Why This Video Exists... (I'm Alex Myatt - Hello New Copywriters!

)
Okay. Hello everyone. welcome to this presentation. this presentation entitled
The Fundamentals of Writing to Sell.
Now, if you are watching this, I'm hoping that you are from the Copywriting
Collective Discord Server.
if you're watching this and you're not from the Copywriting Collective Discord
server, then I'd highly recommend you join.
I'm sure you can find a link somewhere online, uh, or by contacting the person
who who gave you this video. But long story short,
it's the second anniversary of, of when we founded the server. Uh, it's a great
place for aspiring copywriters, veteran copywriters, marketers,
uh, and anyone interested in, in the tools of persuasion to, to hang out, uh, and,
and debate and share opinions and $h!t posts,
and many other valuable, uh, things I'm sure will all agree. Now, this
presentation is effectively a
summary of all the important points I have, I have learned over the last, uh,
few years while I've been launching and, and building my, my career in, in
marketing. Uh, so let's crack into it. First of all,
PART 1: The Power of Copywriting
I'd like to show you this. Um, this is a demonstration of the power that
copywriting holds
and the ability to grasp the fundamentals of good copywriting really can have
this impact on any business that you work with. On the left,
we can clearly see, uh, the results. Uh, this is in the backend of W Commerce.
Um, these,
so these are the sale results of a business that I am still working with. Uh, this
was in the month before I started working with them, um,
before they had applied any of these fundamentals of copywriting and
advertising. Uh, and on the right was in the month after I started, um,
working with them after the contract had been signed. And you can see the
difference just in the, the height of the bars.
But if you look at the figures on the left, the one that, um, shows really the
biggest impact, if you look at that, every, uh,
average net daily sales went from 124 pounds to just over 600 pounds. So, you
know, that's almost, um,
gone up fivefold in the matter of, of a few days, over two months, really. Uh,
and I didn't perform any kind of wizardry to get these results. There wasn't a
huge, um,
technical strategy change or anything like that. This really just was using an
existing businesses channels, uh,
and the assets that they had and applying the fundamental principles of
copywriting,
of good copywriting to them to really pump up results. And that's all this was.
Uh, and you can see the results for yourself here.
So hopefully this is just a, a just to demonstrate what kind of effect this can
have in such a short space of
time. And I promise you that if you take these lessons to heart and you think on
them and you explore and you are curious and you are empathetic, um,
and you really go beyond the brief to try to, uh, to try and act these,
enact these results for your clients and for your projects, you will be able to do
it. Um,
I was in the exact same position as you a few years ago, uh, not really
understanding copywriting. Uh,
and now to be able to pull out results like this for businesses, you know, within
the matter of a month is, uh, it's, it's, yeah, it feels great. Um,
What Can You Expect?
but what can you expect? What can you expect from this presentation? From
this presentation? Um, you can really expect the,
you're gonna have a proven system for writing the best performing copy on any
project. That was really my,
my goal with this when I was in originally creating it. I wanted to give something
that was as practical as possible and gave as many
concrete answers as I, as I could to questions about how to research and how
to write copy and
how to edit rather than just talking about theory. You know, we do go into
theory, of course, cuz we have to,
and it's super important and you need to set up that workbench first before you
start using the tools on it. But I did also want to give a,
a system and the system that I use to write the copy that serves me well.
So that's what you can expect from this. You can expect a, a full-fledged system
for how to write copy,
but not just on emails and not just for ads and not just for sales pages. Uh, I,
I try to really break down the principles of writing to sell and persuasion and
psychology and how people, um, react to advertising.
I really try to get to the core of what I have seen over the last three years, um,
work and not work and show you, well, okay,
these are the kinds of things you need to consider no matter what campaign
you are working on, no matter what medium you're writing for, at the end of the
day,
you are writing to people and people are persuaded in certain ways. So I've
really tried to stick to a holistic, a holistic view of,
of how to persuade people online and, and through copy, not just through a
particular type. Um, which you could argue is,
is not as a, is not as good because some people will want to know specifically
about emails, and that's absolutely fine. Uh, but when I teach people, um,
especially if you are, if you are new, um, and especially when I'm teaching teams
who, who need to be on the same page about things,
I really just wanna give you the fundamentals of, of how you should be thinking
about persuading people in the first place before
you get lost. You know, in the nitty gritty of, of, oh, should I use this formula or
should I use that formula?
Or how should I position this? Like, first of all, we just need to talk about the
fundamentals of persuasion in copywriting.
So that's what you can expect from this, uh, presentation. We first need to
discuss the problem with copywriting and why a lot of
Problems With Copywriting and Why 'digital Marketers' Fail
digital marketers fail. There's no better place to start than with a quote from my
all-time favorite
copywriter, Gary Benga. And the quote is, never sell something just because you
want to sell it,
or indeed never advertise something simply in the way that you want to
advertise it. That quote is,
I would argue the most important quote you will ever hear in the field of
copywriting.
And the reason being is because whenever we are looking at marketing, and
whenever we're looking at sales or copywriting,
we're ultimately looking at persuasion. And persuasion needs to start with the
person on the other end of the ad,
not you. That is the crucial step to, to, to first kind of take, to understand this
field, uh,
Writing for a Company...
most marketing underperforms, because copywriters are taught to write for the
company, not for the prospect.
When I give this presentation, I'm usually giving it to, uh, a team. I'm usually
giving it to teams of people who already work in businesses and
already have a structure in place. Uh, and perhaps on the surface it seems more
suited to say something like this
there, but it's just as suited to someone who is a freelancer
and is looking to learn the fundamentals that are actually going to help them
with marketing.
Because whenever you are writing for a client,
you're trying to please two people. You're trying to please the target audience,
but you're also trying to please the client themselves.
You need them to be happy with it, and that's a huge problem. Um, and I'm not
gonna focus on that because if you spend time trying
to please the client, then you're not necessarily gonna write the best ad. I
understand that sometimes that's a necessity and, you know, needs must.
So if that's what you need to do to earn money, that's what you need to do. But I
don't wanna teach you about how to make it as a freelancer.
I want to teach you about how to write good ads and this concept
of most marketing underperforming because copywriters are not writing for the
prospect themselves. And when I say prospect, I mean the reader, um,
because they're not writing for the reader and instead they're writing to please
the company that they work for, or their boss or the client.
It doesn't do well and it's a, it's a key problem. Uh, it's probably the biggest
problem that I see in the world of marketing,
and it's not necessarily limited to trying to please a boss or trying to please a
client. Oftentimes, as Gary Benga says,
it's people trying to please themselves and thinking in ways that, Hey, I would
like to advertise something this way, or, Hey,
I would like to talk about this point because I would buy it if it was talking about
this point. You know, we, we are trapped inside our own heads,
and it's difficult for us to see other people's perspectives sometimes, but it's a
key thing to break out of. If we want to be a good copywriter,
we need to understand that we're not writing for ourselves and we're not writing
for a client, and we're not writing for a company or a boss.
We're writing for the reader for the prospect. And I'd like to demonstrate this in,
um, probably,
uh, a way that, that some of you may be surprised with because,
um, I'm gonna show you a television advert. Now. This television advert is a
perfect example of something that has been written
for a client, a company to please a boss or to please someone who has made
it, rather than thinking about the person who's actually going to respond to the
ad.
Okay, good fun. Um, that was the ad for the N Nissan 300 ZedX. Uh,
I'm not a car person, so I don't know what I just said. Um, but that's what it was.
It cost 200 million to produce, uh,
and buy the space for on television. It was named as Commercial of the Year by
Time Magazine, Adweek and USA Today.
And it was praised publicly by Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Seinfeld. However,
US sales of the model that's advertised in this ad went down 37% in the year
after it aired,
and the model was completely taken off the US market a year later. It was great
for Chiat, who is the advertising agency that came up with this ad,
but not so much for N Nissan and Advert's. Purpose is to sell.
That's it. There is no debate on that topic. If an ad campaign isn't helping a
product to sell,
then it's not succeeding as an ad. And that is a concept that a lot of people
outside advertising and unfortunately
some people inside advertising seem to struggle with. And this, this is a prime
offender, um, of this concept.
Uh, this ad was entertaining, it was new.
Uh, I imagine it was inspired by Toy Story. Uh, so it was fun and people loved it,
and people, oh, so that was a great ad.
The problem is when people say that was a great ad, it doesn't usually mean
that it was actually a very good ad because people
want to be entertained, um, most of the time, and they're not thinking about
what marketers are thinking about.
Marketers should be thinking about how many sales do this pull in. But people
are just thinking about how, yeah, I enjoyed that.
The question really needs to be, you may have enjoyed it, but did you go out and
buy a NI Nissan 300 zx? No,
then not such a great ad, and this was the problem that it had.
I wanna show you another advert now, uh, an advert that came out, uh, in the
same year as this one,
and we're gonna watch it and then we're gonna discuss it afterwards.
Writing for a Prospect...
If you were to take every honor, every award, everything positive that's been said
about the Toyota camera and lay them end
to end, you'd probably ask yourself, why did I do that with option package
savings?
Why not lease one for as little as 2 29 a month and come up with a fi accolades
of your own? The 1996 Camry,
the gold standard from Toyota. That ad was for the Toyota Camry, uh, in the
same year,
1996 is the first one we watched. Now, that AD was not recognized as a high
award-winning advert.
Um, you'll be high pressed to find any discussion about it online. I certainly
couldn't. It was never praised as revolutionary. In fact, I,
I can't even remember how many views it has on YouTube. I'd imagine most of
them are from me at this point. Uh, however,
US sales of the model were up by over 350,000, which is over 8% throughout the
lifespan of the ad.
And it was the best ever year for sales of the model. It actually became the
second highest, um,
in sales for a foreign car model in the US ever. Now, if we compare those results
to the results of the first ad that we looked
at, I think we can say with with certain confidence,
which one performed better as an ad, which one actually made more people buy
the car that it was representing.
At this point, some of you may be confused because some of you may already
have looked into advertising a little bit. You may already know a little bit about
copywriting online and think,
why am I showing you television adverts? Um, I'm showing you television
adverts, not because they're a good example of copywriting that we are gonna
be looking
at, but because they are the most recognizable kind of advertising ever, or
certainly with with our generations. You know,
we all grew up with televisions, and if you ask someone to think of an advert or
a commercial, um,
you know, the first thing they think of is television. That is what their mind goes
to. Uh,
and what we've discussed so far about focusing on the prospect and focusing
on what the prospect wants can be perfectly demonstrated
in television ads in the biggest way possible and on the largest scale
possible. And that really is why all of this is relevant to you.
We are not looking at television ads. I'm not even gonna suggest that that
second ad we looked at was an amazing
ad. And as we'll discuss, uh, in a, in a moment, there's no way for us to actually
say whether that ad caused those sales to go
up. We can't actually work that out. Um, and we'll come to discuss, discuss that
in a moment.
But all of this is relevant to you because you need to understand the difference
between an advert that people say is good and an advert that actually
Anti Market Focus: Beware of Vanity Metrics
is good. And the truth is, this anti-market focus, this, this anti prospect,
anti reader focus is even worse today in the digital age. And it's because things
like brand awareness, likes, reacts, shares,
comments and engagement are branded around as if they are what matters
when it comes to advertising.
People seem to think that likes and global reach equate to success in sales, and
they don't. At the end of the day,
like we said, if an ad isn't bringing in sales, it is not succeeding as an ad, and
that's what we need to remember. But today,
you'll see far more people boast and celebrate the fact that they hit a
benchmark in likes or they hit a benchmark in shares or comments
or a certain type of react. I have been in meetings where a whole slides of
presentations have been
dedicated to the difference in reacts on Facebook posts.
And it doesn't matter. It does not matter. Sure, maybe that's something
afterwards you can have a look at and, and,
and see if it correlates to anything in any way. But if you are talking about things
like that before you even mention sales,
then you are wasting potential of your campaigns. And for the next, well,
obviously I say for the next two days, for the next however many hours,
we're gonna push these ideas out of our minds because we don't care about
these things. And as we saw in those television adverse in that first one,
it was named, uh, out of the year, and it got all these, uh, awards and it re
received all this public recognition.
Well, it's even worse today because back then the only
real way that something could receive recognition was by win winning an award
that would then get circulated in magazines, on television,
on chat shows or whatever. But now in the age, age of social media, marketers
can claim success because x number of people
watched their video, or X number of likes were given on this post, or it reached
this many people,
or it made its way into 10% more countries or whatever the case may be. There
are far more, um,
opportunities for people to celebrate what I call vanity metrics, things that don't
really make a difference to sales. Uh, and it's dangerous,
especially if you are working with people in companies who get paid salaries,
whose jobs don't rely on the success or failure of a campaign in
sales. They just get paid a certain amount and then they can try and frame as
much
as they can as a win by bringing up these things as likes and reacts and chairs
and whatever it be. In fact, if you go onto many,
uh, advertising agencies websites and you go to their case study section, you
will see a lot of them bring up points like gain 50%
likes, or got x number of more followers. And those are the things they talk
about most. In some cases,
that's all they talk about, and they never talk about sales or, or acquisitions, um,
you know, measurable metrics that we're gonna discuss in the presentation.
So, as I said, we're gonna push these ideas out of our mind, and we're gonna
talk about the thing that actually matters when it comes to
marketing sales. And by consequence, the fundamentals of writing to sell. That
is what we care about.
How do we write copy that actually gets people to buy things?
And to begin to understand this, we need to look at the difference between two
schools of advertising
Direct and Indirect Response Schools of Advertising
indirect response and direct response. There's a key difference between these
two.
Perhaps you've already heard of them. Um, but even within people who has have
heard of direct response versus indirect
response, there still seems to be semantic arguments and, and a lack of
understanding o over what they actually mean.
So it's easiest if I show you some examples and then explain the difference.
These are some examples of indirect response ads. You can see the first ad
that we looked at in the top left. Um,
this has a bias towards British advertising. So if you are, uh, if you live in the uk,
you may recognize some of these. Um, but I'm sure, uh,
you'll, you'll, you get the gist of what they are. These ads are television posters,
um,
sometimes tweets and things of that nature. I'm not gonna tell you what makes
them indirect response just yet. You,
you may already know. Um, but what I wanna do is show you direct response
ads,
and these are some direct response ads. Um, by the way, when I say the word
ad, I don't necessarily mean, uh, paid ad. I'm just talking about a,
a form of advertising just to clear that I've known. I say it could be pages or, or
emails or whatever. Um, so these are some direct response ads.
Hell of a lot more text. I'm sure you'll agree for the most part, um, probably looks
a lot more boring to most people. Uh,
and there is one key difference between the two that you will see on pretty
much all of these ones, but none of these.
