How to Find Your Customer’s Real Problem Before Writing Marketing Copy

Marketing messages often begin with the product: its features, benefits, and reasons to choose it over competitors. But customers do not start their day thinking about a company’s product description. They start with a task, a decision, or something that is not working as they expected.

A marketing team, for example, may spend hours preparing campaign reports. The obvious problem is the time required to assemble data. The deeper issue might be that the team cannot explain which campaigns deserve more budget. Until the team understands that distinction, it risks promoting a reporting tool to people who need a clearer way to make decisions.

Screenwriting offers a useful way to think about this challenge. A story gives its main character something to achieve, an obstacle to overcome, and a reason the outcome matters. Marketers can apply a similar principle by investigating the customer’s situation before writing the message.

Marketing discussions of screenwriting, including HubSpot’s article, describe three layers of a customer problem: external, internal, and philosophical. The framework can help organize thinking, but it should not replace customer research. The practical task is to discover which problem matters to a specific audience and gather evidence before turning it into a marketing claim.

Begin with a problem the customer can describe

Start with a real situation rather than a product feature or a broad statement such as “our customers need better efficiency.”

For a marketing team, the initial problem might be that campaign data is scattered across several platforms. That statement is more useful than “marketing reporting is inefficient” because it describes something the team can investigate.

Write a first version of the problem in one sentence:

Our customer is trying to [complete a task], but [a specific obstacle] makes it difficult to [achieve a desired result].

For example:

“Our marketing team is trying to compare campaign performance, but data from different platforms takes hours to consolidate, delaying budget decisions.”

This is a starting hypothesis, not a verified customer insight. The next step is to find out whether it reflects the experience of the people the business wants to reach.

Ask:

• What task is the customer trying to complete?
• What happens when the task becomes difficult?
• How does the customer handle the situation today?
• What does the current approach cost in time, effort, or opportunity?
• What would the customer like to be able to do instead?

Avoid inserting the product into the problem statement too early. If the team begins with “customers need an automated dashboard,” it may overlook customers who need better data quality, simpler reporting, or clearer decision rules instead.

Investigate what makes the problem matter

A visible obstacle explains what is happening. It does not necessarily explain why the customer prioritizes it.

The reporting team may spend hours consolidating campaign data, but the time itself may not be the main concern. The bigger issue could be that budget meetings happen before the team can produce a reliable comparison. Another team might care more about inconsistent definitions across platforms. A third may already have a reporting tool but lack agreement on which metrics matter.

These are different problems, even if they appear to describe the same workflow.

Screenwriting’s three-layer framework can help a marketing team organize what it learns.

The external layer: the observable obstacle

This is the task, event, or constraint the customer can describe directly.

In the reporting example, campaign data is spread across platforms, and assembling a report takes several hours. The team can examine the workflow, identify the systems involved, and establish how often the problem occurs.

Look for concrete details. How frequently does the task happen? Which steps take the most time? What tools are involved? What happens when the report is late?

The internal layer: the customer’s experience

This layer explores how the situation affects the customer’s confidence, priorities, or working experience.

A marketing manager might feel unprepared when asked to justify budget allocation. Another may be frustrated by repeatedly checking figures. But these feelings should be included only when customer conversations or other credible evidence support them.

Do not assume that a customer is anxious, embarrassed, or overwhelmed simply because those emotions make a more dramatic story. The purpose of research is to discover what the customer experiences, including answers that do not fit the marketer’s initial theory.

The broader layer: why the situation should change

The philosophical layer considers the wider belief or expectation connected to the problem. In the reporting example, the belief might be that marketing teams should be able to explain spending decisions using reliable evidence.

This can help clarify the purpose behind a product or service. It is also the easiest layer to overstate. Not every customer problem needs a grand moral argument, and a broader belief should never be presented as a universal customer motivation without evidence.

Use the three layers as prompts for investigation, not mandatory ingredients for every campaign. Sometimes the practical obstacle is enough to explain why a customer needs a solution.

Use customer interviews to test your assumptions

Once the initial problem statement is written, talk to people who match the intended audience. Customer interviews can reveal experiences, needs, and frustrations, but the quality of the insight depends partly on how the questions are asked.

Nielsen Norman Group advises researchers to avoid leading questions that imply the answer or assume how a participant feels. A neutral, open-ended question gives the person more room to describe the experience in their own words. Read its guidance on avoiding leading questions.

For the reporting example, compare these approaches:

The second column avoids assuming that the customer has the problem, feels a particular emotion, or wants the proposed solution.

