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Go Where the Fish Are: Simple Ways to Write Copy as Your Customer
- 1. GO WHERE THE FISH ARE Simple ways to write copy as your customer Made with ❤ for WP Ann Arbor
- 2. Crickets...
- 3. Why u no buy?
- 5. Let’s have some fun!
- 6. Pop quiz, hot shot!
- 8. ““People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” - Theodore Levitt
- 9. What’s in it for me?
- 10. Features tell, benefits sell
- 12. Collaborate, Share, Store - Online We Make it Easy Case Study: Copy that sells
- 13. Winner, winner... End The Headache of Constantly Emailing Files & Appointment Requests Back-and-Forth Our business suite is the no-hassle way to quickly create a secure space for sharing files, calendar events, and more. The Only Business Collaboration Suite That Anticipates Your Every Move Customize your calendar, file folders, and to-do lists in ways that other business software can’t even dream to do. Eliminate Up to 99% of Your Paper Files Store files securely online. Access them easily. And collaborate in a single, private location.
- 14. Gone fishin’
- 15. Where do my customers hang out? 15
- 16. FORUMS 16
- 17. REDDIT 17
- 19. WIKIPEDIA 19
- 20. What type of people are they? 20
- 21. What are their hopes and dreams? 21
- 22. “PITA” Griffin
- 23. Batman or Uncle Rico?
- 24. Add value like a boss
- 25. You should NOT not P.A.S.A.!!!
- 26. 1. Problem: Identify your customer’s pain point. 2. Agitate: Stir it up so it hurts to the point of discomfort. 3. Solve: Deliver a solution. 4. Action: Call to action. The 4 Parts of PASA
- 27. You know what doesn’t just fall into your lap? Your dream job. There’s nothing more frustrating, embarrassing, and an absolute waste of your time than applying for jobs that are perfect for you, but all you get are crickets after you submit your application and perfectly crafted cover letter. Who are these jobs going to anyways? What’s worse...the BEST jobs aren’t ever posted on job boards or Monster.com! So good luck finding them. It all kinda feels like these age old job hunting techniques are around just to keep you stuck in a rut, doesn’t it?. You weren’t put on this Earth to work a job you hate until the day you die. Our “Screw the Cubicle” workshop will show you how to take your career into your hands with a proven system to: ● Stand out from the sea of faceless applications ● Network like you’re the most interesting man in the world ● Crush interviews and negotiate like a boss Sign up to make your dream job come true! Example: Dream Job PASA
- 28. Dollar, dollar bills, y’all
- 30. For more, you can find us @thechillpillist or info@ohmworks.co FIST BUMPS!!!
Editor's Notes
- MH Thanks for having us today and to be a part of this 8-part “Project Lifecycle” series. Up to this point, you guys have covered topics like project discovery, design, and development just to mention a few. Today we’re going to talk about writing compelling content that sells your product. Because this is the last thing we want…[next slide]
- MH For you to create a product, launch it to little to no fanfare. We all know the typical stories of starting a business or creating a product. Someone has a gamechanger idea, immediately creates the thing, and then doesn’t know what to do with it? Why isn’t anyone buying it? What’s going on? Is there something wrong with my product, my sales copy, my marketing, my pricing, etc. etc. etc. And maybe rather than trying to figure out what the problem is, they look at all the variables, throw up their hands, and chalk it all up as a loss The “field of dream killer” approach to product and business - “if you build it, they’ll come.” This of course has never happened to anyone in this room, right?
- MH So we’re obviously preaching to the choir about how NOT to create a product or start a business. It’s widely known now that this the wrong approach, and there are tons of systems out there like Lean Startup to reduce risk and validate product-market fit What we’ve done with our work is adapt principles across different systems that work and simplified them into our own framework. We don’t have time to cover every aspect of it let alone cover everything around capturing customer voice and writing for different customer segments. But today we want to show you how to make it easier on yourself to capture customer voice to increase your sales and conversion. Before I do that, it probably makes sense to introduce myself so you know who this bozo up here is (Btw - this gif honestly doesn't really have anything to with this slide - just love it and needed some way to work it in)
- HL I specialize in SEO, email management, and copywriting. I run a design agency called Ohm Works where we work with clients to better communicate their value prop, identify their target market, and increase their sales. We do web design, branding, content strategy, email marketing, and SEO. We also run a personal development coaching business based on our own actionable philosophy called Sabi-do. In both of my businesses, customer segmentation and voice are vital to the products and services we offer. You can imagine marketing a dental office is different than marketing a BBQ joint. Even though the value is potentially the same for these markets, it needs to tailored to fit the right market. Because every customer type views value differently. So tonight we’ll show you some techniques we use to craft that message for the product you’re developing.
