[BEST OF] 3 Steps to Write Copy That Converts

Conversion copywriting vs. traditional writing

Louis: Great. So let’s dig in straight away. What’s the main difference between writing for a novel, like, you know, fiction type of writing and writing for conversions?

Joanna Wiebe: Such a big question. That’s huge. Everything. They both use words, and that’s about where it stops. Now, there are similarities, but the differences are much, much bigger than the similarities. Lots of things. So if you’re writing, and I’ve done the whole novel thing, the published in bookstores novel thing, so I can actually speak to the differences here pretty decently. But conversion copywriting, you are trying to move somebody to say yes. You’re thinking about your audience an incredible amount. Basically, that’s all you’re thinking about, is your audience. We like to talk about the customer as the product that you’re really selling, the new customer that you’re creating. Right. So you’re not thinking about the words that you would like to use. With conversion copywriting, you’re thinking about the words that your audience uses. You’re going out and finding those words, those phrases, how they talk about their objections, their problems, the things that they’re going through. And you’re putting those on the page in an order, usually in a framework that is designed to move people, again, to say yes by getting inside their heads. When you think about writing anything else, whether it’s a novel or an essay, you are coming at things from a very different angle, where you’re really trying to make a case for yourself, like your own opinion on the page or your own story you’re trying to tell on the page. And that’s just not going to be the case with conversion copywriting at all. There’s so many differences, though. It’s out of control.

Louis: Yeah, I know it’s a tough question to start a show with.

Joanna Wiebe: It’s big. It’s big.

Louis: But what I’m thinking here is what you said there is really important. The key concept, I think, if I had to summarize, would be you need to make people like. You need to get into the yes. You need to make people say yes, at least in their head. That should be your aim when writing for conversions.

Joanna Wiebe: Absolutely. Yes. And whatever that yes is, I mean, when we’re optimizing, we are looking to optimize for paid conversion, but we know that that requires smaller yeses along the way, like along the awareness spectrum, et cetera. So. Yeah, but it’s definitely moving them toward. Toward that yes, whatever that yes looks like.

Louis: So, Joanna, I have a confession to make. I’m a very bad copywriter.

Joanna Wiebe: That’s probably a good thing if you thought you were a good copywriter. I mean, I also think there are lots of times when I’m a bad copywriter. But anyway. But go ahead. I cut you off.

Louis: Yeah, I’m a bad copywriter, but I’m not the only one. Far from it. When you look at websites around the we, it’s painfully obvious that people struggle with writing copy. So it’s really hard to write something that resonates with people. So today, in this episode, I’d like to go through a sort of a step by step methodology that people can take away and apply in their business to start writing copy that converts. So let’s assume for this example that we’re going to go through that we are trying to sell a side project. Something small that we’re starting on the side, like a course or a service we want to sell as a consultant, something like this. So something simple enough, one thing that we can focus on, and together, let’s try to pick a project, a side project, whatever it is, and act as if we’re going to write copy for it. Right?

Joanna Wiebe: Okay, sure.

Louis: So let me put you on the spot right there, because I didn’t tell you that. But no. What side project would you like to. It could be something completely outside of your niche. Just for the fun of it, let’s pick something.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, gosh. I have to pick, and then I have to tell you how to do it. You have to pick.

Louis: Okay, fine, fine. Every time people tell me I have to do something, I come up with something French related. So you ask for it, you ask for it, and there you go. So let’s come up. My site project is actually a museum for around the Simpsons. So it’s going to be a. I’ve been collecting Simpsons stuff for the last 20 years. That’s not true, by the way. I’m just making it up.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Louis: I have so many things Simpson related like posters and figurines and movies and whatever that I decided to actually start a small museum in my garage in my. In my. In my yard or whatever it is. Right. So that’s kind of our side project that’s not related to the French things at all. Which is good for you.

Joanna Wiebe: No. Okay. So. So we’re going to write copy to get people to say yes to paying money to get into a Simpsons museum that’s in your yard.

Louis: Yeah. Or whatever. Or shade or shack or whatever you want to. You want to put the Museum that

Joanna Wiebe: are in a shack.

Louis: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay, cool. So it’s good. So you’ve already got your product in place, right? So that’s something. Or you’ve got the core of it. Now you just have to package it. Okay, fine. So, okay, so what we do is always the same. The process, it should, in my opinion, always be the same. It’s really basic three step thing. Of course it’s three steps. Won’t want. But no, for real, it’s like really three steps. So starts with research and discovery. That’s like the biggest part, the hugest part of actually writing copy. You don’t write, I don’t write copy. Good copywriters, great copywriters, don’t write copy. They listen, they eavesdrop on their prospects and they just use their words like good copywriters are super lazy. Actually, like, we’d rather just sit there and listen to people talk and go like, oh, that sounded interesting. Oh, that sounded interesting. And just take the things that sound interesting and put them on the page. And that’s like how the best copywriting happens. And not just the best, like in my opinion, but like the best based on tests that we run and seen perform. Well, obviously understanding that there’s, you know, a lot of people who hate marketers might say, like, I hate a B testing too. And I get that there’s a whole discussion to have there, but nonetheless, we’ve seen it work again and again where you go out and you listen for your message. So the first part is to do that research and discovery. And the second part.

The 3-step copywriting methodology overview

Louis: Okay, I’m going to stop you right there.

Joanna Wiebe: So wait, I want to quickly do it.

