Copywriting for Beginners

1. Welcome to Class: Hi everyone, Welcome to copywriting bootcamp, your complete guide to copyright. So we're going to start with, it's an introduction to copywriting and talk about what we're going to cover in this course and what the job of being a copywriter entails. So these are kind of the key elements that we're going to look at that are sort of the key components of the job of being a copywriter. Understanding and creating a brand's voice is essential to the job as his writing business to business copy and business to consumer copy, headline copy, copy for webpages and landing pages, promotional e-mails and product announcements, social media marketing, audio visual marketing, and of course, getting clients so you have actual work to do as a copywriter, how are we going to do this? I think the best way to showcase what being a copywriter is is to create a campaign completely from scratch for a made up company. So we're going to be writing copy for a company called sophists, which is a sock company selling eco-friendly socks. And as we go through each lesson, we're going to write copy for soft. So you can kinda see how our lesson play into the actual writing of the copy. So I'm Brian, I've been a copywriter for the past six years for theatrical TV and gaming campaigns. And in my job as a copywriter, I've been fortunate enough to work on campaigns for Disney, paramount, Netflix, marvel, Disney, warner Brothers, ubisoft, Pixar, and all these really great and exciting and fun projects that I've been lucky to be a part of. I'm teaching this course because I think copywriting is a really important job. I think it's a really fun job when it's done well. And I really firmly believe that advertising can be a positive force in our culture and in our world. If it's approached the right way and done the right way as you're seeing a lot more in modern advertising. So we're going to talk about a lot of aspects of advertising and copywriting that you can utilize to just put your own unique voice in idea out there and create something that's actually meaningful and important and impactful in the world. Hi, I'm Phil. I'm one of the co-instructors for this class and I'm super excited that you're here and super excited to be partnering with Brian on this class. My experience comes from a more personal entrepreneurial space. I have my own business and I've been writing copy myself for most of my campaigns. My business is Video School, my online training business. And today we've had over 2 million students enroll in our classes, over a 100 thousand followers across our different social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. And I'm teaching this course because as someone who's started my own business, I know how hard it is to write your own copy to know what it takes to sell a product or service. So I'm really excited to partner with Brian who brings that more professional copywriting experience. And then throughout the class, I'm going to be providing a lot of case studies into how I've used it for my own business. In this class, we've included downloadable worksheets and a workbook that will help you out. So make sure you download those and get ready to take action. This is going to be a super practical and fun class. So before we begin, just a couple quick things to cover that are going to be essential no matter what kind of copyrighting you do. I think it's always important to have positivity be a big factor of your copywriting. I don't think any ads that try to put down other companies or cultures or ideas or anything like that, or ever going to be very effective to what you're trying to sell. Not to mention other reasons not to do things like that. So approaching your messaging with a sense of positivity is always a good way to go. Honesty, obviously, this is critical and advertising because false advertising is a big issue for a number of reasons. So this basically amounts to don't lie in your copy. You don't say things that aren't true. Don't promote messaging that is exaggerated or misleading to the people who are going to be reading or senior copy and then subsequently buying your products or whatever you're selling. So this all ties into ethics, which just is all encompassing as far as false advertising, lying, making exaggerated claims, plagiarizing especially is a big issue that you want to look out for in copywriting and it can happen very easily accidentally. So whenever you're writing something, makes sure that you're doing something that's unique to you. You need to what you're doing in completely original so that you're not infringing on anyone else's work or words. So thanks again. We're so excited to have you here and Brian has a few quick tips before we get going. 2. Quick Tips to for Better Copywriting: I think a really important part of effective copy is making sure you create an emotional connection with your intended audience. And by that, I mean, you don't want to just be throwing information and facts at them about what you're trying to sell. But you want to be trying to spark some sort of emotion that they're going to connect with your messaging in your product and connect with them on a level other than just being a consumer. And we're going to talk about that a lot throughout the course to just not treating your intended audience as mere consumers, but as actual people that you want to speak to and connect with. So let's look at five quick tips that will improve your writing as a whole. Number one, concision is key. I think with copy, more words is usually not better. You want to get your message across as quickly and concisely in easily as you possibly can know your idioms, these are just the common phrases that you hear all the time. And having a good in-depth knowledge of idioms is going to help you to come up with fun, clever turns of phrase and twists of words and everything that will grab your audience's attention, expand your vocabulary. This is pretty obvious. I think when you write words for a living, knowing more words is always going to come in handy via grammar nerd, also essential if you want to be a writer, you need to know proper grammar. You can't just be turning in work that is completely catastrophically grammatically incorrect, unexpected, get more work, so learn your grammar and then don't consume copy, analyze it. So by this, I mean, you're going to see copy everywhere in the world and commercials on social media, on billboards. And I think starting to look at copy beyond a consumer point of view and more from a copywriter point of view and try to see what the writer was doing who wrote that line and that commercial or that ad. See what message they're conveying, what emotion they're conveying, how they use concision, how they use their words, start breaking down these types of things as you see them and analyze them. And this will help you to become a better writer as well. 3. What is a Copywriter?: Now I think it's worth talking about what copywriting actually is. So let's look at an overview overall. I think when you strip it down to its bare core copywriting is storytelling. You're telling a story to your potential customers about what you're selling, what you represent, and why you think they should patronize your business or support your product. So in an overall marketing campaign, which is all encompassing of everything that we're going to talk about throughout this course. You're going to be responsible for conception, execution and follow through. So that's coming up with the ideas, writing the words, and then following through on whatever is needed after those words are written. It's further explorations based on your words or revisions based on something you submitted. You're going to be there through each step of the way to make sure the words are exactly what they need to be for each part of the campaign. So you're telling pieces of a bigger story to get your key message across. So I think that's a good way to look at each section that we're going to cover in each piece of a campaign, you're telling just a part of an overall story about what you're trying to sell or what you're trying to convey to your audience. And then overall, the Java's really crafting creative means of communicating essential information each step of the way. So each part of the campaign process is going to tell a different piece of the story. For instance, an AV spot or a webpage is going to have a lot more information than social media post or a single headline. So you're going to pick out the right words and the right things to say in the right message to convey at different points of the campaign to get the overall message across that you need to get across. So let's take a look at what the job of being a copywriter actually looks like in most situations. So the first way to go about the job is to be a copywriter for an ad agency. And in this situation, you're working for an agency that has clients that will be coming to them for all of their advertising needs in yogurt assigned projects based on the clients that you have at that company. Another job for copywriters is to work in the marketing department of a specific company. So let's say you get hired by a startup or a company that you really like in, you're gonna be writing the copy for all of their social posts, their websites, their commercials, everything like that. That's a different way to go about the job in your writing specific copy for that one company, usually with a handful of other writers as well. Another way to go about the job is to work as a freelancer. And when you work as a freelancer, you have other clients coming to you directly to write copy for whatever piece of the campaign they need you to be writing copy for. And then also obviously writing to promote your own business or your product. If you're an entrepreneur, or you're just trying to start a startup or whatever it is. Being able to write effective copy is going to be essential in helping you build your business and grow into the company that you want to become regardless of the approach you take. This is a job that usually requires a tight turnaround, late nights, tight deadlines, all of that kind of stuff. But I personally think the pressure of a tight deadline is kind of exhilarating and fun. So we're going to be going into a lot more detail on all of this throughout the course obviously. But I hope that now you have at least a good sense of sort of what the job of being a copywriter is. 4. Overview of an Effective Campaign: So before we get into the ins and outs of copyrighting itself, I think it's worth examining an effective campaign from the past. So we're going to look at the campaign for the film paranormal activity, the first one that came out in 2009. So I know this is an older film, but I think it's really great example of what effective copy can do. Its production cost was very low, only $15 thousand, which is pretty unheard of for a film that is as big as it is. And then as you can see, it did extremely well in the total box office gross from a $15 thousand investment. The franchise gross that it's fun so far is worth almost a billion dollars. And then I know this is over 12 years old, but I'm examining it because it's a great example of what out of the box thinking and effective positioning can do for an overall campaign. So let's look at the core components of this project. It was an effective concept and genre. Horror always sells well, especially if it's really good. It was low budget, So they had a lot of room to take risks and try new things. The film was purchased by DreamWorks after it first premiered, and then Paramount, which ONE? Dreamworks gave the film to 12 US college towns in a very limited release. So the obstacles that this project faced, it was a really small film, which meant it had a smaller marketing and distribution budget then paramount, bigger movies. It had no big stars or pedigree, which is usually tantamount to box office success. And social media was a lot less used for advertising than it is today. So what was the solution to overcome these obstacles and make the film of success? First off, 11 of the 12 college towns were selling out. So it was obviously doing very well. And then the writer and director or in Pali invited audiences to demand it via promotional platform called eventful on his website. So that line demand it is a really effective example of great positioning. And you'll see why, because it was became the first ever major studio movie to virally market of film. And then as it started to get more demands, paramount promised to everyone that it would do a nationwide or lease if the film received 1 million demands, and then it did. So the next steps, the film had new positioning. The demand that line sort of defined paranormal activity because it was becoming this word of mouth sensation that people are loving in everyone else wanted to see it. So they used still standard but effective horror taglines. Don't see it alone. What happens when you sleep in their marketing materials, which is good but could apply to a lot of horror movies. So then other copy that was showing up in campaign and marketing materials where the demand at line, the UK trailer said dare you experienced the US phenomenon and experience it yourself. So let's take a look at the trailer for paranormal activity. I just camera on. I go from Katie to think there's something in the house. Oh, I think I'm going to have a very interesting time capturing whatever paranormal phenomena is occurring. It's not occurring. Windows and doors and lungs explicitly have seen that there is no first steps out there if you do turn to play games with it, that's been fighting it in for six months, the baby, my house. You cannot really control. What's happens to be. This thing left the message. If it's not a goes, What is that? Okay, So that trailer so as you can see that demand at lion's shape, the hallway the trailer was positioned, the copy in the back end of the trailer was experienced it for yourself. And then after that at the button they showed the demand that line again. So I think the thing that this really does, and the key takeaway here is that it spoke directly to the audience. It gave control to the audience, and that made everyone want to experience this movie. So this positioning obviously caused more bugs because people are seeing other people in the theater reacting to it. And I think before that time, especially you never saw trailers that showed the audience reacting to the movie. And then obviously it became the success that it is. So some other main takeaways from this. Effective positioning is essential and sort of shaping an overall campaign. This one created a really unique identity for itself among all of the other horror movies that come out every single year. And it made it that special small movie that you had to request to see if you wanted to see it, also showed an understanding of the audience. Horror fans are some of the most devoted movie fans that you will find out there. And giving them control over what movies they could see. Your request to see is huge in an industry where it usually audiences have no control over what comes out. It spoke to the audiences motion, in addition to all the other lines. It gave them control as we said. And it was positive, honest, and authentic. Nothing about that was a lie about the movie. Nothing about it was derogatory about anything else. It was just exactly what the movie was. This small, scrappy film that sort of made its way to the top. And that is great success story in my opinion. So here's some other campaigns we're going to examine in this course. We don't have to go through all of this right now. But just so you can see that we're going to cover a lot of other campaigns and copy and strategy to give you a better overall sense of what copywriting can do. 5. Creating a Brand Voice: Let's take a look at brand voice and understanding what that is. You can either be creating one for your own company or your own product, writing for another, which is probably more common for a copywriter. And this is an important thing that we're going to cover first because it's sort of dictates all of the other copy. It dictates the tone, the messaging, the style, everything that will inform the copy that you write later on throughout the campaign. So where do you fit in, in this whole picture of the brand voicing? Ultimately, you just really need to stay true to the core elements of whatever that tone is and know how to strike that tone and how to meet that tone so that everything feels consistent and cohesive throughout the campaign. Of course, to do this, you want to bring your own unique tone of voice into that brand voice, just so that you can keep presenting ideas that are very original and new, indifferent. So things to consider with brand voice, competition. It's always good to look at what competitors are doing, how they're speaking to their audiences, and what types of tones they're taking the audience. Who are you speaking to? Who's going to be buying this product and how can you speak their language instead of just generally throwing words at them? Tone? Do you want to be formal, casual, funny, some combination of all of those things. This is also going to be key in defining a brand's voice. Emotion, like we said, the emotion connected to what you're saying is really important to getting your message across. So what sort of emotion do you want your brand to get across? Or what emotion is the brand that you're writing for trying to get across identity. So this is where you stand out among the competition, among the audience in this general niche of whatever you're selling. And then inspiration is important too. I think, especially if you're creating your own, It's good to look at companies that you really admire in life and see what they're doing. And see what elements you really like in their advertising and their copywriting, in what you can learn from that and how you can implement those lessons into your own writing. 