I interview plenty of humans on How I Made It In Marketing, but in this MarketingSherpa blog post I’ll be interviewing an artificial intelligence.
Copywriter is an expert assistant in MECLABS AI. Its totally free to use (for now). Here’s where you can find the Copywriter expert assistant in MECLABS AI:
Why interview an AI you might task? Or as my mother might say, “You went to college for this? So you could interview a machine? Well, I bet my vacuum cleaner has some pretty interesting observations.”
Mockery is fair, but that mockery comes from an old paradigm – that the only experts are humans.
Now you can have a conversation with a digital ‘mind.’ Haven’t you ever felt like you wish you had an expert you could chat with to brainstorm? Well, this is the upside of the expert assistants.
And they can answer instantly, and at no cost (for now). Try finding that in a human marketing expert.
Please note that since this is an AI – and not a real human – when it talks about previous experiences and the like, I assume it is discussing the content it was trained on.
Foundational principles
What are the core principles of effective copywriting that you believe can be applied to all forms of marketing communications?
The essence of effective copywriting is anchored in the following core principles:
Understanding the customer’s needs creates a foundation for relevance
Clarity overpowers complexity – ensure your message is lucid and unambiguous
Brevity is the soul of wit* – concise messaging often yields the strongest impact
Offering value – every word must serve the purpose of portraying the value proposition
Encouraging action – culminate your copy with a strong, unmissable call to action, driving customer behavior.
*Editor’s Note: This is a quote from William Shakespeare
How do you ensure your copy resonates with diverse audiences, especially in an era of increasing market segmentation?
I’ve been a writer my entire adult life. But sometimes I feel that people see me as more of a magician.
So let me first tell you all the things that a good copywriter can’t do:
Substitute for an utter lack of a value proposition
Solve a product or offer problem
Replace seamless UI and UX
Forge instant trust when your brand has burned the customer before
Create an elevator pitch based on the ‘how’ (logistics) not the ‘why’ (benefits)
I’m amazed how many times I’ve been asked to write a TV ad or website with near zero meaningful info about the product or service. They expect me to conjure value and desirability from thin air. That’s not good writing. It’s magic.
Can I put words together in a script or on a homepage that sound good? Sure. But it’s just blandvertising. I can make the words sparkle. But they won’t actually be conveying meaningful information. It’s all sleight of hand. Misdirection. An illusion.
And I think that’s why so many marketers and entrepreneurs who aren’t professional writers think they can’t write. They’ve set the bar too high. They think great marketing copy can do more than it really can. And don’t realize that they have the most important information at their disposal and just need a little guidance on the craft.
While copywriting shouldn’t be doing the things I previously mentioned, it can do one thing so darn well it is (semi) magical:
Help the ideal customer perceive the value of a product or service
So in this blog post, I’ll do what no magician can – reveal how it’s done. Because while mystery and wonder are key to tricks, clarity and understanding is essential for marketing copywriting.
And I’ll do one better. I’ll give you your own magic wand – MECLABS AI (MECLABS is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa). It’s free to use, and you don’t even have to register (for now).
The below screenshots are from MECLABS AI’s ‘Write a powerful headline’ guided path, which can write optimized headlines based on your guidance. While it was just released two days ago and is still in an early beta phase, it can already be a helpful assistant for your headline writing.
Generative AI can already write headlines, of course. In fact, I let MECLABS AI write the headline for this blog post by talking to it. But what makes the headline generation pathway different is that it immerses you in the process, and gives you the opportunity to provide the right input and make key choices.
Step #1: Have something worth saying
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I lay these steps out, they’re going to seem equal. That’s just the nature of outlining a process in a blog post.
But they’re not. I always say – 80% of good writing is having something worth saying, the other 20% is saying it well.
To help you say it well, the first thing MECLABS AI asks you to do is tell it about your business. The focus is on the customers’ problem and the solution you offer, not your conversion goal or what you’re trying to sell or get.
What you can give is worth saying to a customer. They do not care what you want.
As a specific example, I’ll go step-by-step through the MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway by writing a headline for the How I Made It In Marketing podcast.
