If you’re responsible for writing copy—and especially if “writing” isn’t in your job description—join this session to learn how to write text that is clear, concise, and persuasive.
We’ll explore science-backed frameworks to: - Identify what your users need - Organize your landing page - Write copy that motivates users
This session is perfect for anyone who wants to learn a rigorous (but not overwhelming) approach to writing ad copy and designing landing pages.
If you wish there was a more objective way to make creative decisions, then you’ll love this talk.
Brent Summers:
All right, here we go. Hello there, my name's Brent Summers. And today I'm going to talk to you about using science to write better copy and acquire more customers. Before we get started, I just wanted to say a quick thank you to Wes and Andrea and Kat for the opportunity, I'm excited to share these techniques with the community. This is my first time sharing this stuff, but I can already tell it's going great. Let me go ahead and get my screen share set up and we'll dive right in. All right, as I mentioned my name is Brent Summers, I'm a Lead Strategist at Blink and I also run a newsletter called Full Stack Content. Blink is a UX research and design firm that works with leading companies to create meaningful digital products and experiences and my newsletter hosted on Substack is about content strategy. You can find me on Twitter, I'm at @brentsummers and I'd love for you to connect with me and share your feedback about this talk.
Brent Summers:
A little bit about Blink, we've been around for 20 years, we've worked with a ton of different companies. I've done a bunch of work in the last three years with Amazon since joining the company. So today I'm going to talk about using science to write better copy and acquire more customers. I'll be honest, some of these techniques are more research than science but science had a much better hook and they do tap into the science of linguistics and behavioral psychology. I learned these techniques through trial and error across the flight of my 16 year career. Most recently I've been focused in B2B Tech, I mentioned working with Amazon. I've also done a bunch of work in the past with Elasticsearch, HP, Microsoft, New Relic, Segment, Sumo Logic. You probably recognize a few of those names. Some of those companies are more product led than others, but here's my point of view on product led growth. Even the most successful product led companies still rely on marketing to attract and convert an audience. And this presentation will help you do just that.
Brent Summers:
So today's agenda, I'm going to help you learn how to identify what users needs, organize content on a page and write copy that motivates. This talk is really responsible or is really helpful for anybody that's responsible for writing copy. Even if writing isn't in your job description, you're going to... or especially writing isn't in your job description, you're going to learn a lot in this session. It's perfect for anyone who wants to learn a rigorous, but not overwhelming approach to writing ad copy and designing web pages. I really like this because it brings a very objective lens to creative or subjective decisions.
Brent Summers:
So let's dive in. First, we're going to talk Copywriting 101. Copywriting as defined by Wikipedia, is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. In my opinion at its best copy, that's the text, engages people by giving them something of value, not asking them for something. Great copy persuades someone to buy because they want help not because they feel pressured. I believe that good copywriting is concise, clear, and persuasive. Too often we fall into the trap of describing our product or product category, we drone on about features and how we're better than the competition but reality is that people care about what you can do for them. Who knows what a digital media player is? Certainly in 2000 and whatever when the iPod came out, we didn't but this value proposition of a thousand songs in your pocket, that's something that resonated with everybody. I got that example from marketingexamples.com.
Brent Summers:
Here's one more that I really like to point to. I believe infomercials do a great job with copywriting. This is Vince Offer the creator of The Slap Chop, The ShamWow and other popular products that are sold on television. And I'm just going to play a quick 30 second clip.
Vince Offer :
Hi, it's Vince with Slap Chop, you're going to be in a great mood all day because you're going to be slapping your troubles away with a Slap Chop. Now look, here's the potato, one slap, you've got big chunks for stew, two slaps, home fries in a second and look at this, if you add a mushroom, the more you do it, the finer it gets, you don't have to switch any blades. Now you love salad, you hate making it. You know, you hate making salad, that's why you don't have any salad in your diet. Watch this, one slap, salad! I love pizza too but once in a while, get the veggies in at least throw it on top of the pizza. You're going to change your eating habits. Soup, coleslaw, stuff [you watch 00:04:51] five seconds, four, five seconds it's done.
Brent Summers:
All right. So in 30 seconds he listed three benefits, two features and one source of pain, the benefits where you're going to be in a great mood all day, you don't need to switch the blades and you're going to change your eating habits. The features were, one slap for stews, two slaps for home fries, the more you do it, the finer it gets and the pain is, you know you hate making salads. So when you're coming up with copywriting, you can talk about benefits, features or pains and there's this like special mix of all of those that I think infomercials do a good job of getting right and they also keep the pace and the energy nice and high. So we can always learn something from Apple. And while it's at the other end of the spectrum, I think infomercials are a really good source of inspiration.