And the difference is immediate action. Direct response ads have buttons and
forms and coupons.
They have ways for you to immediately respond to the ad. They're trying to get
you to do something straight away. In the digital age,
this is most commonly seen with a link, with a button, with something to click.
We can see in the, in the top middle, a form to fill out. In the middle left,
we have a Spotify banner ad, which says, try premium free. It's clearly a link. It's
getting you to do something now. But if we look at indirect response,
none of these are asking you to do something immediately and they're not
giving you a way to do something immediately.
They may be suggesting, Hey, buy our product. But if someone sees that poster
in the,
in the top of the middle and they go out and buy a bottle of detol, a bottle of, um,
of, of disinfectant,
how do you know that they came from that ad? Or it was because of that ad?
You have no idea. And that's the key difference, a media action.
Because direct response is only bothered about getting people to react to
things in a measurable way
with any of these ads, they can clearly be tracked. If someone clicks a button,
software kicks in and it will tell you, Hey, this number of people saw this ad and
this number of people click the button
in the newspaper ads that you can see. There are things that can be cut out.
There are specific numbers to be called that are dedicated just to that, uh,
specific ad. So they can tell exactly how many people saw the ad and how many
people called
or responded or sent something in or filled out a form. That is the point, that is
the difference between indirect response and direct response.
But where people get confused is people seem to think that direct response is a
style.
They seem to think that these kinds of ads have a style to them. And some of
them may have a style to them,
but they consider that direct response. They consider that conversational tone
direct response.
That is not what direct response means. Direct response is an objective. It
means I want to respond, I want someone to respond to this directly.
It's simply an objective. It is not a style, it is not a conversational way of writing.
It's not a particular way of of, uh,
structuring your copy or paragraph structure or having one sentence per line or
anything like that. Direct response is simply an objective. I want someone to do
something straight away that I can measure.
That is what direct response means. So if you're ever in an argument with
someone and you are trying to defend
direct response, do not think that you are defending a particular style of writing.
You are just, um, defending a particular objective in advertising.
You'll also see people say that indirect response is ineffective and it's not worth
it.
And there seems to be a tribal war sometimes between direct response
copywriters and indirect response copywriters.
Mainly it's direct response copywriters with egos that are a bit too big trying to
shit on people who do indirect response.
But this isn't the case either. Indirect response is not ineffective in the right
hands. It is very effective.
And the biggest companies in the world like Nike, like Cadbury, McDonald's,
burger King, uh, all these huge companies, Amazon partake in indirect response
advertising where they're not asking
anyone to do anything straight away. They're not giving you an option to do
something straight away. They're just saying, Hey, look, we exist.
And it can be used to great effect in many, many campaigns. So please do not
think that indirect response is not valuable or is not
effective, cuz it's not true. And in fact, we have a couple of extremely talented
direct response copywriters. Um,
otherwise, uh, some people call them brand copywriters in the copywriting
collective.
Um, so just wanna clear that up as well. Anyway, I felt I'm getting sidetracked
here. I know I , I know I'm getting into semantics. Um, but yeah,
we know the difference is immediate action. Um, so anyway, circling back to
what we were talking about,
What's the Problem With Modern Copywriting?
what is the problem with so much modern copywriting? Well, despite what I just
said a moment ago,
and despite my slight defense of indirect response, the problem with modern
copywriting or a much modern copywriting is that it
takes inspiration from the wrong school of advertising. It does take inspiration
from indirect response.
And for most of us who actually need to make money as copywriters and our
freelancers and need to work with clients and businesses and
improve results, taking inspiration from indirect response is a mistake.
And you shouldn't do it, especially if you are learning, especially if you are
starting out,
the only indicator of good copy is its measurable results. And in marketing, this
ultimately means sales. And as we've discussed,
the only way to precisely measure results of an ad is for that ad to be direct
response for it to give a clear and obvious action that
the reader needs to take. And then see how many people follow through with
action.
And that being the case, it means that if you are a copywriter or an aspiring
copywriter and you want to
know that you are learning the best principles and things that actually work, you
need to take inspiration from direct response advertising adds that live
or die by their ability to sell end of story. You need to take inspiration from direct
response and you need to study direct
response, especially as a beginner direct response advertising equal the
fundamentals that we need to write to sell.
So why isn't every agency focusing on direct response copywriting? Why is it a
relatively underground term that, you know,
doesn't crop up in the mainstream much? Well, simply put, it's because a lot of
agencies and a lot of marketing
agencies don't need to have that level of success. They don't need to be
insanely, um,
obsessed with learning about direct response and learning about selling
because a lot of agencies don't actually need to make
many, um, increases in results to, to get paid. A lot of agencies just work with
clients who are happy to get more
followers or to increase brand awareness or to have a cool new looking
campaign. It's often more of a, a vanity, um, exercise than anything else. Uh,
agencies who pay their copyright salaries, uh, again, not all of them, of course,
there are many amazing direct response agencies.
There are many agencies that do take inspiration from direct response and use
this as training. Um, but a lot of agencies,
especially in ones I've worked with in the past as well, um, they just employ
people who are, um, quote unquote good at writing.
Uh, and that's that they go, okay, Wayo cool. They're good at writing, they're
quite creative, they're entertaining,
they'll be good in the advertising department. Cool. Um, so the reason that every
advertising agency isn't talking about direct response,
and the reason you may not have heard of it too many times before is because
they don't really need to. That they're often on big contracts where the
businesses they work with don't
need to see a huge jump in results. They don't need to, uh, increase sales
tenfold for it to have an impact.
They are in salary jobs that are relatively cushy, um, that don't always require
loads of, um, hard, uh,
fought and hard one research to establish. So that's why you, you often see this
type of, um, advertising and direct response mainly, uh,
being popular among freelancers and people who are kind of more underground
and, and go into businesses and, and do consulting work. So anyway,
direct response advertising, um, very important. And this is what we are
focusing on. This is what this presentation is about.
It's how to take advantage of direct response copywriting. Alright,
so we've spoken about direct response advertising and why it's important, uh,
but copywriting specifically,
what are we trying to do when we write copy? What is the forever rule of
copywriting? Well, there is one,
The Role of Copy
uh, uh, I would argue this is probably the best way to think about copywriting.
The role of your copy is to connect your product to your prospect's dominating
conscious desire using only your advertising
message. So I'm gonna say that again, connect your product to your prospect's
dominating conscious desire using
only your advertising message. That is the role of copy.
Now, that may seem like a fairly obvious phrase, but it's also a very clear
phrase. It has a very precise meaning. I in,
in other words, uh, if you need it, if you need it in, in said in another way, uh, you
need to talk about what people already have in their own heads,
what they're thinking about. Uh, and that's all you have to work with. Really. You
need to show them that your product or whatever it is that you are
advertising can help whatever it is that they care about. That's kind, that's kind
of it. And we'll come onto, we'll come onto, you know,
how to apply this, uh, in a moment. But remembering this phrase is gonna help
you
keep that mission clear in your head. And while a million things are trying to
fight for your attention on a campaign,
you can always bring it back to this phrase and go, am I actually doing this? If
yes, good,
if I'm not, I need to rethink how I'm, how I'm writing this copy and how I'm
moving forward with this project.
Because most marketers and businesses focus on what they like about their
product, not what it means to the customer.
So if you can remember this phrase, it will put you ahead of 90% of marketers
who are working today,
particularly those who are in agency, um, level jobs,
uh, and, and who are just being paid a salary, who get, who like to get distracted
by, by shiny objects and trends.
If you can remember this, then you are the reason that the business you're
working for is
focused and is concentrating and is winning results. And it really brings us back
to the beginning. And well, the, you know,
the first thing we said, uh, the first thing that, that Gary Benga so kindly brought
up for us, which is that you should never advertising some, uh,
never advertise something simply in the way that you want to advertise it. You
need to make sure you are focusing on the prospect,
how any prospect decides what they're going to buy. Because we can sit here all
we like and talk about good ads,
and we can talk about things that seem to work in marketing. But if we don't
discuss how decisions actually get made
A Few Things to Keep in Mind
and how people make buying decisions, these are three books, uh, fascinating
books. I would, I would highly recommend you read them.
I I'm not gonna do a detailed breakdown of them right now. Uh, but they give a
good view, uh,
a good insight into behavioral economics and consumer psychology. Uh, and
how humans and, and, and in a broader sense than that,
just to how humans behave and why we behave in certain ways. Very interesting
books. Uh, like I say,
I'm not gonna go into everything that they they teach, but I am gonna bring up
five general rules that they seem to
gravitate, uh, around and rules that countless marketing
tests and psychological studies seem to prove. Time and time again, bear in
mind, these are just general rules. There are always exceptions.
N they won't work in every context, but they're things that we should keep in
mind. Uh, and they are as follows.
One, our brains are wired to categorize things immediately. Two, the longer we
take to make decisions the less confident about than we are.
Three, we rely on herd mentality more than we'd like to admit. Four logic is
secondary and five decision making is based on emotion.
Now each of these are important in their own right and you will see, uh, these
concepts and, and shoot off concepts, uh,
crop up in the rest of this presentation and in marketing out there in the real
world. But right now it is that last one that we really care about.
It's that last one that is, is probably the most important decision making is
based on emotion,
not logic, not reason. We are not rational creatures who sit down and consider
every possibility in
every avenue before we land on a decision. Our brains are wired to categorize
things immediately as the first points points
out. We have evolved to make quick judgements and to make snap
decisions cuz if we don't make snap decisions, we don't survive. So our brains
in all things like to work out what it is and
have a decision to land on something. So we know how to respond to it. And
that's why emotion is so important, because emotion has developed to,
uh, to take from past experiences that we've had and things that we know we
already hold dear or that we already care about and bring those up whenever a
decision
needs to be made so we can quickly make it. There's there, there's a potential to
get into another semanti argument here about exactly what
emotion means. Um, in the context of copywriting, I'm gonna tell you what I
believe it means and what I've found it most helpful
to, to imagine when I'm talking about emotions. Emotions are anything that your
prospect knows that they already care
about. So it's anything they already have within them, inside of them that if you
bring it up,
they're already immediately interested because they view it as relevant. So
whatever it is that they already care about in some way, whether that be,
uh, a problem, so a pain that they have, whether it be a desire, something they
want, whether it be a deeply held belief,
whether it be prejudice, whatever it is, if it's inside them and they already care
about in some way or have some
stake in it, then that is emotional and that's what you're trying to tap into. You're
trying to tap into those emotions. So whenever we're advertising,
whenever we're writing copy and we're trying to, to get someone to read it and
we're trying to get their attention and,
and make sure that we get them on, on our side, there's a, there's another
phrase that we can use to, to remember what we're trying to do.
We're trying to join the conversation already happening in their head. We want
to pick on points that they already know they care about.
We don't wanna make them do work. We don't want to bring up brand new
angles
that they may not have thought of before in subjects that they don't particularly
care about and try to make them care about.
It rarely does that work. It's very difficult to do. Instead we wanna take things
that they already care about,
that they already identify with, that they already have problems in or desires of.
And we want to bring those up cuz we know that's a surefire away to get people
to listen to what we have to say. And if you need a way to visualize this, when
we're advertising a product, this is effectively what we're doing.
There are a set number of facts about a product. You know, take an iPhone for
example. The, the product of products.
There is a camera that has a certain level of quality. There are different colors,
there are storage sizes.
There is the fact that it has a touch screen of different sizes, different internals.
Each year it gets better. Uh, it only has one button.
They remove the headphone jack, whatever it is. Uh, there are many, many facts
that we could state and we could list about the iPhone.
And many of those could be, uh, points to advertise. We could twist them in
certain ways to make them, uh, feel more appealing. Uh,
and we'll come onto how to do things like that in the rest of this presentation.
But for right now, we just need to accept that there are many different facts that
we could focus
on when writing advert about an iPhone. But let's say we're advertising to
someone,
there are beliefs and problems and desires that this person will already have.
And this is the circle on the right that we're looking at on this diagram. They
already have things that they know they care about,
they have issues that they want to fix. They have, uh, desires that they, they
want that the things that they, they are,
they feel like they're missing out on. Uh, and they have deep held beliefs and,
and opinions. Um,
and what we are trying to do as a marketer
is hit that sweet spot in the middle where these two circles cross over where we
can take an objective fact about our product and we can twist it in a,
an emotionally appealing way to line up with something that they also already
care about. So let's say for example,
that the thing that our person really cares about is, um,
or the problem they feel they have is that the, the quality of cameras, the, the
quality of photos that they take is not where they want it to be.
And it's annoying and they can never get the the style right. And they like to go
on hikes at night and take photos of the sky,
but they always come out crap to them. Bringing up the new colors of the
iPhone. May not work,
probably wouldn't be bothered about the new colors of the iPhone. And if that's
the thing that they first see about it, and that's the thing they hear a lot,
they're gonna ignore it because it doesn't cross over into that middle section.
However,
if we can talk about the new camera of the iPhone and talk about how amazing
it is and how it's been specially tampered to, uh, tampered with to,
to take photos of the night sky, all of a sudden it becomes far more relevant to
them because it's fixing a
problem that they already have. So even though we could select one of an
infinite number of facts about our
product, we want to try and get the one that crosses over into something they
already care about. Again, this may seem completely obvious to you and um,
I hope it does cuz it, you know, it, it it should, um, to a certain degree because it
just seems, well, yeah, this is how we, you know,
of course we should show people what they care about. But so many times we
gloss over this simple fact.
And I'm gonna show you three examples, um, just from my personal world too,
from my personal experience and one from a, uh,
not even from a marketing context of where this just doesn't happen and where
people don't do this is, uh,
do this and businesses don't even think to this level about how to advertise,
uh, their goods. So I'm gonna show you three examples. On the left side of the
screen, you're gonna see the, um,
original version of whatever it is that I'm showing you. Uh, we'll call this the
control, which means the, um,
best performing version up to that point. In reality, these things hadn't been
tested before. Um, but on the left it's the control,
the thing that was already there on the right, we're going to have the thing that
replaced it and we're also gonna show you,
uh, the the conversion rates of them and, and how well they did.
This first one, um, is actually an example of the business I showed you at the
very beginning,
which those results, um, or, or showing how effective copywriter can be. That's,
this is the business. Um, the, the, the,
where those results were taken from on the left, we had their initial landing
page,
the converser rate was about 1.15% of people who saw it, um, ended up clicking
the button. Uh, and uh, well clicking the button, yeah,
that was a, um, which is abysmal is abysmally. Um, low on the right. We had the
version that replaced it that, um,
that I wrote after conducting research. And you can see the conversion rate
again about tenfold, uh,
what the original was. This is a prime example of the difference between
just writing something for the sake of it and just kind of going, yeah, that seems
like it will be okay. It kind of makes sense. Yeah, that sounds nice.