Here are my answers for the first step. I’m trying to provide precise and detailed my answers. But also notice that they aren’t necessarily worded that great. Marketers make a mistake when they focus on the exact sprinkle of perfect words too soon. First be clear, then be clever.
My inputs…
How I Made It In Marketing podcast
What is the problem that your product or service solves?
The ideal audience for the How I Made It In Marketing podcast is marketers and entrepreneurs. overwhelmed by the immediacy of day-to-day demands, a challenge Stephen Covey encapsulates as the tyranny of the urgent over the important. After all, marketing is 99% boring meetings followed by 1% of sheer creative brilliance. So the sheer brilliance part can get overlooked.
Important work like thinking about how to manage their teams, how to remove blockers for their teams, or what vision they should have for their career. There are other podcasts in the marketing industry, many other podcasts, but most of these focus on buzzwords and hype and promotions and products. Many podcasts offer broad, untested theories rather than practical advice.
What is the solution that you offer?
On How I Made It In Marketing, marketing leaders tell you what actually did work. They share specific, hard-won lessons from their career, and take you into the room where it happened by sharing how they actually lived these lessons (not just opinions on what should work).
Since How I Made It In Marketing is in podcast form, marketers and entrepreneurs can their downtime (while commuting, traveling, running, working out, etc.) to think about the important (but not urgent) questions for their companies and career. By helping marketers and entrepreneurs in this way, we help keep a society built on choice functioning. There have been 88 episodes so far, each about an hour long.
Most guests have been C-level or SVP-level leaders in public or well-funded private companies. And while the majority of the guests are senior leaders and on the brand side, we aim to serve the entire marketing community, so we do have on vendors (like ad agencies and marketing platforms) and more junior marketers on from time to time as well.
And here’s what it looks like in MECLABS AI…
Creative Sample #1: ‘Tell us about your business’ step in MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway
Act #2: Understand where your reader is
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.” – Stephen King
No, I don’t mean Pittsburgh or Peoria.
When it comes to the thing you have to say, where are they in the customer journey?
For the How I Made It In Marketing podcast, my focus is awareness, and you can see below how that affected how I ranked challenges in MECLABS AI.
Creative Sample #2: ‘Force-rank your challenges’ step in MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway
Act #3: Find your voice
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde
There are many ways to communicate something, how will your writing, and your brand, communicate it?
Kind of like in high school where you had to figure out your archetype – jock or nerd, class clown or socialite, theater kid or rebel.
In MECLABS AI, I chose an ‘informative’ tone and then starred my favorite headline ‘Sifting the Gold from the Grind: Rare Marketing Brilliance Revealed.’ That’s not quite right yet, it is just a draft at this stage. But that headline is marketing copy with earfeel – it was viscerally communicating what I’m trying to say.
Creative Sample #3: ‘Review and star your preferred headline’ step in MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway
The best way to write one really good headline is to not write one really good headline. Write 18 headlines. Write 57 headlines. Write 70 headlines.
As a copywriter, I used to paper the walls of my office with marker comps of concepts. MECLABS AI makes it easy for you, giving you half a dozen headlines at a time that you can keep regenerating.
Act #4: Writing is choices
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
Bill Shakespeare could have written, “To be, or not to be, I’d kind of like to know.”
It would have had the same general meaning, but it wouldn’t have gotten it across the same way. There are somewhere between 171,476 (Oxford English Dictionary) and 1,022,000 words (Harvard and Google) in the English language, depending on who you ask. There’s fudgel and grawlix and groak and a whole lot more.
Which means, you have a lot of choices.
I remember early in my days as a copywriter, I had written dozens and dozens of potential tag lines for a client. I brought them to my boss, and none of them were quite right in his estimation. He had a giant dictionary on his desk, he put his hand on it, looked at me, and said, “Well, it’s in here somewhere.”
The specific word choices you make will affect how well people understand what you write, and how they feel about it. For example, on the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode “The Survivor,” a Holocaust survivor and a former contestant of the TV show Survivor engage in a discussion regarding their respective challenges and experiences. It’s the same word, right? But the joke (and social commentary) lies in the difference between the gravity and significance of two uses of the same word with the same meaning. This isn’t the same word with different meanings. Which is you must consider not only the denotation, but also the connotation for every word in your headline.