Louis: Okay, go on, go on, go on. Okay.

Joanna Wiebe: No, no, no, no, no. You go, it’s your show, your show.

Louis: No, no, no. It just, it’s just, it’s just funny sometimes to, to stop right there and go through the first step before telling anything else.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay, well, we could. I wanted to lay out the three steps, but let’s stop. Okay. We can go through and say how that would happen.

Louis: Yeah. Okay, let’s make a note first of all to say that people are going to think that I only invite people on the show who agree with my marketing philosophy, which is obviously understanding customer very well, being able to market with them and not add them. So let’s just make a point here that I haven’t selected you based on that. It’s just that you are very good at what you do. But it seems like every single excellent marketer I’ve interviewed say the same Thing, listen to your customer, listen to your users, listen to people first and foremost. So that’s great to hear that again over again. So step one, understanding them. How do you typically go about that?

Step 1: Customer research and discovery

Joanna Wiebe: So it depends how much time you’ve got, but you can do a lot in a little bit of time, and you can do a lot with a lot of time. So I love the jobs to be done methodology. Interviewing people to get down to the problems that they’re trying to have solved. Now, when we’re selling people on attending a museum with Simpsons memorabilia in it, we’re not probably solving a problem, but we want to get down to some. Some emotional core, like some. Why would a person do this? What is their motivation? And actually getting out of their house, driving somewhere, parking their car, not doing all the other things they could be doing, going into a shack and looking around at Simpson stuff. Right? Like, so that’s. It’s kind of a crazy amount of steps to ask someone to do, unless they’re a hardcore Simpsons fanatic. So we’d want to probably interview first, hardcore Simpsons fanatics and then other people who, you know, like going to museums or people who don’t know what to do on the weekend, or people who have children and want to show them what they grew up with, et cetera, et cetera. So I would set up interviews with those sorts of people as soon as I possibly could. Now, how you go about setting that up is another story entirely. But that would be step one is, can we interview about seven people? Seven to 10 people, maybe? And again, when I’m doing these interviews, when I’m listening to customers and prospects, I’m interested in their motivations, the things that they feel, etc. But I’m really interested in the actual words that they use. So those interviews would be recorded, and then they’d get transcribed. Other people say you should transcribe them yourself. I still like just sending them out to Rev.com or whatever to get transcribed. So you do that. Do the interviews as step one, like a really good starting point, and then kind of zero in on some parts that are interesting in what you hear in those interviews. Like what. What those emotions are like, really? Like what. What do they feel when they go look at a museum? Like, why are they. Is it important to them? Is it important to them to make sure that their friends know they’re doing this stuff, whatever it is. But you’re listening to these things, then you’re. You’re making note of, like, the important stuff, the sticky stuff, right? When I’M looking for messages order in which to put them. It’s really, I want to start first by like, what are the things that people say that make me pause? So. And that usually takes getting down deep. That’s why interviews are so great because you get to push deeper versus a survey where you can get decent results. Like decent copy can come out of a survey. We do surveys galore, definitely to find our messages too. But nothing is quite as good as sitting there interviewing somebody, talking to them face to face, ideally. And when they say something that is like that needs clarification or that feels like you were just getting at the surface, you get to pull down deeper and really dive into that. And that’s where your best messages are usually hiding the stuff that people don’t say right away. But then there are the other messages that they do say right away, right? Where again, if you do a survey, that’s awesome. If you have a list to do a survey with or you go to askyourtargetmarket.com or aytm.com and try to find people who love the Simpsons, let’s say, or love museums or whatever it might be, or hanging out in the strangest places on the planet, then okay, great, go do a survey there. Digging. And when you do those surveys, when I, if I were doing this exact survey for this, I’d be looking largely for long answer responses, right? So because I’m looking for copy, I’m not, I’m not looking for some high level thing. I want to see, see, I want to hear the words that people are using. And so I liked. Even though your response rate can be lower when you ask for a lot of long answer questions, I need the qualitative, not just the quantitative. Quantitative can be good as well for like identifying oh, what is which of these adjectives best describes what you’re looking for when you hang out with your family on the weekend and they can choose the one. And that can help you identify the right adjectives to use on your page, like in your headline, et cetera. Which is exactly. I’ve talked about this on the blog for Crazy Eggs homepage, finding the right adjectives in surveys. It worked out pretty well. Our page converted better than control, so that’s good. So the surveys, so we’ve got interviews. Yes, surveys. Okay, cool. If you can do them. And then also this is my favorite one. I talk about it all the time because it’s so good for something like let’s say you don’t have a lot of time and you’re setting up a new company, you’re setting up this side hustle thing you’ve got going with this backyard museum. And you don’t want to spend a lot of money, so you can’t go to ask your target market where you’re going to pay a certain amount per respondent. You just want to go out and maybe do the cheapest thing you can possibly do to find your message. And that would be going out and doing review mining. So review mining is okay.

Louis: So can I stop you right there?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Louis: Because you’re dropping bombs after bombs after bombs and I feel like I need to go back in time. So let’s just take a step back and breathe a little bit in terms of all the stuff you said because it’s really valuable. Your friend Claire Syllentrop was on the podcast and talked about jobs to be done extensively. So it’s great to hear another person talking about this methodology. That’s the first point I wanted to make. The second point is briefly, how would you answer the objection? I don’t have time for customer interviews.