Ask for recent examples. What happened the last time the customer prepared a report? What did they do when the numbers did not match? Who was involved in the decision? What was the consequence?

These questions help distinguish general opinions from descriptions of actual experiences. They do not eliminate recall errors or other interview limitations, so combine interviews with other evidence when possible.

For a practical introduction to the method, see Nielsen Norman Group’s User Interviews 101. The guide explains what interviews can reveal and distinguishes reported experiences from observations of actual behavior.

Separate what you know from what you assume

After gathering feedback, organize each proposed customer insight into three categories.

Observed evidence includes direct statements, repeated support requests, documented workflow steps, or measured time spent on a task.

Interpretation is what the team thinks that evidence means. For example, several customers describe delays in reporting, and the team infers that faster budget decisions may be valuable.

Untested hypothesis is a claim that still needs evidence. The team may suspect that managers feel less confident because of the delays, but it has not yet heard customers say so.

This separation prevents a marketing hypothesis from quietly becoming a claimed customer fact.

A simple research log can record the insight, its source, how often it appeared, the customer segment involved, and what remains uncertain. Avoid treating the number of interview mentions as a representative market statistic. Qualitative research can uncover patterns and questions worth investigating, but it does not automatically establish how common a problem is across the whole market.

Turn the strongest insight into a marketing message

Once the team has evidence for a specific problem, connect it to the product’s actual capabilities.

A useful message usually needs to answer three questions:

1. What situation does the customer recognize?
2. Why does resolving it matter to that customer?
3. How does the offer help?

For the campaign-reporting example, a draft might read:

“Preparing campaign reports across several platforms can delay decisions about where to invest. Our reporting workflow brings campaign data together so your team can review performance in one place.”

This message identifies a practical obstacle and describes what the product does. It does not promise better returns, claim that every marketing manager feels anxious, or imply that consolidating data automatically improves business performance.

The final copy must match the actual product. If the tool does not connect to every platform the customer uses, the message should say which integrations are supported. If the product organizes data but does not verify its accuracy, do not imply that it guarantees reliable reporting.

The emotional and philosophical layers can strengthen the message when research supports them. They are not substitutes for a clear explanation of the problem and the solution.

Test the message before scaling it

A message that sounds convincing to the marketing team may not be clear to customers. Test whether the intended audience recognizes the problem, understands the offer, and can explain what the product would help them do.

Depending on the situation, the team might:

• Ask target customers to explain the message in their own words.
• Compare alternative headlines in a controlled campaign experiment.
• Observe whether users can complete a relevant task with the product.
• Review qualified inquiries and conversion behavior against an agreed baseline.
• Ask sales and support teams whether the wording reflects the problems they hear from customers.

Choose the test based on the question being asked. Interviews can help explain how people understand a problem; usability tests can reveal where people struggle with a design; campaign metrics can show how a message performs under specific conditions. These methods answer different questions and should not be treated as interchangeable.

Record the audience, channel, version tested, timeframe, and chosen success measure. A result from one campaign or segment should not automatically be generalized to every customer.

The worksheet and testing steps in this article are editorial recommendations for organizing research and messaging. They are not a validated scoring system or a guarantee of marketing performance.

A customer-problem brief your team can reuse

Before writing a landing page, email, advertisement, or campaign concept, complete this brief.

For the campaign-reporting example, the team might record that reports require manual consolidation, that this delays a recurring budget review, and that customers have asked for a single view of campaign performance. The team should separately note whether customers have actually described stress or a loss of confidence, rather than adding those feelings to make the story more compelling.

This brief is an editorial planning tool. Its value is that it makes assumptions visible and gives the team a repeatable way to connect research with messaging.

The real starting point is customer understanding

Screenwriting can remind marketers that an obstacle gives a story direction and that the outcome must matter to the audience. The external, internal, and philosophical layers offer one way to explore that significance.

The work begins before the headline. Identify the task, investigate the obstacles, listen to customers without leading them, and separate evidence from interpretation. Then connect the strongest supported insight to a product capability and test whether the message communicates the value clearly.

That process gives the marketing team a more disciplined basis for deciding what to say, which claims to make, and what it still needs to learn.

Further reading

Google Search Central: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content

HubSpot: Screenwriting Techniques for Marketers — Defining Your Customer’s Problem

Nielsen Norman Group: Avoid Leading Questions to Get Better Insights from Participants

Nielsen Norman Group: User Interviews 101