6. Examples of a Brand Voice: Okay, so let's look at an example of what I think is very effective branding with bark box. So to branding elements to look for the theme collections. These are right on their website and they have a themed collection every month. As it says here, every bird boxes to innovative toys, to all natural bags of treats and U2 curated from each month's unique beamed collection. So right now you know that what this company, you're getting something new every single month if you're going to continue to support their business. And so when you look at their theme collections and you see sort of what they're going for here. You can tell that this is going to be a lot more fun and light and anything a little more serious or heavier, whatever they've got a lot of great DOD pons. It looks like a lot of fun. And they seem to understand their customers who are going to be dog owners. And speaking of the customer experience, this is their call to action, and we'll talk about call to actions later. But you can claim an offer on their website. And then it goes on to ask what your dog's name is. If she's a good girl or if he's a good boy. And then it goes on with this personalization tailored directly to your dog, which is just a really simple out of the box idea copy y's. But it's super effective and just connecting on an emotional level with your audience who obviously loves their pets enough to buy them a bark box. So let's look at this brand analysis just from these two examples. The personalization is targeted towards dog owners over any other customers. So it goes on task but your dogs birthday, your dogs breed your dog size. And then all the emails that you get from them are tailored to your dog, which is pretty delightful if you're a dog owner. It's very customer focused. Like I said, they know their customers are having fun with their brand and what they're doing. It's all funny in late. It's very simple and very effective. They're not trying too hard. And you're gonna get something new every month that those themed collections. So to me, that's a very good example of just a brand that is very clear, very defined. And if you're coming in to do a part of a campaign as a copywriter for bark box, you have a really good sense of the type of writing that you're gonna be doing right off the bat. What can we learn from this? Speak to people, not customers. Once again, this is speaking directly to dog owners, not just to anyone who might have an interest in buying their products a little out of the box thinking can really go a long way. I think just that personalization to dogs over their owners is a great simple tool that differentiates bark box from any competing companies. Find branding ideas that keep your audience engaged, just like the themed box every month, you know, you're gonna get something fun and enjoyable every month with this company. And then strike the right tone for your business or products. So obviously, this is the right tone for a company that is selling dog treats and dog toys in all dogs related things. If it was too formal or to serious, it would just be kinda weird and throw a lot of people off. So no, you're selling know who you're speaking to and make sure that you are speaking their language in resonating with them on a more personal, emotional, and understanding level. And then a big key point with this too is to be original. You don't want to just imitate a company that you like with your copy. You want to see what other companies are doing and what you do like and recognize what inspires you. But you need to take the lessons you've learned from other companies and apply the methods of their thinking to your own to create something that's going to be unique and different in stand out from the crowd. 7. Exercise 1 - Your Brand Voice: Welcome to our exercises. I think a great way to learn is to actually put into practice what we're teaching you. So throughout the class, we've set up a number of exercises in most of the sections. So what's going to happen is we'll prompt you with questions or something that will tell you what the exercises about. And then Brian and I will follow up with actually doing the exercise and analyzing how he did it herself for our fake company, soft. So the first thing you should decide is what company will you be writing for in these exercises? If you have your own company or product or service, I think is a great thing to actually practice with your own business. And that way it's something that you can actually use for your business moving forward. If you don't have a product or service and you're just learning this skill to get a job in the future. Perhaps you just pick a company that inspires you or even accompany that you would like to work for and practice with that company, or follow along and use our soft, soft, eco-friendly sock company as an example. And that way you can compare and contrast what you come up with with what we're doing. We'll leave it up to you to help make these exercises easy. We've included a downloadable PDF where you can print it out or edited on your computer. It has spots for you to complete each exercise. All right, so I'm going to pass it over to Brian, who's going to give you the prompt for the first exercise. All right, so for this first exercise, we're going to look at some questions that will ultimately inform how are we going to be branding our company? So the first one, what emotion do you want your product or business to convey? Who is your target audience? Who is the competition? How will you be different? So by answering these questions with some thoughtful answers than we should be able to get a good sense of the sort of grand that we're going to have for our company. 8. Exercise 1 - Review: All right, Hey, Phil and Brian were here together on the same screen. In each of these exercise reviews we're going to go through what we came up with for this fake eco-friendly sock company that we're using as an example. And by then of the course, we're going to be ready to launch the sock company though. So yeah, we just wanted to come together and kind of analyze what we're doing. And hopefully it will help you whether you're writing out copy for soft or for your own company. So let's get going with exercise 1, which was helping people determine their brand's voice. So Brian, how about you go through the answers to our questions? Sure. So these are the prompts that we gave you in exercise 1, obviously to kinda help you to get thinking about what the brand voice would be, whether you're writing for ofs or for your own business. So what is the emotion that you want your business to convey? I think for us, it's comfort. Obviously, socks are comfortable. And I think it speaks to more than just that. It speaks to a sense of comfort that people have supporting a business that is aligned with their own morals or values. And then also the comfort that comes from fantastic stylistic choices when you're wearing something that you just feel really great about. So in addition to the comfort we want to convey a sense of warmth, welcome, Joy and accessibility. And accessibility over exclusivity, I think a lot of fat fashion brands are very targeting a niche audience of trying to be very exclusively this cool. There's nothing wrong with that. I think with our socks, we want him to be kind of for everyone in those emotions kind of go along with comfort. So I think once you kind of pick a core of motion, you want to think of other sort of elements of that emotion that you can build off of in your copy and write to and think about to position your business or brand in, then this means the tone of our Copy. Then overall it's going to be friendly, funny in positive and welcoming target audience. Who are we writing to? I think considering that the sauce will be pretty fashionable in our minds and eco-friendly, our target audience, broadly speaking, is going to be environmentally in fashionably conscious people. So they're going to be a little bit hip and cool and all that kinda stuff in our mind. And given that more millennials and subsequent generations kind of tend to hold these values more so than others. That's probably going to be our target generation, our target audience that sort of 20s to 40s age range. Our competition is obviously going to be any other company selling eco-friendly socks or other clothing items. And then how are we going to be different? This is going to come a lot more when we look at the competition for our specific company. But generally, I think just having a greater emphasis on our mission, I'm being different stylistically. So visually the way the socks look and feel, fashionable but not fashion forward. And above all, we are going to be sure to include our personal voice and Alt Copy. And I think that's the easiest way to differentiate yourself from any other business. If you're starting a business, is to just put your own voice into it in something that only you could write in all of your copy and positioning? Yeah. I think that looks gray. I think these are questions that anybody starting a business needs to answer because it really is going to come across or it should come across in everything you do. And I know personally as through my business, these are questions that I didn't answer in the beginning and I'm continually trying to figure out myself as my business has changed. But I think it really helps if you like, can even create like that persona that you're writing to. And I think for our fake eco-friendly sock company, these are our target audiences, just some, you know, it's just some one that we have in mind who would buy our product and who were creating it for us. Not necessarily. There's no proof of concept that we haven't done a ton of research into 0. This is exactly who we know our audience is going to be, but it's more so who, who we're targeting, who we are aiming to sell the product to REI, totally. And I think on that note too, with these prompts, It's important to keep in mind that you're sort of brand. Voice and image and tone can evolve over time. This is just a way to kind of get you thinking about what it might be, then, you know, it's always going to be pretty fluid. It's always going to adapt to what you need it to be. But just getting these questions down, first of all, helped to inform the rest of the copy which will evolve over the course of the entire campaign. Cool, so we'll include, I didn't mention it, but all include are filled out PDF so that you can follow along. And hopefully the printable that you can use to write it out or edit on your computer however you want to take part in these exercises. We just hope that it has helped you. And again, by the end of the course, we're going to go through a pretty much the entire campaign strategy and a lot of different aspects of copyrighting. So if you take par and you're actually taking action with these exercises, you're gonna come away with a lot of knowledge and really feel like what we're teaching is good real-world strategies. So hopefully, you enjoyed this exercise review and we'll see you in the next one. 9. Brainstorming Tips: Alright, so we're gonna talk for a little bit just about brainstorming processes. I just think personally, it's really important to brainstorm before every project instead of just diving right in. Sometimes if you just dive right in, It's kind of like trying to run without stretching. You just kinda wanna get yourself thinking a certain way. Get the words in your head, find your rhythm before you start trying to put them into practice. So the key to this is to just get you thinking in ways that will ultimately strengthen you're writing as a whole and to just get you generating different ideas, different ways of thinking, different thoughts. And so we'll look at some methods on how we can go about doing this before we start doing any actual rating. So the first thing to do is free association writing. This is where you're just going to write without being judicious, without thinking. You're just writing words, thoughts, phrases, sentences, anything that comes to mind for the assignment that you're on and just write on it without thinking. It might just end up being useless. It might be nothing, but you never know when you might just find a word or a turn of phrase, or an idea, or a thought that could totally spark something wonderful and great and magnificent. So free association ratings, kinda my favorite thing to do. I'm starting on a new project, whether it's copywriting or any other kind of writing. Just get your brain going, get thinking, and just let your self write out as many words as you can and don't care if they're perfect or not. It's kinda refreshing to just not care in rate terribly research campaigns that inspire you. I think this is something I talked about in previous lessons, but seeing what else is out there and what's been done in the creative work being done by other companies and organizations that you admire is really important in getting you thinking in different ways, in thinking outside the box. Sometimes we can be pretty limited in our own thinking until we see something that sparks something else. And this is, once again not to say that you should try to imitate other companies or do anything similar. But it's more just to see how people have thought outside of the box before, how they've used words in unique ways before. And how can you do something similar but different and create your own original ideas? So researching campaigns, having a good sense of what else is out there is really important in having a better understanding of good copy. And then lastly, just music, artwork, photography, all of these kinds of things that can spark emotion in you and get you thinking and feeling different things and feeling different ways is really going to be important in writing. And I think this isn't talked about a lot in copywriting, but it's just as important as any other kind of writing. You're trying to convey an emotion in a message, into tell a story. And I think you need to come at it from a place of inspiration and of emotion yourself, so that you can translate that into the words that you're using instead of just blindly writing the message that you think needs to be told. So just let yourself sort of get the creative juices flowing. Free association rate. Look at other campaigns, listen to the music, watch movies, and look at pictures that will inspire you and ultimately get you thinking the way you need to be thinking to do the assignment that you're working on and then make it count. This means that in copywriting, as with all reading, every word matters. Every word that you're going to use to tell your story, whether it's a long business to business e-mail or short headline, every single word is going to count. So I think this brainstorming process to get you thinking of different words and thinking in different ways is really essential to get you prepared to write effective copy for any part of any campaign. 