- HL It's 6:30pm on a Wednesday - hump day party time! No matter what business we run, having fun is a key ingredient, so let’s have fun tonight and kick up the jams with a pop quiz
- HL Who doesn’t love a good quiz? The good news is there’s only 1 question and no bomb on a bus or anything, but it’s a hard question...
- HL How do we capture the customer’s voice? To put in their own words what benefit they’re going to get from your product/ solution. Our job is to use real people’s words to express what they want, what they like, what they need. Our job is to empathize with our customers. And when we can do that, we’ll see marked improvements. By empathezing with the customer, we truly see what they need and are looking for. And what they’re looking for is a solution to a problem.
- HL This quote by Theodore Levitt, legendary marketer from Harvard, captures the essence of understanding customer needs. It’s the whole idea of selling benefit, not feature. Again, not earth shattering from those in the room. But it was quite eye-opening when we discovered this concept.
- HL This image is one of our favorite in terms of driving home the importance of selling benefits and not features. So if you’re having trouble selling your product or are trying to come up with ways to sell it, always think of Mario shooting fireballs from his hand instead of the flower. Another great example is to sell a good night’s sleep - not the mattress. People have little interest in purchasing a bed. What they want is a good night's sleep. If you sell features, then you won’t answer the question of “What’s in it for me?” As Seth Godin puts it, “My favorite person is me”
- MH So the last slide was a theoretical example, but here’s a real life one that we’re all familiar with. Whether you love Apple or not, you have to admit their marketing game is on point - at least it used to be. And the marketing for the ipod is a great example of finding customer needs and telling them “what’s in it for you?” While other mp3 players were selling the tech, Apple sold the benefit. 1,000 songs in your pocket? You could barely get 10 songs on a cd when this thing came out. It’s a clear and vivid benefit. Bass boost! Anti-skip! The reason why I want to stress this concept and idea is because it works
- MH You’re not the only one selling what you sell. You should assume there’s at least 5-10 competitors doing what you do. Just like at the sheer number of apps on the Apple Store. There are what? Over a billion apps? So when we recognize that the market is full of competition, we need a way to stand out and get customers on your site at the very least. And the best way to do that is capture client voice. The better we can capture the client’s voice the higher the conversion AND the lower the competition. We’re not going to cover any SEO tonight, but if anyone has questions about it, please come find us or reach out. But in short, your customer has to be able to find you and your product. So if you’re not optimizing your product with keywords that your customer will search for, then you’re basically putting yourself out on a deserted island. In this image, you can see an example of a product which is a t-shirt. T-shirt is high competition and also not very specific. Again, not all customers are the same. Hien likes black tees, I like grey. The closer and closer you can get to the phrases your customer would use like “Blue American Apparel t-shirts,” the higher your chance of conversion.
- HL To show the power of the customer voice, we want to go through a quick case study of how simply using the customer voice increased conversion for this client by 100% In this case, conversion = clicks from a landing page to a pricing page. So, here’s the original copy from the client. We took their name out. So that’s the baseline. We’re going to show 3 variations of of a headline and subtitles, and we want you to tell us which led to the increased conversion.
- HL So, here we go. Which one do you think increased conversion? As a matter of fact, 2 out of the 3 lost to the original copy. That’s just embarrassing. Alright, so the winner is….A! …. Just kidding! It’s C It’s simple to see why right? And the beauty is, the only Copy is the subheader. The headline was all customer voice that came from fishing.
- HL Up to this point, I spent a lot of time talking about customer voice, sell benefits instead of features. But the question is how? My favorite thing to do as a copywriter is find what I call fishing holes. If you’re an experienced fisher, you know where to go to get the fish. You don’t just cast your line out anywhere and hope for a catch. That’s what you need to do as a copywriter. Find the fishing holes. The better the fishing hole, the better you can get into the minds of your customers. Like shooting fish in a barrel as they say. The key to fishing is finding the right fishing spot. To do that, you have to ask yourself...
- HL Number 1 question. If you don’t know where your customers hanging out, you havent spent enough time thinking about who your target customer is. Even if you already know your customers and you have an existing product, we’d recommend doing this exercise. Once you find out where your potential target customers hang out, you can start to discover their underserved needs. Here are 3 potentially valuable fishing holes:
- HL Forums are like having live focus groups at your fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The easiest way to find forums where your target audience hangs out is to use these search strings in Google: “keyword forum” “keyword” + “forums” “keyword” + “forum” “keyword” + “board” Once you find a forum, note how the forum is divided up into sections: Each of these sections is often a Niche Topic. For example, if you search basketball forums, you’ll find niche forums like: NBA Draft Fantasy Basketball College college recruiting Basketball socks Basketball confidence
- MH Chances are your target audience hangs out on Reddit. Which means, with a little stalking, you can find fistfuls of Niche Topics with ease. Then, choose a subreddit where your audience is likely to hang out in. Then, keep an eye out for threads that have lots of comments. Rinse and repeat.
