They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play! Proven copy formula to del...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host, and today I'm going to talk about copywriting because so often in public relations we talk about how we are going to be reaching out to people, but what we write is of fundamental importance. And I was listening to a mastermind for the Thinkific training program, and there's a lady called Joanna Weber who runs the Copy Hackers .com business. And Copy Hackers is an academy for copywriting and really gave me a formula that I thought was very powerful, and I couldn't wait to share it. Now, the formula that she has is for writing effective copy for your homepage. Now, for most of us, and certainly for me, getting enough people to buy what we're offering is a real problem, and we spend a lot of time writing and a lot of time reading, but not necessarily understanding what makes great copy especially great sales copy. So I thought I would share that. Now, one of the key points then that she makes in her talk is that we have to really start with the problem that we've heard most that our clients want to solve. So Joanna Weber says that, you know, really ideally we're articulating in our copy the problem that our customer audience has actually shared with us through our focus groups or by listening online I heard another person talking about doing social listening and listening, for example, on, on Amazon on book reviews to find out what problems people are having solved by certain books. So starting our copy on our web page or in our pitch for our media or for any sales really starts with the problem we're trying to solve, and ideally in the language Of the person that we're solving it for. Now, this is where I thought it became very interesting because I've understood and thought of that part before. But then what Joanna Weber was saying was that agitation is the expression of the problem. So what we really need to do is to create a formula, and they have a formula which I'll share with you. And then we're looking again at what solutions. The customer has already tried, but which didn't work, and what agitation and what frustration or anxiety that leads to, and then introducing our own good or service, which may then solve that problem. Then looking at how we establish our own credibility, and then the why, the try, and then the buy. So they have this formula, which I thought I would share, and I'll write in because I thought it simple. But elegant. So first of all, the problem, then the agitation, then the solution, then again the further agitation, then the introducing, then the why, then the try, and then the buy. So for example, the problem that I have is that I have hundreds of people come, for example, to my website every week. And I've tried, for example, SEO, and I've tried, uh, using various tools like LinkedIn and Facebook, but I'm still not making the sales on my website. So I've then tried by spending money on sponsored ads and consultants, and that's still not solving the problem. I'm still not getting enough of the leads from what should be a full funnel. So therefore, what would be introduced to me would be, for example, a product or service that could really narrow the funnel and bring people that were looking for public relations that had come to my website but somehow still left my website. So in my case, I'm talking now about the mastermind the Get Noticed Mastermind, where for people that have not actually got enough coverage for themselves and maybe have tried through getting a freelancer or tried social media outreach themselves, but they're still frustrated that they're not getting the value out of their business, that they might want to try the mastermind. Now she talks then about the the why. You know, why does this work? And in my case, the Mastermind works because I've worked on over 500 clients. So the Mastermind tools and technologies that I introduce already work. So why should you try the Mastermind? It's because it's already proven. And then she talks about the trying. So this is where she talks about giving people the offer to try, and for example, for 30 days or 60 days or for 90 days. And giving free items away which would be part of the bigger course— trying a download, watching a video, listening to a testimonial. And then the part about buying, and this is where I thought that it was really very talented. So she says, what about, for example, if your prospects are anxious about the time investment? How much time it's going to take for them to get a return on their investment. Could you double the length of your guarantee period, for example? If they may be worried about how much time it's going to take them to complete the course, can you offer then the the courses available 24/7 through online, or do you extend the number of weeks or months that they have in order to complete the course? If they are worried about cash flow. Could you change the payment terms? So if you're selling to a big company, there may not be such an issue with procurement, but for entrepreneurs or for younger people, a payment plan may be better. This resonated with me because with the Mastermind I've been charging a flat fee, but actually many people that are target audience may find a subscription model over time would be much better. And then talking about the hard-to-implement work, the aspects of the mastermind that couldn't be taught or couldn't be learned, let's say self-learned online, can we offer then to touch base with those people through Zoom, for example, on a scheduled basis? So how do we then overcome their objections of time, of money, of risk? And then what Joanna talked about was the incentives to preorder. So she mentioned about a person who had offered free baseball tickets and sold just as many tickets in the preorder as she did the following year selling, just offering baseball caps. So sometimes the incentive doesn't have to be great, there just needs to be an incentive there. She talks about the headline featuring the problem being solved, and she introduced an advert with a man standing up going to a piano and in a social setting. It's an old— it looks like a 1940s cartoon. It says, they laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play! And the advert then talks about How you can take, in fact, the U.S. School of Music course on learning to play music without taking any risk. Talks about a demonstration, for example. Okay, so we have this great example then of taking the words, which would be the if you like, the protagonist, the, the hero, as we like to say now in storytelling business. Take it— that person who we're going to put to the center of our business and help them to accomplish their targets or their goals. So the simplest way for people to identify with themselves is to use their own words. So she has a splash page for their copywriting where it says, as you watch others land clients and gain popularity, you think Quote, damn it, that should be me, unquote. So putting center stage the problems that our customers are going to have is a really great and important way to build copy. Now, in press releases, we don't really write quite like that, so this is a different discipline, but I thought a very valuable one because most of us are writing and press releases are just one part of it. Let's have a conversation with someone today around the mastermind. And actually, we have to write in different ways for different situations. And then what Joanna was saying was that they do a sweep of their text for clarity, for voice and tone, for the so what does that mean, the prove it sweep, the heightened emotion sweep, the zero risk sweep, and the specificity. sweep. So they have 7 different sweeps that they run through the text, and frankly, that applies as much to a press release or a pitch or an article as it would to a piece of copy on a home page. Finally, they talk about whether the home page and the text is selling a specific something or an emotion, and I think this is certainly something that we need to address in all writing. For example, a course— is it selling a skill or a confidence? Is a product selling a service or an end result? And I think that's a great test that we have to apply to anything that we write and any service that we're looking to sell or to offer to people, whether it's in consumer or business-to-business. So I thought this was a very good model and one that we can all follow, this idea of identifying the problem The agitation, the solution, the agitation, the introducing, the why, the try, and the buy. So for copy on a website or a direct mail piece or an advert, that really works. If we're writing, for example, for the media, the agitation and the solution is absolutely there, as is the introducing and the why. Now obviously the try and the buy are not there if we're talking to the media. But ultimately, that's what we're trying to do. And with social media and owned media blurring the lines slightly, because editorial media would, would not approve and not include those try and buy, often now the content we're writing bridges the two spaces. So we really need to think about how we integrate the try and the buy into all of our content. So I'm grateful to the Thinkific team for having this amazing masterminds, and with Joanna Weber kindly sharing her expertise and knowledge. And I wanted to share that with you today because I really think that it's very valuable and has given me some great insight into how I can structure copy better across all the applications that I'm answering, but also that the sweeps, the 7 sweeps really are a great discipline regardless of the copy that we're writing. And so with that, I will sign off for this episode of Speed PR, and I hope that this, uh, is a useful, if short, piece just to have you focus and think about if you're writing something, there's a structure and a formula really to writing certain kind of copy. In this particular case, the website copy for a landing page press releases, press articles, case studies— they all have some structure that's proven. And over the coming weeks and months, I shall be introducing those as well, and also listing and detailing those with some templates on the Speak PR Mastermind course, details of which can be found at speakpr.co. My name is Jim James. Thanks again for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health. A profitable business, and that if you're writing, that the contents of this podcast prove to be really helpful to you. Thanks again for listening.