Versus looking at what prospects actually care about and finding that crossover
between a fact about the product or the service and an emotion
of the prospect on the left helping your hive to thrive and survive.
Uh, that is clearly fluff copy what I would call fluff copy. It's just what someone
has gone. Yep, that rhymes. That sounds good. Oh yeah,
I should probably explain what this business even is. Um, it's a, uh, uh, it's a pub
and bar supplier in the UK so that they help pubs and bars get
snacks basically for the, uh, for the best possible price. They, uh, they sell to
them. Um,
on the left you can just see it was clearly something that someone said, well,
yeah, that's kind of describes what we do and it's pretty generic and yeah,
it rhymes cool, that'll be enough. When I conducted research for this business,
what I found was that one of the biggest complaints about, um, other
businesses in this industry were, or in this market I should say,
were how they forced the customer to, to lock into contracts that were
annoying, um, and complicated and,
and just generally confusing ones that they found hard to get out of and they
didn't quite know how to edit and they weren't sure of exactly what was
coming and when it was coming, that was a big bug bear. So I made sure that
when we rewrote this landing page,
we included that, we made that front and center the point of the headline.
So perfect for your pub wholesale prices, no confusing contracts.
The conversion rate seems to have justified that decision, uh, and seems to be
showing that just by, um,
presenting something that the prospect already cares about,
tapping into that emotion by saying, Hey, look, we understand what you are
going through. We understand your problem,
we understand what you want. Just by doing that, it's increased results by 10
times. And again,
I'm not even gonna comment on if the rest of the copy is amazing or if it could
be improved. The facts are in front of us just by doing that sl that one thing we
are making use of traffic that was otherwise slipping away and just exiting the
pages. Um, so there you go. That's one example of,
of where a motion first beats over just what I call logic first. Anything where it's
just like, yep, that sounds good. Oh yeah,
that seems logical. Uh, it seems like that is something that people would care
about. The difference between assuming and actually doing the research and
finding out,
um, what care, what matters to people. This is another example, uh, different
medium. This was a leaflet. Uh,
it was actually the first leaflet that I ever, uh, wrote. So that was quite fun.
Uh, it was advertising the opening of a vegetarian vegan takeaway
in a town. Uh, and the left, the left version was the first, um, leaflet that went out
to a selection of about 2000 houses.
It was just a menu saying, you know, new, uh, listing the prices of, of the
products and, and showing some photos of the products. Uh,
approximately 19 orders came back from that. And we have to say
approximately because, you know,
there could have been referrals, we don't know. Um, we could only track it by
the, uh,
addresses of people who ordered. So that's how, you know, seeing if they came
from a certain postcode. But anyway, that was the,
that was the first one that that was sent out when the business came to me and
asked if I could help. Um,
I asked myself, okay, well do people actually care immediately about a vegan
vegetarian takeaway?
Is it something people really care about? Not necessarily. If you're vegan,
vegetarian, clearly that's a,
that's a link and it's going to be interesting to you. So, you know, we don't really
need to worry about, uh, vegans, vegetarians cuz they're just going to to try it out
anyway. But for most people,
and for people who we could target, what is it that they care about right now?
Why might someone want to have a vegan or vegetarian
dish? It's not necessarily because they're vegan or vegetarian. There might be
something else there. Uh, at the time,
I think this must have been in February, uh, or no, maybe January actually.
Cause I think it was, oh, I can't remember, January or February, 2021.
Um, the United Kingdom, uh, it where the town was, um, where this, uh, leaflet
went out was in lockdown.
And the something that people really cared about during lockdown, they felt
guilty about was the fact that they weren't as healthy as they once
were and that they'd gained weight and that they couldn't exercise and they felt
like they were having more, um, fast food and, and takeaways. So I thought,
okay, well let's try and play on that. Let's see if that makes people more likely to
order. So instead of just saying,
Hey, we're a new takeaway order from us, um, we, we went with the big, um,
obvious headline,
how to live healthly after lockdown. Uh, again, not necessarily an amazing
headline, but it's hitting on something that people already care about that we
know is
dear to people. Uh, we then deliver some value. I'm not gonna discuss
everything that's going on in this leaflet,
but we then deliver a bit of free value and then we announce that we're a new
takeaway that can, can help them out and shows them how to order and,
and the website to go to. So, and then we can, of course, we can see by the, the
conversions, the, the orders that came from it. Um, again,
around 10 times as many came in just because we, instead of just going, well,
that seems good, we'll just do that. It was, okay,
well, what do people care about right now? And linking up the service that we
could provide, or a fact about the product that we had to something that we
already knew the
prospects would care about. And then lastly, as an example, that's outside of
marketing and in no way, um,
is drawing any kind of political bias. I'm just using this as a very clear, uh,
example that is anti-marketing. Um, this was a, uh,
television debate that took place between Nick Kleig and Nigel Farage in, uh, I,
God, you know, 20 between 2014 and 2016. It would've been one of those years.
Uh, a the audience, the studio audience was asked who won the debate,
and the debate was about Brexit in the United Kingdom, whether the United
Kingdom should leave the European Union. Um,
Nick Clegg was widely considered to have had the, um, better argument in
terms of statistics and facts and,
um, projections. He was bringing out actual figures and he was talking about
trade and, um,
national status, uh, and economic repercussions and things that were quite
math based and science based and, and had clear cut projections behind them.
And Nigel Farage spoke about immigration and taking back control,
uh, of the United Kingdom. And Nigel Farage pretty much wiped the floor with
Nick Legg, and you could obviously argue that it was also about, um, his ability
as an a.
Um, but ultimately the difference between the two came down to
what they spoke about Nigel Farage concentrated on what people were already
thinking about because the hot topics in the Brexit referendum were
immigration and, um, uh, basically eu uh, legislation over the United Kingdom,
those were the things that were on everyone's lips. And that was effectively
what triggered the referendum in the first place.
So whereas Nick Clegg was coming at an angle from, Hey, look, these are things
that you should care about because they're gonna be impactful.
Nigel Farage said, these are things that I know you already care about, so I'm
gonna talk about these and I'm gonna, um,
play on the emotions you're already feeling about them because I'm gonna, I'm
gonna give, um,
an impassioned speech about why they matter and why I'm right on these
subjects. So again,
just another example of how f tapping into people's emotions and what they
already care about and what they already have on their minds is far more
effective than talking, um, about logic.
And really that's why decision making is emotional. That that's what emotional
decision making is.
It's about tapping into the things that people already care about. Um, you know,
when I say logic and when I was using logic first as a, as the left side of all
those examples, you know,
logic just means anything that's assumed, anything that people think that
anyone else should care about,
anything that someone thinks sounds good because it rhymes. It's all kind of, it,
it's never based on research and, and,
and it's never grounded in the emotion of the prospect. It's always because of
some other kind of logic. It's always because of, Hey,
people should be caring about this thing, therefore I'm gonna talk about it rather
than, well, I know they already care about it. So, um, that's what I'm gonna play
on.
This is not seen anywhere better than in headlines because ultimately
emotional decisions are immediate and they happen straight
away. Uh, and we need to show the prospect that what we have to say is
relevant to them
in our first point of contact because they're not gonna give you a second
chance. They're not gonna read a hundred words before making a decision.
Um, our brains are fine tuned to respond to headlines,
whether it be YouTube videos or Netflix listings or newspaper articles or landing
pages or subject lines on emails. You know,
that first block of text that's bigger and bolder than the rest of them is what we
are conditioned to judge things
on the headline. Uh, and we'll, we'll cover headlines in more detail later on in
their presentation and we'll go
into what makes them work and, and what their purpose is. But for this point in
the presentation in,
in the proceedings and what we're talking about, we just need to consider what
headlines are doing and,
and what headlines are doing is that they are forcing our prospects to reach an
emotional decision. We're forcing our prospects to say,
yes, this is relevant to me, or No, this is not relevant to me. When you look at a
headline like this, which was for a newspaper ad, uh,
do you make these mistakes in job interviews? There are two reactions to this
headline. Ooh, I, I dunno, maybe I do make these mistakes in job interviews. Oh,
okay. Like, let's, let's have a look. Or, um,
I'm don't care about job interviews, so uh, I'm not gonna even bother reading
this. Those are the two reactions that you get to that.
And that first reaction is hopefully gonna be mostly, um, given by people who
are in between jobs,
who are worried about how they perform a job, uh, job interviews and who are
considering moving career soon or,
or trying to do it right now. Uh, cuz it's so clearly obvious and relevant to them
that they go, Hey, yeah,
you know what? This is on my mind right now. I'm going to read and see what
you have to say.
Of course you also get people who are just intrigued and that's fine too. But the
point is, it's clearly calling out to the people that this
ad is intended to target, which is people who are between jobs, people who are
thinking of moving careers, people who do want to feel like, yes,
I wanna be confident when I go into job interviews. And it tells that story straight
away by presenting what
the topic is of the ad and if it's gonna be relevant to us. Um,
so even if your headline is repulsing certain people immediately, that's fine as
well. It should do that.
People should also be able to tell if it's irrelevant to them straight away. A
headline shouldn't appeal to everyone.
It should appeal to the target audience of the ad. And headlines like this do a
great job. What you wanna avoid, um,
and this is, and something I wanna show you is a bad example, an example of
where the person clearly doesn't understand that they need to get
people to reach an emotional decision that they're trying to tap into existing
problems and desires and beliefs.
This was a genuine headline that I found on Facebook, on a Facebook ad, uh, as
I was scrolling through. It's from a cold ad,
which means that I had had no previous engagements with this company. I'd
never seen any of their stuff online before,
nor had I been on their website. Uh, but it was still targeted at me.
So it's the first point of contact I am having with this company. I'm not gonna
name the company the creative above the,
the image was the same as the headline, the same words, and I think it was just
a photo of two, uh, women with a piece of paper.
There was nothing specific or particularly des about it. But the headline reads,
X's 15 years of experience to help you live your Best life. What the fuck does
that mean? I don't know. Uh,
I've never seen this company before. I don't know what they do. I'm not sure
what their product is and this isn't revealing anything to me about
their product or service. But even worse than that, it's not showing me how it's
relevant to
my life or to my pains or to my desires or to my beliefs. I simply don't care. So
this isn't even repulsing me,
like in this example, if I was happy in a job and I didn't care about job interviews,
this is this,
um, repulse is perhaps too strong word, but I would be able to clearly see
straight away that this is not relevant to
me. So I can clearly back away from it. But this headline, it's doing neither, it's
not attracting me all, all repulsing me. I, I don't know anything I, I,
I'm not sure what this is trying to say and I don't wanna give it the time to find
out because the brain's default response is to ignore.
If we don't know what something is and it's not, we can't see how it's relevant to
us in any way.
If it's not particularly intriguing, then we just ignore it. And not only am I ignoring
this cuz I probably am not the target audience,
but also the target audience of this are also probably ignoring it because
nothing there is calling out to an emotion that they already have.
It's not forcing them to reach an emotional decision. It's not calling out to an
existing pain or desire or belief.
It's just there, it's just something that someone has clearly gone. Yeah, well let's
just talk about ourselves and yeah,
that seems kind of logical cuz we're saying about how good we are. Um, and
yeah, people like to to to live well. So yeah, we'll put that cuz that sounds good.
They've clearly done, they've clearly put no effort into researching what
prospects actually
specifically care about right now. Now that we know how important that first
point of contact is and how crucial
it is to meet the customer where they are and to reflect their emotions in our
own copy, we may be thinking,
is there an easy way to do that? Is there a simple process that we can follow to
make sure that we are meeting
them at the same point every single time, especially when we first talk to them.
But also when we continue our sales argument and we continue to write our
copy,
while thankfully there is an easy way to know how to, um, to well to know where
to start and, and how to continue your copywriting.
5 Stages of Awareness
And it's the universal prospects journey that's often overlooked in the
mainstream world of marketing. And you may have heard of it before,
but it's something called the stages of awareness. And there are five stages of
awareness. This was a concept, uh,
first introduced and popularized by uh, Eugene Schwartz in his book
Breakthrough Advertising.
If you can pick up a copy of Breakthrough Advertising, I'd highly recommend
reading, well all of it,
but particularly this section cuz he'll explain it far better than I do. Uh, I believe
it's in chapter two.
And he discusses with us how no matter where a prospect is in relation to
buying your product,
whether they are absolutely ready or whether they have never heard of your
company before or whether they know of similar products, but but haven't,
haven't, uh, experienced yours, they always fall within one of five stages of
awareness.
And our job as a copywriter is quite simply to move
prospects through those stages of awareness. So they're ready to buy and
they're very easy to remember
and they are. And we start at the top with unaware. If your reader is unaware,
it means that they don't know that they have a problem that needs solving
because ultimately every product is solving a problem.
Whether that be a pain like we've discussed or it's granting a desire, uh, or it's
tying in with a belief that someone has and,
and taking advantage of that. But regardless, a product is always fulfilling
something for someone.
It's always solving a problem. And if someone's in the unaware category,
it means they don't even know that they have a problem that needs to be solved.
Let alone that your product exists. Typically,
you won't write to unaware audiences In many markets, I personally in, in e-
commerce, rarely,
or I don't think I've ever written to a fully unaware audience. There are some, uh,
markets, especially I know in financial publishing where unaware audiences
are target audiences, um, relatively often. So it, it differs from market to market,
but most of the time,
I would say in gigs that you are getting as a freelancer, you won't be writing to
people who are unaware and they,
they tend to be the most difficult people to, to write to. Uh, and I'm also gonna
go through what you should be doing when you're writing to
these different stages of awareness and, and giving you examples of it as well.
The next stage of awareness, which is a fairly common one, is problem aware.
And this is where your reader knows they have a problem that needs solving,
but they don't know of any solutions yet. So quite a simple one, and again,
I'll give you an example in a moment. Then there's solution aware, which is your
reader knows of solutions that will solve their problem,
but they don't yet know about your product and how that is also a solution or
how it can provide the same solution.
Product aware means your reader knows of your product, but isn't fully
convinced that they want it yet.
And most aware is that your reader knows of your product, knows exactly what
it does and knows they want it.
So clearly our objective as copywriters is to move our prospects into that most
aware category. Um,
you can really imagine copywriting as an exercise in moving prospects through
the stages of awareness.
And there is no one place that everyone starts. It's not as if you're always going
to be writing to a problem where audience,
you're not always going to be writing to a solution aware audience. It differs
from campaign to campaign. For example,
if I'm writing to people who have bought the products before or are part of the
subscription service or something like that, then they're most likely to fall.