10. Exercise 2 - Brainstorming Your Business: Okay, so for this next exercise, what we're gonna do is write ten to 15 words for our company. We're going to write it for soft. You can write it for salts or accompany that you're working on for yourself or whatever you like. And just these can be any words, phrases. They don't have to be utilized, but just get yourself thinking of the kind of verbiage that you can use to craft effective copy down the line in the campaign. Answer just a quick tip. Homonyms which are words that can be multiple things, idioms, anything you can use for a good turn of phrase can be really effective here in sparking ideas that will improve your copy down the line. 11. Exercise 2 - Review: Welcome to our exercise review for exercise number 2, which was to write ten to 15 words or phrases that might be effective for your company. Words or phrases that just might appear in your copy or might have something to do with your company that will help you come up with copy for all of your different social posts, headlines, everything else that we're going to be doing in the future. So Brian, you want to go through what we came up with for soft? Sure. So this is an exercise I like to do before everything IS before every assignment that I started on, I just write outwards. I like gone thesaurus.com to start getting words down that mean absolutely nothing. And sometimes it becomes extremely useful down the line and sometimes it doesn't. So for our eco-friendly stock company, salts, these were the first words that came to mind without even doing much research in the kind of little bits of phrases that we might be able to play with two. So as you can see looking through here, this kind of covers a wide range of things from cold feet to Bigfoot too. Keeping in step in a few different uses of the word step, comfort, you tread, wall. This is just kind of words related to feet, ultimately into socks, in what feet do and what socks do. And I think just kind of getting your head and that mindset of all the words that can pertain to Sachs is a great way to just be able to pull something out of it that can spark something great. So this is just ten to 15 words. You can do this with a 100 or 500 words if you wanted to and just write down every word you can think of that appeals to what you're writing too. So I think for this though, for us, this kind of gives us a little bit of a range to start with for our copy and you know, whether we use it or not. Scene, we'll see as we go through these exercises. But I hope this has helped you to kinda get thinking about how you can start using, thinking about different words and phrases for what you're trying to sell and get across. Yeah, and if you are taking part and especially if you're using software as an example and you wrote down your 10 to 15 words. We would love to see them go onto Instagram and share it with me at Phil Abner, tag me and opposed to, and I would love to check it out posted to the course, however you want to share it with us. We'd love to see what you come up with two, all right, we'll see you in the next lesson and together we'll see you in the next exercise review. 12. Know the Market: So for this section we're going to take a look at market and competition. And these are two factors that are going to be essential and sort of informing the way that you're gonna go about your writing. So market, this is obviously the field that your industry or product falls within. So for us, selling eco-friendly socks are market is going to be a parallel fashion, eco-friendly products, that type of thing. The demographics speaks to the background and specifics of the audience you're speaking to or your intended audience in the competition will be companies targeting a similar audience in a similar market, selling similar products to your own. So let's look at the market first. What is your target audience? What category does your product fall under, and who is the audience for that product or that business? In other words, who are you speaking to? And so like I said before, you don't want to just be throwing information and facts out there. You want to know your audience and you want to know who you're talking to because you're talking to people not to entities. So understanding that it's going to be essential and crafting copy that is effective, positive, authentic, and honest. And why does this matter? Because if you know your audience, if you know who you're speaking to, is going to change the way you write and you're going to be a more effective copywriter for it. So key demographic factors that will make up your audience. These are things to keep in mind when writing your copy in. In knowing who you're speaking to. Agent generation, morals and values, education level, location in the motion connected with your product or business. Each of these is going to affect copy in different ways because you're not going to speak to a 65-year-old the same way you're going to speak to a 10-year-old. You're not going to speak to someone who lives in a different country the same way you'd speak to someone who lives in your own. So all of these kinds of things affect the way that you're going to be speaking to your audience, in the way that you're going to come to know the audience who you're speaking to and understanding this is essential and crafting great coffee. So an important question is, how are you going to know what the demographic factors for your audience are? If you're working in an agency, sometimes you'll get creative briefs, which will tell you all this information so you can kinda know who you're speaking to. But if you're starting a company from scratch and you don't necessarily know who your audiences, then I would say the important thing to do is to just start researching the industry. Hopefully it's something that you're passionate about and interested in. And so with that being the case, you should have a pretty good sense generally of the makeup of the audience that you're targeting. But doing the research, looking online, trying to immerse yourself in what you're selling as much as you can, can give you a really good sense of who you're going to be speaking to. And we'll touch on this a little bit more in a case study coming up in this lesson, the competition. Obviously, you want your campaign to be original, so you don't want to have coffee or any marketing materials that are directly similar to your competitors. How are you going to create something that stands out from the crowd and differentiates you from everyone else out there selling a similar product. This is a really important thing to keep in mind when writing copy because this is a real opportunity for you to do something different, to stand out and to make your product or business different from everyone else. What other companies are targeting the same audience with similar products or services? What do their ads look like? So I think having an understanding of the writing that's being done for your competitors is really important in being able to be original and to find opportunities to know what they're doing well. And to see where they've missed something or done something that you think could be different or better, or target people in a different way. So kind of understanding and analyzing similar companies is going to be really essential to creating really original, really unique, and impactful copy. 13. Exercise 3 - Your Target Market: Okay, so for our third exercise, what we're gonna do is examine the market and the competition for soft. And we'll do a little analysis of what this market will be composed of. What are key demographic factors are for our audience and who the competition for our eco-friendly sock company. 14. Exercise 3 - Review: Hey there, welcome back to another exercise review. This one is for exercise 3, which was all about understanding your market, the competition, and all of that. So hopefully you took power and filled out the form for soft or for your own company and we're gonna go through it for soft. Yep, so let's take a look at aging generation, which we kinda touched on in the branding section. I think Millennial Gen Z, roughly early 20s to early 40s, is probably you're going to be our target audience after doing some research into who will most likely be purchasing our product. So keeping that in mind, we have a good idea now of who are going to be speaking to once we start writing our copy, morals and values. This is really important to know when your audiences well because you can really speak to them on a deeper level and understand the emotion that's gonna speak than the most. So, since we're promoting a sustainable company than sustainability philanthropy are going to be key morals and values and then style and humor I think are also values that we're going to try to connect with, with our audience, education level. This kind of just dictates the way you are going to be writing copy to your audience. So we're gonna go with college educated because that's most likely the type of education ran to that our audience falls into based on what we've looked up. And then the emotion connected with your product or business. As we said before, comfort as number one, feel-good, welcome, humor, positivity. We want to create something that's really fun and enjoyable and accessible for everyone. And so finding a market that resonates with those ideas is what we are going to be aiming to target, goal. And so for the competition, we have some examples we're going to look through, but you can see here on the PDF or if he downloaded our example answers, you can read through it and check out the website yourself to see how we compared ourself to conscious step, kind socks, harvest and mill, and all birds. So we'll start with conscious step. And I just pulled some images off their website of copy that you can see they utilized. So say hello to spring, shake off the winter blues and new designs that there to make a difference, say hello is the first two lines is a very welcoming message. You know, it kinda gives you a sense that this brand is going to be pretty light fun. It's not going to try to be exclusive to people. It's very conversational and friendly, which as the copyright at the top of their website, let's, you know, a little bit right off the bat of what they're about. As you can see, they're very philanthropy centric, power and purpose in every purchase is a great line that tells you that everything that you buy from them is going to go towards a different cause and same with ordinary purchase, extraordinary purpose. They care a lot about their businesses that they support, the non-profits that they support, and the philanthropy is a big part of their overall mission. In these simple lines kinda give you a really good sense of where their values are and where their audiences, morals, and values will lie as well. All of these lines are very clean. They're very easy to comprehend. They're very straightforward. And kinda gives a sense of a good overall brand that is targeting a very ecocentric audience in a very fun and welcoming way. Later down on their website, they also have more information about the organic and cruelty free and fair nature of their sources and their products as well. So yeah, you can really see that without me personally knowing much or anything about this company, they're really positioning the reasons why someone's going to choose them for their socks. They're not the, they're not saying you can get 20 pairs of socks for $5. They're not saying these are the most stylish socks that are going to make you the popular kid in school. They're giving. The reason why you're going to choose them is because of that philanthropic mission that they have. And clearly everything that they have listed out on their website ties back to that. So now let's take a look at another clothing company called harvested milk. That is all about their organic materials. Right away you can kinda see that their style of copy is much different from conscious step. It's very to the point. It's not using any word player, like conversational undertones. It's just telling you exactly what this company is in, what they're all about. And I think as you look through their website too, you see that they have a big focus on their products being made in the USA. So once again, they have their impact listed for the philanthropic minded shopper, but they presented in a way that's just purely straightforward in purely informational and just lets you know what they're all about. The way they kinda right, is very fashion-forward as well. It has that sort of exclusive feel. It's a little more serious and it's a little bit more minimalist in that kinda gives you a sense with the words that they choose to use in the way they presented that this company is for the fashion binded eco shopper. They're not trying to win you over with any laughs or anything like that. They're just telling you exactly how it is in presenting the types of materials that they're using to make their clothing. Yeah, and I think for me, looking at the images, I think this can go beyond the realm of copyrighting. But because a, as a, perhaps a business owner yourself wearing all the hats of writing copy and building out a website. It's important to look at this and see the images they use, even the font choices they use compared to conscious step. Again with the branding minimal, little bit more serious for sure. And all of this comes together and sharing your brand's voice and tone and purpose. So just something to think about and, and I think it kinda ties back to one of your first hips. And the class is not just be a consumer of copy and content, but start to analyze it. And we all should be looking at websites, looking at companies, and Seeing how it works and this is a good example of they know who they are and it's represented in everything, not just the copy, but also the graphics, this font choice, the colors and everything. Not all companies are, are good like this. Sum, it's a mismatch, but in general, it's good to have a cohesive style brand and copy. Okay, so let's take a look at kind socks, which is another brand focused on eco-friendly socks. So if you look through the copy on their website, they have a little bit more of an edge. They're a little more hip. They seem to be writing to a younger audience, younger as an 20s, 30s. People who are a little bit more fashion-forward and they have just kinda like a little bit of trickiness and a wink in their copy. But they seem very more focused on the kinda Edge and kind of really targeting bat millennial generation as directly as they possibly can. They haven't defined ethos so that people know what they're all about and what their products are all about and what they represent. And this just kind of takes a sort of Milgrom tone between conscious step and harvest and Mill, I think consistent across all of the copy on their website. And just sort of has that edge and that seriousness, but also that little bit of playfulness as well. And the one thing I noticed from what you pull it from their website is the inclusion of a hashtag. And just simply the hashtag is something that is a little bit more and modern, is something that a younger hipper target audience would understand compared to someone maybe in an older generation that's not on social media as much. So just again, all these little things that come together to, to share your brand's voice and target a specific audience. Okay, so now we're going to look at all birds, which is an all-natural shoe company which also sell socks. So right off the bat, they have a tagline promoting their shoes on their website called running the rain, which is just a great, concise, simple messaging that shows that there are wall shoes are also waterproof. And then if you look through their website too, you can see that they're very focused on style, on all natural products, which is sort of their big selling factor that everything they make is from nationally source products and comfort to because they're very comfortable shoes and socks in other clothing items. So just looking through their website, you can see that they are very nature focused more than anything else. And this is less about them supporting philanthropic endeavors, but more about them utilizing natural resources to sustainably create their products. And I think explaining how they do that with their copy and really kind of clear, concise, unique ways is a really good defining factor of their brand and really lets you know right off the bat what they're all about if