Conversational Copywriting: Seven Examples and Its Importance in Marketing, Esquemas y mapas conceptuales de Inglés para Derecho

¡Descarga Conversational Copywriting: Seven Examples and Its Importance in Marketing y más Esquemas y mapas conceptuales en PDF de Inglés para Derecho solo en Docsity! Section 10 — More bonus materials 10.1 7 Examples of conversational copywriting Welcome. My name is Nick Usborne, and in this short presentation, I'm just going to show you seven examples of conversational copywriting. Why? Well, mainly because lots of people have asked me to. People keep asking. They read my stuff about conversation or copywriting in the Senate. Can you show us some examples? So that's what we're going to do. It's not an exhaustive list. I'm not saying, hey, this is everything I have to say about conversational copywriting, very far from it. But hopefully it will just kind of tweak your mind a bit and get you into that conversational mindset and help you get out there and recognize when Kopi is conversational and when it's not when it's like overly Scelzi or just plain boring. So, let's start jump starting with number one with the idea of being inclusive. So. this is taken from a Handley's personal blog, a personal website and blog. And Handly is chief content officer at Marketing Prof's. If you have anything to do with the content marketing world, you will no doubt have heard of her again and again. She is an excellent writer. She's always been an excellent writer and she has a very personal style and a very, to my mind, a conversational style. So, let's just tease apart some of this that she's written here. So, this is the beginning of the post, and she starts off. Recently, my friend Ben Opsahl sent me a note. All right. Sent to the short opening sentence, just like it's so simple. But what she's doing here is it's not like, hey, I'm going to write a blog post all about what 1 think and just sit down and listen to just saying, hey, recently a friend of mine sent me a note. It's like it's like something she might say to you around the water cooler. Or in the minutes before some meeting or something, it's conversational right from the get-go, so she goes on and I'm not going to read it all, but basically, she hasn't been writing very much for her personal blog. So, let's go down to paragraph three. So, she says, so what gives? Ben said. You know, lots of stuff to complain about there with grandma, that's fine. The whole thing is much closer to spoken language than formal written language. This isn't like business writing. This isn't like academic writing. This is very conversational writing. So, then she says, 1 wrote back to him explaining that I'm kind of busy with marketing profs and there was more 1 did produce throughout 2017, just not from my own site. Look at this last paragraph. Even as I wrote that to Ben naming him, it felt weird, like an excuse a cop out. Why didn't I write for my own site? Yeah, what gives? So now she's got this internal dialogue going on. She's actually got an internal conversation going on inside of her own mind. And because of the way she's written the whole piece, it is inclusive. We are included in that thought process. We were included, were invited to enter into this space as she you know, she throws these questions around in her mind. This to me, is just an outstanding example of what it means to write conversationally. So, no, to be transparent. So, this is from my friend Drakensberg, who 1 sometimes show off saying, hey, I've been in the copywriting game for 38 years. I think I think Dragon's painting this for 50 years. And he's an outstanding copywriter. He's the only copywriter 1 know who has a testimonial from David Ogilvy on his home page. Anyway, so he's a colorful fellow. So, prepare yourself for a little colorful language. And this is an email he wrote. 1 got it. I'm subscribed to whatever itis I subscribe to. And 1 got this email, and he says earlier today, I said on LinkedIn that if you were one of my five thousand and nineteen connections, I'd give a free gift is a thank you. You can have a copy of my eBook. Ba ba ba ba ba. And then 1 don't know if it happens to you, but when I connect with people, many immediately try to sell me something. Remember, Dragon is a marketer and a copywriter. This is a bloody irritating and be damn hard stupid way to sell. So, I'm doing going trying to do what good salespeople do. You know, as if you were the amateur first get to know people, then figure out what you want and need. So, what's he doing here? It's like he's kind of pulling back the curtain. It's like he's exposing how the magician does his or her tricks. He's like saying to the reader, hey, unlike you, I'm not like them. I'm not one of these heavy-handed marketers. This is what they do. But that's not what 1 do. 1 do this the right way. But he's being totally transparent. And as such, again, he's inviting you in. He's including you, the reader, in this little cheeky adventure in his own mind. All right. It's like is totally the opposite of how marketers and copyright is. Right, because they don't pull back the curtain. They don't tell you that it exposes the magic that they're trying to weave. He does. By doing so, he is like, and the sense is being inclusive. He's being inclusive through transparency. And when you're transparent in this way, what do you do? You build trust. And when you build trust, what do you do? You make it far more likely that people are going to end up buying from you. So, here's another example. This is from Sumo. So, this is a online service business-to- business service for marketers online. Let's look at the heading here. Want more sales in the next 30 days. So as soon as you write a question, if you do it right, you're being conversational because again, you're being inclusive. You're soliciting some kind of response from the reader. But more telling here is if you were writing this headline correctly through the way you learned at school or through your business practice, you'd write, do you want more sales in the next 30 days? But when we speak conversationally, when we talk, we don't say, do you? We're very likely to say we want more sales. And if we go in here and I'm not going to read it all, but I'm going to go down to that bold, very short paragraph. And again, the short text, short paragraph is a sign of being conversational is how we speak in business language, in marketing language. We often have longer sentences, longer paragraphs, but not in conversation. So down to the bone. But wouldn't it be nice for us to show you what they're doing? Question mark. Why, yes. Yes, it would be so. We're sharing some epic lessons, just those first two sentences. Very short. Why? Yes. Yes, it would