Your most powerful marketing language comes from your customers. You want to know what theywant from your kind of product and service, how they use your product or service, how they thinkabout you, and how they talk about you. If you don’t know these details, you are simply guessing from a conference room about your marketing messaging.

If it comes from your market, you know it’s automatically relevant and resonant with your market.

How do you gather these insights? By asking your customers, one-on-one, in brief interviews. Focus groups won’t get you what you’re looking for here. Neither will Internet surveys. You want to talk to people, so you can experience their emotions and be able to dig into areas of interest.

Sample question: What do you say about our product or service when you describe it to family and friends? Here’s another: What are the first three words that come to mind when you think about our product or service? (My book details more than 30 of these questions to ask customers.)

The most effective language at your disposal is a few phone calls away. Will you make them?

Free Admission — This Week’s Evangelist Marketing Teleconference: Join me on Wednesday August 8 at noon eastern time for a powerful teleconference on language. It’s called Language is Everything: How to Create Wildly

Effective Messaging. Details here. This is a $50 product on my Web site, but if you’re reading this you get access for no cost. Just send me an email saying you’d like to participate, and I’ll get you dial-in-instructions (if you’re on the list already, do nothing, and you’ll get instructions by Tuesday). If you can’t make it live, I distribute a recording within 24 hours of the session. More than 150 people listen weekly. It’s high value, and for you, there’s no cost.

The Evangelist Marketing Institute is a private strategy and marketing consulting and coaching practice with clients that include Logitech, TiVo, and Sprint, as well as a wide range of startups and mid-market firms.  Details about my work are here.

The Evangelist Marketing Minute is a weekly thinking launch point that is always short enough to read in about 60 seconds. It covers marketing, branding, positioning, language, and public relations. Your email address is never shared, with anybody, for any reason.

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