you go onto their website. So just to be clear, we're not shoe or SOC experts ourselves. But something that I see here from Albers is they've really latched onto using the US rule, which they claimed to be the best hair in nature for their products. And now I would guess that there's other companies that use wool in their shoes, but haven't used that as a, a reason so much or as a, a, a word or a key phrase or headline as much as all birds in their copy. So you can see in this screenshot that they really use wool and they're explaining why woul is a great option for a shoes. And that choice of fabric is really a selling point of theirs. And that's coming across in there copy. Yeah, absolutely. I think focusing on the all-natural elements is is a great indicator of just who they are and what they represent, what they want to represent to their customers. So looking at some of our competitors websites, we can ask ourselves, where are there opportunities for us to differentiate ourselves and stand out from the crowd? All of these websites are pretty different and take a different approach to their messaging. So what can we do that will be different from all of those. I think playing up humor is a big way to go with this and just something that we can do differently than all those other ones. Accessibility, obviously, conscious step had a very accessible field to them, but I've been kind of building on that and just making sure that ours is equally or more accessible to people than others with our copy will be great. Wordplay. I didn't see many great feat puns. Maybe that's for a reason we'll find out when we start writing or, you know, Canada, those turns of phrase. There's an opportunity for it, whether it's the right thing to do or not, we'll kinda know once we start writing the copy. And then I think you need calls to action is another thing that I didn't really find on those other sites, not that their calls to action or bad, but what can we do that will be a little bit different from those in separate us from the pack. I think that's going to come across as we work through these exercises, how we differentiate ourselves and hopefully you seeing our process of actually going through competitors and analyzing them helps you understand what you should be doing as a business yourself or as a copywriter. Alright, thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 15. B2B & B2C Marketing: Okay, so we're going to look at two very important elements of copyrighting. Business to business and business to consumer, also known as B2C and B2B. So let's start with B2C. This is business to consumer, obviously. So this is going to be any copy from the business directed towards the consumer. So this is going to be obviously the majority of all copywriting. It's going to entail social media, promo, emails, websites, headlines. Everything that we're gonna kinda cover and examined in this course is B2C copywriting. So the core components, B2C copywriting is going to be message, tone and emotion. The message is going to be obviously what part of the overall campaign story you're telling in this specific part of the campaign that you're writing for, the tone is how you're going to reflect the company's voice or branding or identity within its market. And then with emotion, this is obviously just the reaction you're hoping to get from your audience. How are you going to connect with them? How you're going to be speaking to them and not at them. Good B2C copywriting should overall, the conversational, creative in customer-focused conversational because you're speaking directly to your audience. You're not trying to just throw information out there like we keep saying, you're speaking to them creative. You need to be attention-grabbing. Do something different, make your brand's voice heard in the industry, and then customer focused. This is all for the customer, not for your business. So you need to be sort of thinking about what your customer wants to see, hear, read when you're writing copy for B2C copywriting. An important thing to keep in mind with B2C is that you're going to be reaching customers at different parts of their journey towards understanding what your product is, what your overall story is. So some people might be brand new to your company or product, and you'll have to speak to them differently than people who already know your product well or regular supporters of your shop or business. And you want to retain their attention and keep them engaged and interested. So that's something to keep in mind when you're speaking to the consumer is just which consumer are you speaking to? How are you speaking to them? And how are you going to approach the way that you use the words to communicate what you want to communicate with them, okay, So B2B, this is business to business obviously. And this is going to be any copy from your business directed to and other business. And so this is going to be a lot different from the general copy that you're writing for consumers because you're speaking generally to more than one decision-maker. This is usually email specific. So you're going to be communicating with people via email and you need to make sure the wording of those emails is exactly what it needs to be to get the message across that you want to convey. In like I said, this is going to more people than one. See you need to keep that in mind when you're writing. You're not just trying to reach one person. You're trying to reach several people more often than not. And it's going to be a little bit more practical than emotional. You want to have that emotional connection still at what you're trying to convey and put forth. But you need to be a little bit more business minded and business oriented with the way that you approach the wording of these e-mails. The primary purposes of doing this is to generate leads, build relationships, and trust that are going to be ongoing hopefully to help your business healthier business and vice versa. And calls to action to get them engaged and involved in your business. So the core components of B2B copy, messages, everything. You want to be a little more clear and informative than attention-grabbing. You want to present a problem for that business and explain why your business can be a solution to that problem. You want to promote your company and contain any relevant content that will drive home the point in the message that you're trying to convey in this email. So ultimately, a good business to business e-mail should be professional, clear, and informative. You're going to be a little bit less conversational and colloquial than you would be if you're speaking directly to the consumer, you're going to be a little bit less clever and cheeky, then you would be in some copy and you want to be clear and concise with what you're saying. And you want to give them all the necessary information that they need to understand what you're trying to sell them. And this can be a really tough balance to strike because it's hard to now err on the side of being too professional or not being too casual, or not being tuned formative, or not being too irrelevant. So all of this really takes a lot of skill and practice and study. And we'll look at an example of a B2B email that would be effective for our company. Soft. Once again, it's good to be authentic. Even when you're writing a B2B e-mail, you don't want to think of the decision-makers as these faceless entities that are going to be making a decision about whether or not to support your business. These are all people you're working with, these relationships you're building in. You need to speak to people the way that you would speak to people, not to faceless entities. 16. Case Study - Effective B2B Emails: Welcome to another case study where I'm going to just provide a little bit more backstory or examples of how this has applied to my business video school. So in terms of B2B emails, it's something that I don't send out a lot of B2B emails, but I received them. And so I can tell you from my experience a couple of things that are more effective and also what will make me just delete an email automatically, the verses that the proposal should be mutually beneficial if you're a business going after another business, trying to work together with them on something, you have to make a proposal of that is going to be mutually beneficial for them as well as you. You're obviously reaching out to them to expand your business, to make some sort of connection to make more sales. But that business isn't going to want to work for you if they're not getting anything in return. So to emails that successfully did this to me were photo arcade and Porto moment. Both of these companies reached out to me, realizing that we had similar audiences related to photography students or people interested in photography. And photo arcade reached out to me and they actually, not only did they send an email, but the included a video recording where the founder of the company sent me a message and talked about what he was proposing. But he did so in a way where I knew that he truly understood what my business was. And that's really my second is and that's really my second. In addition to being mutually beneficial, you really have to make it clear that you understand what that company is. And it shouldn't seem like just a mass email that you're sending out to dozens or hundreds of companies. I can tell when I get messages and emails from those kinds of companies and maybe they've just replaced my name or the website URL. And they make it seem like they're trying to understand my business or that they know my business, but it is pretty clear that it's just a copy and paste template. So I think it's important to start with a template, but maybe really look and do a little bit of research for these companies you're reaching out to, to understand them a little bit better. And so for example, photo arcade knew that I had photography students. They knew that my students might benefit from their software that they're developing. And it was enticing enough for me to read the email and watch the video, and knowing that they took the time to put together that that video for me specifically has really helped. I'm just on a side note. If you're looking for a quick and easy way to record video for a potential business you're reaching out to. There's a number of really cool and free applications you can use, but one that I use is called use loom.com. It's a browser extension that allows you to just quickly record your screen and your webcam right in your browser. And so really personalizing these emails with that, I know it's going a little bit beyond copywriting, but that can help grab attention and get a response. And then just quickly, the other email that I got that's sort of similar was this one Porto moment. And they reach out because they wanted to do a giveaway with few of my classes. And they seem to understand who my audience was. I get these requests often, sometimes it's from companies that have nothing to do with photography. But they're asking if I could share share their company to my audience or if they could do a giveaway with me. But it's clear that they're just looking at my profile, seeing that I have a following and trying to get access to that following. But there's, it's not mutually beneficial because businesses aren't aligned, aren't about photography. So remember the two key points I have are make it mutually beneficial and do the extra work to customize your template so that the companies you're reaching out to know that you really care about partnering with them. 17. Exercise 4 - Write a B2B Email Template: So for this next exercise, we're going to take a look at what a B2B email for our company soft might look like if we're reaching out to a prospective retailer who might want to carry our product in their stores. After that, we'll analyze our email and kind of break down what we did and show you how we sort of hit those points that make for an effective B2B email. 18. Exercise 4 - Review: Welcome back to another exercise review. This is for exercise number 4, which was writing a template for a business to business e-mail. So we'll go through the template we came up with and talk about what we can use this for. So as you can see, we have our template here to a prospective retailer. And this is obviously going to be the bare bones of what you're sending. And that's not to say that you want it to be much longer than this or that you want to send someone a very long e-mail, but you want to have the points that you want to get across. And then once you know who you're writing to, you can tailor it to them as Phil was mentioning and make sure that it's personal and then it is beneficial to both you and to the person email too. So let's just take a quick look at this first paragraph here. As you can see, this is really concise. You're just introducing yourself at your company and just saying real quickly and concisely and clearly, what you're all about. Obviously ours is high-quality, environmentally friendly socks, stylish fun created from only natural, organic, and sustainable sources. So this is only three sentences, but right off the bat, whoever will be reading this e-mail is going to know who you are, know that you are accessible to them in what you're selling. This next paragraph is something that can really be tailored a little bit more to whoever you're writing to. I believe your customers will love our socks. So this is an opportunity to present your mutually beneficial relationship that you're hoping to have. Let's say this is a retailer who's selling a lot of natural products, organic products, having an understanding of what they're doing, who their customers are. This is where you can demonstrate that in find your way to present void that you can fill with your product and near services. Once again, this can be more personalized, but it shouldn't be too much longer than this. This is also only three sentences. It's right to the point. It's very clear and it just tells them what you are proposing to them with the service you've already acknowledged at the top? Yeah. And I like this last line that you said about without any similar products on your shelves, I think you could literally, if you were a business, you could, I mean, you can do this across the country or the world, but if you're targeting a local business, I would literally go to that business and make sure, you know that's true and say that, you know, make it a little bit more personal and say, Hey, I was in your store the other day and I noticed that you didn't have any similar product on your shelf and I think this would be perfect or whatever and make it, you know, you don't want to say that without it being true, I think that will come across if it's just a template and you're saying, oh, I walked into your store and didn't see it because who knows, maybe there is something on the shelf that similarity so you wanna make sure is true, but I think that's somewhere you can put a little bit more of a real-world personal touch as well. Absolutely. And I think to kind of finding the finesse of just the right words to not sound like you're being derogatory. Store. Yeah. Not saying, you know, I don't have my product or anything like this. Yeah. Yeah. Just say here's something I noticed in, here's something that I can present and find the right words to do that clearly and concisely write this next sentence is a strategy that speaks more to marketing then copywriting, but we'll use it for our purposes. If you wanted to send someone a sample of your products so that they can see it. The reason I think it works well here is that it has this last sentence about getting their thoughts, wants to have a chance to look them over. This is a good place to kind of tailor it towards whoever you're writing to and show that you care about their opinion. You care about what they have to say about your product and you're not just trying to hawk something on them. You're trying to create a mutually beneficial and hopefully long-lasting relationship with them in you value what they have to say about what you have to offer. Obviously, once again, at the end you want to make yourself accessible. You don't want to play hard to get or try to be behind the scenes or or whatever you want to be available until one day to respond to this email or we're not going to do any business with probably not the best idea. So yeah, just I think these kinda hit the key points that you want to have. And this also just allows you to tailor what you're gonna say to specific people or businesses or whatever you will be reaching out to. So yeah, I would say if there's a space, maybe in that first paragraph two is somewhere that you can throw some kinda complement at them. I think any business or person really appreciates a compliment. And so if there's a way to say something about their business or their store or whatever that complements what they're doing and shows that. And maybe it's in the second paragraph as well of trying to tie in how their customers will like our socks. But it's not just about me, me, me, but it's also about you. And that's going to, if there's somewhere we can throw that and customize it to whatever specific person you're writing to it. I think that's a good idea to absolutely. Yeah. Also, the last thing I'll say too with this is just something you can see compared to all the B2C copy that we're looking at in this course. This is a lot more professional. It's a lot more informative in it kinda strikes that balance between being conversational and friendly but not there's no feet pumps still. Yeah. Which we might not get to it at all. It's just very letting them know what you're all about him speaking to them like people and not like faceless entity that you're just trying to get your product to. Yeah. And we didn't really talk about this email subject line, but I think that's a good one. To start with. It builds curiosity. A better SOC option. If I was a clothing store owner, I would wonder, okay, what, what is this? And you add a little bit of information in context with, for ICO minded customers. So I think there's a good balance there of building curiosity, but also giving enough to make someone want to actually open it. It's not just like, Hey, do you want to sell our SOC at your store? It you came up with something that was a little bit more clever. All right, hopefully you enjoyed this exercise review. Hopefully you're taking part, doing your own exercises and coming up with some great copy for your own business or for soft, if you want to send it to us, feel free to, we can check it out and we'll see you in the next exercise. 