Joanna Wiebe: Do you have time for a business? Like, how important is this to you? I would have a big attitude about it. You had to have time for the important. This is when I talk about this like three step process, when I draw it out for like my students, the research is. It takes up like if you can imagine, like a keynote slide or a PowerPoint slide, the research takes up like 2/3 of that slide. And the other stuff, like actually writing and then editing, that takes up the remaining third. Like squished together those two parts of it. This research, you will. People who haven’t done the research before, who haven’t done the interviews, think it’s going to be hard to do and it’ll be a little uncomfortable. The first two or three that you do. Yep. Because you won’t know what you’re doing. So you’ll have to like figure it out as you go. But there’s, you know, you can get coaching on that as well. Like Claire talks about it. Obviously the guys from like the rewired group who do jobs to be done extremely well, they teach about it as well. So you can go learn these things. But once you’ve done a couple of interviews, you get hooked like you actually like doing. I do. People that I know do, because you sit through, you get to pull in all of this information and you will have fireworks going off in your head. This is why you like for jobs to be done. You usually need two people to do the Interview. And one like to interview one person. So you have two people who are asking questions and taking notes. Because you’re going to be so busy writing down things that you’re hearing this person say that someone else is gonna have to jump in and take on those, take on, like, the gaps in it and ask their own questions that dig deeper on things. It sounds like, oh, I don’t have time for that. But one, you have to make time for it. And two, you’ll want to make time for it once you actually start doing it. It’s not painful. The first one or two, like anything, the first one or two times that you have to go through any process, those are kind of like, ugh. But then after that, you realize what’s so awesome about it, and you will want to do it. You will. You just will. You just have to do it.

Louis: So amen to that. I agree 100%. I’ve done this process a few times, and every time I’ve done them, it’s like clarity on steroids. It gives you this clarity about your marketing, about what you need to do next. It’s absolutely amazing. So to talk about the interviews on surveys a bit more, what would be your three favorite questions? Ask.

Essential customer interview questions

Joanna Wiebe: My number one question that I won’t leave any situation without asking is, what was going on in your life that brought you to. And then blank, whatever that blank is. So what was going on in your life that brought you to check out our service today? What was going on in your life that brought you to buy this product? What was going on in your life that brought you to return this product? What was going on in your life that brought you to do X gets people really, like, starting to think about their own lives, what was actually going on? So it’s not like, well, what did you do? Or why did you do it? But like, what was going on in your life? And again, when you’re in an interview scenario, the first answer they give you will probably be okay, but it’ll give you enough to kind of start digging in. Because now they’re imagining the scenario they were in when they actually started whatever that X thing is that you’re trying to learn about. And it might again, oftentimes is what was going on in your life that brought you to check out our service today or to search for a product like this today or whatever that might be. But that’s my number one question to ask. I say it all the time. I love it so much. I get the biggest. The best copy wins for me. Come out of answers to that question. So that’s number one. And then it depends if you’re talking to prospects or actual customers. So if I’m talking to actual customers and I’m looking for copy, and it doesn’t always have to be actual customers. Like in the scenario where we’re trying to get people to come to this museum, it could just be a customer of our competitor. So if our competitor is the Museum of Modern Art, let’s say, wow, that’s a good competitor to have for this product. But if that was our competitor, we could interview people who have been to that competitor and ask them kind of more words around like, or more questions around unexpected outcomes. So what is a little known outcome? Now this is the actual phrasing. I’m trying to recall it on the survey that I did most recently because wording changes. But the point being, you’re asking a question where they’re going to tell you a surprising or unexpected side effect of using your competition or your competitor’s product or using yours, right? And this is where you can draw out more interesting specific examples. When we talk about writing copy that converts specificity is huge because it’s how you actually show that you’re inside your prospect’s head when you get specific. So when people can say, and like for Crazy Egg, we did this where we had like this giant list that came out at the end of it, at the end of asking this question. Where it had, I think we had. On the page, on the winning page, we had something like 30. We had three columns of things you could use Crazy Egg to do in your business. And There were like 30 different ideas in there. And those were all based on what people said they’d done that was unexpected with Crazy Egg. So we were able to redesign our homepage or we used it to the list kept going on. And sometimes they’ll be really obvious examples example that you already know, like why people are using your product. And then there’s this little unexpected stuff that can help bring your product to life for people who are making assumptions about what your product is. So if our product is Simpsons Museum in a backyard, people are going to make really quick assumptions about that, right? But what are some unexpected outcomes of actually going there? Or what did you experience that was unexpected for you that can help add dimension to the product that you’re trying to sell. So people don’t just look at it at surface value, but they start imagining that there’s more to this thing than they even thought was possible. What else could be Hidden under the hood, right? Like, what else. What other cool stuff could be hidden under the hood is usually bad thing, but in a good way. What other cool things might actually take place at this museum? So those are like, those are some bigger questions then I do like the adjective question. Like, what word would you use to describe your experience with X? And if they just get to choose one word, it’s a short answer question. Like, what word would you use to describe your experience with the Simpsons? Or with going to the Museum of Modern Art or with trying to find something to do on a Saturday with your family? If you can get those adjectives and you see like, and that’s where a big quantity of them, you’ll see a lot of people saying, like, for things to do with your family, they might. You might say, oh, I think people will be frustrated because they can’t find things to do with your family. But what could happen is you could surface a more interesting word or something that’s not even frustrating. You thought it was this negative thing, but maybe they’re feeling really enthusiastic about building memories with their families. Right? Like, those are things that once you ask people to say the words, that can start opening up new ideas for your copy that makes you actually sound different and better.