Well, they're definitely going to fall into that product aware or most aware
category cuz they're existing customers. Therefore,
I'm not gonna try and write to them as if they're a problem aware audience
necessarily. Um, and similarly,
if I'm writing to someone who has never heard of a product before, uh,
um, and they don't even know that there are
products like out there, they, they don't know of the solution, but they have a
clear problem, then they're gonna be in that problem aware stage. So it really
differs. Um,
and we're also going to talk later on about how to identify what stage of
awareness someone is in because it all comes down to research at the end of
the
day. So don't worry right now if you are still a bit confused on how to identify
that because we are, we are gonna come on to talk to it, uh, to talk about it.
But for the time being, let's just look at how you would tackle each of these
stages of awareness.
If you're writing to someone in the unaware stage, you can only appeal to the
identity of the reader. Uh, like I've said, you,
you may never write to, to anyone who is unaware. Uh, but the problem with the
unaware stage is that people don't know that they have
a problem. Therefore, you can only really try to grab their attention and intrigue
them
by talking about something that they already believe or something that they
already are. And I'll show you an example of this in a moment.
With problem aware, you need to show your reader that you understand their
problem and then claim that you have a solution to it. So, very simple solution
aware,
you need to show your reader that you understand the solution that they're
aware of and go on to prove your product achieves it or is even better than that
existing solution. Product aware. You need to reiterate your best promises and
claims of your product and prove
why your product is the best choice for the reader. And most aware for people
who are basically right on the edge of buying,
you just need to overcome any final objection or show them an offer that they'll
find hard to refuse. But do you see that in each one of these stages?
With each objective you are linking to what the product, uh, what the prospect
already knows and where they already are.
So each of these stages, no matter where they're in, you can always do
something to join the conversation that's already happening in
their head. You wanna make sure that you hit on the stage of awareness they're
in and do the right thing linked to it.
If I am writing to someone who is product aware and they've already heard of
the product and they already know what it
does, I don't want to write to them as if they're in the problem aware stage cuz
they've already been through that.
They already know that they have a problem and they know there are solutions
and they know of your product. So there's no point of me in tracking back to try
and convince them that I
understand their problem. It's just a waste of words. Similarly, if I am
approaching someone who is problem aware and they know that they have
an issue with something, I don't necessarily want to open with the name of my
product and talk about how
it's the best because they may not even understand that solutions exist for their
problem yet.
And a product name isn't necessarily going to grab their attention and allow
them to understand that I get what their um, issues are.
I need to write in the stage where they are, like we've said before, we need to
join the conversation that's already happening in their head.
We need to make them reach an emotional decision straightaway and appeal to
their emotions, appeal to their problems, their desires, their beliefs.
So let me give you some, uh, well, not real life cuz I've made these ones up. Um,
but let me give you some examples of headlines in these different stages of
awareness and just to show how universal this is. I have chosen, uh, an industry
that I have never written in before, uh, with, with a,
with a product I know nothing about, uh, which is golf. Just to give you
examples of just power.
By knowing the stage of awareness that someone is in, I can craft a headline
that's far more relevant no matter what the industry
is. Uh, so for the, for the purpose of this exercise, I have chosen a golf course
that allows people to improve their putting
game. Bear in mind, I know nothing about golf. Some of these words may not
make sense, uh, but I, but I just,
I wrote these out quickly to to show as a, as an example of, of how simple it
becomes using the stages of awareness.
So if someone is unaware that they even have a problem yet and they don't even
know that they want to improve their putting game,
all I can reach out to is their identity. So I write club level golfers could be in for
a big surprise this
September because all that is doing, and all I can do at this stage is call out to
their identity,
something that they associate with themselves and intrigue them with a, you
know, obviously with a bit of intrigue a bit, um, saying something like,
Hey, if you read on this may be relevant to you. So they may not know that they
have a problem yet or know that they want to
improve their putting game, but the fact that I'm calling out their identity is
giving me the best chance of
getting them to read on. So that's why I go with a headline like that. In the
problem aware stage, this person will know that they have an issue,
uh, that for example, that their, uh, their handicap is not as low as they want it to
be. Again,
I think that's a , I think that's a real thing. Um, so I write Golf Pro denies his
handicapped cutting method gives club players
an unfair advantage. I'm not gonna go through all the techniques that these
headlines are, are using. Um, but you can see there how I'm bringing up the,
the topic of cutting a handicap and I'm implying I'm the implicit promise that I
am that I'm giving to people is that if you read on,
you are gonna find out something about how to cut your handicap and I know
you care about that right now.
So that's why we use a headline like that in Solution Aware where we say that
people understand that to cut their handicap,
they need to be better at putting and they know that that's the solution to their
problem. I hit on that straightaway with a really simple headline,
how to Sharpen Your Short Game, no additional equipment needed. Uh,
obviously that last bit is just a, you know, a suffix that's, uh,
doing something else, but you can see that I'm hitting on the solution straight
away by bringing
up, I understand that you know what to do and I'm gonna show you how to do it.
In an ad like that, when that's my headline, that's when I would typically go on to
introduce my product
relatively quickly because I know that they're already solution aware and they're
already looking out for things that can provide that solution or
better things that can provide that solution. If someone is product aware, so
they have heard about my course that I'm selling, I will bring it up in the,
in the headline. So I say Achieve Flats stick mastery in just two weeks.
And like we said in the product to our stage, we want to reiterate the best claims
and promises of our product.
So I'm introducing a timeframe and saying, look, you can have this within two
weeks. I'm allowing people to imagine, oh wow,
I can have this huge benefit. I could achieve this flat stick mastery, which is also
the name of the course in a very specific timeframe. And a,
a short enough timeframe for me to imagine having it now. So I'm reiterating a
promise of my product.
And then most aware for people who have heard of the product and they know
they want it, they may just have a slight objection. It could be anything.
In this case we'll say it's the uncertainty of it working and they just wanna know
that their, their cash is safe and they're not blowing any money. We,
we open with, uh, a, a very clear offer, a hundred percent refund if you don't lose
at least five strokes within a single
month. So there we're, we're pretty much putting our skin in the game and
saying, Hey,
we know you like this. Um, we, I'm joining the conversation that's happening in
your head cause I know you already want it and we are also providing this
guarantee for you.
So you don't need to worry if it doesn't work. And then you can see some real
life or you know, um, uh, made up. But ,
uh, examples of how the stages of awareness work in a headline.
I know I'm only talking about headlines now because we've been speaking about
the emotional decision and the importance of joining the conversation that's
happening in someone's head straight away. But the stages of awareness can
also be used to guide the rest of your copy,
which is something we'll come on to look at as we go on the presentation. But
for the time being, we just need to see how headlines and how that first point of
contact with our
copy can be made so much better and easier. And we can take the randomness
away by following the stages of awareness.
And for the sake of clarity, I've also given some real life examples of headlines
I've seen out and about, uh, some I've written or not, some maybe two I've
written, uh,
to show you where they would come in these stages. Usually this is a bit of an
interactive section where I ask people if they can,
um, identify them, uh, but for the sake of it, I've just shown you what they are.
Uh, so you can kinda have a look around,
um, at your own ledger. So pause it now and, and have a, have a view and see,
uh,
if you can work out why these headlines fall into that particular category. But
just to give you a couple of examples,
let's have a look at one that could fall into two of the stages of awareness. Cuz
something else that's important is a headline could function
in one or more stages of awareness. So we take, take a look at the second one
down on the left stream,
clearly with APOs unique Sound Wave 2.0 technology. That could be with some,
for someone who is problem aware because they know they have a problem of
streaming clearly and that's what they wanna do,
or with someone who is solution aware and they know that they need a better
mic.
Um, and that is going to be the key to solving their problem. Uh, and in both
cases we're joining the conversation that's happening in their head
because we are giving them something to grab hold of cuz they can understand
there that their problem is they want to stream more clearly.
But the solution also is that, oh, I need a better mic. And we are fulfilling both
those things within this headline.
So that could double in stages of awareness. Um, and you may find that other
ones I've, I've put that only fall into one stage of awareness could also double
into other
stages of awareness if, uh, the audience is right for it. And then you take the one
at the bottom left as well,
how to avoid the biggest mistake new real estate investors make. Well, that
could be for someone who's problem aware. Clearly if someone is, uh,
a new real estate investor and they're worried about something, um, so it's quite
a broad headline, but if they're worried, um,
and they they really don't want to make a mistake and they feel like they're
having a problem of without confidence, then clearly that headline fits.
But also it could work for someone who's unaware, who they can only, uh, grab
onto their identity because we are calling out directly,
this is for new real estate investors. Even if you don't think you have a problem,
if you are a new real estate investor, you may be interested in reading this.
So it could also double as an unaware headline as well. And then one last one,
um, just so we have covered all of the, uh, all of the stages or most of the
stages anyway, um,
most aware, uh, oh, we should probably do the product away one as well. But if
we look at the, the,
the third one down the left most aware vapes and off dog down dry shampoo,
that is a really simple headline. We are giving a very clear offer saying, Hey,
you should get this now because there's a, there's an offer on, there's a clear, uh,
reason, there's a discount and we're just naming the product.
So clearly as for someone who already knows that they want the product and is
just waiting for something else to give them that little nudge, uh,
potentially that could also double for someone who's product aware as well. But
if they're at a point where they're considering buying it,
they're likely in that most aware stage anyway. They just are waiting for, for
something to nudge them over. And then if we look at the product aware,
just to complete the circle on the top right there, Dan's 5K to one mill changed
my life, Sarah X Homemaker. Well,
we can clearly see there that it's for someone who already knows about the
course because we are leading with the course's title and we are giving proof,
we're reiterating a claim. The yes, this changes people's lives. And like I say,
this is doubling as proof cuz it's a direct testimonial from someone as well. So
hopefully all that, uh, makes sense.
And why are the stages of awareness so important? Uh, like I say, if you feel my
explanation hasn't been satisfactory, I would highly recommend,
uh, getting hold of, uh, Eugene Schwartz's breakthrough Advertising, uh, reading
through I believe chapter two, where he goes through it and you can,
you can kind of look back through it at your own leisure. But the, the stages of
awareness is so important because as I mentioned,
it takes the randomness out of copywriting. It allows us to be confident in where
we're starting and what we're doing.
At any stage of the copy, we can always look back at the research we've done
and go, okay,
what stage of awareness are this person? Is this person in, right? I know I need
to do this then.
And if we know that someone is problem aware, then we can even even follow
the stages of awareness down to show, right? Well,
we need to introduce 'em to the solution and then our product and then make
our product the best one. Um, that's that, that, that, you know, we,
we need to make it clear that it's the best one for them. Uh, we'll come onto
exactly how that happens. You know,
it's not like it has to take a certain amount of words or a certain amount of time.
People can jump through the stages of awareness within a few sentences.
Other times it takes a whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole documents.
So it really differs from campaign to campaign. But the important thing is we
understand where someone is starting out and we
know that we have to guide them forward to get 'em to that most aware stage.
So that is why the stages of awareness are so important.
And this section wouldn't be complete without me just showing you some
genuine real life in all their glory.
Examples of where advertisers clearly understand what stages of awareness
they're starting in and what they're trying to appeal to. We'll only take a few of
these as an example. Uh, look at the bottom right, uh,
for a product called Snow, which is a teeth whitening kit, 15% off photo of the
product, uh, and also a photo of the product being used.
Clearly this is for someone who already knows what the product is. Uh, they,
they obviously know they have a problem.
They want their their teeth to be nicer, they wanna feel more confident in
themselves perhaps. So we're not trying to appeal to that cuz we're not talking
about what this
product does. It's for someone who already knows what the product is and
probably knows that they want it as well. So this is either on that product or
most aware stage, um,
most likely, most aware cuz we're leading with 15% off.
There is no other copy on that creative. Um, and we are just reiterating the point
about how it's the most advanced teeth
whitening system. So it comes up to someone who is in those highest stages of
awareness who are, who are nearly ready to buy.
But then we go right down to the other end of the spectrum and we look at the
top left, have you taken out a loan credit card or mortgage?
And that was a television ad, which again, won't have, uh, won't necessarily have
a direct um, call to action that could be measured.
It may have a specific number, but it may not. So we can see how this doesn't,
the stages of awareness don't just work in direct response. We can use them to
strengthen any kind of advertising.
But if we look at the top left ad, that's not presenting a problem immediately,
nor is it presenting a product or a solution to a problem. It's simply calling out
the audience who may be watching.
If I have taken out a loan before or a credit card or a mortgage, I can see that
this might be relevant to me.
So I'm going to continue watching cuz this is the first point of contact that I've
had and it's calling out something I can identify with or I can identify
with having done. So that again, clearly the unaware stage is what that is calling
out to.
It's not presenting a problem or a solution, it's just calling out to people. And
then one last one, we'll look at the bottom left. Um,
28 day day keto diet plan. 100% made for beginners. Okay, well who do you
think that's for? What stage of awareness is that made for?
It's not for someone who's unaware clearly because it's presenting a solution.
It's not for someone who is problem aware because it isn't actually bringing up
a problem, it's not presenting, oh do you feel fat or do you feel like you need to
gain weight? Instead,
it's for someone who is solution aware because it's for people who already
know about keto diets and what they do.
It's about for people who already understand that that's a solution. But clearly
it's not product aware because it's not mentioning a product.
We are just introducing people and saying, Hey, we understand where you are,
we're joining the conversation that's happening in your head cuz we know that
you've heard of keto plans before and this is a really good one. And then it gives
a bit more information saying it's made for beginners.
So this is made for people who have, you've never taken a keto diet plan before,
this is for you. So clearly that is in the solution aware stage,
right? The secret weapon most marketers are afraid to use.
The Secret Weapon Most Marketers Are Afraid to Use
So by this point we know the purpose of our copy, we know what our job should
be as a copywriter,
we know how people make decisions and we understand the importance of
provoking an immediate response.
But now it's time to learn the last part of theory while setting up our,
our workbench on which we are going to eventually research and write and edit.
But so far, just by having a clear understanding of of what we've already been
through will make you a better copywriter than most.
It gives you an advantage over marketers who still follow the doctrine of indirect
response advertising or who think too logically or rely on
randomness and unnecessary entertainment to get by. Certainly in my career,
uh,
recently and as I'm working with more agencies and businesses and people I
have to work with, uh, I guarantee that just understanding the things we've
already spoken about will
take you beyond them. But having this next weapon in your arsenal will take
you up to the top 5%. Before we've even spoken about the actual writing
process,
this single thing is what the top direct response agencies in the world use to win
campaign after
campaign. And it may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but cuz it seems
counterintuitive, many marketers are scared to use it,
they're scared of even testing it. But I promise you, if you can get past that, that
uncomfortable feeling of trying something that seems illogical,
you will have the most powerful strategy for writing copy that converts. It's a
thing that you should apply to every single piece of copy you write,
regardless of where you're writing it or what it's for. And the label that those at
the top most widely recognize
this concept by is the rule of one.