19. The 3 C's of Effective Headlines: So now we're going to take a look at headline copy. So what does headline copy? This is a single line of copy that usually is paired with an image or some graphic that will be on a poster, print, ad, and online add anything but it's suited to, that tells your audience what you're all about. It's a single line that encapsulates the positioning that you're trying to get across the piece of the story you're trying to tell about what your product is, what your brand is, what your messages in. Ideally, this is going to be something that's really catchy and attention grabbing and engaging. Because if you have a good headline, then that can lead people to looking into your company a little bit more and get them interested in what you're telling them. So what purpose does it serve? This is sort of the gateway for people to know what you're all about. So copy wise, I think this is a really fun and unique skill, which is why I think it's fun to write because you get to use a very select set of words to get a certain message across in a really unique and concise, in clever way. So this really gets you thinking about your brand, about the message you're telling in distilling it into the simplest possible form that you can't provoke that emotion in the audience and get them thinking about what you're selling them. So I think an important thing to do now is to take a look at some key components of effective headlines. And I think these three C's are pretty important to remember and encapsulate what good headline copy does. It's concise, which means it's just short, quick, easy to the point. It's something that just clicks in your reader's mind. It doesn't take much thought or thinking. It's not always going to be the case, but generally with headline copy, concision is better. And we'll look at some instances where that's not the case. Thinking in that way helps you pick the right words to get the right message across. Clarity. Obviously you don't want it to be too obscure or two out there that people just don't know what it is. They don't pay attention to it. They engage in their move on. Him. Cleverness. This is sort of the attention-grabbing pirate. This is where you can take a common idiom or phrase and turn it in a unique way that gets people to stop and think and look at what you're getting across. So what does a good headline encapsulate? Message, emotion, and voice? I think these are the three most important parts of a good headline. You really want to get the emotion across if you're trying to make people laugh, if you're trying to make them feel good about themselves, if you're trying to alert them to cause that you think is important, that has to come across in the headline copy and in the words that you choose. The message also needs to be very clear and you need to let people know what it is that you're trying to tell them. In the voice speaks a little bit more to the brand that you're writing for, whether it's your own or another, you need to make sure you're sort of matching a more cohesive tone that is going to be consistent throughout all of the copy for that campaign. 20. Examples of Great Headlines: All right, so let's take a look at some examples of effective headline copy from these four companies, Volkswagen, Nike, Oatley, and The Economist. So first Volkswagen. So this is a really popular campaign from the sixties when the Volkswagen Beetle was first introduced. And in this time I think it's worth just knowing for some background that a lot of marketing of cars was about big board, flashy, fast, cool. Cars were sort of status symbols at that time. Then vw comes out with the beetle, which is the opposite of all of that in this ad that said, thinks mall was totally against the grain of everything that other car companies were doing at the time. And the reason this worked and got so much attention and why people resonated with it so much is that it was very self-aware. It wasn't trained to sell The Beetle as something that it wasn't. It was saying this is a small, kind of ugly car by standards of that time, depending on how you view it. And we're going to just embrace that fully and be honest and authentic about it and have fun with it. So that gave it a unique identity among its competitors. It was very honest, but it wasn't self-deprecating either. It wasn't seeing that their car is piece of junk in it, It's not worth buying. It was just pointing out different qualities of that car that were a little bit funnier and more offbeat than others. And it was pretty bold to do this too obviously, because it went so against the grain of everything else that it could have easily backfired. In this thing small, I am triggered. Several other lines with that same positioning. This one that says live below your means. It makes your house look bigger and if you run out of gas, it's easier to push. So they really just kind of took the thing small concept and had a lot of fun with it and just embrace the weirdness of this car in their headline copy. In these really concise, simple lines really get across that messaging. These are all generally under 10 words. Some of them only a few words. And I think that using those words as efficiently and effectively as they did is a great example of headline copy that tells the full story. That gets the big picture across. It gets the reader interested in looking at a little bit more into what they have to say. So I think that's just a great starting place for headline copy that really does exactly what it's supposed to do. And then on the note of Volkswagen, Here's a different example of headline copy. Now this ad is really attention-grabbing and funny. If you look at it in the real headline copy is at the bottom there where it says it's important to stop at the right moment. And taking that concept and using it in a way that they could easily demonstrate in copy above it in a clever, fun way that's different from the car itself is a great attention-grabbing, funny use of that concept to get you interested in the car that they're trying to sell here, which is about the facades City Emergency break. So this is just sort of an example of how you can take headline copy and sort of play with it and do something new with it in different. If you have the right verbiage to use. Okay, so let's take a look at Nike, which has a very famous headline. Just do it. So this headline came out quite a few decades ago. But it's obviously stuck through all of their marketing even to this day in sort of positions the company as this brand that's speaking directly to its audience, who are athletic people, as you know, sports stars, people who are aspiring to be great sports stars, people who want to push themselves to the limit physically. Mentally and emotionally. So just do it Is three words that totally encapsulates everything that are about in encouraging their audience to get out and be active and to ideally do it in Nike's. So the reason that I chose this one is that it's very concise. Obviously, it's very simple, it's very easy to remember, and it speaks directly to the Nikkei audience. This is effective positioning for their future copy, which we're going to examine after this. And it lends itself to further exploration with that positioning. So let's look at these ads by Nike as well as you can see here. This takes the concept and expands on it a little bit in continues to speak to the audience with that same message that in this instance the shoe works if you do. So now once your excuse and smoke them. So this is a great example of copy that lends itself to further exploration. It's easy to remember and it gets across exactly the message that the company wants to get across to its audience, which is, you can push yourself further. You can do better things. You can be physically active if you buy our products. So I think that's an effective use of words to get that message across that they want to get across. Okay, so Oatley, I chose because they actually do not have very concise headlines, but I find them really interesting and attention-grabbing, which is why we're going to examine them. So this is the main headline that you see across a lot of alleles advertising. And so this is attention-grabbing, obviously as it should be. But what I like about this is it really stands out among the competitors in it's designed to keep people reading a lot of that's the bold font, but it's also the way the copy is worded in phrased to keep the audience reading through what this oat milk company is really all about. And it makes a bold statement with this one, particularly it's like milk but made for humans. Because it's just a kind of weird statement that's going to make people want to know what they're talking about. Ideally in this sort of tone and weirdness and bold, long attention-grabbing copy. It can be seen throughout a lot of their other headlines, such as the posters they'll have out in public or online, which as you can see here, are very long and very self-aware and just very targeted directly towards people who are just walking by. Which is an interesting strategy when you're talking about a company that isn't going to have a built-in audience. There's not a huge oat milk demographic out there, so they need to get attention somehow. And they did it with these really funny, clever, unique posters that are just trying to make people read them and keep reading them and then look into their product. So I think this is a good example of how you can take something that's a little bit longer if you utilize it in the right way. If you're the right type of company to do it. And if you strike the right tone with the audience because this is just gonna be kind of fun and funny for people to read as they're going for walks, driving by city buses, scrolling through Ali's website or Whatever they may be doing to find these ads. So just to show that you don't always need to be super concise with your words. But make sure if you're not going to be concise that there's a very good reason for doing so. Okay, so now lastly, we're gonna take a look at the Economist magazine that's targeted towards a more highly intelligent audience and they really embrace that in there copy. So let's take a look at this line here. Great minds like I think, is a great use of just a very simple turn of phrase. Great minds think alike obviously as the idiom, by just switching a couple of words around and giving it a totally different meaning. That creates an ad that's super attention grabbing and also speaks exactly to what their magazine is all about. That creates a headline that is super attention-grabbing and also speaks to exactly what their magazine is all about. So as I said, this is very attention grabbing. And I think another thing that's important to keep in mind is that if you're going to be clever, you need to be clever for a reason. I think being clever with wordplay or ponds or whatever you wanna do is great. But if it's kinda purposeless outside of just grabbing attention, then it's not going to get you very far. This is clever wordplay that speaks exactly to the message they're trying to get across, which makes it a really effective headline. So this speaks to a very distinct audience. Obviously, in speaking to that audience, I think is a very kind of bold way to just ONE their brand and say, This is who we are, this is who we want to speak to. And this is the way we're going to do it. And I think that encompasses the tone of the magazine as a whole. So as you can see, these other headlines maintain the same tone throughout. They speak directly to an audience that is interested in world affairs, is interested in intellect and is interested in higher learning, in higher education. So even the B-sharp is just a really simple use of a simple music note. So that's a great example of really just sort of unique out of the box thinking that gets a message across It's very distinct because writing it with the music notes speaks to an audience that would be able to read music. And people who don't get it won't get it, which I think for them is obviously the point. So think really knowing your brand, owning your brand, speaking to the audience you want to speak to, is something that the economists as managed to do really well with their ads. So key point to remember, I will just say failure is an option when you're writing headline copy, it takes a really long time, often to just get to a really good copy line or to a good handful of copy lines. So when you're writing, I just would recommend not editing yourself. Just write anything that comes to mind at first. Just, if you have an idea for a headline, just write it down. And it could be total garbage and you can delete it later. But sometimes by doing that, you can get your brain thinking in ways that you wouldn't otherwise be thinking. So one bad idea can generate a great idea. One word or turn of phrase can generate another that actually works. So I think when writing headline copy, it can be really hard to sort of not get very myopic and focus on finding exactly the right words, but starting out, just go for it to start out, start writing things down and then just whittle it down from there. I think that's a better way to go to let yourself arrive at the option that you really want to use. 21. Exercise 5 - Write Your Headlines: All right, So for our next exercise, you probably guessed it we're going to be writing headlines. I think a good place to start is 10 to 15 headlines that you feel good about. Usually if you're writing an assignment, this could range anywhere from 45 to 20 to 30 to 40 or 50. It just sort of depends on the client, the project, the exploration, what's being asked. So we'll kinda keep it simple in this time and find a sort of nice middle ground of ten to 15. And I think that allows us to explore some different ideas, some different messaging, to kind of think of different ways that we can get across the right message and the right headline for our company. So we'll be doing this for software. Of course, you can do it for whichever company you would like to. So just a tip before we begin. This is a good time to revisit that list. You'd be an exercise. Two of the different words, phrases, idioms, anything like that. And think of any others too along the way that you want to throw in. You might use all of them. You might use none of them. But this is just