Louis: And then you talked about the third way you get data from potential customers if you don’t have a lot of time and don’t have a lot of money. And I think a lot of people will be really interested in what you’re going to explain right there. So you started to say it and before I interrupted you, because I think it was important to go through the previous steps a little bit more in detail so that people could understand what you meant. So the third one is the mining reviews and mining information online. Right. So how do you go about it?

Review mining for voice-of-customer data

Joanna Wiebe: So review mining at its core, you’re really looking for reviews for your products. Sure, if you’ve got them. But this is a new product. There is no Simpsons Museum in your backyard. So you don’t have reviews for it yet. But people have reviewed other similar services. And when I say that, I don’t just mean like MoMA, like reviews of MoMA, although. Great, good, you can go on. Where are these places? People like TripAdvisor would have a lot of reviews for activities. Yelp might have some reviews for activities. But you want to go in and look at reviews, things that people are, to use the terminology for jobs to be done. You want to find the other products that people are hiring to do the job. Your product is supposed to do for them. So. So sometimes that won’t be a direct competitor, like a museum. It might be something else that families are going to do on the Saturday. Might be be reviews for the circus, right? Or for some sort of carnival or for going to a laser tag facility on a Saturday or some other place where you drop your kids off and they play in like a tub of plastic ball things. So you can look at other solutions that are being hired to do the job your product is supposed to do for people. And you go through the reviews for those you don’t. It’s like, it’s not about, like if it’s a book that was being hired or something, you don’t have to worry about the content of the product itself. You’re looking at reviews. So what are people saying about that? This is a really quick exercise. It should be. I mean, you should block out about an hour of time. But you should expect to fly through reviews where your job when you’re doing that is to look for, to really pay attention to the parts of the reviews that make you kind of stop or pause. So some reviews are crap. Like you don’t like they’ll be useless. It’s just like a quick little bit. Just prepare yourself that there’s going to be some crappy reviews in there, but then there are going to be some really useful reviews that people leave about what they. And you’re looking for objections that they had to actually going to do this activity in the first place. Oh, it was too far a drive or it only opened at 10 in the morning and my kids are up at 6am and I need to get them out of the house by 7 or they’re going to be like nightmares. Okay, interesting. So what are these little things that you wouldn’t know without actually doing this eavesdropping activity? You’re paying attention to sticky language, to objections to things that make you go, hmm, what, what do they mean by that? Or that’s interesting. Or that’s a weird way to put that you’re looking for all of that. You’re just going to go through and basically highlight using whatever like web clipper that you use. We use our own web clipper for this. But you go through and you do this highlighting activity and then you just start organizing those messages on the page. But that’s really what it is. You’re just going to read through reviews. You’re going to look for the stickiest language that expresses things about hopes, desires, objections, et cetera. And then you’re Going to start clipping that and organizing that as actual copy.

Louis: So step two, I suppose. How do you organize all of that then?

Step 2: Organizing messages with frameworks

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, that is step two. I know. You’re amazing. Yeah. So once you’ve done all this research and discovery, then you want to start organizing what you’ve got. So you have to start making sense of the things that are rising to the surface as like the most important stuff. Okay, fine, but how do you really put that on the page? So you organize, you go through and you tag all of the research. Hopefully you’re using Evernote or the Air Story system or whatever it might be. But if you’re using something to organize this research, that’ll make writing copy a whole lot easier. But okay, so we get to this place where we have to organize the research and put it on the page again, we’re not summarizing the research at all. Your job is not to take what people said and find a way to make it sound like a marketer said it. That’s why everyone hates marketers. They think that people actually give a crap about like what’s going on in their head. We don’t. We don’t care at all. We want to hear our own selves on the page. We want to see ourselves on the page. So do not summarize or do not rewrite the things that you have heard people say. Take it exactly as it is. This raw voice of customer data that you need to write high converting copy. And when you organize it on the page and you want to rely on old school frameworks, I say this with full enthusiasm for swiping and stealing from the greats of the past. So the Gene Schwartz’s, John Caples, the list goes on. Claude Hopkins, all of these great copywriters in the past, we’ve seen over time certain frameworks keep working that were born in the 1920s and so on and that like. So you want to grab a copywriting framework. Like my favorite is problem agitation solution. So I want to organize my messages on the page or in the email or whatever it is that I’m writing at this point. I want to organize them opening with problems with like the core problem, usually like this bigger idea problem that’s being solved then agitating it. And that’s where we use specifics. And that’s why that voice of customer research is so critical, because you’ll find all these specific examples and then you get into the solution and that’s where your product is. And you talk about like the why, the try and the buy within Solution. Okay, so that’s one framework. But if we’re selling people on doing something delightful on a weekend, we could lead with the problem. If the problem if when we’re doing this research, we’re like, oh wow, there’s real challenges with trying to find something to do with your kids on a Saturday or on a Thursday afternoon or whatever that thing might be that we’ve identified as like an opportunity. So we might say, okay, there is a problem here, we should open with that problem. Then we’ll agitate the problem. So if it’s like, okay, I don’t know if anything to do with my kids on Saturday, that’s like my opening part of my headline based on something that I, that I pulled from voice customer data, then we want to agitate it. What does that really look like? Right? And so we’ll pull in examples there. We’ll start like, ideally, if you’re using the right solution, you’re going to start dragging those agitation examples on the page. Like your kids are freaking out by 11 in the morning and you need something. Right? Like you just want to start putting those examples on the page that you pulled in. Again, you’re not writing, you’re organizing. So we’ve got problem, then we’ve agitated it, then we’re gonna get into the solution. So here are some things you could do. Here’s why those aren’t gonna work for you. But here’s the thing that we think you should do this weekend and that you’ll love doing this weekend. It’s the Simpsons museum in my backyard. And here’s what’s gonna make it so awesome. Here’s why you’re gonna love it. Here are some pictures of what it looks like. Here are some examples of people who’ve had a great time there. That’s like the kind of try it idea and then a call to action. Okay, fine. So that’s the basic framework that we’d want to start organizing our messages in if we were like, you know what? The research isn’t showing that there is a strong problem here or that there is a big pain point to lead with. We could try a different framework. So we could do like a very, very popular one is ada. It’s attention, interest, desire, action. People use it all the time. It’s like the go to for beginner copywriters for a good reason. It’s a pretty solid framework. So we’d start organizing messages based on stuff that’s going to grab their attention. So we can start putting those on the page. It doesn’t mean that they’ll make it into the final copy. We just want to start organizing what we’ve got. At no point have we written a word. So we’re starting to organize things that are going to grab their attention. Like some cool statement that somebody made about how museums give their kids. I don’t even know. Right. This is why you don’t ask a copywriter. Because I jumped to some stupid, like made up idea. You’d listen. You put it on the page, but you want to grab, you want that attention grab up at the top. And then you want to build on it with like, okay, make me more interested in this. Okay, I’m interested. My like logical brain is being pulled in here. Now make it emotional for me. Right. That’s where the desire happens. And then you get into actually a real call to action. But this is how we’d start organizing them on the page using a framework that. That’s the second part of it is. And I call it, sometimes it’ll be in a wireframe, other times it’ll just be in a document. But that’s step two.

