Secret #12
Don’t Reinvent The Wheel—Great Copy Leaves Clues

“Your job is not to write copy. Your job is to know your visitors, customers and prospects so well, you understand the situation they’re in right now, where they’d like to be, and exactly how your solution can and will get them to their ideal self.”

Joanna Wiebe

You need to do the right research before you start creating your sales copy. Why? So you’re immersed in the mindset of the people you’re targeting with your sales message. Now, what type of research would you need to do? What do you need to know?

What do they want more than anything?

What are their big desires? What are their fears? What scares them? What are their objections to buying stuff like what you’re trying to sell?

You need to find out these things:

If you do that, you have a massive advantage over the other people creating sales messages.

Look at the sales messages your customers see in the marketplace. Look at the number one bestselling books on Amazon that target your audience. Read the back cover copy. Look at the chapter titles. See the sales messages used to get these people to buy.

This process is called “funnel hacking.” Look at what’s already working with an offer, sales copy, and product, then apply that to what you’re doing with your products and services. You don’t steal what others are doing, but you do model how they’re approaching and selling to the marketplace.

Where do you research?

Amazon is my number one source for research. Not only can I see what people are buying since Amazon has everything listed in categories of best sellers, but I can also look at the comments that people make and their feedback (or lack of feedback) on every product. I read the five-star reviews to see what gets people excited.

More importantly, I read the one-star reviews to see what has people pissed off and make sure I don’t do that with my offers.

But the real gold when you’re looking at reviews is in the two, three, and four-star reviews. Why? Because those are the people who liked some of it and didn’t like other parts. Those are the most helpful people because, quite frankly, the five-star people are often fanboys and the one-star people are just bitter “know-it-alls” who hate life. The two, three, and four-star people explain, “Hey, it did this, which was good, but it didn’t do this, which upset me.”

Use their words to help write your sales copy.

Let’s say you’re selling a product about how to speak Spanish. You notice people complain that a popular product doesn’t teach you conversational Spanish. Instead, it sounds like you’re learning straight out of a classroom.

Here’s how you can use that feedback.

  1. Clue yourself in on what to include in your own product.
  2. Emphasize how your product uses conversational Spanish.
  3. Use that angle in your headline, “How To Learn Conversational Spanish In As Little As Two Weeks!”

Those are the things you find out when you do the research. You have to immerse yourself in the sales messages potential customers are seeing and how they react to them.

Google is another great research resource. If I want to solve a problem, I’ll search Google to see what comes up. Read the blog posts, look at the ads, look at the keywords people use and the related products. Look for the ideas people share in blog posts and articles. Look at the questions people ask. It might take a couple of hours or a couple of days to immerse yourself. It might take you a week, depending on your schedule and how well you know your audience. But it’ll be the most valuable couple of hours, couple of days, or week that you ever spend. This research is how you see the words people use and connect with them in your sales copy.

The consequences of not doing this are severe. Quite frankly, if you don’t use the words they use, if you don’t resonate with them, they will not buy from you.

Your sales messages will fall flat with your target audience. They won’t pay attention to your headlines. If they do pay attention to your headline, then your copy won’t work and your ads won’t be any good.

Immersive research helps you pretend you are one of your prospects with the same problems and desires. See what’s available out there. Look at the sales messages and the feedback, especially for products and services that are popular with your target audience.

Immersive research gives you a direct way to take advantage of where your competitors are succeeding and where they’re failing. It automatically positions your offer as a unique and better solution just by understanding the market through research.

Feedback from one of my products brought this home to me in a big way. For almost two years I had the number one PowerPoint educational DVD on Amazon. We sold thousands of this thing. While looking at the feedback, I realized that some people felt like the entire DVD was a pitch for a piece of software called Snagit®. I thought, «What the hell are you talking about? I demo how to create a PowerPoint presentation with all these different slides, and I use Snagit as the example to build the presentation around. I don’t care if you ever buy Snagit. I don’t even tell you where to get it!”

But it shows that people don’t pay attention! (Big surprise there.) They’d buy the DVD and watch it, but they didn’t pay attention to the slides I made using Snagit as the example. They skipped ahead and watched the part of the training where I showed the final presentation which happened to be an excellent presentation for Snagit! But if they had watched the whole instructional video, they would have seen that I built the presentation in front of them.

This confusion never occurred to me, but I changed some verbiage and part of the sales copy which cleared it up. It’s a great example of why you want to look at the feedback from your competitors. However, you also look at your feedback to improve your own sales copy.

My competitor could have exploited this issue to their benefit by saying something like, “And unlike other training, we don’t try to sell you anything extra. We include everything you need to make amazing PowerPoint presentations and don’t pitch any extra software.” Even though it was BS, and I wasn’t pitching, a competitor could have smoked me if they’d been paying attention.

Another place to do research is your frequently asked questions that come in, or your email support tickets. Those are a goldmine. Nobody wants to read the negative feedback or objections, but if it makes you a whole lot wealthier, then that’s enough motivation to do it.

When you sit down to write your copy, research needs to be part of your planning process. Say, “Hey, I’ve got to write a sales letter, a postcard, or an email. Let me designate a couple of hours to do some research. If I’m selling a book, let me research popular books. I’ve got to write a sales letter for my software, let me go research software.” Make this part of the copywriting process. Instead of opening your word processor and staring at the blank blinking cursor, wondering what to write, do some research! Get your mindset in the right groove, and some amazing copy will result.

As I’ve said before, writing copy is a game of momentum. You need to get your copywriting engine warmed up before you write. Kickstart that process by reading other people’s text and the feedback from customers on the related things they buy. This practice gets you into that copy mindset and makes it easier to start writing.

My best piece of advice about the research before writing sales copy is:

  1. Just do it. Get the words, feelings, and ideas directly from sales copy that engages people.
  2. Understand the reactions of people. Amazon and other sites that allow you to look at reviews are your goldmines.

Spending a few hours researching similar products helps you get into the flow of creating sales copy. The result is better sales copy, written much faster.

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