What is Voice of Consumer data?
Voice of Consumer data, or VoC is just a fancy way to say “speak how your customers speak.”
Borrow words and phrases from your audience.
You don't have to do this, but it helps to build a picture of the way your target audience communicates, so you can speak their language back to them.
Why use Voice of Consumer data?
First, using the language, phrases and references your target audience uses gives them a sense of familiarity when they read your copy. They’ll (subconsciously) start to think: this person gets me.
Paying attention to the things your audience says also helps you attune to their pain points—another marketing phrase I don’t like. When I talk about ‘pain points,’ I’m not talking about finding the things that hurt people and rubbing salt in the wound, and I’m definitely not talking about creating made-up problems to scare people into spending money they didn’t need to spend.
I’m talking about seeking out the small ways you make clients’ lives better. The dreams you help them move towards, the quiet fears you help them calm, the daily friction that you help smooth over. By paying attention to the way your audience speaks, you are also paying attention to their complaints and their wishes. From there, its not hard to speak about the ways you help.
How to do it right now
You can collect reams of data on VoC and easily spend hours (or days) analysing it, but a really quick way to use it is to go into reviews and testimonials left by your existing customers, pull out a few phrases that resonate, and work them into your next Instagram caption — not as quotes, but as a natural part of the copy.
Start a document where you can drop helpful words and phrases that you gather by paying attention to the way your customers (or ideal customers) talk::
Actually just talking to people irl
On social media (especially in ephemeral media, like Instagram stories, and even better 1:1 in the DMs)
In feedback to you (from public reviews or private email responses)
Looking at the reviews of similar products or services (or of products that solve a similar problem, such as reviews of books that help people DIY what you do, for example, a hypnobirthing coach might look at Amazon reviews for a book that aligns with her philosophy on hypnobirthing). We’re not lifting sentences verbatim, but you might start to find phrases or sentiments that come up again and again.