Ask customers to reconstruct real situations and decisions: what was happening before they looked for help, what triggered action, what they tried instead, what made alternatives fall short, what worried them, what outcome they wanted, what evidence helped them trust the choice and how they described the problem in their own words. Use follow-up questions to turn general opinions into concrete examples, then look for repeated patterns without treating a small interview set as statistically representative.
Before writing marketing copy, ask customers about what actually happened around the buying decision.
You want the situation, the trigger, the alternatives, the failed attempts, the desired outcome, the objections, the proof they needed and the words they naturally used. Questions about abstract preferences can help, but concrete experience usually gives a copywriter much more to work with.
Michael Haynes describes detailed client conversations as a practical way to understand needs at both the organization and decision-maker level. David Fradin approaches customer understanding through the job a person is trying to accomplish and how the product is actually used. Brooke McCarthy emphasizes empathy with the audience, while Sarah Sal adds a useful boundary: customer understanding still has to meet real market behavior later.
For the interview itself, the job is narrower. Get the customer out of generalities and back into the decision.
Start by knowing which message decision you need to inform
A customer interview can wander for an hour and still leave the writer unsure what to say.
Before the call, define the messaging decision that needs evidence.
Are you trying to understand which problem should lead the page? Why buyers start looking now? What they compare you with? Which promise feels credible? Why they hesitate? Which proof matters? How they describe the desired outcome?
You do not need to show the customer your internal hypothesis. You need enough clarity to notice when an answer changes it.
Haynes’s B2B perspective is useful here because he looks beyond a generic “customer” and asks about the organization, market and decision-maker. A product can enter very different buying situations depending on who is involved and what the company is trying to accomplish.
A good interview therefore begins with context rather than a request for copy.
Ask for the situation before asking for an opinion
Questions such as “What do you value most?” or “What features matter?” invite polished summaries. Those answers may be true, but they often skip the sequence that made the decision meaningful.
Ask the customer to reconstruct a real event.
Useful prompts include:
- “Take me back to when this first became a problem. What was happening?”
- “What had changed around that time?”
- “When did this move from annoying to worth solving?”
- “Who noticed the problem first?”
- “What happened that made you start looking for an answer?”
The goal is to find the trigger in context.
A trigger can be practical, such as a missed deadline, a new hire, a process failure or a change in priorities. It can also be a buildup rather than a single dramatic event. The interview should discover which pattern the customer actually experienced.
This is where exact chronology helps. “We needed better reporting” is an abstraction. “We had a board meeting coming up and the team was still rebuilding the numbers by hand” gives the writer a situation, stakes and language.
Find out what the customer did before choosing you
Alternatives reveal how the buyer defines the category.
Do not limit the interview to named competitors. The customer may have tried to solve the problem internally, delayed the decision, used a spreadsheet, hired a freelancer, patched together several tools or simply lived with the problem.
Ask:
- “What did you try before this?”
- “What were you using instead?”
- “What made that approach good enough for a while?”
- “Where did it start to break down?”
- “What other options did you seriously consider?”
- “Why did you rule them out?”
These answers can change positioning.
If the real alternative is “keep doing it manually,” copy that only compares your service with another provider may miss the buyer’s actual decision. If buyers arrive after trying a cheaper workaround, the page may need to explain why the new approach is worth the extra commitment.
Fradin’s focus on the customer’s job helps here. The alternative matters because it shows how the customer has already tried to accomplish that job.
Ask what the customer wanted to be different
Pain is only half of the decision.
You also need the outcome the customer was trying to reach.
Ask:
- “What were you hoping would be different?”
- “What would a good outcome have looked like at that point?”
- “What would have become easier if this worked?”
- “Who else would have noticed the improvement?”
- “How would you have known the problem was solved well enough?”
Keep pushing toward observable meaning.
“More confidence” may be important, but what would confidence allow them to do? Approve the plan faster? Walk into a meeting with reliable numbers? Stop checking every deliverable personally? Launch without another round of revisions?