And for our purposes, it can be remembered with a simple acronym, albeit an
acronym that doesn't actually form a word , uh,
r And before I discuss what Rio is and what it means, uh, I just wanna point out
that this is something that most direct response,
successful direct response marketers will use in one way or another with slight
variations between them. Uh,
this is the acronym I use cause it's the one that I found most useful when I was
starting out and I still refer back to it when I'm teaching juniors cuz I think
it sets out in the most, uh, easy to understand way, but other people will just talk
about the rule of one as a general concept.
Other people have different acronyms for it. So bear in mind that it's a very
similar thing to,
to what most good direct response, uh, copywriters have in their arsenal. But
this is just my take on it and what I found to be the most useful.
So rella, it stands for one reader, one idea, one offer, and one action.
Each piece of copy you write should encompass these things, but more
importantly than that, they must only touch on one of each of them.
But why? Well two reasons. One, it keeps your advertising message organized
so you can better understand what is
driving your prospect and, and what they've already been exposed to. And two,
which is, which is more important,
a confused mind or an overwhelmed mind doesn't buy.
It's a fact that the more messages you throw at someone, the less likely they are
to understand your main point or the less likely they
are to view it as important and subsequently the less likely they are to take
action.
In a moment we'll go through each of the aspects in turn and I'll delve deeper
into exactly what each one is doing. But the overview and,
and those two reasons, you know, messaging and organization and not
overwhelming the reader are just really
important to understand as the reasons we even use this concept. And as we
go through each of the points,
you'll see just how deep these reasons go and what effect they have on your
aim of converting prospects.
So one reader, what does one reader mean? What does it mean to focus on one
reader? Well your copy must be written as if it's aimed at one person
specifically. Why is this important? Because it focuses your messaging based
on your research and attracts only those
who align themselves with the idea of your product. Meaning the copy that you
write will be far more persuasive for your perfect
prospects rather than mild and forgettable for all those you read it. An example
of this, uh, and again, this isn't copy,
but this is just an example of who a one who one reader might be. When I'm
writing copy,
I'll write this landing page as if the only person who'll be reading it is a 50 year
old mum who's had back pain that's been getting progressively worse over
the last decade. And who is only just getting time back to themselves after the
kids have moved away. She hates exercise because it's painful,
but feels guilty for not being more active. Now we'll go into how we get this
information and the research we do, uh,
and a lot more about our perfect prospect or our ideal client later on.
For the time being though, all you need to remember is that that's the kind of
mindset we have to have when
writing anything. It doesn't mean we're gonna be ultra specific and start writing
things like, you know, aren't you glad that both of your kids, your son and
daughter,
have now gone to uni after getting top grades? You know, that's not what it
means. It doesn't mean we need to go specific on one person's life.
It just means that after our research when we found the kind of person that's
most likely to benefit from our product and buy it,
we know that they're gonna share many aspects with others. And it's these that
we put into our ideal client, hence our one reader.
Cuz there's always gonna be one kind of person who may not make up the
majority
of our customers, but who is the most perfect for the product.
And by imagining that we are just writing to a single person, our messages
become far more relatable from our perfect prospects point of view.
And even for those who don't necessarily fall into that category, cuz just by
being clear, you'll get people on the outside of that perfect sphere start to see
the point you're trying to make and go, okay, I don't perfectly match that, but I do
want Matt, one thing. So it comes down to the core idea of copywriting,
which is the why do you cast your net? The less fish you're gonna catch. We
wanna use a sniper, not a shotgun. If we try to appeal to everyone,
we're not gonna convince anyone. So instead it's far better to go hard on
specific points shared by our
ideal clients. You know, by most of our ideal client, that person, that type of
person that we deem to be yet this is who we wanna focus on.
Cuz this is who we are most likely to convince and we'll come onto how to do
that when we go into research. So that is what our one reader is,
that's what we mean when we say, uh, one reader. The one idea what it means,
the single core message of your copy. What main benefit are you promising that
will satisfy your one reader's most
intense conscious desire? And why? And how is your product able to support
the delivery of this benefit?
Now it's quite a mouthful and we'll break it down, but why is this important? Is
because the one idea is the crux of your entire sales argument.
You must be able to explain it in a single sentence so it's undeniably clear to you
and consequently will be clear in the copy that you write.
It focuses the copy and doesn't overwhelm the prospect with competing
benefits or features that will dilute the primary benefit most relevant to them.
So an example of this glucosamine helps support joints of older dogs so they
can walk more comfortably.
Our treats contain the highest concentration of naturally sourced glucosamine,
and that is an example of copy what could be copy,
um, but also, uh, more often than not, the one idea and something like this that
you're writing is just so you
understand it in your own head and then you can write copy around it. But it's so
important that you can boil down the one idea to a sentence
like that. So by establishing the one idea of your copy, you know, i e what you
want to get the reader to believe, by the time they finish reading,
you'll focus your entire argument. And ultimately it comes down to a single fact,
which is the more things you try to convince your reader of,
the less likely they'll believe you and the less weight each point will hold. A fully
believed idea is 100 times more powerful than 10
partially believed ideas you can use other subsequent, uh, subsequent claims to,
to support the central idea that you're going for.
But a huge mistake Martys make is blasting prospects with loads of benefits
straight away, which makes them instantly less believable and gives the reader
too much to
think about. You know, other benefits can and should form part of your
argument and other points should
form part of your argument. But everything you write should always revolve
around one common theme that will
be most likely to convince your ideal client, your reader. There are plenty of
formulas that you can use
to come up with your one idea all driven by the research that you do, of course.
And it's important to note we're gonna be going into the research in a moment.
Uh, and research is the key to figuring out all of this. So if this still isn't entirely
clear as you right now, don't worry because it will be as we go through it in real
time or not real
time, but you know, as we go through the the process. Um, but uh,
but yeah, uh, it's all driven by research. And similarly, there are ways to
strengthen ideas and to use other messages to support your
one idea. Having your one idea doesn't mean that you can't talk about anything
else and you know, you can't mention any other benefits.
It just means that that is the central point that everything else needs to relate
back to that. And again,
we're gonna talk about the specifics of this when and what it means practically
speaking when writing copy and deciding what to write about. But for now
though,
just remember that you need to establish your one idea to give focus to your
sales argument and make it far more likely that your prospect will buy.
What is the one main thing that you are promising them
next, the one offer. What does it mean the entirety of what your prospect will
gain after taking
action? What deliverables are you promising to your prospect? What is the cost
to them for getting these deliverables?
This is important because your offer must be clear, otherwise nobody will trust
you to deliver on it. Simply put,
they must be able to picture exactly what they'll gain. And this must be easily
defined because a confused mind doesn't buy or
click or or convert. An example of this, again, this is just making it clear for your
yourself in your own head by entering
their email, my prospect will receive a free PDF that details the seven things I've
learned
about PPC ads. It will be downloadable on the next page and it will be delivered
to them via
email that's just getting clear on exactly what we're giving to them. And it's so
important. And as you've seen here, I've not used a paid example,
I've not used a product as an example. I've used what we would call a lead
magnet. So something that is free and something that's digital. Um,
just to show you that any piece of copy your writing, whether it's an email or a
landing page or a entire sales page,
is always gonna have a single offer on it. You're always gonna be asking
someone to do one thing that you're,
you're promising them one particular thing and you need to frame exactly what
that is, how they're gonna get it, and what it's gonna cost them.
Whether that be money or whether that be putting in an email. Um, the one offer
that you have,
it can be made more desirable through your copywriting skills and, and how you
present it on the page. And again, this is something that we're gonna talk about
when we move on to writing copy.
Uh, but you can only ever have one offer because you want it to directly support
your one idea. You know,
you're effectively showing your one reader how they can take advantage of your
one idea through your one offer.
You're showing them how they can get that one idea that you've been talking
about and that's gonna be through your offer. So it's the key that's gonna allow
them to fulfill the desire that's been
affirmed by your copy. You know, that's why it's so important to lay out your
offer clearly and to make it as
attractive and as easy as possible for your reader to take you up on. So that's
why just having one offer and being super clear on what that is,
is important. Okay. And lastly, one action. What it means there must only be a
single action that you are guiding your
reader towards performing. For each piece of copy you write, this is important
because multiple options are one of the biggest conversion
killers you must establish in line with your one offer. What the single action, the
single thing should be that you want the reader to take,
otherwise you run the risk of them getting overwhelmed or sidetracked with
something unrelated to your ultimate goal. An example of this is on this page,
I only want the reader to click through to the order form, so I won't include any
other links or buttons to distract them from that single
aim. This is closely tied to your one offer. Uh, but, and, and to be honest,
I think it could be wrapped into the one offer and I think most people, most
people do wrap it into the one offer and they'll use either just three
points or they'll add something else, um, to fill that fourth spot. But I include it
as its own part because it's such an
important yet simple rule that too many people get wrong. You should only ever
ask a reader to do one thing per page.
The more opportunities you give them to stray away from your copies one offer,
the less likely they'll be to continue through your marketing funnel.
And particularly in agencies. I see this, I see people link to blog posts just for the
sake of it on a page,
um, cuz they can, and having things on the side and having little popups here
and there for no
real reason when the really, you know, you're just trying to get 'em to convert. So
you don't want to distract, you don't want 'em to click a click a link and take 'em
to another page and risk
closing down the browser. Uh, you know, the more opportunities you give them
to stray away from your copies one offer,
you know, the less likely they're gonna be to continue. For some people, despite
having the one offer nailed down,
still ask their readers take two actions, like subscribe to a newsletter and then
click through to the next page and
they're separate on the page or they'll, you know, they'll link blog posts or
whatever it is. That's why we include it in our rule of one,
one action from your prospect per page. That's it. People get decision anxiety
easily,
so there's no need to give them more options and more things to do. They need
to be shown a single path. Uh, and again, we'll, we'll,
we'll show you, um, we'll show you how this works as we go through, but it's, it's
quite an easy concept.
I should also mention at this point there are always exceptions to these rules. I
know I say the rule of one and generally most of the time you absolutely
should stick to the rule of one to Rio, but there are always gonna be slight
exceptions.
Nothing in marketing is ever set in stone. Ultimately testing is the only right
answer.
If anything that you do in real life contradicts anything I've said, um, but you, you
prove yourself right?
Then you go with that for that audience. If that's what works, then that's what
works. But typically you wanna stick to the rule of one.
But when a single piece of copy adheres to all the four rules of Rio, it will be far
easier for the prospect to understand,
more persuasive for your ideal client. You'll see higher conversion rates and it
will make the entire process easier
for you as well. So it just focuses every aspect of your copy and it makes the
rest of the
journey far easier to plan and write two. So whatever you have to go on to write
next after you've written a particular
page, it means you've already been following a specific way of, of writing these
things and structuring them. So then it becomes far easier to write the next
piece cuz you already know what
someone has been exposed to. Uh, and the stages of awareness that we
already discussed are gonna affect exactly
how you present each point of Rio in any piece of copy of course. But this is
what we'll talk about later on, um,
when discussing how to actually write things. But quite simply,
if you have a firm understanding of the stages of awareness and the rule of one
or Rio and you remember to apply them in your copywriting,
you will be automatically more effective than 90% of marketers and copywriters
out there. There. I promise you,
just remembering these two really important bits of theory will give you the
expertise that so people lack,
so many people lack just because they're not sure of where to start or how to,
um, how to focus their copywriting.
Research
The concepts we've been through are pretty much the minimum viable aspects
of theory that you need to understand to, to be a good copywriter. Uh,
and although we'll be moving on to pretty much entirely practical lessons from
now on, there's still one last piece of the workbench effectively that
we need to set up for. We can move on to writing the copy and rather
excitingly we're going to talk about research. So research the foundation of
every successful campaign.
You may often hear the quote that copywriting is 80% or any other kind of
percentage that is high, uh, research and only 20% writing.
Uh, and uh, they, again, there's a lot of merit in that quote. Every successful
campaign is built on heavy
hitting research because without it, as I'm sure you'll recognize by what we've
been through already,
without understanding your product and your customer and the market you're
writing in, you won't be able to sell anything successfully.
So research is crucial and I wanna take you through the multimillion pound
process that'll win for you time and time again.
Why is that a multimillion pound process? Cuz it sounds kind of cool, uh, and
because it's, it's what I've used to help me, uh,
make all the sales in the last two years, really. And it's, it's, it's evolved, you
know, it continues to evolve, I suppose, but I, it's,
it's at a point now where I haven't changed it hugely, uh, for a good kind of year.
And this is what I,
I have found helps me time and time again. So,
research is the foundation of every successful campaign. Unfortunately, it's also
the foundation of many marketing campaigns that fail. Uh,
it research is an extremely broad term and many processes that purport to be
researched don't always give us what
we need to, to write winning copy. So not only is it vitally important that we
conduct research in the first place,
it's also important that we research in, in the right way. Uh, so I'm gonna give
you the,
the very same research process that I and my agencies and and businesses use
that help us craft laser focused
messaging, you know, messaging that translates into successful copy and
successful campaigns.
I won't say that this is the only way to conduct research. Uh, and for sure some
people use successful methods by doing different things. Um,
they, they, they may do it in slightly different ways, it may be completely
different. But what I'm about to show you in detail is a way that I
know works. Since this is the exact process I use myself,
uh, I'm also gonna provide you with a, with a step by step guide effectively, uh,
and, and try to, to be as detailed as I can.
Cuz I appreciate you can't really ask questions directly now, but I will, I'll try to be
as detailed, detailed as I can right now, so you can, you know,
just go back through it and, and refer back to this, this section easily. I just want
to show you what I know works for me. Okay?
So research process. The sticky research process is what I call it. Uh, it's not a
coin,
The Sticky Research Process
it's not a term that I coined. It, uh, was probably from both copy hackers. Uh,
shout out to Joanna Weeb, who was instrumental in, in, in teaching me when I
was, uh, starting my copywriting career.
Uh, and from my, my friend and fellow copywriter and marketer, uh,
Jonathan, um, Jonathan Baldo slash angry, if I can butcher his name anymore,
uh,
who I know have both used the term sticky, um, to refer to copywriting and, and
messaging and research before. So I think that's where I get the title from.
Uh, but what, what is, what is mine and how I, uh, how I structure it is that it's, it's
split into three very distinct sections.
Product research, which is what you've got to work with already, what you're
trying to sell, competitor research,
which is what others are already doing, and market research what your
audience really wants.