To make it easier, MECLABS AI color codes nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and then gives me alternative choices for the words.
Creative Sample #4: ‘Optimize your word choice’ step in MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway
Based on the options it gave, I changed ‘sifting to ‘extracting.’ I wanted the reader to get the feeling of actually taking those key nuggets out of the podcast, not just sorting through them.
I kept ‘gold.’ I appreciated the alliteration MECLABS AI made with ‘grind.’
I changed ‘rare’ to ‘uncommon.’ It just felt like it was, ironically enough, less commonly used than ‘rare,’ which I feel like I see in a lot of headline.
‘Marketing’ is spot on. That is exactly what the podcast is about.
I changed ‘brilliance’ to ‘ingenuity.’ ‘Brilliance’ just feels braggadocios.
I then used the ability to type in the headline box to add – ‘In These Deep-Dive Conversations.’ The fact that these are conversations is an important fact I wanted to convey. I then asked MECLABS AI to highlight modifiers again and give me more choices.
Creative Sample #5: ‘Optimize your word choice’ step in MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway (further edits)
I changed ‘revealed’ to ‘brought to light.’ Revealed felt a little too clickbait-y while brought to light felt illuminating, which is what I am going for.
I kept ‘deep dive,’ although MECLABS AI suggested ‘in-depth’ which I actually liked better. But I didn’t want it to sound repetitive with the word ‘in’ just two words earlier in the headline.
I changed ‘conversations’ to discussions.’ As for how the words felt, it was a tossup for me. But I did like that discussions is one syllable shorter.
Act #5: Make sure there is substance behind the style
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
I’ve interviewed a lot of writers for jobs. Here’s what separates the wheat from the chafe – having a ‘why’ beneath the headline.
And that has always been my favorite part of showing off my own work. It’s not that the text on the page was ‘magic’ (there’s that word again). It’s understanding ‘why’ those words were chosen.
In the final step, MECLABS AI gives that explanation, and includes all of your work.
Creative Sample #6: ‘Develop your creative brief’ step in MECLABS AI headline generation guided pathway (further edits)
Here’s what it said about my headline…
The headline captures the core interest of both marketers and entrepreneurs, navigating the ‘grind’ of day-to-day tasks to uncover actionable ‘gold’ or insights. It aligns with the podcast’s unique value proposition, which is sharing real-life victories from high-level marketing pros, allowing the target audience to glean rare wisdom during their non-urgent times. This plays directly into their desire to elevate important work over urgent demands through engaging lessons and stories, distinct from the common industry noise.
Is the end result a perfect headline? No, far from it. Maybe this is my own ego speaking, but I feel like I could write a better headline with a yellow legal pad, blue pen, and zero restrictions.
But it is 80% of the way there. And that’s the goal of this blog post. If you’re not a professional writer, here are the steps – and even a free tool – you can use to get some pretty good headlines.
And if you are a professional writer, you can try it out as well, but you need the right mindset. If I think of the tool as the writer, it chafes a little. But if I think of the tool as a colleague to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off of, it excites me. It’s like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in ‘Fantasia.’ I have to go from mopping the floor, to conducting an orchestra of mops. Therein lies the magic.
I don’t have an actual ad budget for this, but I didn’t want to waste the headline. So I clicked the clipboard feature to copy it, and posted the headline on social media. You can see how it’s doing for yourself on:
Every Wednesday, we hold a free Marketing LiveClass as part of ChatGPT, CRO and AI: 40 Days to build a MECLABS SuperFunnel. Everyone is welcome to join and learn, as we build marketing funnels with members of the MECLABS SuperFunnel Research Cohort.
In the LiveClass, marketers and entrepreneurs can ask questions in the webinar chat. And we answer them right here…
Hi Dan, I’m trying a new angle on copywriting for one of my products. If you have time to give feedback, I would really appreciate your wisdom. I also know you’re super busy, so no pressure. I also know you’re the master of copywriting, so your guidance is invaluable. Thanks for all your wisdom. I’ll load it into Notion later today. Here’s the link: [anonymized]
Here’s the CFO: To help motivated volunteers in the church boost their ministry effectiveness and gain spiritual confidence by giving them 4 theology/ministry courses (“Advanced Bootcamp”) in exchange for a cash payment and a significant investment of time.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Let’s see if I can help.