Brent Summers:
Here's what you got to remember, good copy addresses user needs. And in order to address user needs, you'd first need to understand what it is that your audience needs. And the way to arrive at that understanding is perhaps unsurprisingly, by talking to them. At my last Product-Led Summit talk, I shared a framework called The UX Flywheel, I'm going to reprise a section of that talk because I think it's really relevant to the topic of copywriting. So understanding customers deeply is an essential element of marketing. If you work for a product-led company, you already probably understand your customers pretty well and why that understanding is important to growth. But indulge me for a minute because in case you don't understand the difference between market research and user research, I want to explain those to you because they're both important but they're very different. Traditional market research focuses on surveys and quantitative understandings of demographics, user research is more like one-on-one interviews where you learn about people's motivations, self-identity, attitudes and their context of use.
Brent Summers:
I'm going to give you a really good example, imagine two customers both born in 1948, they're both white men, they're raised in Great Britain, they're married, they're successful and they're wealthy like living in castles wealthy. They both have a home in the Alps, they like dogs and they have two children. You got a picture of these two men? They sound so similar, right? Well, one of them is Prince Charles and the other is Ozzy Osborne. So these statistical descriptions that you get in demographics and market research are really important, but a true understanding of habits, culture, social context, and motivation of users is really essential to a great user experience. And without a great user experience, it's difficult to achieve product-led growth and without understanding those things, it's difficult to market to anyone.
Brent Summers:
So The UX Flywheel is a framework to help you understand what users needs and how you can tap into that on both the product side and the marketing side. Flywheel has three ingredients, the first one is desire. Desire is something that's really difficult to manufacture. You just can't invent that, I'm married now but back when I was dating, I had a guy that I was dating for a while, his name was Eric. He was tall, he was handsome and he was a doctor. My mom would have been so proud of I had married Eric but despite my best efforts, I just wasn't that into him. So desire is about making things that people want because that is so much better than making people want things. UX methods like user interviews and contextual inquiry, can help you understand what people want deep down inside. And that understanding helps you design and describe new products and creates a stronger market position.
Brent Summers:
The second ingredient is trust. Trust is earned through consistency of behavior, meeting expectations. Influencer marketing is a great example of trust. These influencers promise that they're going to create content, they create it every day and they build up audiences, loyal audiences that pay attention to them. Earning people's trust takes time. You can evaluate how well people trust a marketing page or product through usability testing and concept evaluation. And that will help you arrive at a better, clearer, more effective messaging, whether that's product messaging that has a value proposition or instructional messaging, that's how to use your product.
Brent Summers:
The final element is action. In today's world, we're really distracted, we really only read headlines and you've got to figure out how to motivate people to read your entire email or the entire landing page and most importantly, take action and press the button. You can do that through a combination of language and design and quantitative UX methods like data science and analytics are helpful at helping you measure different hypotheses and see which one works best in the wild.
Brent Summers:
There are some language things that you can use. This is the first I wish I would've made a slide for this, but if you haven't heard of Cialdini's 6 Principles of Persuasion. I'll read these off to you. You should look up Robert Cialdini's Influence at Work. The six principles of persuasion are liking, authority, commitment and consistency, reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity. You can dial up those different dimensions of persuasion in order to make a landing page more effective in order to motivate a user towards action. So screenshot this, this is the three elements of the UX flywheel, desire, trust, and action. And each time you spin the flywheel, you learn more about your customer and what they want deep down inside, how to get them to trust you and what motivates them to buy. And those learnings will fuel your product-led growth. Here's a quick table that talks about the three stages, maps them to research types and methods that you can use. This is not comprehensive, but it does give you some direction for how to measure desire, trust, and action. Grab a screenshot of that real quick. I'm going to take a sip of coffee. All right, so that ends the reprisal.
Brent Summers:
Now we're onto the new topic. I think the most important piece of copywriting is understanding the goal. Without understanding the goal, you don't know what to write and you don't know how to evaluate what has been written. Business goals sound like this; we want to sell more widgets, we want to earn more subscribers, we want to generate more leads. User goals in opposition sound like this; I want to solve a problem, I want to explore good content or I want to talk to someone. I think that the best way to reconcile these different dimensions is to bring them together. I'll show you how to do that. Remember Vince with Slap Chop, right? He wants to sell more Slap Chops, but his content was all written around user goals. He recognized that people on the website, they need to find the product, understand what it does, evaluate if it's right for them, find a good deal and calculate shipping costs. If you go to slapchop.com, you'll see all kinds of stuff about their free shipping and there's a bonus item. It's a really, really value forward offer.
Brent Summers:
So when you understand the user needs, then you can understand what the content needs to do. So in the case of Slap Chop, it was rank for Slap Chop, demonstrate the product, convince people that it's easy, create a sense of urgency and highlight free shipping. So see, when you put the business goals next to the user needs, you can understand how they relate to each other and how the content can support the user in doing what they need to do, which arrives at the business goal for you. Now, I get that people here are not selling as seen on TV products. So here's a pretty common set of user needs for a B2B SaaS company. Somebody arrives on a B2B SaaS page, whether it's a homepage or a PPC landing page, usually you're trying to qualify a visitor. The user on the other hand is trying to solve a problem, understand what your product does, evaluate if your product's right for them, they want to see a demo and they want to calculate the costs.