a good place to get yourself thinking of different verbage that you could use for your headline copy. So go ahead and write it, enjoy it. And then when we come back, we'll examine our answers for soft. 22. Exercise 5 - Review: Welcome to this exercise review. This one is for exercise number 5, Writing headline ideas for your company. So we went ahead and wrote out ten to 15 headline options. And this is really going to dictate where we move forward with a lot of our copy moving forward. So let's go through some of these ideas you came up with. Yeah, so I think these kind of speak to a lot of different ways that you can position the company. And each takes a little bit of a different approach as to how it wants to speak to the audience. So it could be something that's a little bit more of a plan. Words like the wall truth, or good for your soul, or going for the SOC factor, or stuff that just kind of tells you a little bit about what we're about in a concise and clear way. Yeah, I like that there's options for something super short, something a little bit longer that might be used for a different part of your copy. I think some of these would be perfect for, you know, a Facebook graphic or a, or an advertisement where it's just big bold letters, words. And you only have space for a couple of words versus others that might be able to be used on a website or throughout your your e-mail marketing or things like that. But I think it's probably a good idea to pick one or two of these moving forward and see how it works. And maybe it doesn't work and you change it or you end up with a slam dunk like Nike's, Just do it and that's what you use for pretty much all of you here. Campaigns move forward in the next decades of business that you're running when you're writing a headline copy generally for a client or for yourself, you can be asked to write anything from five to ten to ten to 20 to 20 to 50 to even more than that. This is just to kind of find different ways to get the message across that you want to get across and to find different ways that you can go about positioning your product or business in reaching the audience in different ways, getting people engaged in different ways. So I think going through our list here that we've come up with, we're going to want to find one line for our purposes that we can use across all platforms and that we can also use to build on with other copy and that we can change and position in different ways throughout our campaign. So I have a question. So in regards to actually what it looks like to do this if you're a copywriter working for a client, like who generally do you come up with? Like, you know, you're ten to 15, you send it off and do they generally like I'm sure it's a group of people looking at them and trying to pick one. Do they ever like, come back to you and say like, okay, we like happy sheep, happy fi, bi, is there another way to say this or, or how does it work in the real world? Works exactly like that. You'll write countless and callous lines, usually with a team of other writers. Your review of the Creative Director in your agency or, you know, if, if you're working for a freelancer with someone at the agency you're writing for. And they'll review it and review it and they'll whittle it down, send it to the client. The client will. Either like one and use it or like an idea from one or not like any of them and ask for more. But very often we get asked to do different iterations of one line. How many arts can you do for happy sheep, Happy Feet? And usually it's more than you think you can do is asking. You keep writing and they keep asking and you keep writing and just goes and goes and goes. And this is especially true with that movie poster taglines. It takes a very, very long time to arrive at just the right words to print on a poster and print across all the campaign materials have in the trailer and all that. So That's interesting. So how many times have you come up with a list? And you're like, I know this is the one, this is the best one and then they pick the one that you didn't like the most are generally is it like do they pick the ones that you think are better? It depends. It really depends on the project. Sometimes they'll pick the ones that I really like the most that I put right at the top of the packet because I don't want it to be seen first. Yeah. And sometimes I'll pick a random one that I thought was kind of a throwaway line that worked for whatever reason or don't want a slight tweak on something that I thought was not great. So, you know, you kind of never know what's going to resonate with different people when you're writing a headline copy. But I think just trying to find as many ways as you can and trying to not be too repetitive in what you're submitting. Whether you're doing this professionally or for yourself, you want to give yourself options and different ways to look at what you're trying to say. Got it. All right, so we are going to present the one that we chose which we're not picking right now, we've brainstormed this, we've thought about this ourselves. And so let's go and look at the one that we're using for moving forward. So we're gonna go with Treat your feet. And for our purposes to just before we get into why we chose this, we're going to presume that design is a totally different aspects from copywriting. And we'll say we have a designer or we're designing herself separately. We kinda went with a Bigfoot theme for our brand to make it kinda quirky and off-beat and fun and unique. So that's how we have this happy looking big for here. This is Soft son. And I think treat your feet as a great line because it lends itself to a lot more exploration. You could do something like treat your feet to organically sourced. Treat your feet to the most comfortable socks. Nature has to offer. Treat your feet to wherever you wanna do, but it's something that rhymes. It's really quick, it's easy, and it kinda gets across what we're all about in three simple words. Maybe you disagree, maybe not. It's all really kinda subjective. I think if you're writing for your own business, you get to choose what you want. If you're not, you have a little bit less say over it. But for our purposes, I think this might not have been the most playful or fun or punny line, but I think it's definitely the most effective of the lines that we had. One thing I will say about treat your fee is that I think the reason we picked it. Is because we start thinking about the actual copy that we were going to write for our other posts. And we're almost working backwards in the sense we were trying to understand what, how can we get across to a customer, what is going to be a reason to buy soft? And one of the things that in my mind kept coming back is that we want our socks to be a little bit of a treat. Exactly what this says. We want it to feel like a treat. That's how we can sell it as something that you might get a treat for your feet. People spend money on, coffee's, on drinks, on little splurge is all over the place. But I don't see Sachs as necessarily something people are splurging on. But at the same time, I think your feet are something that you're constantly thinking about or there's oftentimes where you're like, Man, I feed are tired, they're cold, they're whatever. And I think actually having that as a selling point, like a little treat for your fee is something that can really help sell the socks of ours. The one thing though I will say is that treat your feet doesn't get across the eco-friendly genus of our, our sock company, which is a really big aspect of it. I think our socks aren't just like super comfortable. They're very eco-friendly, right? And so that's going to have to come across in our other copy on the website, social posts and all of that to write. And I think the other thing though, that kind of made this edge out, despite that, is just that it speaks to that comfort level that we want to go for. It speaks to the accessibility and it speaks to the fun because it's rhyming is fun, It's nice, it's easier to remember, and it kinda just lends itself to a lot of possibilities. And obviously the imagery again goes beyond copywriting. But I think it's good to understand all of these aspects of marketing, right? And this character, this image of a Bigfoot wearing socks. It's just funny. I've never seen like a big foot wearing the clothes or anything. But I think it's it's not necessarily like to say, Oh, you're a big foot, you should wear socks. It's just like if Bigfoot would wear socks and his VR as narrowly as possible and he would wear our soft socks, then it's gotta be something that you're going to like as well. And you'll see that as we go through the rest of the exercises, how we play on that as well. And if you ended up writing any headline copy for sauce, we'd love to see it. So feel free to just share on social media or post to the class in a CEO, what great words you came up with for our fake company. Awesome. We'll see you in the next exercise review. So yeah. 23. Website Copy: All right, So now we're gonna take a look at writing copy for websites, which is obviously one of the most important copywriting exercises that you're gonna do for your business or product. Because it's going to be the first impression that anyone searching your product are looking into your business is going to have with your company. So you wanna make sure you make a good impression obviously, and you want to choose the right words and verbage and language to really convey everything that you want to convey. So what should a good copy for a landing page B? You want it to be very informative obviously. So the most important information is going to be at the top of the page. And this is where you really need to get people's attention and show them what you're all about, what you're trying to convey. It needs to be clear and easy to read. No one likes to go to a website and just see text everywhere in over explanation of everything that you're trying to get across is a lot better to go to a website and just see the words that you need to see that tell you what you need to know about this product or business or service. You want it to be representative of your brand obviously. So if you're trying to go for humor, you want it to be funny. If you wanted to be serious or emotional, you need to make sure that's conveyed in the messaging as well. So all the words that you choose need to be indicative of what your general tone of voice is, whether you're writing for your own brand or foreign other companies. And then of course, you really need a call to action. This is what you see on every website and we'll go into more detail on that. But that's basically just going to be you're requesting people for their email address or other information to get them on your list of subscribers so that you can reach a broader audience with promo emails in the lake. What should your landing page not be? Over complicated? This just goes back to not having too many words, too much for your audience to have to read through and decipher and figure out. People just want to see what you're all about in the easiest, clearest, most concise way that they possibly can. Totally inaccurate. If you're going for humor, you don't want to be serious. If you're trying to be serious, you don't want to go for humor. It's just going to throw people often confuse them. So you want to make sure that you're speaking to the brand voice and tone, that you want to be consistent through all messaging in any advertising campaign. And then you want to not be speaking about your business instead of to your audience. So an important thing to remember is that people are reading this as you communicating to them. So if you're talking to someone who's just constantly talking about themselves, you're not going to want to spend much time talking to that person, at least I won't. So understanding your audience and speaking to them and not about you is a kind of a fine line to walk. But you're going to see in some of the examples that we have how that can be achieved. Okay, so quick tip, using headline copy at the top of your website is a great way to just get that information out there about what you're all about right at the beginning of your webpage. So people can see the line. They can know what you stand for, what you are all about, what you're selling, and get a sense of your business just right off the bat before they scroll further down the landing page and learn a little bit more about what you're trying to sell to them. 24. Calls to Action: Called action. This is something that you're going to see on just about every website. And it's a really tough thing to do as a copywriter to find a good way to write an effective call to action. So you asking readers mostly for their email address, but it can be other things. You could be asking people have fallen social media for funding donations. You can be asked people to take surveys about your business. So it's just kinda whatever action you want the audience to take after they visited your website in asking people to do that can be very challenging and tricky, but there's a lot of phone creative and clever ways to go about doing it. So it's a fine line to walk. A lot of people don't want to be receiving constant e-mails and promotions all the time from every single business that they support. So getting people on board to do this is kind of tricky and something that takes a lot of skill to sort of get gesture rate. So the big question is, how do you concisely in convincingly requests and one's time and attention, which is increasingly valuable in a digital age. And people have shorter and shorter attention spans. So let's look at what a good CTA does. Obviously like everything else that speaks to your audience. It demonstrates an understanding of the audience. You're not just going for email addresses blindly. Your training get specific email addresses from people that you feel like will benefit from the product that you're trying to sell to them. It speaks to an emotion just like anything else. No one's going to want to just hand over an email just for no reason. You need to sort of show that you resonate with people on a level beyond a means to your own ends. And then I think a lot of CTAs now too well, like not acknowledged hesitations as to forking over an email address. A lot of people know that not everyone wants to just subscribe to every single list. So if you can find a clever way to acknowledge that people might not want to just hand over their information. That can actually work out quite well and it gets CTA. And then once again, offers a benefit to your audience. You want to make sure that people who were signing up for your newsletter, for your product announcements, anything like that, is going to get something worthwhile out of it. So great start is obviously discounts. Free samples, contest entries. This kind of gets people on taste in the business they want to try out your products in maybe giving them a discount code on their first purchase is a great way to go with that. So we'll look back at bark box, which we examined earlier in this course, which I think has great CTA because as we mentioned, it speaks to the dog, the dog over the dog owner, which is a really fun way to just connect emotionally with your audience, understand your audience, and do something that's a little bit different and out of the box in, it's probably going to make people more willing to subscribe them to something that's just blindly asking for an email subscription. 