First, let’s define copywriting. I define copywriting as ‘Helping the customer come to the best decision about a brand, product or conversion goal.’ (from Marketing 101: Copywriting vs. copy editing vs. content writing). And this person had taken a step in that direction, starting with a CFO (customer-first objective).
I don’t think it would be practical or fair to paste their entire page in here, but I also don’t want you to focus too much on what his copy says, but rather understand the principles of how you can optimize your own copy.
I also cannot definitively say whether the copywriting will be successful or not, because I am not the landing page’s ideal customer. But I think I can best help this person (and you) by calling out how the different levels of value proposition should appear on a landing page.
The landing page should primarily focus on one of the levels of value proposition. But for most landing pages (and certainly this landing page) all four levels should be present, usually with the other three levels supporting the main one you are focused on. (If you are unfamiliar with value proposition levels, you can read Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions).
So let’s look at those levels:
Product-level value proposition
This page is focused on the Advanced Bootcamp, which consists of the courses. The page clearly informs people what they are getting (“4 precisely selected courses”), has a section for each course that explains what it will enable the participant to achieve, discusses the elements of the course (video lecture, downloadable charts, etc.).
You’re probably doing this pretty well on your product-focused pages as well, so I won’t dwell here. You likely understand the basics of communicating what is involved with your product.
Prospect-level value proposition
According to the customer-first objective stated above, the prospect this page is focusing on is “motivated volunteers in the church.”
However, the tone of the copy is not what I would expect for that audience. “You’re a happy little Christian gerbil,” “It’s too hard. You don’t have enough time. Your brain will hurt. It costs too much. You’ll want your mommy,” “Fix Your Boring, Lame, Mediocre Spiritual Life.”
Again, I am not the ideal customer, but my best guess is this copy will turn off more of the ideal prospect than it will attract.
Remember, it’s not just what you say with your copy. But how you say it.
So one of two things has to happen. Either the Customer-First Objective has to change with a clear definition of exactly what subset of those motivated volunteers the copy will attract.
Or the copy needs to change so the tone speaks to the desired prospect.
If your prospect stays the same, what is the resulting experience of the tone of language like “G-d, , Jesus, Church, blah, blah, blah?” Does this emphasize the importance and relevance of spirituality in the ideal customer’s life? Would replacing phrases like “treadmill” and “happy little Christian gerbil trotting endlessly nowhere” with more positive and empowering language better speak to the ideal customer?
In the case of this page, I suspect much of this is intentional and the result of some deep thought. As the questioner mentioned, he is “trying a new angle.” But I would argue this is much more than a new angle. This is changing your ideal prospect. And so it is worth the time to change the Customer-First Objective, and force yourself to first clearly define who exactly the prospect is that you are trying to serve with this copy.
With that exercise, a few things may happen:
It may help you better target your ads
You may realize there is not a big enough total addressable market
You may identify new ways to reach that audience
You may find new avenues for messaging
I’ll give you an example. Right now, the product is called an Advanced Bootcamp. And the primary visual is a big black boot. However, that title and that visual connote to me the military. And the military is known more as a group that can strictly follow a rigorous process without dissent.
But the way the copy is written, I would define the ideal prospect as “demotivated Christians who haven’t found the right church to volunteer for, have a deep soulful connection to the faith but feel disconnected, cast out, and overlooked by church doctrine and/or communities.”
Now this might connote a different name for the product. How about the Faith Rebellion Experience. SoulFire Quest. Spiritual Reboot. I’m not sure any of these are the right names. But having a clearer definition of the prospect, we can better tailor the name – a key element of the copywriting – to connote that this is a product that is for people like them.
Process-level value proposition
The CTA buttons have a similar tone. “Let’s Kick the Devil in the Teeth. Clicking can be hazardous to your apathy.” “Get Off the Couch and Into the Battle. CAUTION: Clicking Here Will Wreck Your Excuses.”
These are evocative.
What they aren’t is clear.
You may get a curiosity click. But the challenge is, the next page is not something that would pay off clickbait. It’s a cart page (with supporting value in the right-hand side) that has a form for credit card info and a purchase.