I've often considered coming up with sexier names for the research process, uh,
but I'm trying to keep to the rule of copywriting.
So I suppose that clarity should come first. Uh, but for each step I will go in
depth and give you the best possible idea of what
works and, and how it works. I'm also gonna reference tools and, and websites
to make your job easier for you. But like I said,
I'm gonna give you a full breakdown of this anyway, since I've taken you through
a lot so far, and I appreciate that your brains may be a little overloaded,
although I'd still recommend listening to this in its entirety so I can try and cover
any questions that you might have. Okay,
Product Research
so the first part of the process is product research.
And likewise, this is split into three distinct sections, the product rather
obviously, uh, the ideal client and the existing brand.
The product, again, is split into three sections, which is the physical product, the
facts and features of the product that we've already touched on,
the functional product, which are the benefits of those facts and features, uh,
and usps. So anything that makes the product unique.
So unique selling proposition or unique selling point. Uh, what makes it
different. Uh, the second part is the ideal client,
which is who was the product created for and also who buys it. There's a
distinction between these two questions. Uh, and depending on
how your, the position of your product already, you, you may view it slightly
differently and the existing brand lastly,
which is the image and if that aligns with the ideal client and what authority we
can already take from the brand. You know,
what's the status of trust in the market? How much proof can you show that the
the brand that you're working with is,
is good. The easiest way to think about product research on the whole is to
become an
expert, as big an expert as you can on the product. You should know everything
about it from the manufacturing process down to all
the possible benefits that it can provide someone with. Then you wanna look at
what kind of people use it or would recognize it as
something they could benefit from. Uh, and then you wanna have a firm
understanding of the business presenting the
product and how they're already viewed within the market. This is the exact set
of documents I use for product research and I'm just gonna
Research Template and Resources (Linked Above and Available in CC # how-to-start-
copywriting channel)
take you through relatively quickly because I, I feel like product research is the
easiest thing to conduct and will come the
most naturally to you. So you can see on the left we have the first part, which is
the facts and features,
the benefits and the USPS with the facts and features. You list down everything
you possibly can about the
product, any objective facts or any features that it has that are
indisputable, that are cold, hard stone facts.
You note them down, how long it takes to manufacture, where it's
manufactured, who it's suitable for, what the ingredients are,
if there's anyone who can't use it, you know, when it comes to allergies or, or
whatever. Um, what features it has, obviously. So,
so you know what, what it actually has on it, uh, or in it, the storage size that
obviously I'm, I'm trying to,
you may not necessarily have all these things, you know, it is, could be be
different if you are advertising a speaker versus, you know,
toilet roll. Um, but for toilet roll, how many ply is it? How long is it?
Uh, how long does it take to get delivered? All of these things that are facts and
features about the product or about the
service that you can possibly note down. You put it down, you should know
everything about it. And I, I can't state that enough.
Any facts, any features, get them down. The next column is,
uh, benefits. I'm not gonna go through the whole process of how you turn facts
and feature into benefits, cuz I think that is,
there's enough on that out there and it's the first thing that any copywriter
learns. So effectively it's just that fact or feature.
Is there a benefit that it gives to someone? Can you directly, um,
link that fact to what it would mean to someone in real life? Just as a, a quick
example, uh,
the touchscreen on a phone, that's a feature, a benefit of that touchscreen is
that it's easier to navigate between apps,
for example. So, uh, trying to, trying to use an example we used earlier.
So there, there you go. That's, um, a clear, uh, benefit. Similarly, using another
example, um, that we've already seen, uh,
the fact of the service that provides, um, snacks and products to bars and pubs,
a fact of that is that someone can add as many items to their basket as they
want and then check out.
The benefit of that is that the person doesn't get locked into any confusing
contracts. Um, and of course you can,
uh, reframe benefits depending on the person you're talking to, depending on
the rest of the research that you come out with. But initially,
if you have any clear benefits that you already know that a fact or feature
provides, you note those down. Um, and you can note it down next to it,
you know, so it links directly on the sheet. And then similarly on the third row,
uh, usps, if any of those fact features,
benefits are unique to that product and they're something that,
uh, no, no other products on the market have, and you already know that, then
you note that down, you say what makes it unique. Uh,
so hopefully that should be clear enough for you. You just get as much written
down there as you can straight away when you've done the research about the
product, uh, itself. The next section,
The Ideal Client
which is the ideal client, there are two ways that you can go about working out
who your ideal client is.
The first one is if you, if the business that you are working with already has an
existing audience and
it has a, a f you know, a, a fair pool of customers to pull from already
l look at the people who buy most frequently. People who buy, um, re repeatedly
or, or people who spend the most,
um, get the top kind of 15 profiles of those people, whether you have, if you
have access to the information,
of course it's always handy if you have access to as much information as
possible. So on, um, you know,
their emails and how much they've bought and where they're from, where they're
located. Uh, if you can find their Facebook profiles or,
or whatever, then that's also another reason. Or their LinkedIn profiles that's just
as good.
Link their profiles in this box. I recommend trying to find about 15 people and
then go through them
and note similarities between them. There's no surefire away on how to do this.
You just need to investigate each person as much as you can and see what they
have in common with each other.
And then you can fill out the net, the section that we're gonna, I'm gonna show
you in a minute, but that's,
if you already have an existing audience, do that because that will give you a
good idea of who is already buying it,
uh, and who you can already clearly appeal to. The second option is if you don't
have a,
an existing audience and if the business is, is new, uh, or maybe they don't have
enough data or you don't have access to the data,
the next best thing you can do is look at who the product was designed for. Um,
if you're choosing product, uh,
option number two for Id identifying your ideal client, then I would recommend
conducting competitor and market research
before completing this just so you have a, a better view of everything else. Um,
but what you want to do in this case is note down the ideal client's gender,
their age, their job and their income, their family status, their location, what
social media they use and how often they use it,
the reason that they need the product, the number one reason they need the
product and their stage of awareness.
Get that noted down again. And you should be thinking about who is this
product designed for? So talk to the person who created it, why did they create
it?
Who did they have in mind when they're creating it? And ask them to imagine if
it was a person, who would they be?
How would you answer all these questions? And then once you've gone through
the audience data in option one,
or once you have gone through all the other research and filled out option two,
then you need to complete that ideal client profile on the, uh,
the second part of the second page, which is, um, after you've done all that
research and after you've looked at what we've got is
data put down their gender, age, job and income. Family status is location,
social media usage, reason they need the product and state of awareness.
Get that locked in because then you have justifiable reasons for putting those
things cuz either you've been through who the highest buyers are,
what they seem to have in common generally, um, or you've completely
narrowed down who the product was designed for, um,
and who it's most likely to appeal to. And the rest of the research will enhance
this process.
So please don't think that once you've done this research, like the product
research, that's it and you'll never come back to it.
You should be adding to it as you do the rest of the research as well. Cuz you
will always pick up on things that you didn't see before. Uh,
and that goes vice versa for everything else. Always refer back to research
you've already done and keep a record of
everything you're doing so you can go back through and, and adjust it if need be.
So that's the ideal client.
Just making sure that you are identifying the one reader, the ideal client who
you're going to imagine that you're writing to next,
the existing brand. The last section of the product research. Does the public
image of the existing brand align with the ideal client? Uh,
why does it, do you find that the people who engage with the brand, um,
and the public image, it seems to have the reactions, it seems to get,
um, the general image that it's trying to portray in its advertising.
Could it be trying harder to link to the ideal client that you've identified?
This is really only for if the brand is already established. Uh, if you find that the
ideal client is someone different to who they're actually
trying to appeal to, you need to put down whether or not the image is doing a
good job of, of,
of, uh, representing and appealing to the ideal client. And if it isn't, then why isn't
it doing it? What's different? You know,
if you find that actually the ideal client is, uh, is a man, and obviously this isn't
the broadest terms possible, but all the, uh,
branding is trying to appeal to women, clearly you need to do something about
that. So just note that down and we can use that for future reference.
The Existing Brand
And then lastly, what aspects of the business or the individual client could be
viewed as a reason to trust in their expertise? Do they have qualifications?
Do they have X number of sales? Have they got loads of testimonials? Note
down anything possible about the existing business where,
um, you could view it as a reason to trust them and something that's clearly, uh,
supportive of the what they're purporting to be. Whether that be, you know,
a an expert in the space or, um, a product that solves a problem, you need to
make sure that you have proof for that.
So note down everything that you possibly can about the existing, uh, proof
elements of a business. And they could be really anything.
So, you know, but mainly you wanna be looking at qualifications, years of
experience, um, testimonials, sales figures,
uh, any kind of satisfaction percentages, uh, feedback, whatever it is, stuff like
that. Note it down where you can.
And that is a very quick rundown of the product research process and we're
gonna be seeing this kind of inaction and, and filled out as we,
as we go through, um, the rest of it. So it'll start to make more sense as we look
at the rest of the research as
well. But that is where you wanna start by just getting and understanding the
product or the service that you are
working with. Alright, so the next phase, uh, competitor research.
Competitor Research
Competitor research is all about understanding what's already taking place
in the market. You wanna know what kinds of things your audience, uh, are
being exposed to by, by other businesses. And this is twofold, really,
you know, one, it allows you to see things that are already working or not
working. Uh, and two,
it allows you to keep an eye on your competitors to see if they're missing any
opportunities, uh, or if they're, uh,
they're capitalizing continuously on a specific topic or a specific medium.
The way to do competitor research, uh, it's, it's really, it is quite free flowing. Uh,
the basic concept is to find competitors,
you know, outside of the ones that will already be obvious to you, cuz you, you'll
kind of, you'll be easily, easily be able to find people who are selling the same
kinds of products that
they exist. Uh, but the best way to find competitors and see what your audience
are being
exposed to by them is to act as your ideal client. Act as your audience. So, set
up new accounts on Facebook, on Google, on YouTube, and Reddit,
and dedicate them to that project. So on, on those accounts, you only want to
be searching as if you are the ideal client.
You search terms that are similar to the concerns that your ideal client likely
has. And obviously this will be from the ideal client profile that you have. Uh,
but if you don't have it nailed down just yet, you'll just wanna search terms
around the kind of products, uh, and,
um, problems that you know that your competitors are solving and problems
that you want to solve for your audience as well.
But search on Google for terms that are similar. Click into the ads eventually.
These will show up on Facebook as well. Join Facebook groups.
Do as much as you can to act like your ideal client and record what you see as
you're going through. This is a very free, uh,
free flowing exercise. You just want to see what your audience are being
exposed to
as you go through with this. You can make, and this is up to you how you do it,
but you can make specific records of so screenshots and notes of the funnels
that you are traversing. So what was the ad that,
in that got you to click? What did it say? Where did that lead you? What did you
see when you were there? What was the next link that they offered?
How many things are they showing you? What kind of emails are they sending?
How frequently are they sending emails? What kind of points are they hitting
on?
You just wanna understand, usually your top kind of two to three
competitors. You just wanna understand what they're doing and how their
approach is. And this isn't gonna be, you know,
all useful straight away, but as you go on and you, you write for the project and
you, and you create new things for the project,
it'll be stuff you will constantly go back to and have a look and keep an eye on to
see what others have done.
So don't think that this is just a one and done exercise. This is something you
wanna continuously keep up. Uh,
but ultimately it's allowing you to highlight competitors who sell a similar
product or who sell to the same audience. That's actually a really underused,
uh, concept to, to not only see who is selling things similar to you, but also to
identify audiences that are selling to the same market or the same
kind of people, cuz they may well be using language that,
uh, really hits on, um, the points that, that you can be making as well. So if you
are product is,
say, uh, pregnancy clothes for women, even though someone like, um,
uh, Pampers or I think, I dunno if it's called Pampers in, in the us, uh, whatever
the equivalent is, you know, uh, a diaper and nappies brand, uh,
even though they're not necessarily selling the same thing as you,
they may be using a similar kind of language they make. They're selling to the
same kind of audience cuz they're selling to new mothers
or people who are preparing to be parents. Uh, so you may wanna look at what
kind of language they're using,
just for an example. Never underestimate the power of looking at businesses
that
aren't quite competitors, but who are selling to the same audience.
And this is quite a free flowing exercise. Competitor research. You know, there's
not really a specific way to do it. You just generally want to get an idea of how
other businesses are operating in
the market and what kinds of messages they are using. Uh, you can never be
certain about how well their ads are performing.
But a good rule of thumb is that once you've signed up to their lists, once you've
opted into their ads and maybe you've got a lead magnets or you've
bought from them the things that you see quite regularly from them. So the
same kinds of emails or you see ads coming up a lot, uh,
those kind of things work. Usually you've always gotta be careful,
but it's usually a good bet that especially if they're a bigger business, the things
they're using a lot on things they're repeating probably are doing
quite well. Um, so yeah, you just wanna get a good understanding of competitor
research. And as you go throughout the rest of the research process and the
writing
process, you can always, uh, link back to competitor research cuz it, uh, it will
always be useful.
Here is a an example of what I actually use for my competitor research. I, I
usually do three competitors, but you know,
if I find there are more that are suitable, I, I, I have gone up to doing about seven
before. Uh, sometimes I only do one or two.
If, if it's a, if it's a relatively niche market, um, this how I separate it out. I, I say,
okay, what's the main idea?
What is the thing they seem to be hitting on? They may not be as sophisticated
and as focused in their messaging as we will
be, but I generally want to sum up what they're trying to say, what their main
message tends to be. Uh, u s P,
do they have something that makes them unique? Do they have something that
we don't have, uh, particularly as well, but what do customers get if they go to
them that they may not get,
they go anywhere else? Uh, pain focus and desire focus. Uh, the, the, these are,
these are more, um, oh,
what's the word? Subjective, I suppose, in anything else. Uh, I just have a look at
if there seems to be a pain that they keep talking about,
if they're really trying to appeal to some kind of problem or if they're trying to be
more positive and appeal to a desire. So something that's more of a, um,
positive one rather than a negative one. So instead of saying, oh, I wanna get rid
of something, or I have this problem, I need solved more saying,
oh, um, we give you these good things that you don't currently have, rather than
getting rid of something, it's more, more of a subjective, again,
can, uh, can be drawn into semantic arguments. But I just like to have a good
idea of if they're saying things
that are pain focused or desire focused, I have them down. Sometimes I don't
fill those out because there's nothing obvious that sticks
out. Uh, social media. I wanna know what social media they have. I link it there. I
do a short, um, kind of not too long,
but just a short summary of, of what kinds of things they tend to post. Um, ads
if you're not using it. Um,
or if you're new and you, you want to know how to research competitors, the
Facebook ads library is one of your best friends.