25. Examples of Website Copy: Alright, so we're going to look at landing page copy for the following companies. Toilet paper startup called who gives a crap communications network called slack, and a non-profit called farm animal sanctuary. So three very different kinds of businesses, and we'll see how they each approach copy in a different way. So let's start with a company called who gives a crap. So this is the first thing that you see when you go to their website in this banner on the top slides and we'll look at some of the other things that they tell you in their information on the sliding banner. But first, let's look at the CTA, which is saying that if you enter your e-mail, I get a lifetime supply of toilet jokes. And they say Just kidding, only send a few. I think this is something that really kind of speaks to the hesitation of people not wanting to get bombarded with e-mails or toilet jokes or whatever it might be. And I think sort of being a little bit more playful with that. Like they are as a great way to sort of grab people's attention and make them laugh and kind of show that this company has a sense of humor about what they're doing. They're very clear voice, clear service, and a clear call to action, like we just said, So delivered to your door. And then the line under it just kinda tells you exactly how the product works. And then sliding band and it goes on to talk about their philanthropy, their donations, and sort of the purpose of their business with what they're trying to achieve, what their profits. I think this is a great example just because it really balances their philanthropy with their sense of humor. So this is a company that cares about doing well in the world and doing good things in promoting these services. But they also are acknowledging that they're selling toilet paper in there, having fun with it in a way that's not off humor, not off-color. It's a little bit more elevated and sophisticated than that in the way they get that information across with these lines of copy is just very concise, very clear in gives you an immediate sense of what this company is all about. And if you scroll down to kinda have their three statements here about what their company is and what they represent. Once again, this very concise, clear, kind of fun in light. And I think just a very good example of effective copy, effective branding. And just a really easy way to get across exactly what they were aiming to get across with their website. So I think this is just a great example of a website that effectively gets across exactly the messaging that they want to get across in a very clear, concise way. So now let's take a look at Slack, which is an interoffice Communications app. And then Slack is an example of a website or right at the top of their landing page, they have a headline. Slack makes it downright pleasant to work together. This just does a good job of telling you what they're about and they're aiming to make work-life more pleasant. And I think that's enough to engage most people to slide down further on the website and see what they're all about. So if you scroll down a little bit past the headline, you see the description of what Slack is presented in a Slack message, which is a very simple tactic that is a good way to just get across the way their business works, what it is, what they do and what they're about. And this is also just short enough to keep you scrolling, to learn a little bit more in as you keep scrolling down the website, you can see they have their big points in big bold letters in very concise sentences with a little bit more information below are off to the side. I think this is an example of just communicating the essential information in the clearest, most concise and clever way to keep people engaged and to give them a good understanding of what their company is all about and what their product is all about. So you can just gonna kinda get a sense of the business just from this page scrolling through. And then this is enough, usually for people interested in office communications to do a little more research, read the About Me section and do a further deeper dive into their website and learn more about the product that they're selling. Okay, and lastly, we're going to look at a non-profit called farm animal sanctuary. So when you go to farm animal sanctuaries landing page, the first thing that comes up is an emotional call to action. So they're saying that if your gift to rescue farm animals from cruelty will be mashed up to $50 thousand. So this speaks to an emotion that people who are going to be visiting a site like this are likely going to have, who are going to want to support animals, support this non-profits mission. And to be able to do so while having their gift matched is a good incentive to get people involved in their service and what they're promoting. And then having the nice picture of this Sweet goat with it is a great way to just sort of drive the point home. The reason I chose this one outside of it being different from the other companies that we looked at is that it is a non-profit in as such, they have kind of a long About section right here on their homepage. And sometimes like other things, it's okay to go on, especially something like this That's really promoting what they're about and what they're doing in what a visit to their sanctuary will be like. This is something where you kinda wanna go a little more in depth and you want to speak to the emotion that these visitors are going to have when they visit the farm. What it's like they're, what they're all about. And it kind of gives people more detailed and wood want to know from something that they're just trying to buy. So if it's the rate situation, I think it's okay to have a couple of paragraphs explaining what you're all about as long as they're well-written as this is clear and get the message across it they're aiming to get across in once again, this very much just speaks to the audience. It knows who's on their website, it knows who they're trying to reach, and it tells you what you're gonna get from them when you visit the sanctuary. And this is a slightly less copy related tactic with something that's great to have on a landing page if you can, especially for an experience like farm animal sanctuary offers, is having testimonials. And this is true for any business really, if you can setup what your business is all about, what you do, what your mission is, who your audiences, what you're selling. And then have people scroll further to hear testimonials from other people who have supported this business before. That's a great way of just sort of connect and create a more unified community of your audience and your customers. And let people know what you're all about and let people know that there's other people who are also supporting this type of cars. 26. Exercise 6 - Write Your Website Copy: Okay, so for exercise 6, we are going to prepare copy for our website, for soft or for whichever website you choose to do. And so something to think about, this is what might the copy for our products homepage look like? And going back to the examples we just looked at, It's D1, it to be short and concise. Do you want it to be a little bit longer? Do you want to strike a balance between philanthropy and humor? Do you want to be more informational? This is kind of just getting you thinking about like, how are you going to get that brand voice across? What kind of words are you going to use? How long will it be? How are you going to approach writing copy to get people engaged, to get people involved, and to get people thinking about what you're trying to sell them in. Then lastly, what will we include? This is just a mission statement, a call to action, a headline. There's no real one size fits all for websites. So I think knowing the key components of an effective landing page and matched with your personal business is going to dictate what you want the copy to be on the website, what you want to communicate to the reader and what you're going to say to get them interested and involved in doing a deeper dive into what you're selling. So take some time, think about this. And then we're going to do the assignment for soft. And then we'll revisit what we came up with for our company. 27. Exercise 6 - Review: Welcome to do another exercise review this one's for exercise number 6, all about websites. So we asked you to start writing out the actual content that might end up on homepage or a landing page. And sort of get a little bit more of the background feel and tone of what it might sound like. So Brian, let's go through what we came up with for our soft website. Okay, so let's take a look at the first question, which is, what will the copy on your website look and sound like? So just a few things that we noted here. You can see that given the tone of our brand that's starting to take shape, we want to have clean and clear messaging of who we are and what we do. That's obviously Big Ten Paul, part of what software is all about. We're not just selling socks, were doing something different. We're contributing the causes that we believe in and we're doing stuff that's more sustainable and source from organic materials and all that great stuff. So I think that's something that really is going to have to come across on our website for sure. We want to have that conversational tone of voice and style, to have that sort of sense of comfort, that sense of inclusivity, that sense of accessibility to anyone who visits the site, that anyone is welcome to feel like baking, be a part of our business, support our products. We want to have transparent insight into our practices. I think this is something easy across the board of a lot of eco-friendly, eco minded companies is they want you to know that they're not just saying it, they're actually putting what they're doing into practice. They're actually taking their mission into the real-world and doing something with it. So that should come across on a webpage for sure. And then obviously product highlights, you're still a business. You still want people to support you at the end of the day so you can continue to support the causes that you care about. In our case, it's going to be, you know, all the causes aligned with our mission. And so these are kind of the main things that I think just right off the bat we know are going to have to be included on our website. Yeah. And then the next we sort of had you come up with different aspects that might go on your website, headline and call to action, maybe a mission statement. We actually built out a template website and we're going to look at the eye and we can go through each section. But we used Wix.com. And again, there's some aspects of this course that go beyond copywriting. But as a, an entrepreneur, if you're taking this class or potentially even as a copywriter, you might get tasked with editing websites, are creating websites and weeks is super easy. I literally made this website in late 30 minutes. And not to mention, I think as a copywriter, there's something very satisfying about seeing your work in practice as opposed to on a Word document, seeing it in action, it kind of makes you see the words come to life in a different way and gives you a different perspective on what you're writing. So let's take a look at the soft website that filled need very nicely. So as you can see at the top here, we have our treat your feet headline that we chose from the previous exercise. In beneath that we put a sub-headline, which we also wrote in that headline category. We love organic cotton, the planet and being cozy. This just made sense. This I think we felt just encapsulated everything that we're about. And it presents it in that sort of like conversational, easy going way that we want to be consistent through all of our messaging. It's speaking directly to our audience, is telling them who we are and what we're about. And I think going back to what we mentioned in the last exercise review, this adds to the treat your feet headline because it covers not only the sustainable sort of eco-friendly Venus, but also the cozy factor that hopefully are Sachs actually are. Absolutely. And I think that's something to bring back the headline with the treat your feet. This is something that I think is just the initial gateway into everything else that we do. So it's a really quick, easy way in. And then you see on the website right below it a little bit more about us. And hopefully that inspires people to want to scroll further and read a little more about our company and what we're doing, which I do right now. So let's go now. I mean, I already see this question thinking of socks. This is so enticing. I'm going to see what this is. Yeah, so this would be our call to action section. And instead of just saying sign up for our e-mail list, we decided to put forth a history of the SOC trivia quiz. And it invites people to sort of test their knowledge on socks. Maybe you know, something that you didn't realize you knew or maybe you have something to learn about socks. Either way, if you take the quiz and you do well, then you get a chance to win a free pair. If you take the quiz, otherwise, you just get a 15 percent discount. So sort of a win-win no matter what. And I think the reason we chose this as it is just sort of a little bit more out there, a little more out of the box. It's very engaging. It's kind of playful and fun like everything else we want this site to be about. And it hopefully will get people interested in further exploring our products. Yeah, and just surveys, quizzes, getting people to take those little actions. People love this kind of stuff. So again, a little bit like beyond copywriting in terms of like coming up with the different ways to get people engaged and build out a website. But having that certain knowledge is always going to be beneficial. So the next thing we have here is our mission statement. And once again, we really want to put forth what we're all about. So we just wrote three simple sentences here to encapsulate our brand and our company. Promote sustainable sourcing and practices, support organizations that make our planet a better place and offer our customers the greatest socks that have ever existed in the history of the universe. Pretty simple things that we are obviously doing very well with our fake sock company. We can say we're going to create the best sock in the history of the universe. But it's funny. It has that like more funny tone. Obviously exaggerated. We obviously care very much about what we're doing, but it just kind of matches the tone of the rest of the copy that we've seen so far from our website? Yeah. And then below this we have a section super basic that would have the actual products themselves. In terms of design, this could be moved up or down depending on all sorts of things. You don't want to necessarily have it at the very bottom, but we just wanted to include it there just to show you where it might be. Then lastly, we have these other three sort of like facts or tidbits that give a little bit more information about us as a brand. Absolutely. And you can see what these are and just a little bit more straightforward and clear. They're not trying to be as fun and tongue and cheek, but they're just saying in the clearest possible way what you can expect from our company. Every product is made from 100% organic and sustainably source material. 20% of every person, ports climate change and conservation non-profits. And if you're not satisfied after 30 days, you can get a refund. So these are just sort of facts about our company that people might be interested in, that they can look further into on the website. But on a landing page, this just sort of cements everything that we've set up in our other copy in gives people are pretty well-rounded picture of what we're doing in, hopefully entice them to follow our call to action, to learn a little bit more about us into expressed an interest in our products, not trying to brag or anything, but put it together pretty quickly. And even the graphics, I did use a little bit of photoshop to get those socks on our big for here, but the rest of it was all built. Canva.com, which if you don't use Canva, It's a super easy way to create your own graphics. So again, a little bit beyond the scope of copyrighting. But we talk about later on in the course, putting your foot out there, trying to get work as a copywriter and putting together a website with content that you've actually written is a great thing to do. And so Wix is something that I could recommend for beginners. Alright, that's it for our website exercise. And we'll see you in another one. 28. Why Email Marketing is Important: Welcome to this new section of the core is all about email. We thought this was a logical next step, moving from writing out copy for a website to understanding how to write better e-mails. So in this section we're going to talk about the content of your e-mails, the topics of an email, and also the all important subject line. So first we want to understand why email is important. Now, while this is a copywriting course, we understand a lot of you watching this class might be interested in the general marketing aspect, email and copywriting. So we have other courses that dive deeper into e-mail marketing, building out sequences growing in email list, talking about all the tools showing you how to use the tools. That is not what this course is. I do include some of the basics so that as a copywriter, you understand what's going on. But first, why is email still relevant? And something you should know? Email is powerful. I don't know about you, but one of the first things I do in the morning is check my email. And I'll admit it that sometimes it's as I roll out of bed and just start getting ready for the day. An e-mail compared to other platforms of or means of communication is still that sacred place where I have a little bit more control over who can access me. And therefore, when people do reach out to me in email, I hold it at a higher level as more important than things like someone reaching out to me via messages on Instagram or commenting at me on Facebook. So email is powerful, people care about it. And so if you can talk to people in e-mail form, they're going to care about it. It's that direct access to consumer, unlike social platforms, unlike putting out an advertisement or a YouTube video, you're hoping to get eyeballs, but you're not really sure if you're connecting with that person email, is that direct, one-on-one communication with the person. We have to understand that success with e-mail marketing and copywriting is much more than just sending out one promotional e-mail. There are different ways to sell a product or service in email. Some times it is that direct promotional e-mail where you're announcing a product, where you're pitching a product. But a lot of times it's more about nurturing your subscribers, sending them informational, entertaining content, depending on why they chose to sign up for your email list. Going to determine the type of content you write and you have to nurture them. And then maybe subtly, you throw in the option to take it to that next step and purchase a product for from your business. So hopefully now you understand why email is so important even in this age of all these new forms of mass communication, e-mail is still one of the best ways to grow your business. 