It also has a line that says, “You have a free 24-hour inspection period. After that, your card will be charged.” So maybe you could change the CTA to “Get Free Preview” and change “inspection” on the cart to “preview.”
A few other thoughts to help this particular questioner as well as other readers:
The buttons don’t look like buttons. Make sure your buttons look like something that can be clicked on. Compounding this problem, they have really long CTAs. For example, the first CTA is 15 words long. I was a little confused on where I can click. These looked like pull-quote boxes to me.
Above one of the CTAs, we see four markdowns on the price from $16,500 to $387. This strains credulity. If the markdown is really this big, it needs a pretty compelling explanation for why. Otherwise, this will feel like a hype-y sale, not like help. Nobody wants to be sold, they want to be helped (look back to the definition of copywriting at the beginning of this blog post). Especially for an educational and faith-based product like this, trust and the feeling of not being sold to are essential.
Is this even the right process-level value proposition? If you were selling socks or cameras, a process-level value prop focused on adding to cart and putting in a credit card number might make sense. But this is an online course. You do give a free 24-hour “inspection period.” But could you give the first full session for free? You have a full page of hype-y copy explaining how this is going to shift my paradigm, so let me actually see it!
As Anton Chekhov said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” The best copywriting shows, it doesn’t tell. And the best way to show the value is not with sales copy, but by giving them a taste of the actual experience (when possible).
Primary value proposition
What organization is standing behind this product? Why should I believe they will deliver on all these promises?
Especially in this case when the task is so big – to challenge one’s approach to their religion.
There are typical, good evidentials on this page – “40+ years, written over 27 books.” (written over 27 books? So… is that 28 books?)
But is there enough primary value prop there to get someone to act? If you are challenging their approach to their faith, shouldn’t we know more about why you are uniquely qualified to do this? Why the ideal customer should trust you?
This is a deep, and difficult, question to answer. And it will take more than simple evidentials. Frankly if you can crack that, you will likely unlock many insights that will help your organization better communicate its value to potential customers.
In addition, the footer of the page has no email address, phone number, physical mailing address, links to social media accounts, nothing that would help me build trust in the organization behind this offering and let me know it isn’t some sort of scam.
I appreciate today’s clarity, so let me expand a bit because I feel you’ll be able to provide a bit more depth on it. I also provided a super quick overview of exactly what they get out of the offer (60-minute consult). The rest is mainly a discussion on what I asked at the very end with my own struggles in intelligence, competency and meshing it all with AI.
This SuperFunnel cohort member is using some of the thought tools included as part of the program to help discover the most effective value proposition for his offer. By interviewing customers and reviewing competitors, he uncovered some elements of value he didn’t realize when he came up with the value proposition on his own, using his gut.
Getting this outside perspective can help us challenge our own assumptions and unlock value that truly matters to the ideal customer when communicated on our websites.
You can do this by interviewing potential customers. But also, what feedback are you already collecting in your organization and how can you systematize it? How can that better inform your primary value prop, but every level of value prop as well…including the process-level value proposition of your website’s usability. Here’s a quick example – “In our customer service group, we found that 50% of their calls at times were based on ‘I can’t find my order status,’” said Matt Clark, Global Head of eCommerce and Digital Marketing, Newark Element14 (from Customer-centric Marketing: How market research and listening to customers informs website optimization).
But when you get this outside research and go through this corporate soul searching, you end up with… a lot. And then when you add AI to the mix to help with competitive analysis, you have a lot more to work with.
At this point in the process the element of the value prop we need to focus on is clarity. We need to winnow, pare down, simplify, condense. There shouldn’t be one unnecessary or unclear word in our offer value proposition statement. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
And this is the struggle facing this particular cohort member. He’s doing some smart and impressive stuff. And in his Customer-First Objective, he discusses what the customer can get out of the offer, but he doesn’t carry that through to his offer value proposition. For this reason, I question if his value prop is clear enough. For example, “streamlines processes through augmented intelligence systems.”
While the value prop isn’t the direct language in your marketing, I worry language like that isn’t the sharpened tip of the spear this business owner needs to clarify his marketing. What does that stuff do for the customer?