be. Again, what's happening is the writer is creating this dialogue by himself. But in the process is including you. The reader is engaging you. The reader is using the power of conversation. To draw you in and make you part of this message, number four, using everyday language, particularly as it relates to your audience. This is Angel's Cup. This is a coffee company. They're one of those coffee cup coffee. Coffee subscription is a coffee club subscription service where you kind of sign up and you say, yes, send me tea bags of coffee once a month or every two weeks or whatever. This is run by a young couple, the millennials. And here's the homepage or the first group to the home page become a coffee hunter is written to you, the reader. No, it's not about them. It's not about their business. It's not about how, you know, how wonderful and spiffy their business is. They're talking to you to read it, become a coffee hunter. It's an invitation. And then under that crazy variety, awesome roasters, blind tastings in an active community. Remember, this is to millennials. So, they're not using formal old person language. This is just regular language that, you know, their market, their target market might be using. Sitting down in a coffee shop in conversation with one another, take your coffee game to the next level, starting at nine dollars ninety-nine month, etc. and then the button underneath. Skip the pitch and join now. So now we're going back to Drake and broaden his transparency. These guys doing the same thing. Hey, we know everyone's trying to sell stuff to you. We know So let's dive in. So what is conversational copywriting? Well, I guess the full definition will reveal itself over the next few slides, but simply it's a more open, transparent and engaging approach to copywriting online. And probably the most important word there is engaging. And I'll explain again why 1 think that's the case as we move forward. The simplest way to express this, I think, is with these two pictures on the left-hand side, we have old school, old media, broadcast marketing, broadcast copywriting. On the right, we have a couple of two people sitting down sharing coffee and in conversation. So, I think that picture on the left very much represents the old school of copywriting and marketing from offline media, old school media on the right. 1 think that is far more representative of what people want and what people respond to in the online interactive medium of the web and social media and mobile and all that good stuff. 'm familiar with both of the sides of the equation. I've been a professional copywriter for almost 40 years now, so the first half of my career was writing broadcast copywriting, old school copywriting for traditional media. But for the last 20 years, I've just been on the right with on that right hand side. I've been writing exclusively online, and this is where I've kind of developed and evolved my copywriting skills to be more interactive, more engaging, less intrusive, less shouting. So why bother? Because commerce today is different. The Web, the mobile social media has changed everything. And if you want to build an open, trusting and lasting relationship with your customers, with your audience, which clearly you do, you can't get there by shouting. You can't get there by grabbing a megaphone and shouting into people's ear about buy my stuff. Tt's cool. That just does not work anymore. So, as we go through this presentation, there are a few different areas 1 want to cover. One, I want to start off with some examples of conversational copywriting, so you understand more clearly what I'm talking about, why now is the time to dump the old school approach. 1 want to just very briefly walk through the process, because it's a lot of research and science behind why conversational copywriting works better. Then I'm going to kind of get more into how to and how to get you started to find your conversational voice and then finally some warmup exercises so that you can really get sick of warm up exercises and the kind of tips and tricks like here's some ways to start getting conversational in your copy right away. So, let's get started with a few examples I didn't like, but 1 don't much like reading from slides in a presentation. But hey, this is about copywriting, so it can't really be avoided. So, here's a here's part of an email from a fellow called Jeff Walker, who you may be familiar with. He's the founder of Product Launch Formula. And he has he*s always had a very, very conversational way of writing. So let me just read through this. 1 don't know about you, but I've never had been very comfortable with selling. When I was in the Boy Scouts. I only sell two bags of donuts for a fundraiser, one to my parents and one to our next-door neighbors. 1 mean, how hard is it to sell donuts? I'm not sure why 1 always felt squeamish about sales, but 1 know I'm not the only one. What he's doing here is he's making he's getting off the pedestal. He's getting off the page. I mean, off the stage. He's saying, hey, you know what? I'm not so very different from you and you're not so very different from me. He's being inclusive of the audience. This is different. It's not the way we used to write copy in the old days. In the old day, you know, hey, you have these fancy Madison Avenue advertising agencies and these fancy copywriters writing this fancy stuff that was printed in magazines or appeared on TV. And it was not inclusive at all. It was just broadcasting this fancy, sophisticated message at an audience. So, this is very different, and this is very, very powerful. When you engage with people and you include your audience, be transparent. This is from Drakensberg. He's a he's a British copywriter. 1 show off about having been doing this for almost forty years. Drayton has been doing this for over 50 years and he's still going strong. So is again part of an email from Drake. And one morning earlier today, 1 said on LinkedIn that if you were one of my 5000 and nineteen connections. 1'1l give you a free gift as a thank you, then he gives him you can have a copy of my free eBook, etc. cetera. 