Louis: So I love this concept and I actually haven’t heard this methodology before. And I did talk to a few copywriters or people heavily involved in copywriting, but this is the first time I’m hearing the idea that you don’t have to write anything yet. You can just organize the voice of your customer in a neat fashion in order for you to have a nice framework in front of you where it’s really easier than to write anything because you don’t have a blank page in front of you. You basically have a structure in place already with words that people use. So it’s much easier, I feel for beginner copywriters, as you mentioned, or even people are not copywriters themselves, but do need to write convincing landing pages or convincing messages.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. I mean, by and large, when I’m not working with clients, I’m teaching people who are like those clients. Right. So I firmly believe that you do not have to be a copywriter to write great copy and that founders should be writing their own copy, it will be a skill that will never stop working for you. Like, it works everywhere, all the time. It always comes back to copy. So if you can do this exercise of listening to people and organizing what they’re saying on the page, and then of course doing the step three, which is going over it with like basic editing techniques, which we can talk about, and then of course testing what you find there, that will always Pay off for you. And even if you are an experienced copywriter, this is still a better way to do it. Because as like, even when we were talking and I was trying to come up with stuff like, oh, here, the something that might grab their attention is. I don’t know, kids need something to do, right? Like, obviously my brain. And I’m not, I’m not bad at copywriting. I’ve been doing it for 15 years. I mean, I should. You would think Joanna should be able to do that. Nope, it’s hard to do. Is far easier to just go listen to what people are saying. And then the best thing about it is not just that it was easy for you, but now in the end, when people look on the page, when they read your copy, they are far more likely to see themselves in it. That’s like, that’s the best part is it becomes. Your page becomes a mirror. It’s not just a bunch of words that a copywriter wrote and polished. It’s a mirror where your prospect really sees themselves the way they want to see themselves. And that’s completely based on stealing their messages using voice of customer data.

Louis: So this is important. This is more than important. I don’t have the right objective right now, but this is absolutely critical to nail, to understand. When you read copy, that feels like, oh my God, they understand me so well. Oh my God, I feel this service is just for me. They’ve done this job. They’ve done the job of like what Johannes described in terms of understanding people so well that you can write the copy that will connect with them. But there’s one thing that we haven’t talked about that is obvious to you and me, that is obvious to a lot of listeners, maybe not to new listeners, is the fact that, that for that to work, you do need to pick a target market, a target audience that is small, that is tiny enough for you to be able to pull that off. Because if you start to write for everybody, you write for nobody, right?

Joanna Wiebe: It’s true. If you write for everybody, you write for nobody. But then people get really scared. They’re like, well, I don’t want to reduce the size of my market, which I understand, right? Because there are some business, like when I think about Calendly for like, what we’re clear was write Calendly really could work for any business on the planet. Which means any person in those businesses could use Calendly and life would be good, right? So they might look at that and go like, well, I don’t want to niche down I don’t need to niche down. Like our product is actually made to go broad. Now if you can go small, and this is. Seth Godin was just at Business of Software this year and I don’t think anybody would be surprised to hear that he said like start small. Start with that little tribe that you’re like building. And then slowly, only when you’ve nailed that, then do you move out and slowly moving out from there. Right. So we all know that we should start there. But then there are still those people who are scared. And it doesn’t mean that you. But you shouldn’t write for everybody. But you do have to put those specifics on the page. That might not resonate with every business on the planet. If you’re calendly, right, where you’re really saying, okay, who are our best prospects? Who are the people? If calendly is good for everybody. Well, what about the paid version of Calendly? Shouldn’t we be trying to sell that one instead, like, so we can. People will find a way to sign up for the free one. No brainer. Fine. They’ll figure it out. But maybe our whole page should be about then the paid version of it. In which case, who are those people? And that’s like where you would start to. It’s not niching down, it’s choosing your ideal prospect and saying, these are the guys with the credit card that we need to get in our system. So let’s talk more to those people. Exactly. And that’s where you can of course narrow your market and talk to them. Definitely. Yeah.