He opens the value prop by talking about “increases profits and reduces expenses.” But does that really clarify anything? Really, what B2B product or service doesn’t help a business owner increase profits or reduce expenses?
However, he knows how to winnow, simplify, and clarify for his customers. His main deliverable takes a lot of different data and puts it into a simple dashboard (it’s so much harder to simplify communication about our own work).
So how could he answer the offer value proposition question, “If I am your ideal customer, why should I act on your offer rather than offers from any of your competitors?”
That deliverable may be the tangible piece he leads with. “Because [ideal customer described] will get a dashboard that simplifies complex data needed to make key business decisions that affect costs and profitability. This dashboard is the only [ideal customer] tool powered by [a very high-level explanation of the business process here, supported underneath by evidentials]…”
This isn’t exactly right, of course. And may be way off. But it’s an example of how we can add the tangible to our value props and clarify the value the customer will receive…which is especially difficult for a complex offering.
Should the OVP include specific evidentials?
Yes, your offer value proposition should include specific evidentials. Credibility is one of the elements of a forceful value proposition. Every claim you make should be verified. Or else, why would your ideal customer believe it?
That said, to keep the value prop clear and simple (as discussed above) the best way to use evidentials is with footnotes. Put a superscript number by each claim that needs to be verified in your value prop, and then include that number below the value prop with the evidentials supporting it.
Question for Daniel’s next article: What role does SEO play in our current climate? We’re talking about paid ads… is that the best way forward? Thanks.
I’m sure by now you can see I love quotes. A great way to learn from the wisdom of the ages. So let me remixed Robert Frost who said, “The best way out is always through” to tell you that “the best way forward is always through…the customer’s eyes.”
Because the customer should be your focus. Yes, the current macro-climate is important. But the most important climate is the micro-climate. How do they want to receive information? Where do they look for answers to meet the pain point you are addressing or goal you are trying to help them achieve?
And don’t just put yourself in an SEO-or-paid-digital-ads box. Consider every conceivable option.
So the real answer isn’t the current climate. The real answer is hammering out a go-to-market model for your business. For ideas on that, you can listen to Episode #58 of How I Made It In Marketing. Shruti Joshi, COO, Facet, describes her GTM approach at Verizon and at her current organization (listen to Marketing Operations: Process is the foundation for success).
You are welcome to join us on Wednesdays at 4 p.m. EDT to watch and learn from a Marketing LiveClass. You can RSVP now by clicking this link. Here are excerpts from recent LiveClasses to give you an idea of what you can experience…
Be Passionate about the Marketing Challenge You Are Trying to Solve
Chris Berkenkamp Talks about the Most Important Things He Learned from the MECLABS Cohort
A point-first headline is a headline that begins with the main point you are trying to make to the reader.
There are three types of sentences: point first, point middle, and point last.
Creative Sample #1: Illustration of point-sequenced grammar
Essentially, when you write a point-first headline, you are leading with the information that is most appealing and relevant to the reader. So placing the main point of value for the customer in the front of the sentence increases the probability it will be read and understood by potential customers. For this reason, the best-performing headlines are typically point first.
Writing a point-first headline is the equivalent of the inverted pyramid in journalism. Writing a story this way encourages the reporter to put the most newsworthy info first.
Another journalistic saying that is very applicable to a point-first headline is “Don’t bury the lede.” In other words, make sure the most newsworthy part of the story is front and center. For marketing, “most newsworthy” translates to “main point of value to the customer.”
A headline experiment
MECLABS Institute worked with a survey company to research which headlines would be most effective to recruit panelists to take surveys (MECLABS is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa).
The experiment tested a series of point-first and point-last headlines. Below you can see each headline along with its conversion rate and relative difference compared to the control (original) headline. We’ve also underlined the main point in each headline.