1 don't know if it happens to you, but when I connect with people, many immediately try to sell me something. This is a bloody irritating and be a damn hard, stupid way to sell. So, I'm going to do what good salespeople do first, get to know people, then figure out what you want and need. So, there's a few interesting things happening here. Clearly, he has character. Clearly, he has voice. His sentences about this is a bloody irritating and be a damn hard, stupid way to sell. T think most people will be comfortable with that. Some won't. And the people who are not comfortable with that kind of language, they're kind of not going to be part of Dryden's tribe because he is he's very forthright that way and he's very kind of open with his use of off-color language sometimes. But more interestingly, what he's doing here is he's like a magician telling you how the magic is done. First of all, he's saying, look, there are some stupid people who, you know, sign up as you connect with you on LinkedIn and immediately try and sell you stuff. I'm not going to do that. But he's actually saying his first T'm going to get to know you and understand you and give you some free stuff. And then 1 sell you stuff. And this isn't the only email. He often does this. He sent an email all about the power of the word free, know the power of the word sale on sale. And he was saying that how you know, throughout history, offline and online, the word sale is tremendously attractive to people and grabs people attention and makes them buy. And so, he's talking about that. And then at the end, he says, oh, by the way, such and such, you know, this product of mine is currently on sale. So, again, he's like being the magician, explaining the process. And then it's like, oh, by the way, in his magic and my thing is on sale, please buy it. That kind of transparency is very disarming. He's like being it's like he's being totally open and honest about almost like, hey, I'm about to manipulate you into doing something and here's how and here's why. And now let's see if it works. There's something very disarming about inviting you kind of behind the curtain to find out how things actually work. You can just try some imaginary dialogue if you want to write text that feels conversational. So, this is from Sumai Dotcom. Want more sales in the next 30 days? You notice how that's abbreviated. People would never have written a lot of copy line like that twenty years ago that have written. Do you want more sales? That kind of abbreviation is also something that is conversational because that's what we tend to do in spoken language. We tend to abbreviate our sentences. We tend to be less fussy about grammar. So anyway, in October we introduced the CMO Partnership Program to the world and a few partners have crushed it. We've seen first-hand that crazy effective tactics to make more sales. Wouldn't it be nice for us to show you what they're doing? Why, yes. Yes, it would say we're sharing some epic lessons, those two lines. Wouldn't it be nice for us to show you what they're doing? Why, yes. Yes, it would. It's almost like they are imagining that they really are in conversation with the reader and the reader is replying, yes, yes, that'd be great. Thank you. But they can't actually talk with the reader. This is an email. So that kind of inserting the other half of the conversation within their own text. So, again, there's something there that is inclusive, it's engaging. It's recognizing that this isn't just broadcast information, but there's a real person reading this and trying to engage with this. So, you know, I think that's quite nicely that I use everyday language. Everyday language is a marker of conversation. So, this is a coffee subscription service that is was launched by a young couple. It's called Angel's Cup. It's one of those things where you pay whatever a monthly subscription and they send you a bag or two of coffee. So, in Instead of talking about, you know, sign up for our coffee subscription services, become a coffee hunter, which is kind of interesting, makes it sound a little more exciting. The text underneath, crazy variety, awesome roasters, blind tastings and an active community. If you go to many coffee sites, I'm a bit of a coffee geek and there's a kind of language there's a kind of convention talking about small batch roasting and artisanal roasting and companies. They'11 use the same kind of language. It's like they get the same kind of playbook. These guys are different. They're just saying they're just using their own. These are young people. They're just using their own language. Crazy variety or some roasters, blind tastings, active community. Take your coffee game to the next level. They just this is how they talk, and this is how they write. And it's kind of fun underneath. This is like the top the first screen of the homepage. You can scroll down on this and there's plenty more information. But they say a button there, skip the pitch and join now and again. It's almost liked that transparency here, saying, yeah, if you scroll down, you get the full you get the full pitch, you get the full sales pitch. But if you want, you can just skip the pitch and join now, which is again, it's kind of interesting because there's a transparency there. You don't see in traditional marketing and advertising and copywriting. So conversational copywriting, the conversational approach is also a cure for life, less descriptive text. And there are billions of lines of lifeless, descriptive, boring, lifeless, descriptive text on the web. So, I actually have a course on this, and students do homework and then 1 look at their homework and comment on the homework. And so, on the left there is an excerpt is from part of something that 1 asked the students to rewrite. And this is the Tanco family sorry, the 10K place, family results, all-inclusive family vacations, give you a top family vacation with your kids in time to reconnect as a couple to horrible sentence, no emotion, no pictures painted, nothing, you know, nothing evocative or interesting about it as a kind of vacation description. And it's very typical descriptive text. So, you know, over time, hundreds of students have tackled this in all kinds of different ways. That diversion on the right 1 found kind of interesting. And again, this is just an excerpt from this piece of homework. But what she wrote well that student wrote was overheard at the Tanco Place Family Resort. This kid's only stuff is awesome. 1 bet mom and dad are bored, which is kind of interesting. First of all, what she's done is she said, hey, I'm not going to just do boring descriptive text from the office of the resort. 