Sabri Suby argues that branded copy underperforms direct-response marketing. His book landing page gets 20 minutes average time-on-site across millions of views by focusing on prospect problems instead of brand tone. Conversational copy that sells beats polished brand voice on clicks, conversions, and ROAS.
Questions this video answers
Approximately 20 minutes (across millions of views).
From lockdown in Melbourne.
Chapters
Founder Sabri Subhi joins me now in the studio. I really look at business as an incredible vehicle to really like make good and make change in the world.
The material side of that question was more about the sentiment of a specific brand before we start talking to them. So at least in that side we get a better understanding of the current tone or the current feeling from consumers about that brand. So when we do get to talk to them within ads or within how they're corresponding with them as well, from, from a client to a consumer perspective, we can also advise on what that looks like to them, but also have a reflection of that within our copy as well because it's quite important to get a measurement of the sentiment.
So it sounds like you're talking about branded copy versus direct response copy.
Yes.
Most of them, they don't even have a brand even though they think that they have a brand. Right. They have a logo. That's not a brand. Right. Our copy is colloquial, it's conversational copy. We try to understand the prospect, not the brand. Right. Because you can't go and pretend to be a big brand unless you are a big brand. Right. And most of those big brands do what we're doing in the beginning to even build themselves into a big brand. So our focus is on understanding the target market and what are the things that are keeping them up at night and then talking to those people like a human being. It's not about talking to them like we're talking to them from a brand. We're trying to talk to them as if we're just talking to like another person. And that's the reason that we get the results that we do on Facebook. Right. And believe you me, we have run campaigns where we use the branded copy and we speak how the client wants to speak to like in their ads and we just let again the data show them. Right. So it's like, yeah, I get it, I understand it's not really on brand. We're happy to run a variation of that. Definitely happy to do that. Do we have like your word that if our one gets you much better customers and at a cheaper rate, more profitably, then do we have permission to exclusively run our ads? Right. And then educating the client about their branded copy is actually alienating their market because if it wasn't more people would buy. Right. More people would pull out their credit card if they resonated with that branded messaging so much more then everything would show that you get a higher click through rate, you get a longer time on Site, you get a higher roas because the language is branded and it's speaking towards that brand tone and sentiment, the way that it smells, do you know what I mean? As opposed to our copy that's talking directly to the user. So that's the whole thing about it. Like people argue about do people read all of that copy and all of that kind of stuff. Right. I'm sure that you guys have seen like my book landing page with all of that copy on it. Have a guess at what the time on site is for that landing page.
Just over a minute.
It's 20 minutes.
20 minutes.
20 over millions and millions of views. The average time on site is 20 minutes. Who reads all of that copy? No one though, right? No one reads copy. It's like it's the biggest load of shit ever. And I've split tested that to crazy high heavens. So it's like we don't just do it because we like to write copy or we don't just do it in this way. Everything that we do had has to earn its place. It has to go out there and capture more money soldiers and bring them back to camp. If it doesn't, we wouldn't be doing it. So like, I wish there was something that you could tell your clients that want the branded message, but they came to us for a specific reason and obviously our form of marketing resonated with them. Otherwise they wouldn't be a client. And my copy is not branded copy. Yeah. So like I just like I can't cement enough that it's, it's only there from a scientific way. If it did not get results, we would not be doing it. But the people that run branded copy, they don't report on roas. They report on sunshine and giggles and impressions. Right. You cannot take those things to the bank account. So that's like you can't have it both ways. You can't want really high roas and then write wishy washy copy. It's. What is it? What do you want? What are we optimizing for? Is the campaign performance based on how it makes people feel or is it its ability to go and make money multiply? If it's the latter, then we can run both. And if we get the result that we think that we're going to get, then we need to run our ads. Hey guys, we're coming to you from lockdown in Melbourne. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe. Share it with a friend. We're dropping a video like this every day on YouTube and I will see you in the next video.