Point-first headlines
Get Paid to Take FREE Surveys: 28.76% conversion rate, 10.44% relative difference
Here’s Your First Survey, and an Invitation to Join Our Research Community: 28.35% conversion rate, 8.97% relative difference
Get Paid to Fill Out Online Surveys: 27.98% conversion rate, 7.46% relative difference
Get Rewarded for Your Opinion: 27.92% conversion rate, 7.23% relative difference
Set Up Your FREE Account Today and Start Earning Money!: 27.35% conversion rate, 5.03% relative difference
You’re Invited to Join the [Company Name] Community and to Earn Rewards For Your Opinions: 27.14% conversion rate, 4.24% relative difference
Join the [Company Name] Community and Have Your Opinions Count: 26.92% conversion rate, 3.36% relative difference
Take Online Surveys From Home and Win Cash & Prizes: 26.81% conversion rate, 2.95% relative difference
As you can see, point-first headlines tended to outperform point-last headlines.
While no point-middle headlines were included in this experiment since they tend to underperform both point-first and point-last headlines, here are a few examples of what point-middle headlines for this landing page might look like.
Point-middle headlines
Sign up today and get paid to take free surveys
Take free surveys and get rewarded for your opinion
Share your opinions and win cash with online surveys
As these examples show, the main value to the customer is easier to overlook in a point-middle headline.
Page Templates That Work
The tendency for point-first headlines to outperform point-last and especially point-middle headlines (all else being equal) led MECLABS to recommend to marketers that you should test point-first headlines on your landing pages.
But don’t let the necessity of function blind you to the importance of form in the headline.
At the end of the day, it is communication. And so your copy needs a certain earfeel.
After all, great advertising and branding doesn’t just get a point across. It gets the earfeel just right. Whether it’s a headline (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”), a tagline (The Ultimate Driving Machine), a credo (Truth Well Told) or an organization name (Wounded Warrior Project).
If you’ve never heard the word earfeel before, don’t feel bad. Admittedly, I just made it up. But I think it is the perfect way to express the need for marketing copy to not just be words that literally summarize a thought, but also communicate them in a way that customers will comprehend and viscerally feel them.
I got the idea from mouthfeel, which Wikipedia defines as “the physical sensations in the mouth caused by food or drink, as distinct from taste.”
As an example, the Wikipedia page has a girl enjoying a peach. Something can look like a peach, taste like a peach, and smell like a peach, but if you don’t feel the fuzzy skin when you grab it and the tender flesh when you bite in … well, it’s just not a peach.
We know that intuitively.
Yet, we sometimes build headlines by simply checking off a checklist — trying to communicate four elements of our value prop and stuff them together. But if it doesn’t have earfeel, even though all the words are there, the message is just not getting through to anyone.
Here are some examples when that happens …
The headline isn’t really a headline
Just because there are words at the top of the page doesn’t mean you have a headline. A headline with earfeel should be welcoming and begin a conversation.
That lacks earfeel. You would never say that to another human being in a sentence. It reminds me of the old Coneheads sketch on Saturday Night Live, where a family of aliens could speak and understand English, but while everything they said was technically correct, it lacked earfeel …
Prymaat Conehead: I am engaged in preparing your favorite meal, small starch tubes combined with lactate extract of hooved mammals.
Beldar Conehead: Ah. You mean macaroni and cheese. I’m sure we will enjoy it.
There are 21 psychological elements that power effective web design (see infographic). Of those elements, one of the first your customers will experience is the headline.
A powerful headline is your make-or-break opportunity to connect with the customer and get them to engage with the rest of your page — and ultimately convert.
We’ll provide you oodles of examples of effective headlines in this MarketingSherpa blog post to help spark ideas as you brainstorm your own headlines. And you can delve deeper into all 21 of those psychological elements in the following videos from MarketingSherpa’s sister brand, MarketingExperiments:
Like with your own landing pages, in many of these examples the headline wasn’t the only factor that affected performance. However, a different headline is a pretty significant change on a website and is usually a major contributing factor to a change in performance. The best performing headlines below are bolded. The capitalization in these headlines represents the actual capitalization in the test.
Before: We’re here to help. After:Simplifying Medicare for You Results: 638% more leads
We frequently receive questions from our email subscribers asking marketing advice. Instead of hiding those answers in a one-to-one email communication, we occasionally publish some of them here on the MarketingSherpa blog so they can help other readers as well. If you have any questions, let us know.
Dear MarketingSherpa: I came across your organization because I was searching for data showing which/what kinds of companies and industries care most about well-written marketing copy, in all forms.