If you just type in Facebook Ads Library, uh, you'll find the website on Facebook,
um, the,
the section on Facebook where you will be able to search any business that has
a Facebook page and see what ads they're running in any, uh,
region as well. Really useful. If an ad in a competitive Facebook ads library has
been running
for a long time, uh, particularly more than three months, it's probably performing
quite well and you can deconstruct it and analyze it
and see what kinds of things they're, they're hitting on in the ad. And then also, I
always like to look at praise and con, uh,
and complaints they get from, uh, reviews, uh, feedback and in forums. I'd like to
have a look, right?
What are people saying that are good about this company? What are people
saying that are bad about this company? Cuz those are what we can use when
we are, uh, writing our own copy.
And we'll go into in a moment. Uh, another, uh, the last, the last part of this kind
of research that we, uh,
this research process that we use that's very similar to getting that kind of
information. Uh, and yeah, and I should just mention again,
if anyone wants these documents again, just, um, just talk to me,
uh, get in touch and I can send them over. But a helpful way to think about this,
this whole research process, uh, it,
it's, it's, it's fluid. It's a fluid process. You know, go with the flow of where your
research takes you and,
and take down anything that you feel like might be of note, as a minimum. Try to
get down everything that's laid out in the research docs that I show you,
but don't let it limit you. You know, go down paths to see where they lead as
with everything in copyright. And we don't wanna risk it becoming too
mechanical.
It's helpful to have guidelines and to know rough stages that we need to
complete, but ultimately, nothing is ever set in stone.
And you should always allow yourself to, to, to use instincts, you know, based
on the fundamentals that we've already discussed. So, um, yeah, that,
that would be the last thing I say on competitor research. Allow it to be fluid and
allow yourself to get lost down rabbit holes when you
are, when you are researching competitors. Okay, so now we come on to the
longest, but I would argue the most fun, uh,
Market Research
and insightful part of the entire research process, which is why I've left it till last
to, uh, to show you market research.
Remember, your copy should connect your product to your prospects
dominating conscious desire.
This is where we discover what that desire is. This is where we discover the
stage of awareness, um,
for our ideal clients as well. If we, if we haven't yet established that, this is
where we discover the best messages to use in our copy.
So this is like the start of really nailing down what we are gonna talk about when
we, when we write our copy. Um,
ultimately to write a winning campaign, you need to have a deep knowledge of
your market, of your audience.
And although outside formulas and looking at other businesses can be helpful,
everything that you need to succeed in marketing is wrapped up in your product
and in your market. And here are some tools that I often use to help me with
this
existing audience data. Of course, if the business you're working with has, uh, a
CRM and they have, uh, uh, or yeah, a CRM system, um,
that basically that just means if they've got logs of all their customers up to this
point, uh, and they know more about, uh,
an audience than just what they bought, if they've got information about where
they're from, um, and what kinds of things they like and how often they buy, uh,
and their gender and stuff like that, then use that use, use existing audience
data, but also Facebook groups.
And the Facebook ad library as we've discussed, and Reddit and relevant
subreddits, YouTube videos, Amazon listings and reviews,
online forums and other social media, uh, Feedly and Quora. These are all
websites and things that I would highly recommend using for market
research. This is by no means, uh, a limited list. There can be more that you, uh,
that you touch on and that you use. So,
um, yeah, , and, and it would be great if I, if I could just throw a bunch of
websites in your face and say, okay,
go and do some research. But, uh, but you already know it's not gonna be as
simple as that because at the end of the day, you know, what exactly are we
looking for when it comes to market research?
VOC
Well, unsurprisingly, the information that gives us the best idea of what will work
for our market and
our audience comes from the prospects themselves. As we've mentioned loads
of times in this presentation so far,
it's the prospect and it's how they make decisions. And it's the beliefs and the
problems and the desires that they already hold.
It's their emotions that really matter. You know, it's from those conscious
desires that they have and the words they use to
express those desires that we're gonna find out how we, um, how we should
approach copy this information. So stuff that the, uh,
audience say themselves is what we call voice of customer data.
The best way to get an idea about what the market wants is by getting the
market to tell us what it wants. You know, it's indisputable that when people see
their conscious desires reflected in
copy, they're more likely to respond positively to it. And like we said, you know,
relevance and intrigue are the keys to establishing that connection initially.
And what better way to establish them than by finding out what's relevant and
what intrigues our market. You know,
there's no better source than your potential customers decide on the messaging
for a campaign and the messaging for your copy. So,
voice of customer data is invaluable to us as copywriters.
We just wanna know what prospects actually say about what they want. What
do they want? We need to know it from them directly.
So then, do we simply ask the market what it wants? Well, as arguably the father
of modern advertising,
David Ogilvy once said, the trouble with market research is that people don't
think what they feel.
They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say. Getting
information that, you know,
will resonate with what people actually want is quite tricky. It can be valuable to
ask people their opinion. It can be,
but the failure rate is disproportionately high for products that purely go off of
asking people. Much like an overall reliance on logic,
though seemingly sensible, it can lead to failure. You know,
relying on what people say they want is not necessarily a good thing, cuz people
don't always say what they actually want.
Oftentimes they say what they want you to hear or what they think they want is
not what they actually want.
So it's a bit of a problem with just asking people. And just going off of that, that
first kind of direct voice of customer data. For example,
if Red Bull had listened to their direct market research, they would've never even
gone to trial. The feedback was overwhelmingly bad.
Reviewers said it didn't taste good, it left them feeling gross, uh, and that they
could never compete with brands like Coca-Cola considering the
price per unit and, and how small the, the amounts were. But they found their
niche and have dominated ever since.
Cuz they're now a multi-billion dollar company. So, despite the first people who
drank Red Bull and were testing it,
saying things like, I wouldn't drink this piss if you paid me to. They are now one
of the most successful drinks brands in the world.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a product where the market
research was overwhelmingly positive.
Surveys, test groups and direct questioning gave a team at Uya real confidence
about the potential of the console, which was a, um, uh,
a small games console very cheap that, uh, ran on a kind of mobile operating
system.
They raised millions of dollars in funding only for the product to completely flop.
So you can argue in it, it was initially successful, uh,
but when it actually came to market and they were going off that research,
they'd done, it was a disaster. People just weren't interested. The, the,
you know, the best selling game on the device, I, I, I believe only sold 7,000
copies.
And despite what their extensive market research had told them, the market just
wouldn't buy it. It was made all the worse by the dis uh,
the dissatisfaction of those who did buy it. Because when they got the console,
they were like, this is not what what I want. Um, and on the screen, there's a,
there's a quote from, uh, one of the initial kind of beta reviews from, uh, a
website, which was,
this is the perfect hybrid of something that's inexpensive and open, yet good
reviews.
And people saying what they want initially doesn't always lead to success.
And a perfect example of ignoring direct market research
in practice comes from the Dollar Shave Club. Their initial research showed that
the spoken demand was for
raises that lasted longer or were far cheaper. That is what they found out to
begin with. Um,
it seems logical and it married up to what people were saying, but the founders
instead decided to launch the company based
on what they thought was actually behind those statements.
And by digging a little bit deeper into what people actually cared and
complained about when not being asked their opinion directly,
what they discovered is that the core issue was that buying raises inconvenient.
It's not that people want 'em to last longer necessarily, or that they need to be
cheaper. It's that it's irritating to buy.
And it's inconvenient to buy razors because you feel like you are spending
a lot of money for something that is a necessity. And you have to do, you have
to kind of guess at, um, and remember every,
you know, two months, three months, one month, depending on how many you
buy. So remembering to buy razors and having to mess about with a protective
casing and things like that, they were real pains, but they weren't something that
people openly admitted to,
whether out of embarrassment or just a simple oversight. It was only by digging
into the real why that the door shave club could produce
a breakthrough product. And of course, they set up a subscription service
where, uh, you would just get delivered razors every however many, um, weeks
or months,
and you would pay and they would be brought straight to your door. So you no
longer had to go out and get them and try and remember and worry about
running out. So that was really the key to it.
So what did all these examples and hundreds of others have in common when it
comes to market research?
What is the thread that links so many examples of easy to predict in hindsight
campaigns? It's that the only kind of research that you can always rely on is
indirect. And it's this indirect voice of customer data that we really care
about. In other words, the results of the research for these campaigns and what
would've
actually worked and what did end up working didn't come from direct
questioning in a market research context. It wasn't interviewing prospects and
talking to them about what they wanted
that made these failures or successes, what they were, um, or certainly made
the failures what they were, I should say.
It wasn't focus groups or market research, you know, surveys that constructed
these winning conclusions or these, um,
or what could have been winning conclusions. It was voice of customer data
procured through accidental or cloaked
or lateral means to make it simpler. Uh, the people who revealed the desires
that proved to be the ones shared by
thousands or millions of others didn't think that they were being probed for
opinions. They didn't think that they were taking part in market research just in
passing. They would mention it or someone would say, I think this might be
actually what is driving people.
When we look at what they're saying, it's not necessarily taking things at face
value.
Because when people don't feel like they're being questioned, they don't feel the
need to change their answers consciously are,
or subconsciously to fit in with what they may view as a social norm.
It's market research that comes from indirect means that provides campaigns
with winning messages time and time again. Um,
and sometimes this will line up with direct market research. I'm not saying that
direct market research is useless cuz it can be very
helpful, but I'm saying that it can't always be relied on. The only thing that can
be relied on is when it's indirect because people won't
change their answers based on the fact that someone is questioning them. So
therefore, the type of data you want to collect is indirect voice of customer data.
And now there are plenty of studies that dive into cognitive dissonance and
marketing and social conformity and authority matching and all this kind of
psychological, um, uh, concepts, tests that show how people change their
outward opinions depending on the
context of the situation, basically. But by far the best proof of this inaction is
just a thi
a simple thought experiment. Uh, imagine that your partner asks you, you know,
your boyfriend, your girlfriend asks you what your favorite film is,
and let's just say for arguments sake that it's grownups too. God knows why it
would be, but you know, you like what you like, uh,
I doubt you'd have much trouble telling one of the people that you trust most
about your genuine feelings. You go, oh, you know, I I really like grownups too.
Maybe someone knows if bit's stupid, but I really enjoy it. But you change the
context of that. Say you're in front of the film critiquing panel of the Guardian
newspaper
or of, of really, uh, you know, the New York Times, uh, for our American friends,
um,
who are trying to get an idea of what films different kinds of people enjoy.
Maybe you'll being questioned by them. You'll have a bit of a rethink and
suddenly decide that the Shawshank Redemption
is actually your favorite film and you happily tell them. So. But later on, when
you are met with the choice to watch one of these two films in private on
Netflix with nobody to judge your choice, then perhaps despite 75% of people
choosing a higher brow film in
public, the actual watch rates fall to perhaps half or lower if they're given the
choice between Sure and redemption and grownups too.
We wanna tell people what they'll expect to hear because we don't wanna risk
seeming odd. We want to impress, we want to conform,
we want to be on the side of authority ultimately. And unfortunately, this even
goes for when people have insisted that they'll tell the truth,
whether consciously or subconsciously their brain will always work to put them
in the most socially acceptable position that they can be in.
So what does this all mean for us? Well, in a nutshell, we need to source voice
of customer data from places where people have no idea
that they're being probed for market research. Uh, and I can tell you from direct
experience that this kind of research has been
what's led to the success of most of my campaigns. It's not been talking to
customers directly, it's been seeing what they say in places where they don't
know they're being
asked questions. And that's why we use tools that we've discussed, like Quora
and Reddit and Amazon reviews and Twitter and forums and YouTube
video comments. Um, they're places online where our target market feels safe.
Of course,
you need to identify the right one for your target audience. Um, and, and
thankfully, uh, well, for a change,
I suppose we people get to share their unfiltered opinions on these sites. And
depending on the ideal client, some of these places, um, well,
like I've said, some of these places may be better than others. Um, but in all of
these cases,
when we identify places online where our target market shares their thoughts
on areas relating to our product,
we just wanna copy and paste the raw data that they give us word for word. You
should copy down comments, posts, direct quotes, um,
anything from our target market discussing areas that are relevant to our
product. And I'll show you exactly how to do this and,
and how to organize it in a moment. But, um, but yeah, but as I'm sure you've
guessed by now, the the purpose of this is for us to get to know, um,
how are prospects think to get to know them intimately and to get to grips with
their desires and their concerns and their beliefs.
But you should use your ideal profile, your ideal client profile, um, to,
to, to help you focus your attention. You know, if you already have enough of an
idea of your ideal client,
if you've established it already, then you can use that to your advantage and you
can go to places where these
kind of people hang out. But like I mentioned earlier, if you haven't been able to
construct an ideal client profile yet, and you only have an idea of, uh, who the
product was designed for,
then you can use this research to inform your decision. You know, i e what kind
of person is having problems with, um,
the thing we know our product can solve. So you can reverse engineer it from
this research as well,
just by researching the problems that your product can solve and seeing who's
reacting to that online and who's asking questions in that area,
you can reverse engineer an ideal client.
Now, when you are recording this raw IOC data, it, it can be tempting to just
copy down swathes of comments without really knowing
what's useful, which is why we establish five main categories that this data fits
into,
5 categories of VoC (+2 to Clear Up the Rest)
and then two more that help clean up the rest. Uh, and I do this as I'm going
along.
So as I'm copying and pasting comments into this, uh, the doc that I use, which
I'll show you in a moment, I, I,
I categorize them immediately as I get the, uh, data and as I'm copying, as I
copy it into one of these categories. The first one is pains and fears.
So if there's a common or a direct quote, uh, from a review or a forum or
whatever it may be that's talking about a problem
that requires a solution or a fear or a pain, something that is negative and, uh,
worries related to those problems,
then I put that into that section. Next is objections. So these are issues that
people have with believing alleged solutions.
Like what, what are, what's stopping people from believing things? What are
they bringing up as reasons to not follow through with purchases or not
believe what a video is telling them or reviews or whatever it may be? Uh, so I
put those down in the objection section. Then there's desires,
positive associations with the imagined outcome of solving a problem. So
anything that, that people are saying that they really want or they can't wait to
have, um,
or yeah, any of anything of, of that nature. Is there anything positive that they,
they kind of imagining and then they can't wait to, to secure for themselves?
Then firm beliefs. Firm beliefs are opinions that they hold as, as absolute fact
that they refuse to be violated. So, uh,
for example, I mean the mo this is the most infantile example, but if, um, you are
talking to a Christian audience and you say that God doesn't exist,
that is a kind of a, a a, um, kind of gonna break any,
any relationship that they feel that they have with you and they don't want to,
they won't wanna buy anything from you. So just recording any firm beliefs that
people have, if,
if there's anything that, um, they hold really dear that they 100% think is right.