Brent Summers:
So your content again needs to, identify the problem the product solves, explain how the product solves that problem, highlight popular use cases, maybe testimonials and customers that are inside of certain industries might help there, show off the best features and ultimately convince someone to start a trial. This is generalizations about B2B SaaS companies. So here's one company that I think is doing that really well on a PPC landing page. This is Bambee they're an employee onboarding tool. And so this is above the fold on their PPC landing page. They've got employee onboarding for small businesses, making it really clear what the product is, it's an employee onboarding product. And who it's for, it's for small businesses. You can try Bambee today and you'll get a dedicated HR manager for expert HR guidance, a platform to manage employee personnel records, simplified onboarding process and online storage for HR policies and e-signatures.
Brent Summers:
Now they're asking a lot of the user, there's like seven or eight, maybe nine fields there. But they're pairing that with a ton of value and then they're cementing that with, authority coming from Norton's secured and Trustpilot verifications. So there's a whole lot more to this page but even in that first frame above the fold, they're satisfying most of the objectives that somebody needs when they arrive at a SaaS website. So this is a good example for you to model. All right, when it comes to organizing content, pages get long, there's lots of things that you need to do. I'm going to give you a framework for reconciling what should go above the fold, what should go below fold.
Brent Summers:
Let's not forget that ads are content too. A search ad on Google right now consists of the ad itself, which has headlines, descriptions and a display URL. And then there are these things called ad extensions, they're callouts, site links, extensions, locations, seller ratings. Remember that each click on an ad costs you money. So it's important that your ad help the user quickly determine whether or not your product is helpful to them. In this case, I searched for user onboarding software and two of the examples here Paycom and Lessonly are actually focused on employee onboarding, which is not exactly what I had intended. So by getting that level of specificity in the headline and the description there, Paycom and Lessonly are going to prevent me from clicking on an irrelevant ad. So that's a way that you can sort of point out to your audience whether or not your product is right for them.
Brent Summers:
Okay. We're going to continue now and talk about this age old problem of being Above the fold. We're all children of the internet. Well, maybe you're not, but I am a child of the internet. And I learned about above the fold as being this like digital marketing challenge, when I was working on website redesigns. Turns out this is something to do with newspapers. If you think about the way that newspapers are folded on the rack, the stuff above the fold, it's a very high value place to be. But the reality is that we do scroll on the internet.
Brent Summers:
So this is a way of thinking through what really needs to be above the fold and what you can deprioritize, either behind an interactive element or just pushing it lower down the page or maybe altogether on a different page. I think the first thing to do is create that matrix of the business goals, the user needs and the content objectives. Then you can brainstorm in a bullet list, all of the kinds of content that you might need to put on the page. So in the case of a B2B SaaS company, maybe it's a white paper, it's a trial, got to always have that hook and promise the value proposition
Brent Summers:
Case studies, briefs, press releases, blog posts, all of those things can help you achieve those content objectives. So now that you've got this like, messy list of the things that might help a user accomplish what they need to do so that you can satisfy your business goal, answer a couple of questions. How badly does the user need this content? And what impact will this have on our business goals? When you evaluate each of these items for their severity of user need and potential impact on the business goal, you can map them inside of a four quadrant framework and start to determine what goes up high, what gets a lot of saturation or contrast, what's big, what's small. So in the top right corner, that's what your page is focused on. The content there should be showcased because it's essential to the business goals and user needs. The content at the bottom of the page, I'm calling that, the include section, that's the lower left, and that content is not necessarily important for the business or the users, but it's required for some reason, that's the stuff that goes in the footer, additional supporting material. So then you've got drive and focus.
Brent Summers:
Anyways, the point here is you can plot where content belongs. This screenshot over on the right is a B2B SaaS tool called Cloud Elements. And I broke down their content and plotted it into these four frameworks, so you can take a screenshot of this if that's helpful for you. And this framework I learned from The Content Strategy Toolkit by Meghan Casey, it's a really great book, you should pick it up. But again, this is just a way of thinking through what to go first, second, third, and perhaps leave out altogether or put down on the bottom of page.
Brent Summers:
All right. The next section is where we're going to bring it all together. If there's one thing that I've learned about writing copy it's that everyone thinks they can do it, everyone has an opinion. These tools should help you to navigate those conversations by bringing some objectivity to the situation.
