The book I wish I'd read in 2017
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Most copywriting books talk about the copywriting itself - the persuasion frameworks, things of that nature.
But I've always thought that these things get a bit over-egged. The real work in copywriting is figuring out what to talk about in the first place.
A snappy, eye-catching headline about a benefit that your customer doesn't care about is not that helpful.
So it was great to finally get around to reading Finding the right message by Jennifer Havice.
It's a copywriting book that covers an often-forgotten aspect of the job: the customer research behind the copywriting. It's packed with solid advice on how to structure interviews to get more valuable information.
This is important because it's surprisingly easy to wrap up a customer research interview, and realise you have nothing useful at all. I've done this a painful number of times - which is why I wish I'd read this book in 2017.
The book is packed with good advice, but the best bit is the framework she gives you. This framework is a great way to a) make sure you get the right information b) organise information you get from multiple sources, and find useful patterns for your copywriting.
Let's talk it through.
(Also, just to be crystal clear - Ms Havice has no idea I'm writing this. I'm not getting paid to promote her book. I wish.)
The six elements
Here they are:
The struggle
The fix
Differentiators
Stage of awareness
Hesitations
Success
I'm not going to talk through all of them because a) I don't have space and b) go buy the book.
I'm just going to look at the three that I get the most value from: the struggle, the fix and success.
These are the things you should structure your customer research around.
The struggle
This is where it all starts. You want to know what problem your customer had before they started using your solution.
It is very easy to just get right into an interview with a question like "so, why do you like using our product?" But the people you're writing for aren't using the product yet!
You're trying to get them to buy it. You want to know what life looked like before they used your product, as that's the position your potential customers are in right now.
The fix
Pretty straightforward - how your product solved the problem they mentioned in the struggle.
This shows why it's so important to talk to customers about what their life was like before they used your product.
If you don't have a good understanding of what their struggle was, you're not going to be able to contextualise their fix.
Success
Success is the outcome of the the fix. It's the specific benefit that your product allows to happen.
This looks like it's the same as the fix, but it is actually crucially different. It's different from solving a problem. It's the good thing that happens as a result of solving that problem.
The absolute #1 critical thing in this element is to be specific. I know I'm always banging on about this, but it bears repeating: success phrases like "save time" or "save money" are not that specific. They are things that everyone wants to do.
To get a meaningful "success" statement from someone, you need to continuously ask them "why". Why does that matter? What does that enable?
An example
Let's do an example: my time tracking software, Toggl.
My struggle before I got Toggl was that I had no idea how much time I was spending on projects.
This is a real problem as I charge on a fixed-fee basis. I need to know how much time I'm spending on things in order to know how profitable they are.
Previously, I was doing this in a convoluted way, where I wrote down my start and finish times for various tasks in a little notebook. Not that useful, and very time consuming to add everything up.
The fix: Toggl has a super-basic timer thing. I press play when I start working on something. I press stop when I stop. Too easy.
Success: Now I have a much clearer idea of how long things take. This gives me a better idea of how much to charge; if a certain type of project is consistently unprofitable, I either need to charge more, find a way to work faster or both. But I can't know that if I don't have easy access to information about how long things take. Toggl provides me with this.
So while the fix solves an admin problem, the success is that I have a better view of how to price projects. That's much more impactful than the fix!
Go read the book
Anyway, if you're doing customer research interviews, read this book. The framework it gives you is hugely valuable - saves you a ton of time trying to piece together information from poorly-run interviews or (even worse) having to go back and have second interviews.
It also gives you a way to structure the output of your interviews. If you assemble all your "fixes" in one place, you'll find patterns really quickly. Same goes for your struggles and successes - not to mention the other three elements that I didn't mention today.
Grab it here.
Have a good week
Sam
PS: Another video up on Linkedin - talking about those annoying vague adjectives like "simple" and "powerful". Check it out
PPS: I've been putting together a cold emailing process over the past few weeks. One big thing I learned quickly was how to create templates - balancing brevity and ability to scale against the need to give customised, valuable advice in every initial cold email. Read about the evolution of my cold email templates in this presentation on Linkedin.
PPPS: Yes you can book a landing page review for $799 if you want, but honestly I am incredibly busy at the moment. I would rather you didn't. But if you must get your landing page reviewed, here's a link.
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