'm going to look at this through the eyes of someone who's at the resort, a customer. And you would expect then that to be through the eyes of the parent of the adult saying, oh, we're having a great time. 1 hope the kids are okay. She turned it around in another twist here, saying, now I'm going to do this to the kids” point of view, the make emotional based decisions in our prefrontal cortex that lights up. And then people listen, people engage. People are open to what you say. This is how we engage with people. You don't do it. You can cannot do it by shouting. Interestingly enough, once you are in conversation like those two people on the right and the prefrontal cortex is lighting up and the amygdala is asleep, one of those two people could actually say, hey, you know what, 1 want to tell you something. And they could just have a moment of pushiness. But it's almost because the prefrontal cortex has been active, it's almost like you get a free pass to make a bit of a pitch because that pitch ordinarily would have triggered the amygdala. But within the context of a happy prefrontal cortex, it doesn't know you can't go too far. But there's some fascinating work being done on. This is a wonderful book called Conversational Intelligence by Judith Glazer. And if you're interested, go and grab that. Get a get at Amazon or your bookstore and get it. Conversational intelligence. Judith Glaser, fascinating. Look at the science behind conversation and how it interacts with our minds and our brain. So, yeah, it's real. There are real advantages to being more conversational. So, if we got engagement now, we want to move on from engagement to trust and loyalty. And again, there's data. There's so much tracking we can do online. There's plenty of data at hand here as well. So, on the left, 70 percent of consumers with high emotional engagement will spend twice as much with the brands they like, and 70 percent will spend twice as much. Now, if you're involved with marketing online, you know how massive those figures are. Most of the time, we're trying to move the needle by a couple of percentage points or not 70 percent, twice as much as massive on the right. When they feel emotionally connected, 81 percent of consumers will promote a brand to family and friends and family. Again, absolutely huge from marketers” point of view, digital marketers” point of view that that that's massive to actually have your customers become advocates for your product or service, to be fans and to promote it to friends and family. So, we're moving from engagement to trust and loyalty. And this is central. Again, there's tons of data on how trust and loyalty convert into sales. I particularly like this kind of quote from former chairman and CEO of Unilever. You can have all the facts and figures, all the supporting evidence, all the endorsements that you want. But if at the end of the day you don't command trust, you won't get anywhere. And that is absolutely the truth. And that is the downfall of that pushy car salesman or the person who puts their foot in the door when theyre selling, you know, knock, knock on your front door, try to sell you whatever a vacuum cleaner, whatever it is, is that if you don't trust that person, you're not going to buy from them. It's essential. So here we go back. We'll go back to that process of conversational copywriting, to emotional engagement, trust and loyalty and then increase sales. That emotional engagement, that's like the kind of linchpin. And you cannot get there with old school B.S. hype or by shouting you can hey, you can emotionally engage me that way. But the engagement you'll get is 1 feel resistant. 111 feel angry, 1 feel pissed off and I'll push you away. Butif you want positive emotional engagement, you can't get that the old route, you have to get there in a more conversational and respectful and transparent manner. So that's why the why of why this thing's why this gets why this works. I'm fumbling my words not so. OK, let's not how are you going to if you're if you think this is a good idea, how do you get started and how do you find a conversational voice for yourself? So, I think the first thing, if you think about conversation, is something that most of us are really not very good at. Most of us are really good at trying to talk and very good at trying to listen. When it comes to conversations, often we have our own things. We want to say and express what the other person's talking about is just kind of taking up valuable time and space while we wait to have our next word. So that's a bad conversation. A good conversation is when you actually are an active listener, and you listen to your audience. So, if you want to be a conversational market or a conversational copywriter, you have to start by listening to your audience. And it turns out that online this is something that's not so very hard to do. You can do polls and surveys, quizzes, all kinds of stuff. You can do it on Facebook. You can do it through services like Survey Monkey. You can get out there and actually actively listen to your audience, ask them questions, ask them open ended questions, learn about what's interesting to them, what they care about social media. Wonderful place to actually listen to your audience. So, you're not now actively conducting surveys, but you can if you use social media. Well, in other words, you encourage interaction in your social media streams. You listen to and respond to what people say. You start to get a very good feel for what they care about, the kind of language they use and how you would actually hold a good, positive, engaged, emotionally engaging conversation with those people. Reviews on the right, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Amazon. 1 mean, there's so many sites where you can listen to the voices and not just the voices and the language, but also the emotional responses and the feelings of your audience. So, whatever your business, whatever the industry, whatever the product or service you're selling, there are places you can go where you can read reviews, not just of your own stuff, but of competitor's stuff and get a really good feel for the emotions people attached to that, what frustrates them, what makes them happy, what makes them angry, et cetera, et cetera. So the great thing about the Web compared to old school is that is an amazing place to listen and to research and to understand how you might actually have a real conversation with those people in a way that they would actually feel that you are talking and engaging with them How would you feel if what do you think when you think about the last time you what I'm doing is I'm inviting people to participate in my message. I'm not just saying being on stage is really scary, unless you take my super-duper course, that's just a statement. It's a closed statement. If 1 say imagine you're on a stage. Now I'm inviting you to participate. This is a more conversational space I'm pulling you into. So that's another really good way to get into the conversational spaces to include the reader. And using openings like this used questions to draw the reader in. Again, is that same way of inviting engagement? So, this is actually again, this is a this is a piece of homework text written by one of my students. What features do you look for in a hotel? How about a comfy lobby with friendly staff, perhaps a gourmet dinner in an upscale restaurant? Those