Marketing copy becomes more specific when desired outcomes are connected to real behavior.
Surface objections without trying to overcome them
An interview is a poor place to defend the product.
If the customer tells you what almost stopped the purchase, stay curious.
Ask:
- “What made you hesitate?”
- “What felt risky about the decision?”
- “What were you unsure would work?”
- “Was there anything you distrusted at first?”
- “Who else had concerns?”
- “What would have made you walk away?”
Then ask what changed.
“What helped you get comfortable enough to proceed?”
That question can reveal a proof requirement. Perhaps the customer needed to see a relevant example, understand the process, speak with a person, clarify scope, see the product in use or get internal approval.
The copywriter should record the evidence the customer says mattered without converting one answer into a universal rule.
Capture the customer’s language, then keep the context attached
Voice-of-customer research is often reduced to collecting colorful phrases.
The phrase matters. The situation around it matters too.
If a customer says, “I felt like the bottleneck,” record the wording. Also record what was happening when they felt that way, what responsibilities were piling up, what they had tried and what consequence made the problem urgent.
This protects the copy from becoming a collage of emotionally strong quotes detached from meaning.
Ken McCarthy’s broader direct-response perspective emphasizes staying close to what the audience currently cares about. That reinforces a practical habit: preserve the customer’s own framing where it is clear and useful, but do not force every interview into language the writer hoped to hear.
When several customers describe a recurring situation in different words, that recurring situation may matter more than the most quotable sentence.
Follow the interesting answer
A rigid questionnaire can make the interviewer miss the best material.
If someone says, “We had already tried three other ways,” ask what they were.
If they say, “I didn’t trust agencies anymore,” ask what had happened.
If they say, “The price was not the main issue,” ask what was.
Haynes describes depth interviews as detailed discussions rather than quick surveys. The useful implication for copy research is responsiveness. A prepared guide keeps the conversation on purpose; follow-up questions discover the detail.
Good follow-ups are simple:
- “What happened next?”
- “Can you give me an example?”
- “What do you mean by that?”
- “Why did that matter?”
- “What were you comparing it with?”
- “How did you decide?”
The interviewer is looking for evidence that changes the map, not for a chance to display product knowledge.
Separate repeated patterns from memorable one-offs
A small set of interviews is qualitative evidence. It should not be described as statistically representative of an entire market.
That does not make the interviews weak. It changes what you can responsibly conclude.
Look for:
- situations that recur;
- triggers that show up repeatedly;
- alternatives several people tried;
- objections that appear in different forms;
- language patterns that point to a shared understanding;
- contradictions that suggest distinct segments or buying contexts.
Also mark unusual comments as unusual.
The finalized customer-research synthesis makes this warning explicit: a memorable customer statement can turn into “what customers think” simply because the team repeats it often enough.
Avoid that trap. Keep interview notes traceable to the people and situations that produced them.
Sarah Sal’s testing perspective provides the boundary after the interview. Qualitative research can generate a stronger message hypothesis. Later market behavior helps show whether that message performs. The interview itself does not prove demand or guarantee conversion.
Use a simple interview note template
For each conversation, capture:
Situation: What was happening before the customer looked for help?
Trigger: What changed or made action feel necessary?
Current workaround: What were they doing before?
Alternatives: What else did they consider or try?
Breakdown: Why did those approaches become inadequate?
Desired outcome: What did they want to be different?
Objections: What made the decision feel risky or uncertain?
Proof requirement: What helped them believe the choice could work?
Decision context: Who else was involved, and what constraints mattered?
Exact language: Which phrases did the customer naturally use to describe the problem, stakes and outcome?
Follow-up lead: Which answer deserves another question or comparison across interviews?
That is enough structure to keep the call useful without turning it into a script the customer has to survive.
The best pre-copy interview leaves the writer with fewer assumptions and sharper decisions. You should understand the situation that created demand, the alternatives the buyer already knows, the objections that slow action, the proof that reduces uncertainty and the language the customer uses when describing all of it.
Then the writing has something real to work with.