Uh,
classic example in the financial space for this is, uh, writing to Republican
supporting, uh, retirees.
You don't want to come along and say, Hey, Biden and Hillary are great. Um, cuz
you know that that just violates what they already believe in.
100% Shakeable beliefs, uh, opinions that people hold,
but they would rather weren't true. So things that they're happy to be convinced
of, otherwise, things that they,
they think are true, but they, they would, they would rather, they had a reason not
to believe. This can be a difficult category to,
to define sometimes, and it doesn't come up too often, so don't worry about it if
you can't find anything or nothing crops up that fits
into that one. Uh, but I had to make its its own category for it. Cause I did find it
coming up, uh, fairly regularly.
Uh, and then the last two categories we have are other. So anything else that's,
is seemingly useful but doesn't fit into one of the categories above or common
words and phrases. So any part of the market's vocabulary or vernacular that
gets used frequently.
Uh, really, really useful just to, to understand what people, um, are using and
what kind of words they respond to as they talk to each other.
But by knowing the ins and outs of these categories, uh, in the market,
you'll be in, uh, a better position than, than anyone else really to, to sell to them
because you are immersing
yourself in the world of the prospect. You are pulling the most convincing points
straight out of
the market's own mouth. You're getting the concerns directly from them. Uh, I
just use a simple Google doc to, to record this for this stage, uh, and, and,
and it, and it looks a bit messy, but I love it because we're, you know, we we're
getting down the unfiltered thoughts of hundreds of people after all.
So it should be messy. Um, and it, it can end up looking, uh, something like this.
Uh, you can see there on the left, uh,
nearly a complete document. Um, they can be longer than that. They can be
about that size. They're usually longer than that. Uh, in fact,
I don't actually think that is the full document. Um, but, uh, but then I've zoomed
in just to show you what kind of stuff is in there. Uh,
I italicize everything that's copied directly from comments online or, or quotes
from videos or whatever. Uh,
and I do normal font for any general thoughts that I'm having while going
through the research. So if I notice any general patterns, I'll just, um,
put it down, uh, in the document so I remember to kind of make a note of it later
on. Uh,
but that, again, that's not, that's not I, uh, vo voice of customer data that is just
me thinking, oh, I'm noticing this a lot.
But your IOC sheet should be filled with italics. It should be filled with, um, direct
quotes. You know,
you should let the raw data do the talking at this stage and only note down your
thoughts when you notice frequent patterns or, or similarities. Um, so, uh,
so yeah, this is, um, this is what the sheet looks like. Uh, and this is what the
sheet looks like. Before I've typed anything on it,
I'd give a little, um, just a reminder for myself or for anyone using this. Just say,
oh, you know,
here are places that you can look and you can see the categories all set out
there as well. You know, it's not, it's not fancy and it's not clever.
It very much reflects this stage of the process. You know, we, we, we are, like I
said, just immersing ourselves in the market, you know,
in the world of our audience, and we're letting ourselves experience what they
care about, looking for things that they love, that they hate, that they believe,
and they object to. So we want it to be as raw as possible because the,
the best messages are, are found in the words of your prospects, um, especially
when they don't, don't know that you are, you are looking for them.
And here's what it ends up looking like in, in a kind of fuller, a fuller way. Um, you
know, bear in mind that this was copied and pasted from across hundreds of
sources.
Uh, so anything that fit into one of the categories and, and came from someone
within my target market, um,
ideally as close to my ideal clients as possible, was taken and pasted into this
document. Um, and I don't, I don't record,
I don't usually record where I get specific, um, quotes from, but I will, I I'll tend to,
to do a list at the bottom of, of links that I've used.
And again, this is, um, I didn't actually mention it. Uh, so this, uh,
is from a real project that I worked on, a project where I was writing, um,
copy for a, uh, well, not just writing copy, I was actually, um, building the
business as well, uh, a dog treat for older dogs, um,
to help them with their joint pains and generally helping older dogs, uh, have
something healthy in their old age, which they, they still enjoyed.
So that's what this is from, this is the research from that project. I actually used
it earlier as an example when I was talking about the one idea.
So, um, you can see how that one idea kind of, you know, where, where that, that
started. How I came up with that one idea was from this research. Um,
but, uh, but anyway, we already have now, after we've done this,
a bank of relevant thoughts from our target market directly quoted from them.
You know, this alone,
this sheet alone is a wealth of information for us. There's gonna be many
phrases and words and messages here that are gonna
resonate with the target market because it comes directly from there and, and
people like them's thoughts. Uh,
but this is where we go a little further from here on, just to make things easier
for us and to begin the steps of turning this raw
data, um, into something that resembles copy and, and, and a winning
campaign.
So it's where we, we, we change it into something like this. You know, we, we
groom through this raw data and we translate it into easy to digest messages
for us to look back on. The simplest way to do this, um, is in a spreadsheet like
this.
So typically how you want to, uh,
how you want to approach this, um, is keeping the categories as they are as
you've got in the raw
data. So I'm gonna use my mouse just to show you here. So all of this stuff here,
you know, I've got pains and fears, objections,
desires, firm beliefs, shape or beliefs, other, and then, uh, common words and
phrases you can do directly into this, um, uh, spreadsheet.
I mirror these categories as the headers, as the headers, uh, um, of these
columns on the spreadsheet.
And for each of these, I wanna translate these quotes into sentiments,
into general messages that keep coming up and put them in a kind of nugget
size summary of what, um, of what they are.
So I go through this and I see what is coming up frequently, what's coming up
frequently. The simplest way to explain the process is,
is just to say that whatever sentiments you, you find coming up most frequently
and with the most intensity are the ones that
you should summarize. So here you can see that the first, so these are also in
order of, um, kind of frequency slash intensity,
you have to, you have to kind of use a subjective measuring system to, uh,
to rank them, you know, whatever you see coming up frequently or the most
intensely goes at the top.
And then next, and then next. And here you can see pain of seeing time catching
up with the dog,
knowing what's never to bought, particularly around stiffness. And we can take
from here the raw data that we got getting
stiffer and slower with age. Um, over the past year, it's become painfully clear
that our dog is get, is getting older. Um,
I look at her now and I know what is inevitable. I know this is quite an upsetting
topic. Um, but you know, this is,
this is real copywriting. Um, uh, I coming up time and time again, you see,
it's people singing their dogs getting older and starting to notice things. Um, so
that's one of the biggest pains of fears they have.
So that was what was coming up most frequently. So that's what you put at the
top. Um, next, the fear of seeing the dogs suffer and lose their joy in life,
or pain of recognizing new behaviors, uh, behaviors or tendencies, but not
understanding why or what they are. Um, so that last one again,
we were seeing things come up like, um, people worrying about new things or
things they'd never noticed before happening
and, and immediately linking that to old age, um, in dogs. And we do this for
every category. Again, uh,
I'd encourage you to pause this now and just have a look through some of the, I
don't, I, again, I don't think this was an extensive list, um, because I,
I needed to fit it on the, uh, on the screen and still make it readable. Um, but you
can just see the kinds of IOC data that was coming out and see how
I've translated it into IOC summaries in this spreadsheet. So you can get a good
gist. Um, for, for what that process, uh,
is like, After an hour or two of combing through the raw IOC data,
you'll have a series of sentiments, um, that is to say emotional feelings that your
target market have and will
recognize if, if mentioned because it's what they themselves bring up of their
own accord.
You know, here you can see we, we tend to have about three to five per
category,
um, which is relatively typical. Uh, though, depending on the topic or or size of
the market, you,
you could have as many as 10 items come up frequently enough to, uh, to
record. Uh, but now we can,
we can really start to see the basis of the messaging that we're gonna use in
our copy.
We can see the messages that are gonna allow our audience to see themselves
in our copy that's gonna be immediately relevant to their conscious desires.
So everything we've gone through is starting to fall into place. Uh, and in fact,
you may even stumble across new benefits, uh,
that you didn't think of before. By doing this research, you may realize that that
certain features can satisfy what the market wants
in ways you hadn't even considered that, that that will become evident to you
through the IOC data. Uh,
and I usually use, um, I usually use this spreadsheet for, um, more frequently to
go back through at every stage
of, um, of the campaign, especially when I'm entering new parts of the
campaign as well. Uh,
and the reason I use a spreadsheet is, uh, is just to keep everything organized.
Cause I'm typically managing a team of copywriters or working on project, uh,
multiple projects myself. Uh, so it's easy for me to have multiple tabs up to,
to keep track of different areas of the campaign. Anyway, so now we know how
to translate the raw IOCG data into
summaries. And now the final stage of the research process is upon us.
Final Research Steps
I've already touched on this first point, um, but the next thing you need to do is
take the IOC summaries and rank them
according to their intensity and frequency. It doesn't matter which category
they're in,
view them all as equal and have a look at which IOC summaries come up the
most frequently and in the most intense way of the raw data that you've
recorded. Um, there's no set rule for how to do this, for how to rank them. Uh,
but,
but remember that by now you should have a pretty good idea what your
audience cares about. You should be pretty immersed in the market.
So some things will be clear winners because you've seen them come up time
and time again, and they definitely come up the most, uh, whether that be a
problem,
whether that be a desire, whether that be a big objection, um, whether that be a
deeply held belief,
whatever's coming up the most frequently in relation to the research you've
been doing. Then you wanna put that IOx summary at the top and you wanna try
to
rank the others in as best in order as you can. Some may be kind of hard to
position in an, in a precise way,
so don't worry too much about getting the order spot on. Uh, just get the
obvious things down first and get the,
the kind of best one placed and, and any that that come that follow that. Uh, and
you can throw the rest in according to your gut feeling of what you feel
like has come up more often. But the important thing is you're being led by the
research that you've already
done. Um, so that's the first thing you wanna do, is you wanna fill in this column
here and just rank them,
rank all of the ones that you can and get them in the best order that you feel
reflects how intense and how frequently, um, they are,
they are brought up by the, uh, the market. Then what you wanna do is you
wanna match each summary to a corresponding
benefit if you can. So you wanna go back to the benefits list that you did in the
product research
phase. Uh, and remember, you may have filled in more benefits as you've been
doing the rest of the
research, cuz you may have thought of more or more may have cropped up or
during the competitor research phase, you may have been able to swipe things
that they talk about as benefits that you
didn't consider. So that list may have grown, but you wanna go back to that list
and you wanna match those
up to any IOC summaries that you have ranked. So keep them all in the order
that you've ranked them in before you even looked
to the benefits, and then go back to that benefits list and go through them and
have a look that if any of the benefits can in any way satisfy one of the
summaries.
So whether they solve them or support them or agree with them,
if they're in some way related to the IOC summaries that you have brought up,
note them down. You wanna find any points of commonality between your
product and your IVO
summaries. That is really what this phase is about because as we know,
copywriting is simply connecting your product to your prospect's conscious
desire. So when we have that down, we can see how the prospect's conscious
desires or
pains or whatever it may be, um, of the IOC summary can link to the product and
what our product can do.
So there we go. It re this is really, um, the practical way of fulfilling the mission
of our copy.
Some of the IOC summaries may not have a corresponding benefit, and that's
okay. Not every, not every single one needs to don't force it. If it isn't there,
that's fine. It's just as important to know what our product can't do as what it
can do.
So we don't expect every single i o summary to be satisfied by a benefit that we
can think of. Uh, but once you've ranked and matched each one,
you'll decide on which one to use, uh, as your one idea. I hope that that was
clear.
That's kind of the end of my research process and the end. The last thing to, to
discuss really is, is how important is research. Um,
So, How Important Is Research?
what so far leading up to this point before the writing stage, you now know your
product better than the manufacturer.
You have researched your competition and made notes on what they're doing,
and you can even see where they're going wrong or where they're going, right?
Depending on how frequently their ads are coming up. You have a huge log of
raw opinions from your market that you have ranked, uh,
you have summarized them and made a note of how frequently and intensely
they come up.
You have linked these talking points and these issues to the possible and
potential benefits of your product and how they could satisfy them.
So even though your copy isn't written yet, and there's still a way to go before
it's refined into the perfect messaging,
by simply completing this research process, you are better prepared than any
other copywriter to complete your brief.
You know, the market inside out. You have a log of their thoughts that show that
you actually care about them.
Um, you're not relying on blind logic or tainted research that's, um, you know,
been, been, um, been tampered with by someone's unconscious.
Uh, you have the resources to make the prospects see themselves in your copy
and to be at the forefront of their mind by being relevant to what they consider
important. And all this is only possible through this level of research. So
granted,
this probably feels like more than it actually is because I've been talking for a
long time about all of it. Um,
but I promise you that this is the most powerful tool that you can use as a
copywriter is deep, meaningful research.
And it's why every single master copywriter that I have been mentored by or
read books from or seen seminars of, uh, and,
and even and I've even experienced this myself, uh, have said that they spend
more time researching than anything else.
So even if you weren to use the strategies and techniques for writing that I'm
gonna reveal, uh, later in this presentation,
just having this research process in your arsenal will give you a better chance
than anyone else if impacting a prospect's life through advertising.
IOC data is something that few copywriters bother to harness to this extent, and
it means that they're throwing away simple chances to connect with readers
by using their language and highlighting their direct concerns. Let's learn how to
write some damn good copy.
PART 2: Putting All This into Practise
But before we break into the process, uh, there's one thing I wanna say and it,
it's really important cuz I've,
I've worked with a lot of juniors over the last, uh, couple of years. Uh, I've been a
junior as well, you know, when I started out. Um,
and one thing that I I wanna make clear is that you will come across people who
think they know how to write good copy just because they
know how to write English. Uh, and it's really difficult to deal with as a freelancer
because like I mentioned
earlier, sometimes you're trying to, you're trying to please two people. You're
trying to please the client and you're trying to please the, uh, the,
the reader, the, you know, the prospect. And it can be difficult to,
to, uh, go against what the client that you're working for is, is saying and,
and what their suggestions are. So I'm, I'm not, I can't really offer advice on how
to get around that, but one thing I will say is if you are in a position where
someone is
telling you that there is an absolute way to do something, uh, and they have no
evidence to back it up and they're not an experienced
copywriter and you know they have no real, uh, control of, of sales copy, then
please do not take it to heart.
Because I've met a lot of people who will talk about concrete rules
in marketing and, and it's just not the case. As we've discussed already, the only
indicator of good sales copy is sales.
Like that's, it results equal good copy and nothing else. So don't let anyone, um,
skew your mind or make you think that you need to be doing something a
certain way or you absolutely shouldn't do something. Same goes for this
presentation.
If I tell you something but you find that something contradictory works for you
or something contradictory works on a specific
campaign, then you go with the thing that works for you. Do not think that what
I'm telling you are hard set rules because they're not.