could be statements. The fact that they are questions actually invites the reader to think, what features do you look for in a hotel, a comfortable lobby with friendly staff? Does that matter to me? Hey, maybe it does. Maybe T can imagine the last kind of positive and negative experience 1 had, et cetera, et cetera. Questions can be helpful. Not always is not always the right approach, but it's definitely something to think about when you want to engage the mind and the attention of your reader. Try a short line template. In fact, this again is another piece of student work where she wrote something very, very long, long sentences, long paragraph. And l said 1 actually sent her a short line template where, you know, basically the width of the line, the maximum length of the sentence is as you see here. So now if I read this, you need a fence for your pool at the Guardian fence system is made a transparent mesh, so it doesn't block the view of the pool. Kids can't climb the mesh and it closes and latches by itself. It's an attractive and super simple way to keep your kids safe. That sounds like spoken language, that sounds like conversational language, because those lines are short when we're speaking in Latin real language, we tend to kind of mess up the grammar a bit, but we also tend to communicate in shorter sentences like you see here. So, it feels more conversational. It feels more personal. It feels like we spoke being spoken to by a person and not by a business or a corporation. Leave space for your readers. This is. This is super important, it's not always easy to do, but it can be an amazing way to draw the reader in. So, this is we've got the fence pool. OK, so it's summertime barbecues on the patio, little ones playing in the yard. Fido chasing squirrels, jumping into the pool to cool off. Dot, dot, dot are the pool and its old fence. Give us a call. The Guardian pool fence systems. Let us help you enjoy a worry-free summer. So, what's happened here? Again, this is a piece of homework that was sent into me is a lot of other students were talking about saying, oh my goodness, think if you know your kid fell in the pool while your back was turned, or neighbor's kid jumped in the pool when you weren't at home or and really painted very specific, detailed pictures here. It's, oh, the pool. You're leaving it. The writer here is leaving it to the reader to fill in the space to use their own imagination. So again, this is, again, much less like a traditional company describing stuff at you, much more like an individual getting into conversation with you. And it's almost like, hey, think about it. And you raise an eyebrow at someone and your kind of inviting them to fill in the rest of the story. That's what's happening here. Leave space for your readers. Relax, you're in agreement. This isn't actually a piece of homework. This is from a newsletter I received from someone. And she'd taken a break in sending out the newsletter because she was having a baby. So, she says, my apologies for being out so long. Turns out being a mom takes a lot of time. Who knew? Well. It's kind of interesting because in terms of business language that feels good today, it certainly wouldn't have done 20 years ago, would have felt very unbusinesslike. And now we're getting some of the language like LOEL that is native to social media coming into other media like email and even on websites and elsewhere. So is turns out being a mom takes a lot of time. Who knew? Question mark. Exclamation mark. Is that grammatically, correct? No, it's not. But again, I'm not saying use bad grammar. I'm not saying don't be clear in what you're communicating. But again, don't be that kind of old school grammar nerd, because that's not the way we talk in conversation. It's not the way we engage with people. One on one read the copy out loud is as a test to whether this sounds and feels like it could have been part of a conversation. So, this is an actually a before and after. And this is this is real. 1 didn't make this up. 1 found this. Hang on a sec. 1 need a slip of wood before attempting to read this. These changes reflect our view that tighter integration and closer collaboration between our teams is a critical component of sustainably growing our business. While this process has required us to make some really tough decisions. We believe that rigorously ensuring our team structure always aligns with our goals. Who will this last year in Italy and he was having this gelato in this Italian restaurant. And, you know, he then included somehow had the brushes into the whole story of his vacations. So, Tlook, and I've said he takes his brush on vacation and let's say he takes his brushes on vacation that apologize for the typo. So, he does this is this constant evolving story and conversation between him and his students. What he's doing is generating conversation. He's deeply engaging with his students, which is super important. If you are a teacher, he's removing the barrier between teacher and learner. He's removing the barrier between seller and buyer. And that's the part I think that should interest us most as copyright is, is how this this game, in a sense itis playing, removes the barrier between seller and buyer. And all of a sudden, through this fan engagement, this conversation, everyone is enjoying this. And what he's doing at the same time is building. Amazing brand loyalty. So, you know, these students love him. He's a great teacher and he's a fun teacher. And, you know, you see the fun he's had with the brushes. If you listen to him teaching, that is him. He's a kind of funny, humorous, funny guy, as well as being a really, really good painter and a really, really good teacher. So, all kind of works together. So how could you do something like this for one of your clients? Because this is it's not strictly conversational copywriting, but it's absolutely conversational marketing because engaging with the audience and getting them to engage back with you, there is a conversation happening. There's a two-way process happening. So. When you're working with clients, how can you do something like this for one of them or another thought for you, another challenge, how could you do something like this for your own freelance business? It's just something you could do to add a story, to add character, to provoke interaction, to provoke conversation for your own freelance business. Of course, it has to be on brand. His is very much on brand. This is like his character, this playful, interesting, creative character. Could we you could we do something for a freelance business that would work in a similar way? Could I do something like this for this course for a conversational copywriting course? I've started thinking about this. If you got any ideas, please share them. Anyway, this is just a very short lecture. 