Brent Summers:
First, we'll do a quick quote from David Ogilvy, on average, 5x as many people who read the headline as read the body copy. When you've written your headline, you've spent eighty cents of your dollar. So that is to say that headlines have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the funnel. The point of the headline is to get somebody to read the second line of an email or the second page behind an ad. I came up with this heuristic framework called S.C.R.E.A.M that I think helps compose better, stronger headlines. So S.C.R.E.A.M stands for; specific, clear, engaging, ambitious and mine. There are a series of questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether or not your headline screams.
Brent Summers:
Just remember this, if a headline's offensive, people might skip over it. If a headline's dull or boring, they're probably going to ignore it. If the headline seems confusing, they're going to disregard it and if the headline seems inaccurate, they're not going to trust it. So, if you ask yourself these questions, you're going to arrive at through iteration probably a better headline. Iteration and choosing which headline is best. That's what the next couple of tools are about.
Brent Summers:
This one is a free tool by the Advanced Marketing Institute called, Emotional Marketing Value. There's a link at the bottom there. Headlines are most effective when they invoke emotions in the reader's minds. This free tool looks at the sounds of the words to determine their potential for emotional impact. The sounds of the words is really important. So this is based on some research from Dr. Hakim Chishti. He studied linguistics and spirituality and he's specifically looking at this phenomenon called universal harmonies. So the tonalities, multi-syllabic words, that sort of thing. These categories or emotional impact areas, there are three of them and it's basically logos, pathos and ethos, if you're into Socratic rhetoric. Intellectual words are effective when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation. Empathetic words tend to bring out profound and strong, positive emotional reactions in people and spiritual words have the strongest potential for influence and appeal to people on a deep, emotional level, they're not appropriate for every situation. If you are in a product-led growth company, you might be marketing towards engineers or deeply technical people, so you've got to be really careful about those heavy spiritual headlines.
Brent Summers:
I'm going to give you an example of how I've used this tool. I iterate on headlines, I plunk them into the analyzer and I write the score down and I put the score in a spreadsheet with conditional formatting. No I didn't write these headlines. These are examples that I pulled from the about page of several websites focused on aerospace innovation. So this is like the mission statement. As you might expect, the higher the value the better the headline, right? The greater proportion of emotionally resonant words. According to the Advanced Marketing Institute, the best headlines tap into one or more impact groups. So some of the best performing headlines on this one, our reason to believe, scores high, 100% but purely intellectual. By contrast, we solve big problems responsibly, 100% but entirely empathetic. So a better option might be, we are inventors, builders and doers, that's 50% across all three impact groups. So again, this is a way to iterate through a bunch of different headline options and use an outside perspective on which of these is best.
Brent Summers:
Another tool that I really like is readability scores. So I use a free one by a company called WebFX. The more complex your subject matter, the more important it is to focus on readability. This is a competitive analysis that I did for one of our clients, Sumo Logic. Prior to our work they scored at around ninth grade, which is pretty good. I like to try to strive for 10th grade or below, eighth grade for marketing use cases. Anyways, Sumo Logic is a log analytics platform so it's deeply technical material. But if you look at some of their competitors, Splunk, New Relic and Elasticsearch, they had simplified the language, simply by using more periods and less commas, no semi-colons, less adverse. When you simplify your writing style, people can focus on the message itself, it's just lower cognitive load. This is especially important when people are in a hurry, as they tend to be while browsing marketing sites or doing a competitive analysis across a series of products.
Brent Summers:
So readability, I like the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score, I just think it's easy for people to comprehend but there are lots of different scores that you can use. So I'm going to bring this together for you. This is one of those tools or one of the ads that I found earlier, this is Paycom, so the top of their landing page, it says onboarding, quickly and seamlessly transition high-caliber applicants to productive contributors, with no data re-entry. That's a fine headline I suppose. I'm not a big fan of adverbs personally, so I'm going to show you how I did a rewrite. My revised headline over here on the right reads, streamline onboarding, improve data quality and impress new hires. That scores better on the emotional marketing value matrix, it gets 55% and it reads as both intellectual and spiritual. On the readability score, it brings the grade level down from college level reading to 10th grade.
Brent Summers:
And then by this evaluation matrix that I have called the S.C.R.E.A.M Framework, I believe anyway that this revision is more specific and more clear. I think it is equally relevant, I think it's more engaging and more ambitious, it uses three verbs, it promises three outcomes, it doesn't use any adverbs. The other thing is it taps into this psychological principle called the rule of threes, which suggests that somebody will be able to more easily remember my revision than the one on the left. So I would consider that to be more own able, that's the mine in S.C.R.E.A.M. So there you have it, that's how to use science to write better copy and acquire more customers. I hope this was helpful for you. I'm really interested in hearing your feedback. You can email me directly at brent@blinkux.com. I've got that newsletter where I blog every Sunday, you can get that it's contentstrategy.substack.com. And of course I'm available on Twitter @brentsummers. Thanks.