Louis: Right. So I was expecting this answer, which is great. And I had Seth Godin on the show and we talked about this, particularly when you’re starting out. Right. So this is an important distinction to make. If you are a business like currently generating like 10 million upwards in annual revenue, obviously you will have an audience that is maybe slightly bigger than a side project for Simpson fanatics. Right. So when you’re starting out, usually you should start with a tiny audience, especially if it’s your first time launching something and it’s easier than to write copy. But I do like the advice of obviously focusing on your most profitable prospect, most profitable customer, and talk their language on the page. And you can also create different campaigns for each type of persons. Right. You don’t have to write this one landing page that suits everybody.

Joanna Wiebe: Hallelujah for that. It’s so true. Right. Like there’s really no excuse for anybody, whether they identify as a marketer or not, for anybody to say, like Oh, I can’t do that because it would require too many pages or too many emails. Segmentation tools are better than ever for email marketing. Personalization tools are springing up all over the place. And landing page platforms mean you can just duplicate a page in an actual like single click and just rewrite the parts of it that need to be rewritten. So there’s really no excuse for not targeting your messages to the different markets or market segments that you’re trying to contact. Absolutely, I agree.

Louis: So before moving on to step three, can you just remind us of the key frameworks for copywriting that you’d recommend people to use? So you mentioned two. Which are they again?

Joanna Wiebe: They are Problem agitation solution. So that’s the one. That’s my favorite one. It’s my go to. It performs well every single time I test it. So I love it so much. Attention, interest, desire, action is the other one. Ada. Attention, interest, desire, action. There are the four P’s which are like, I always get them in the wrong order which is why I don’t love the four P’s. But that’s out there as well. I think it’s promise, picture, proof and push. Although promise and picture I might have flipped around. But the idea is that, yeah, again you open with a promise and you create a picture like bring that to life for people and then you put your pitch in there. The actual like, here’s what you should do and then push them or pull them or whatever people are saying now instead. But yeah, so those are some basic frameworks. I default to the problem adaptation solution 1 all the time and it doesn’t seem to get old people don’t call me on it. So if you’re like, well, I need a bunch of different frameworks. No, you really can just like work with one. Just make one work, kill it with one, really get it. Like so you’re perfect at it and then if it doesn’t perform for you well anymore, then move on to ADA or something else.

Louis: So when I was much younger than this and I was starting out in marketing, I used to follow this French blogger who was talking about marketing. And there’s one lesson that I learned from him was this framework he shared around writing copy. So it’s actually I have never really shared that with anyone except a few people I work with.

Joanna Wiebe: It.

Louis: It’s basically the same basis than the problem agitation solution, but it’s a bit more detailed. So it goes like this. It goes so problem, the wrong solutions being used to solve this problem. Why are those the wrong Solutions, new solution, why it’s the right solution, and proof that it’s the right solution. And then moving on to the next steps. What you should do instead, what should you do next? Because agitation to me. You mentioned a few examples briefly about agitation stuff. I think that’s probably the most important part of this framework. Can you clarify a bit more into this concept? What examples could you give our listeners?

