them.

Writing is hard. Crafting a message which grabs your customers by the danglers is tricky when they just never seem to be interested in the same things as you.

Disconnect between marketers and their audience is costly; New Coke, Google+, Cheetos lip balm (yes, really). Embarrassing, multi-million-dollar flops.

But how? These titanic organisations command more market research budget than most SMEs will ever dream of. How do you manage to soil the linen on such a flabbergasting scale?

See, here’s the thing… people lie. Especially when they’re in an environment like market research where they feel like their answers reflect who they are as people. Up to 80% of people lie to their doctors for this very reason.

Faced with this depressing human truth, what hope does the average business have? How can you get to the heart of your customers’ needs and use that knowledge to write better marketing?

Grab your swag bags and mask up, kids. We’re going robbing.

Everyone’s a critic

Social proof, the knowledge that ‘people like us’ enjoy the thing we’re thinking about buying, is a marketer’s golden goose. Providing this proof is its own billion-dollar industry.

Trustpilot, Tripadvisor, Google My Business, Amazon. Hundreds of thousands of people every day are having their say.

So steal it.

These nuggets come direct from reviews of Euroloo. For portable toilet hire in Essex, they’re easily number one or number two. If you’re in doubt as to what folk really want from their portaloo experience, ponder no more. The majority of five-star reviews talk about the service provided by on-site staff.

Now privy to this knowledge, their marketers can dump the irrelevant messaging. No more getting bogged down talking about, for example, their environmental footprint or the latest lavatory technology; folk don’t seem to care.

Let that sink in. Customers are willingly, nay, happily doing your market research for you, with their guard completely down. For free.

If you’re not currently getting proactive about asking for reviews, begin immediately. And while you wait for them to roll in, your competitors are already proudly showing off their own reviews.

Steal them.

Take the words right out of my mouse

This goes beyond simply measuring sentiment. If you know where to look, you can pilfer copy wholesale.

Digital culture has given billions of people the freedom to say whatever they damn well please without fear of consequences. For some reason that I’ll never be able to fathom, this is seen as a bad thing.

Reddit is oft maligned (by people who’ve never heard of 4Chan), but it’s an absolute goldmine of customer and industry sentiment. I can all but guarantee there’s at least one subreddit dedicated to whatever it is you might need to market. Same goes for Facebook groups.

The human tendency to evolve language gives you a unique opportunity here. Engaging respectfully with online communities will tip you off about keywords and catchphrases long before your competitors begin to target them.

Let’s look at some examples:

· As recently as 2007, a hashtag was called ‘the pound sign’ in the US, and rarely mentioned at all elsewhere. Twitter changed that

· ‘Photobombing’ is common parlance now, but would never have gained traction before photography went digital

· People have been ‘twerking’ since long before Miley Cyrus, but she didn’t propel it to inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary until 2013

· In mythology, ‘trolls’ are unpleasant creatures who like to cause havoc. Nowadays, the word refers to… oh… actually, never mind

Of course, these are high-level examples of single words. But your communities are, I promise you, evolving new keywords and articulating new challenges as we speak.

Steal them.

Copywriters don’t just copy writers

This might not sit particularly well with some people. After all, we creatives are supposed to… well… create, right? Stealing other people’s words surely stinks of plagiarism?

David Ogilvy disagrees: “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product,” he said in 1963.

Ok, you’re right. Quoting Ogilvy is a bit cliché. How about Picasso? “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

One more, Jean-Luc Godard. “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

That last one is the crux. Say your community happens to develop a nice long-tail keyword which will net you big traffic, months ahead of the competition. You still need to write your way around it properly.

Executing better marketing consists of finding ideas which resonate, and getting them in front of the right people in as unspoiled a way as possible.

That takes strategy, courage, and the right medium to amplify your message.

In 2020, that’s going to mean transposing text phrases into ‘live’ media like video. If you can be the one who takes what’s on the tip of your audience’s tongue and puts it across as a multisensory experience, you’re going to win.

Nobody will even suspect you stole the whole script.

Better digital marketing by Sookio

Is something missing from your message? Are you feeling the bite of that disconnect? Do you even know who your audience are anymore?

Let’s get that sorted out for you. Talk to Sookio today.