I am taking on a career shift from many years of Software Engineering and Project Management, and I am targeting B2B copywriting, with a niche somewhere in the high-tech sector. I know that is too general, as just about every company today is facing high-tech challenges whether or not they know it, and I need to go much narrower.
Admittedly I am in the early stages of this transition, but I am trying to focus my efforts as much as possible. My thoughts are to eventually produce materials such as white papers, case studies, explainer video scripts, but those require more expertise and track record than blogs, short articles, etc., which is where I feel I could start. At this point I’m very open to any start. I’m planning to get a website up and start posting some blogs on it, but I’m researching how I want to do that, too.
But back to Marketing Sherpa — As I make a wide scan of potential clients it occurs to me there will be many people who just don’t care and don’t need clean, coherent, well-organized copy. I don’t need to expend my efforts there. At the other end of the spectrum there should be people in industries where the slightest misstatement or grammatical error can sabotage one’s attempts. That’s where I want to work.
I would welcome any suggestions you might have on this point, and since I am still such a green twig in this new field, any other counsel would be great. Do the ideas I have laid out above sound sound?
Dear Rob: Thanks for your question. If you’re looking to break into B2B copywriting, the number one skill set you must prove is that you can write effective copy. And the clearest way I know to do that is to write effective copy. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Start blogging
You’re on the right track with your idea to start a website and begin blogging on it. You’d be amazed how many aspiring writers I interview who don’t do this.
When I was just starting out, you had to work hard to build your book (portfolio). Try to find an internship or nonprofit or anyone who would let you write for them. Sure, you could do spec work. But that wasn’t nearly as valuable as having real published work for an actual client.
Today, you can publish to the entire world with the push of a button. Yes, in some ways it’s still spec work. But unlike a dot matrix printout hidden in my giant black portfolio, your blog gets exposure to the world. You can share it on social media. You can look at the analytics to see who’s reading it. You can solicit comments. You can attempt to interview people on your blog.
So, by all means, do it. Start that website. Start that blog. Get yourself out there.
We frequently receive questions about marketing advice from our email subscribers. Instead of hiding those answers in a one-to-one email communication, we’re going to start publishing some of them here on the MarketingSherpa blog since they may be able to help many other readers. And if you have any questions, let us know.
Dear MarketingSherpa: I wanted to ask you what would be the biggest advice you would give to a non-native English speaker who wants to develop outstanding copy writing.
Dear Reader: We’re all non-native in some way, right? When I started working as a contracted consultant to IBM, I didn’t speak their language either. It was my first tech job, and that industry (like every industry) has a language all its own.
So the best advice I can give you is to immerse yourself in English, especially its use in whatever industries you want to write for. Subscribe to respectable English-language newspapers and consumer and industry magazines and read them daily. Read not just the content but the advertising. Do the same with English-language blogs, websites, forums, social media, etc.
Also, run tests on your writing whenever you can to help understand what language most resonates with the ideal prospect.
When we ran that test, we didn’t know if the term “AccuraScope” would resonate with the ideal prospect. So we tested to discover the best words to use.
Best of luck with your copywriting career.
You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content, MarketingSherpa, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.
In my four years at MECLABS Institute, the parent company of MarketingSherpa, I’ve held a few different roles on the Editorial Content team.
However, my very first role was junior copy editor. Having been there and done that, it provides me a unique perspective to manage our current copy editor, Shelby Dorsey.
It’s a unique role. No one seems to know you’re there until you mess up. I can still remember that first email forwarded to me after a director in the company found a small mistake I overlooked in a newsletter send. It was horrifying.
Recently, Shelby and I have set out to help improve some of the processes around the copy editing role, and I know we aren’t the only ones who need help streamlining this area of marketing.
First on the list was increasing the turnaround times for the various content pieces.
To start the presentation, I wanted to find a quote that embodied what a copy editor is. In my search, I found the copy editor description Merrill Perlman wrote in her CNN article, “Why ‘America’ needs copy editors.”
It’s with this quote that I started a simple, but detailed internal PowerPoint deck outlining the copy editing process, requirements and timelines. To help you implement or improve your own copy editing process and procedures, we’re giving you an inside look at that deck.
Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind
You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.
