Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 6 Review

Here’s to another week of my Growth Marketing minidegree by CXL completed! This week I focused on Momoko Price’s copywriting course “Product Messaging”. Momoko is a conversion copywriter and I absolutely loved her course. She made the copywriting process very organized, technical, and data-driven. I never thought of myself as being able to become a copywriter but Momoko explains that you don’t need to be an English (or any other language that you use to work) major, to be a copywriter. By following her process, it’s easy to come with compelling, effective, and optimized copy.

Like me, you might assume that to be a good copywriter you’ll have to be an exceptional writer, but, like anything in Growth Marketing, the copywriting process is just extremely customer-driven. If you focus on your customers/your target audience and have the right path to follow to obtain information on what your customers' needs are, the copywriting process won’t look so daunting. That’s what the course is all about, teaching you how to do some proper research, analysis and then create a process to put all those things together into effective conversion copy. So, how do you start? Let’s check it out!

If you are interested, you can check out my past articles about the program here:

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 1 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 2 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 3 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 4 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 5 Review

Copy “Teardown”

A copy teardown is basically an assessment of your current page copy, and here Momoko teaches us how to do this through a systematic framework. Keep in mind that this is not just critiquing the page on what YOU think it’s good or not, which tends to be a big problem in the usual heuristic processes. This process takes into consideration actual fundamental conversion elements. Here are a few tips from Momoko on how to use the copy teardowns:

1. Base them on (yet to be dis) proven persuasion principles.

2. Use them as a gap analysis tool, not a re-writing guide.

3. They can’t tell you what will work (Only listening to customers & prospects will get you this info) — only what likely isn’t.

And the basis of her whole process are 3 approaches to persuasion studies which, I won’t get into specifics about each of them for the sake of this article’s length, but I highly recommend you research about:

· Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising

· Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion

· MEClab’s Conversion Sequence Heuristic

So, taking into consideration all these approaches and full-funnel coverage, Momoko personalized a framework into a worksheet with questions that helps us assess copy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if her framework can be publicly shared but maybe you can try googling it and see if you can find it.

Message-Mining

So here is how you find out how to write effective copy without being an English major. Message mining is the process of doing some research online, where your target audience is, and observing what they are saying. Your customers are voicing what they care about, their concerns and this is extremely useful information for a copy. You can find this in competitors' reviews, or reviews about your own product, or through other solutions within your market.

Joanna Wiebe once said “instead of writing your message on a blank page, just steal it. Steal it directly from the mouths of your prospects.”

Your customer will be able to effectively explain the value of your product because after all, they are the ones who use it and pay for it. They also speak a common language with your market, which makes it all more authentic.

Uses of message-mining:

1. Identify Key Messages

2. “Swipe” Memorable Copy

So, what do we look for when “swiping” copy? Here’s a bullet list from Joanna Wiebe:

· How real people describe our product

· The benefits and points-of-value they talk about

· Anything they rave about

· Specific things they don’t like about products similar to ours

· Suspicions they have / Way they’ve been burned before

· Real-life problems our product helps them minimize or solve

· Interesting analogies and similes they use

And what do we use these for?

· Relevant, value-focused headlines

· Authentic lead paragraphs and hooks

· Market-specific terminology /slang

· Emotionally engaging purchase prompts

· Laser-accurate objections

How do we message mine?

Easy 5 step process:

1. Make a list of keywords: your brand (if well-known), your product type competitor brands.

2. Google “keyword” reviews. Also: complaints, forum, questions, discussion, comments.

3. Check popular review sites (Amazon, Yelp, ConsumerReports, TrustPilot, TripAdvisor, Facebook pages, own site reviews).

4. Collect into a spreadsheet

5. Categorize and rank messages. Motivators / Pain points, purchase prompts, objections, swipe-worthy copy

You can also message-mine from your customers through Surveys, interviews, user tests, etc.

The lesson here is LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS / TARGET AUDIENCE!

Crafting Effective Unique Value Propositions

Value propositions are the most influential element we can control. It answers questions from your customers like:

Reason to buy your product

Why should I use you over X?

What’s your differentiator?

What’s your unique advantage?

A key point to remember is, when you are writing your value proposition, think about it in this mindset:

You make a statement, your customer answers, “So what?” and then “Ok, prove it”

How to brainstorm your Unique Value Propositions

1. List your products key features

2. Pinpoint those features that are unique to your product

3. List customer pain points for each feature

4. Define desirable outcomes for each pain

5. Score pains/Outcomes by severity and frequency

6. Edit top-scored pain/outcomes into UVPs

7. Score the UVPs (and go with the best one)

Message Hierarchies

“Human thoughts tend to arrange themselves in story. Therefore, synchronizing your copy to the visitor’s thought sequence requires a story-based framework.”

- Todd Lebo, Marketing Experiments Lab

This is why your page copy needs to have a message hierarchy. This means synchronizing your copy to the visitor’s thought sequence, which often requires a story-based framework, through a beginning, middle, end. How do we do this?

1. Identify your visitors’ awareness (via survey/poll responses)

2. Pinpoint your UVP (Unique Value Proposition). Ideally using the voice of customer research.

3. Mine your surveys, transcripts, polls, user tests for top Motivation/Value/Anxiety messages.

Writing the first draft and editing your copy

So now what? We’ve got all this info, frameworks, so what do we do next? Here are a few key things to remember when you start writing your first copy and editing it:

1. Needs to be clear and explicit. Clarity trumps persuasion.

2. Match the reader’s mindset. Handy headline trick:

-Message-match with a quick question

-Answer with specific unique value

3. Blow them away with value.

- Make an exhaustive list of specific, happy outcomes

- Elimination of specific pain points

- Prove it with hard data and rich testimonials

4. Use quantifiable proof whenever possible.

5. Don’t just talk. Paint a picture!

- Lift word pictures from customers

- Replace general nouns with specific ones

- Replace generic adjectives with vivid ones

- Replace weak verbs with punchy ones

- Call out your reader with their needs

6. Show and tell generously

7. Cut anything that’s not doing real work

- Is it reflecting/matching motivation?

- Is it conveying (or clarifying) value?

- Is it proving a claim?

- Is it addressing an anxiety?

- Is it adding authentic specificity?

Conversion-Focused Formatting and Layout

There are some design factors that can dramatically influence your copy’s effectiveness

· Position of each piece of copy on the page. We have a basic tendency to read in an F pattern (upper left quadrant first)

· Size of each piece of copy on the page. Fitt’s law: the bigger/close an object is, the more accessible it is.

· What order you put each piece of copy on the page. Visual hierarchy: headlines, sub-headers, and testimonials should not be interchangeable. Text is a design element but IT’S ALSO information.

· The amount of space/clutter. Hick’s law: the more stimuli (or choices) users face, the longer it will take them to make a decision.

· Typography. Studies show that bigger, higher-contrast fonts are easier to read, and that extreme line heights (<0.8, >1.8) impede readability.

· Directional cues towards (or away from) your copy. Eye-tracking studies consistently show our eyes’ tendency to be drawn to (or guided by) human faces, pointing gestures (arrows, fingers, gazes, etc.), and outlines.

· Colour contrast vs background, imagery, buttons. Contrast tells our eyes what to focus on. If contrast is low or poorly controlled, our ability to distinguish between elements (or characters) is dramatically reduced, which impacts our ability to read text.

And to finish it all off, remember the last article: use wireframes to match it all together!

This is it for today’s article. 6 more weeks to go, so stay tuned.