1 was just so tickled. I was so delighted by this. Itis such a pleasure to see smart, effective marketing with a light touch. And what I love about this is it didn't come from some big fancy digital advertising agency. It didn't come from some professional group. This is just a guy, a painter who is also an instructor. And it's just a pure act of creation that in fact, had it been created by digital advertising or marketing agency, they would probably have gotten awards for it because it is so creative. It's so effective. So, yeah, I just want to throw this in the mix and see if you can think of ways to apply this for your clients” businesses or indeed for your own. OK, thanks. 10.4 Developing an ear for conversational copy Welcome to this bonus lecture on developing an ear for conversational copy or maybe an eye for conversational copy. Either way, 1 think it's useful to be a kind of perennial student of copy and to just cast your eye over stuff that you see each day and ask yourself the question, is this conversational or not? Is it truly conversational? Is somebody trying to kind of fake it or are people just not even trying? So, in this lecture, I'm going to go through some examples of each of these and then look at one or two other ways of looking at conversational copy and perhaps even rewriting a little bit of it. So, here's an example 1 took from it. 1 did a search for real estate consultants. And let's ignore the first sentence and get into the second sentence. Our group of 40 counselors, including nearly 20 certified prizes, are familiar with the various industry standards, have in-depth knowledge of the real estate market, and use a personalized approach to help you identify problems and come up with a practical solution. So, uh, there are all kinds of hallmarks in this text here that identify this is not conversational, but perhaps the simplest kind of signifier is the length of the sentence. That second sentence, it's just insane. That is truly not conversational. Copy. Nobody talks like that. Nobody talks in those long compound sentences. And it's like this total absence of. Engagement with the reader, this is simply communication of information at a reader. There's no attempt to kind of paint a picture or evoke any kind of response from the reader. You know, our group of 40 counselors, including nearly 20 certified appraisers, T mean, who cares? Various industry standards and nonspecific. Can you get. 1 mean, just the whole thing is so much written not to be engaging. Uh, there's absolutely kind of no story there. There's not even the hint of engagement or conversation that. So, here's his some quite different tacks. This is from a Web development platform, a content management system. So, the Web experience platform software doesn't make a website. People do like you, the creatives who tend the human experience into amazing web experiences. So, I call this kind of fake conversation, that kind of getting it right in one sense, in that we have these kinds of short, snappy sentences and they're talking about people, people like you, creators. You know, there's all these attempts to create these kind of touch points to engage with the reader. But this is kind of overlaying kind of B.S. happening. The creators who turn the human experience into amazing Web experiences. 1 mean, really, would you say that to someone across the table if you're looking them in the eye? I live at the center of your audience”s digital universe, where everyone can engage with your brand. It's like, oh, we got the word engage that. That's good. But really, center of your audience is digital. It's just like 1 don't know, it just doesn't seem real to me. This doesn't sound like one human talking to another. It feels like the usual same old same old marketing copywriting B.S. masquerading as being conversational, as being friendly, as being engaging. And I just don't buy it. Maybe you do. I don't. OK, so from Grasshopper Dotcom Grasshopper provides one 800 numbers for businesses. Hey there. Well, that's a pretty human conversational opening. Whether the idea to start your business struck you this morning or ten years ago, you got an itch that needs to be scratched. It's time to jump in and get started. Paragraph maybe you're trying to build a new software company that's bigger than Google. Maybe you want to start your own landscaping company or architecture firm. But how will you make the jump from average worker to business owner? How will you turn your brainwaves into a company? We'll show you how. So that strikes me as being truly conversational, copyrighting. The length of the sentences works it feels spoken. You could use this as a script and talk to someone. You could just speak this, and it would feel natural. There is no nonsense copywriting B.S. center of digital universe experiences, blah, blah, blah. Here, it's just simple language. Look at the words. These are short, everyday words. No fancy words, no long words, no compound sentences. This is written, but it could just as easily be spoken at the end there. The questions we talked about this in the body of the course questions are a great way to engage your reader. But how would you make the jump from average worker to business owner? Question mark? How would you turn your brainwaves into a company question mark? These are questions that engage that invite the reader to think to participate in what's happening within this script. So, 1 like this. 1 think this is 1 think this is good copy. All right. So now I'm going to do a little before and after 1 kind of very imperfect, but this is a for a consulting business consulting company. So before and 1 just pull this off the Internet, we have a weekly status meeting with all project managers and our corporate project management office, giving our project managers a forum to discuss and strategize on their projects and providing a high level of visibility for corporate project sponsors and contract managers. Um, that has almost nothing to me. Again, this is one huge, long sentence is a four-and-a-half-line sentence just to have broken with one dash. It's 1 don't know what people learn to write like this. I don't know whether this is business writing or is meant to be marketing writing. 1 don't know. But one of the hallmarks of copy and content that is absolutely not conversational is the super long compound sentences. Because nobody talks like this, nobody listens like this, nobody comprehends like this. 1 mean, what earth does that mean? I've just done a very light rewriting of this, just trying to peel away some of the nonsense. We have weekly status meetings that everyone attends. 