Problem-Agitation-Solution framework in action

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, so an example that I give a lot. Agitation is my favorite part of problem agitation solution. But we have this case study and I’ve talked about it at like Wistia Fest and all different conferences too. Mozcon. I talked about it last year. This case study for a company called Sweatblock. So it’s an E commerce company. It’s not SaaS, but it’s E commerce. And they do, they’re the number one solution if you have hyperhidrosis or like AKA you sweat a lot. So it’s called sweatblock. It’s just like a towelette that you buy anyway. So it’s solving a real problem. Like there’s no question about it. It’s solving a problem for people who sweat excessively. Sweat on their face, sweat on their hands, behind their knees, sweat everywhere makes their life very uncomfortable. So we opened that with. So we did this AB test. We did a bunch of AB tests on the page and this was the one that after a series of a B test, it continued to outperform everything else. So problem agitation solution was the framework we used. The problem that we opened with was the headline was in quotation marks. It doesn’t even have to be hot out. My armpits are always damp or my armpits are always wet. And then so that’s the problem that we set up. Then we built on the problem just a little bit just below that headline. And then we had an entire section which was a significant size on the page that was just agitation points. So what does that really look? So we said like deodorant isn’t enough for you. You probably tried to hide your secret or to hide or to mask your sweat by. And then we list it out. This is where Agitation, Agitation happened. We listed out the things people were doing to hide, right? So and this all came from Amazon review mining because they had like, I think SweatBlock has like 5,000 reviews on Amazon. So we could just go through their product alone and find a lot of examples of how people were masking their problem. So they would say things like, I wear a sweat soaker undershirts, like an actual like sweatshirt undershirt is not something a copywriter would sit around and come up with. Like, you have to actually experience this problem and live through that attempt at a solution to use that kind of phrasing. And if you heard somebody using that kind of phrasing and you had that problem, you’d go like, yep, I’ve done that before. So examples like that you always wear dark colors. You don’t ever get to buy light blue shirts or light pink shirts anymore. You’re afraid to raise your hands to raise your hand in social settings, you’re afraid to high five people. When you hug, you leave space between you because likely that you’re going to be damp and you’ll rub off on the person you’re hugging. So we got through. We agitated with these actual examples. And then we got into, okay, solutions do exist. And this is like what you’re talking about, Louis, with the. You’re talking about solutions. For me, I jump quickly through the solution part of this and right into the product. But you’ve expanded that solution area where you’re saying, okay, here are some solutions that you might have tried solutions like this, but here’s the outcome. Like, for a sweat block, you might have considered trying Botox to stop sweating, but here are some of the problems with that. And maybe you’ve also just tried putting on deodorant four times a day, but here’s why that doesn’t work either. And then after you’ve knocked through those other solutions, then you say, but there might be. Let’s now get into the better way. And that’s where we introduce sweat block. And we didn’t do the thing is you just like that I just said where we expand on the other solutions. But it’s exactly like what you’re saying. It’s very easy thing to shove into this exact framework. Then you get into the solution, then you talk about, okay, well, here is a solution that could work for you. There’s like this advanced way to. Or this advanced chemical. We wouldn’t say chemical, but whatever that is, where you can dab it on once a week and let it air dry. And then for the whole week, you don’t have to worry about sweating. We’ve made this into something called sweatblock. Here’s why it’s better than anything else you’ve ever considered using in this area. And that’s where we’re now getting into expanding on the solution, talking about the product itself that we’re trying to move and then moving through why it’s important to you the Try side of it. Like, here’s a demo of how it works, here’s how other people have used it. That’s where social proof really comes in. And then we get into the buy part, the actual so the why try buy that fits underneath solution. So it’s similar to what you’re saying for this example for Sweatblock, our problem agitation solution framework that we use to write the second page outperformed the control and brought in 49% more paid conversions than the control did. Just by leading with problem, then add shading and then solving it.

Louis: Boom. That’s result right there. Thanks so much. That’s a lot of. That’s great clarification and I think it’s going to help a lot of people into using these frameworks. So now we have organized voice of the customer in front of us. We have a framework that we want to use to start with. What is the step number three?

Step 3: The Seven Sweeps editing process

Joanna Wiebe: This is where we really, I mean, we’ve gone through the writing, the quote unquote writing process, which basically isn’t writing at all. It’s organizing things on the page. If you’re using a solution like Airstory, that’s when you just merge all of your cards and now you have a whole bunch of copy and you go through and edit it in order to get it to a place where you can a b test it. So editing is where the actual job of the copywriter becomes something more than simply listening and organizing. So the best copywriters are really good listeners. We’ve done the listening part. Now all we want to do is edit in the awesome is how I talk about it as edit in the awesome all the time. That’s where you do things like voice and tone, where you go through and you take language that’s clunky and you. I don’t want to say Polish because people then immediately just start cutting things down until it sounds like every other thing that’s ever been said in the history of marketing. So not polished. But you want to take clunky voice of customer language and just make sure it doesn’t sound clunky. That’s it. But it has to still be sticky. We don’t want to lose all of the good that comes in just pulling language from what our prospects and customers are actually saying. We want to keep the core of that. Keep it as I use the word raw a lot. Keep it as raw as you can without sounding like you threw a bunch of voice of customer data on the page. So we want to go through and do that editing Process, make it. Just clean it up. Very light cleaning. Shouldn’t be a heavy, like detailed thing. You’re not rebuilding anything. You’re cleaning it up. And we do something. We talk about the seven sweeps, which is a great way to think about. Okay, so as I’m going through and editing, what am I really paying attention to? Like, what should that look like? So once I’m making it, I’m cleaning it up, I want to pay attention. I’m going to list off the seven sweeps for you. And a sweep is a fast moving review of the copy on the page. So it’s a quick, very quick editing process. That’s why it’s a sweep. Right? It happens quickly. So they are. The clarity sweep is the number one sweep. It’s everything goes back to clarity always and forever. Always, without question, goes back to clarity. Okay, so we start with that and we end with that. We always go back. Is it clear? Cool. That’s number one. Then comes the voice and tone sweep. So you identify like, okay, what is our brand voice? Is it coming through line by line? Is the mood that’s being created by this copy? Is it the one that we want here? Is it going to be the positive experience that we need our prospects to have? Is it going to make them feel the thing we need them to feel? If we want them to feel panicked by the end of this copy, did we make them feel panicked? And that’s where you’re doing this voice and tone sweep. Tone being more around the panic voice being more about your brand. But whatever. We talk about the two together, voice and tone. Then the next two sweeps are the so what sweep. Like, as I go through and read through my copy line by line, if I am the prospect looking at this, every line I read, every. Every statement that you’re trying to make me believe I should be able to answer, like, so what? Like, so what? Like, why does that matter to me? Why would I care that there are 16 Homer Simpsons dolls from Japan? Like, why would I care about that? So what? And then I’d have. My job would be to say, okay, here’s why Japan’s cool. And they’ve done really cool stuff with Homer Simpson dolls. And you have to see this stuff to believe it, right? So you do the so what? And then the prove it. And the prove would be like, okay, here are. Here’s just a picture of one of the crazy Homer Simpson dolls that we got in Japan. Like, see, See, this is pretty cool, right? So you’re doing the so what? And then the Prove It Proof is obviously social proof, where you have to have social proof to support a claim. Proof can be like a demo of your product. It can be screenshots, it can be product shots, it can be the look inside on Amazon, like look inside the book, things like that. But you need the prove it sweep. So we’ve done clarity, voice and tone. So what? Prove it. And then the last three are specificity. Am I being specific or am I being vague? Can I be more specific? Can I get deeper into my prospect’s head than this? That’s part of the sweep. The sixth one is the heightened emotion sweep. People are feeling something. Are they feeling it enough? Can I do anything more here to make them feel the thing they need to feel in order to move on acting today? And then finally is the zero risk sweep. And that’s the one where you go through and say, like, at what point do I feel risk when I’m reading this? And what can we do to reduce that risk by the end of the page? And that’s it. That’s what we go through. And we’re doing the editing process.