- Simple thing that I find not enough people do is scroll down to the bottom of a google search and look at the related searches I’ve been playing basketball all my life and never have I thought of using the term “how to dribble a basketball faster” but apparently 90 people look this up every month. Over 1000 people a year. By digging into that, I found a phrase that I knew but totally forgot “basketball handles” - this is a very specific bball term. And 800 people search for “basketball handles drill” every month. Same concept - dribbling and handles and its a 10x if you use a specific bball term.
- MH Wikipedia is an often-overlooked goldmine of niche research. Where else can you find overviews on a topic curated by thousands of industry experts and organized into neat little categories? Here’s how to use Wikipedia to find Niche Topics when you search “Basketball” You can also click on some of the internal links on the page to check out the Table of Contents of other, closely related entries. AND you can click on the references
- MH As you find your fishing holes, ask yourself - What type of people are they? Go beyond demographics because they don’t sell. For example, you don’t buy the Wall Street Journal because you’re 55, you’re male, you’ve got 2 kids and you bring in between $125 – $250K a year. There’s something more about the person who buys the WSJ that leads them to buy it. That’s what you’re trying to find. This also helps you set the tone for your copy as well (which is another talk we could give). Once you figure this out, ask yourself...
- MH What do they want? Mr. 5-hour energy guy is hoping for a system that will get rid of his absurd hack. You’ll find people write things like “all I want is to wake up with energy and without having to hit the snooze button.” Another benefit of asking this question is you get to find out what solutions your customer is using today to achieve their goals. These are your competitors.
- MH And lastly, you want to identify what the PITA is aka “pain in the ass” (in this case, pain in the knee) You may also hear this being called “burning pains” What are they complaining about? What words are they using? Phrases? Key in on language that’s repeated over and over and over. There’s a reason why they’re using it. We were going to create a Better Sleep course (that we put on the backburner), and we went through this process. Were we to create the product, one of the comments we were going to use in our copy was “To wake up in the morning, I tie a 5-hour energy from the ceiling over my head and set System of a Down’s Chop Suey as my alarm. When the song goes off, I stand up and pound the 5-hour energy.” You hear that and you immediately can understand the pain this person goes through to wake in the morning This is the voice of the customer that you can use in your sales copy to sell your product.
- HL Once you find your fishing holes, you’ll start to see different niche target markets. Maybe your product can solve each and every one of their problems, but make sure your content is clear on WHO your target market is. If it’s too generic, you won’t be able to capture the customer’s voice. Take cars for example. If you make cars, what kind of car are you making? Is your customer Batman or Uncle Rico? You have to answer this question because depending on your answer, you’ll have different needs to serve. For example: Batman’s car needs to shoot missiles and turn into a motorcycle. And it can only come in black. Is this your market? Or is it Uncle Rico? Uncle Rico, on the other hand, needs something to carry his video camera and tupperware Can you see a scenario where both Batman and Uncle Rico would want the same car? Both need a car, but once you get deeper than the surface, you’ll start to see different needs - one to fight crime and the other to relive his glory years This is why we emphasize the work and time needed to identify niche markets and capturing the customer’s voice. It’s a ton of work up front, but saves you so much on the backend.
- HL Now that you’ve found some fishing holes and identified your target niche market and their burning needs, it’s time to write content and add value like a boss. How do we take the burning points and market them?
- HL The formula we like to use is PASA (and we say PAHSA not PAYSA coz it just sounds classier). We took a copying writing formula known as PAS and added a missing one critical ingredient. So we remixed it like R.Kelly remixed Ignition to come up with PASA. There are other copywriting formulas out there like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) or SLAP (Stop, Look, Act, Purchase) etc. but we’re fans of this formula because it’s simple to apply. And it works within the framework we’ve been through go through really well.
- HL A simple way to think about this is having an itch in the middle of your back that you just can’t scratch. You want to point that itch out using the research you did, and make the itch unbearable. Do this by calling attention to it. Use the burning points you found as your agitation. And just sell them the back scratcher using benefits language.
- MH - Read off slide We’re working on a dream job workshop for our subscribers and this is a quick draft of some copy. Wanted to share it so you can see PASA in action. Again, really rough copy but I’d say 80% of it was purely copy, paste, and editing existing phrases, words, and sentences I found in fishing holes.
- MH You’ll be happy and make it rain. Thanks everyone for having us, and thanks again to Angela, Brian, and Nutshell for hosting us.
- MH
- MH Did anyone try to apply this to a real product they’re working on tonight? We’d love to chat about how it went. Personalized web experience for a potential next topic