1 get that that simple. This gives us all the chance to step up to date on the group's projects. Get I get that is good to get people together around the table. So, everyone's on the same page. And I kind of I don't really understand what this means, but I want it to include everything from the before version. We also get to shine a spotlight on our corporate project sponsors and contract managers. 1 don't know who they are, what it means, but I guess it's something that they wanted to include. So, I've included it. So, I don't think my version is a particularly fine example of conversational copywriting, but I do think it's a big step forward from what came before. And if nothing else, because Tve turned one sentence into three shorter sentences, I've taken out most of the long words. And the kind of weird stuff that they put in there, so, you know, even with a light touch, you can significantly improve on what a company has done before so here's another example of where they kind of 1 think they get it right and they get it wrong all in the same place. So, this is a mobile bike shop repair thing. They can come to your office and repair your bike while you're working. We offer a convenient mobile bike shop experience at your home or office. We believe that bicyclists can help change the world, whether you're a road warrior, a commuter, an elite triathlete, a day that or mountain bike or enjoy your weekend rides on your bike. Our goal is to offer a convenient premium service that gives you more time to do what you love. Right. So, kind of peeking out from behind, thatis. A kind of conversational, hot, as it were, this is about loving to ride your bike, what you do is what you know, what you love, you love to ride and yeah, the convenience of having your bike serviced or repaired while you're at work. So, you don't miss your evening ride. That's great. That's great. And there's kind of a hint there. And it's almost just in these last few words, more time to do what you love, right? Capital letters, exclamation mark. It's like finally the writer remembered that he or she actually liked to ride. And hey, I'm a pretty passionate bike rider myself. I get that. But there's other stuff that's kind of wrong. At the beginning. We offer a convenient mobile bike shop experience. What is that? What a to the whole concept of conversational copywriting as opposed to one way broadcast traditional copywriting, I think there's a couple of ways that you can approach. One is to look at what they're doing with social media, very active on social media. Hopefully they are and hopefully they're not. They're not using social media simply as a is a broadcast medium. Hopefully within the channels there they are reaching out and connecting with their friends, their followers. Hopefully they're answering questions. They're being responsive to some degree. If that's the case, then they're already being conversational. They're just doing it within one discrete area, which is social media. So, your job now becomes much easier. You can say, hey, look, look at the value of the conversational approach. Now, let's take some of that mindset and some of that language and take it from just being in social media over to other areas like content marketing, email marketing newsletters, web pages, even sales pages. So, you use this kind of social media activity, is that a doorway into the broader use of conversational copywriting? Another thing to look out for is to see if they are using stories. 1 do. They use found stories, the origins of the company. Do they use employee stories? The story of the employee who went the extra mile for a client, perhaps. Best of all, do they use or publish customer stories where customers write in with stories about how they used their product or service and how it made some big difference in some way, particularly that last group customer stories. If theyre doing that again, it means they're actually already in now in conversation because theyre listening to their customers that publishing what the customers say and feel their experience. So, you do the same thing. You say, look, this is what it's like to be conversational. You're doing it now. Let's again take that mindset, some of that language over from the storytelling side and into other areas, like the content, the email marketing, the website, etc. So that's it. It's you know, I'm glad you find the whole idea of conversational copywriting appealing. 1 do. I've loved it for ages. I'm a huge fan of that old school, in-your-face broadcast copywriting approach. But you're quite right to bring up the question of how do 1 sell this on to my clients? And as you suspected, 1 think when you write that question, it's a matter of choosing the right sides first. And then when you do that, then you now have a case study and it's going to be much easier now to convert or to sell the next client on this approach. So, thank you very much, Stacy, for that question. And T hope everyone watching this found that question and answer helpful. If you are enjoying the QUA format, then just subscribe to this channel so you don't miss. Future questions and answers, thank you very much by. 10.6 Is conversational copywriting a good fit for a company selling baby clothes Hi, this is adding another video to our Kunie collection. This is a question that came in from Doris, who's halfway through the conversational copywriting course. And here's a question. 1 have a small business selling baby clothes in my marketing. 1 want to be able to connect with my audience mothers at a very emotional level. Will conversational copywriting help me with that? Well, Doris, I'm hoping that if you're halfway through the course, you've got a pretty good sense of the answer to that question already. But yes, absolutely. In fact, this could be a case study in support of conversational copywriting because your business is so emotionally charged. If we're talking about motherhood, if we're talking about babies, then this is a very emotional business year and it's a very emotionally charged business year in and in a way, old school kind of broadcast copyrighting, the kind of copywriting that 1 learned before the Web when I was doing direct mail, what I was doing, print advertising. The craft, 1 learned was for these one-way media where basically I was selling at an audience. I was broadcasting a sales message at an audience. Now, 1 tried not to be too pushy, too much in broadcast mode, but that was the nature of media back then. It was one way with the Web. Itis a two-way medium, whether it's the Web, whether it's social media, whether it's blogging, whatever this is, this is a shared medium. It's no longer owned simply by the space is no longer owned and dominated simply by major