Louis: Wow, that’s like, that’s, that’s some proper framework right there. I don’t think, I don’t think you are a conversion copywriter. I think you are the best framework person in the world. You deliver the.

Joanna Wiebe: Because I’m lazy. I’m so lazy.

Louis: Everybody is lazy.

Joanna Wiebe: Framework, right. And it works then. And then you’re like, okay, well I did the job and that wasn’t hard. So that’s good.

Louis: That’s amazing. I think it’s coming a little bit from your past experience in. You used to consult for conversion rate experts, right?

Joanna Wiebe: Yes, yes.

Louis: There are. I know very well somebody who also was part of Conversion Rate Experts, David Damanind, who’s the CEO of Hotjar and he’s the same than you. It’s framework everywhere and I’m quite the same as well. And I think it wouldn’t be fair to say that. I’d love to find somebody who doesn’t like framework. As our brain is wired this way. The least energy we can use, the better. Right?

Joanna Wiebe: Totally.

Louis: Right.

Joanna Wiebe: So you’ve been.

Louis: Sorry, go on.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, no, nothing. I was just going to say Carl, the co founder of Conversion Rate Experts is a rocket scientist. He’s an actual rocket scientist turned copywriter. So if anybody is going to teach you the importance of not starting from scratch and of relying on past excellence to build on and make your own excellence so things don’t fall apart, it’s going to be a rocket scientist. That’s probably why there’s like such a pull for people who have been with conversion rate experts. Yeah.

Louis: So Joanna, you’ve been amazing in delivering this step by step methodology. You actually over delivered. I wasn’t expecting that level of details and actually learned a lot from you and I don’t say that lightly. I did learn a lot from this conversation. I actually wrote a few notes there to remind myself to do starting tomorrow. What do you think more generally, what do you think digital marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years?

Learning humility and long-term marketing skills

Joanna Wiebe: The thing that comes. I mean there’s so much that we can learn every single day. But for me, the part that’s been the most useful is throughout my career. I keep going back to humility, to the idea that you don’t know, you don’t know, you know nothing. Jon Snow is like one of the greatest lines ever. And it’s true. Like the more we can learn humility, the more we can stop acting like we’ve got all the answers, the better things go right. As soon as I step out of the frame when we’re trying to convert people, as soon as it’s not about me in any way, shape or form, things get way better. So I’ve learned humility. I’ve learned not to take myself too seriously in my role. And I think that that in addition to everything you can learn about analytics and email marketing and SEO, if you can come at it all with humility, then you’ll always be learning and you’ll always be doing things from the right perspective, not just from your own. So that’s what I would say.

Louis: That’s a great answer. What are the top three best resources you would recommend? Marketers in particular. So it doesn’t have to be a book, it doesn’t have to be a podcast. It can be anything really.

Joanna Wiebe: Well, this podcast, obviously, because it sounds like you’re doing really cool stuff with it, but honest. But I mean that’s honest too, but Backlink co by Brian Dean is my go to resource for everything. Like when I just want to do something better with my business. Brian Dean, who I love, keeps teaching great stuff. So I go back to Backlinko a lot. That’s one of the bigger ones for me. Any of the books from the 1920s on copywriting you talked about David from Hotjar and I think his he talks about scientific advertising as his go to tested advertising methods is another great one. Any of those books that you can Find what’s the one that’s coming out? Is it scientific advertising? They’re bringing it back.

Louis: Oh yeah. Science advertising. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. So I would find any resource by Claude Hopkins, by John Caples, or by more recent but still late Gene Schwartz. So those are also Eugene Schwartz. However, his actual name is Eugene Schwartz, but everybody called him Gene. Okay. So I would Google that and follow any links there. You will be destined to learn crazy amounts just from those three guys.

Louis: Amazing. Thank you so much that. But I’m going to check them out as well. Joanna, last question. Where can listeners connect with you? Learn more from you?

Joanna Wiebe: I am [email protected] that’s where we do all of our writing on what we’re learning about conversion rate optimization and conversion copywriting. So copyhackers.com on Twitter opyackers with an F S do add the S. The guy that doesn’t have the S does not like hearing things that should go to me. So add the S. And other than that, yeah, check us out. We’re doing a lot of cool things over at Airstory Co as well. So those are the places you can find me.

Louis: Perfect. Joanna, thank you so much.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you, Louis. It was great.

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