media companies. Everyone you know, you, me and everyone else, I mean, billions of people began to participate online. And that makes it a conversational medium, whether companies like it or not. In your case, when you're selling baby clothes and it's emotionally charged, something happens. Here is that broadcast advertising, broadcast copywriting at an audience tends to make us lift our defenses as an extreme example. You see this. If you go to a, you know, car salespeople or you go into a retail store where assistants are being paid on commission and they can come up and try and sell Axia. And you know how your defenses come up, those filters come up. You don't you know; you're trying to protect yourself against these salespeople. Those are extreme examples. But a lot of conventional, ordinary, regular copywriting broadcast copywriting is a version of that. Conversational copywriting is different. It is the perfect fit for the online space because it is two ways. It is conversational. So, in your case, if you're selling baby clothes to young mothers, then yes, your tone and style of copywriting should be conversational. But not only should you write that way, you should be that way. So, you get into conversation with your prospects and customers through social media, through your website, through your blog, actually get into conversation, be conversational as well as writing in a style that is conversational. And the more you become conversation with your prospects and clients, the more easily you'll get a feel for that kind of language, the kind of conversational tone you should be using when you write your own materials, whether it be emails or web pages or sales pages or whatever. So, Doris, I thank you for the question. And like I say, it's you know, when it comes to baby clothes, this is almost like a case study in favor of conversational copywriting because it's such a good fit. So, I appreciate the question gave me an opportunity to kind of get up on my stage and can 1 say, yeah, a conversation. Conversational copywriting. Thank you. 10.7 With conversational copywriting you communicate like a real person Hi, this is something of an experiment. Each day I get questions from people, usually through email or through the contact form on my website, and very often 1 just type up an answer and send them off. And it occurred to me that with not all of them, but some of the questions that actually do better off sharing the questions and the answers with lots of people rather than just one person. So, 'm going to try doing this with video and see how that works. If it works for me, see if it works for you. I'm sure we'll figure it out sooner rather than later. So, the question here from Daniel, who had been reading about my course, conversational copywriting, and he had a question. So, I'm going to read out the question and then we're going to tackle it. So, Daniel says, you talk about being conversational with our copywriting. 1 get that woman are actually in conversation with someone like in the comments stream, under a blog post or when going back and forth on social media. But how can we be conversational when writing a page of content or even a sales page? Well, Daniel, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked that because, no, you can't fully, truly be in conversation with someone when you're just writing a Web page or sales page, content page, information page, whatever it is, because you're just communicating at an audience, just reading that Web page. But you can write in conversational language person to person rather than a corporation to person. So, I just went to the Web just before 1 did this, and I picked out a couple of examples just to illustrate what 1 mean by that. So first off, 1 found a website all about fleet rentals of motor cars, and they offer all kinds of services and things. And one of the things they describe is they offer multiple channels and dedicated personal staff to handle your vehicle, remarketing needs. So, you actually kind of have to wrap your brain around it to figure you almost have to translate that out of corporate speak into real person language. So let me read it again. Multiple channels and dedicated personal staff to handle your vehicle, remarketing needs. What does that what does that actually mean? So, let's translate that into conversational language when you're done with a vehicle. We can help you sell. It really is what they're trying to say to try to say when the lease is done, when you paid up the lease or you want to change the vehicle, we can help you sell it. So, when they talk about a dedicated personal staff to handle your vehicle remarketing needs, that's what they mean. When you're done with the vehicle, we can help you sell it. When you write like that, you are writing in a conversational tone. That is how you would talk to someone with a beer or in the back yard or in a coffee. The first version is how you are taught to write it. Its kind of corporate business writing. It's not conversational. It's a corporation to person rather than person to person. The way 1 rewrote it is person to person is more conversational and his tone. So, another example, I'm sticking with vehicles for some reason. This is from National Car Rental. No disrespect, fellows. It's just the first year was the first site 1 found when 1 did, I did a search for this. So, what they're offering, they got a fancy little app. They have now downloaded the National Car Rental App and tap into the power of more speed, choice and convenience all at your fingertips. Well, goodness gracious me. So, this isn't kind of corporate talk. This is marketing talk. So, we've got all this tapping into the power stuff and for more speed and it's all at your fingertips. So racy and exciting. So that is like marketer to person talking as opposed to person to person talking. I'm actually kind of miss the point because when they talk about tapping into the power of more speed, choice and convenience all at your fingertips, that would work if 1 was still sitting at my desk because I'm still in front of a keyboard. 1 can still access your systems is still at my fingertips, you know, the keyboard fingertip thing. So actually, misses the point as well. And it is kind of bloated with that marketing chat. So, my version let me just read it one more time. Their version, download the National Car Rental App and tap into the power of more speed, choice and convenience all at your fingertips. My version first part is the same. Download the National Car Rental app for when you're away from your desk. I mean, that's what it's for, I thought nappies for, so it's on your phone. That's the benefit of the app. It means you can access your account and everything, bookings and