29. Tools for Email Marketing: Let's talk quickly about building and maintaining an e-mail list. Again, this is geared for people who are running their own businesses or helping with a startup, a smaller business where as a copywriter, you might also be in charge of the backend, the marketing type things, not just writing the e-mails of themself. So the tools that I recommend, and there's dozens more that, I mean, probably hundreds more that are great options, but the ones that I've used in the past and can recommend our Mailchimp, a Weber convert kit and Constant Contact. Currently for my business, I'm using convert kit and also I'm using Mailchimp for some sort of like just group projects and other things that I do that aren't related to my business. And I loved MailChimp because you can get started complete lately for free. So if you're starting a business, if you're doing anything with email, Mailchimp is a great place to start. So how did you get someone onto your email list? Typically the way to do this is by giving something away in exchange for an email address that's called a lead magnet. Now the key with this is that you have to make it irresistible. You start to solve your customer's pain point with some kind of freebie. But if you're more of a service or a brand that's not selling physical products, giving away something like a PDF, an e-book, a video series with information and e-mail series with information, education, or even entertainment or a webinar. All of these are considered lead magnets that you can give away in exchange for that email address. You know the drill, you go to a website, there's a pop-up, there's a sign-up form that asks you to submit your email address and only if they give you something interesting, if there's helping you to solve your problem, are you willing to sign up for that list, right? So think about it from the customer's perspective. What is something that you can give them that's going to be irresistible, that's going to make them sign up to get that offer. But once they're on your email is there's so much more that you have to do because you don't want to get any spam or any additional emails in your inbox. And so those very first emails that you send out half to be crafted very cleverly with engaging, interesting content to keep people on that email list. One other quick tip for maintaining an email list is to prune your cold subscribers. This is more a financial tip, but most of these platforms are tools. They charge you per subscriber or there's tears. And if you go pass a certain number of subscribers, you're going to pay more. And so it's important to just prune them. There's depending on the platform like convert kit for example, there's filters that you can see where subscribers haven't opened an email in the past 30 days or 60 days, and it's a good idea. The best practice is to send them an email and ask them if they want to stay on the email list. And there's ways to automate if they click a link or things like that, it will automatically keep them on that list. And anyone that doesn't click the link that says stay on will automatically get deleted. But that depends on the platform. But the tip is just make sure you prune your e-mail list. There's no use having a gigantic list if people are engaged, I would much, much rather have a smallest with a higher, highly engaged audience, an audience that's opening those e-mails. So these are just general best practices for maintaining the list. In the next lessons, we're going to really dive into the copywriting aspect of emails. 30. Make People Open Your Emails with Better Subject Lines: The first thing you need to do as a copywriter is ensure that people actually open and engage with your emails. This comes down to writing a great subject line. The two key things that you want to get across with pretty much any subject line is curiosity and urgency. So you want people to wonder what's inside the e-mail through your subject line. And then also have some sort of urgency that tells them they have to open this right now. You don't want it to be archived or skipped or just waited on because the chance that's ONE will actually take action with a purchase or a call to action, whatever you're asking for in an e-mail is more likely if that person has a sense of urgency and wants to open it right now. So let's look at some best practices for better subject lines. On the left-hand side, you have the tip, and then on the right-hand side we have an example. So the first one is short and sweet, and you can't do all of these with every single subject line because these are just a bunch of different ideas that you should try out. So the first thing is short and sweet, and this is a good best practice. In general. You want your subject lines to be shorter, not run over the extra limit amount where you can't see it on mobile and things like that. So shorter is better. But something just as simple as like, hey, you had taught, is something that if you've got that from a non friend, you might want to open it more so than just a generic promotional type headline or subject line. Because this is something that is more personal, more, it's sort of builds that curiosity of like, okay, what are they going to say next? The next is ask a question. Did you know? Did you know simply is like, okay, well, what don't I know. And I'm already curious to know what is in this e-mail. I want there's something in me that wants to prove that. Yes, I do know. And so I'm going to open that e-mail to see what's in there. And obviously I don't want you to just copy these subject lines. It's figuring out for your brand, for your product, for your voice, your tone, and everything. What types of questions might you ask it for your audience? If you are doing more of a promotional announcement or sequence, something like including a deadline can often help increase open rates, something like four hours left to dot-dot-dot. Or you can actually include what it is. But I think leaving some information out bills that curiosity. So if it's four hours left to blank, you can't have are wondering what it is compared to four hours left to get this amazing discount or sign up for the class or whatever it is. So it really depends and you've got to test it out and see what works. But including a deadline can really help a command. So an example of this is like you have to watch this or. Go do this right now or openness and read it. Read this email. Things that just tell people to do something. It's more likely to make them do it than just saying something like, here's a cool video or this is a video we made about our whatever. Here's a video about blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. If it's a command, it most likely will increase your open rate. So all of these examples that I've shared so far don't really include much information about what's inside the e-mail. You can combine it with information. This next one is a good idea. Hint at what's inside. So my grandma's secret recipe. Hmm, interesting, right? We're getting a little bit of information about what might be inside that e-mail, but we don't really know what it is. And instead of just saying, my grandma's secret recipe for marble cake or I don't know, it tells the first thing that came to my mind, my grandma's secret chili recipe. You're leaving a little bit of the information out. So it entice someone to click. And if you say my grandma's secret pizza recipe or pasta recipe or whatever it is, a person doesn't, isn't interested in that type of food, is not going to open that e-mail, right? And so leaving a little bit out is a good idea. And then my last tip is using numbers and emojis. So the thing about numbers and emojis is sort of breaks up the visual NUS of the text with numbers, lists. We know listicles do really well on line seven. Best things. Number three is going to really wow you. These are proven to actually do really well and get people to click on them. So just using a list or a number is going to get people clicking or opening those emails. And then emojis is another example. I used to be completely opposed to using emojis. I thought I was super tacky, but both for email and social media, there's a proper and good way to use them in, mostly because it helps visually make your email look and stand out. And we're going to look at examples of that in just a second. Another key point is to test, test, test. If possible, use your e-mail software is AB testing capabilities to try out different subject lines. I'm not sure how it works or if it's available for other all the other email marketing apps out there. But with convert kit which I use, you can set it up to test out to subject lines. It sends out the email split evenly to 15 percent of your subscribers. And then based on the open rate, it will send the following 85 percent, the subject of the email with the subject line that had the higher open rate. So this is a really cool built-in feature. If you don't have a future like that, you could still AB tests. You could set up different groups of people in your e-mail list or just over time, play around with the different things that types of subject lines that we went through. Short and sweet questions, deadlines, commands, hinting at what's inside using numbers and emojis and just compare and contrast. Now it's a little bit harder and it's not true AB testing. If you're sending out emails about different things or if the subject line is about a completely different topic. But over time hopefully you can get a sense for what's going to work with your audience and what doesn't. But testing and analyzing what's working is so, so important. Hopefully these tips help you write out better subject lines, put them into practice, let me know what works for you. What doesn't hit me up and share with me on social media or wherever and let me know if any of these have increased your open rates. 31. Qualities of Effective Promo Emails: Let's look at the core qualities of effective promotional e-mails. First, let's break down the components of an email. You have your subject line which we just covered in the last lesson. You have preview texts. Now this is the start of your email that's going to be visible on most email apps or if you're online on a web browser, if you open up Gmail, Yahoo mail, whatever it is, it's that first line. And it's going to depend on what device you're using, what email service you use. It's the amount of words that you see is going to depend on those different things. But generally it's going to be the first 510 words are so that you see, so this is your preview text that is very important to think about and then your body copy. So this is the core, most of what your email is. And then a call to action and a call to action. Brian covered. This can go at the end of an email. It could go earlier in the email. There's no specific way or rule to say, Oh, you have to have a call to action at the end, but it's important to have some sort of call to action. It's generally more important in best practice is to have one. Now let's go through some best practices. So one thing that you might not have thought about is choosing a good From name. So this is going to be in your e-mail marketing tool. You can choose what name appears when someone seeing that email in their inbox. So typically they're not just senior email address, it's going to be a name that you select. And so I made the mistake with my business video school online.com for awhile. It just said like video school online or something like that. But then I switched it to fill from VSO, which worked. It's a little clunky. I actually changed. We upgraded our business to just video school now. And so my current emails are filled from Video School. And so it adds a little personality to it. I am the face of the brand, and so it's that personal connection. Depending on the brand, you might be writing for a brand that doesn't have a specific face or personality that it's from. But whatever it is, make sure you pay attention to what that from sender name is because you want it to feel relatable. You want it to feel you look professional and be clear who it's from. But it's one of those things that you might not think makes that much of a difference. But having a good relatable from IIT name that appears can increase open rates. Keep it brief. Now, there's always a time and place for longer emails, but unless someone is signing up for an email list with the expectation that they're getting long form emails. People do not want to read long emails, so keep it short, keep it brief, keep it to the point. I mean, that's just generally best practice for emails include one call to action. I already briefly mentioned this, but if you have a lot of different things you're asking people to do, they're going to be less likely to complete all of them or any of them, or what the most important May 1 be. They might not know what the most important one to us. So for example, I wouldn't send out an email that says, Hey, check out this new course that I'm selling or I'm launching. Also, check out this YouTube video that I put out. Also, go look at this photo on my Instagram. That's a lot of things that someone could choose to do. And likely the most important thing to me as a course creator and as that being my business model is to get someone to buy that course for me. And so I don't want to distract them with those other things. Now I will say that I don't always follow this rule. Sometimes I send out a sort of recent content e-mail that includes all of our latest tutorials or website blog articles that we put out. Or I have an e-mail in my sequences that goes out after someone joins my email list to say, hey, have you followed us on social media? And I sent out our Instagram account, our YouTube channel, our Facebook page, and all those things that someone might want to follow because you don't know what platform people are on. So giving them the option is a good idea. But when you're doing a promotional announcement or e-mail, you want to make sure you have one call to action, offer value in your email. When you're doing email marketing. And you're not doing a promotional e-mail. Even when you are doing a promotional e-mail, it's so important to offer value and that's going to look different depending on what your businesses, who your target audiences. But generally you're wanting to help solve your customers problems. So think about what your customers need help with. Why are they following you? Why are they on your email list and provide that support? You're the expert in whatever your business is. And so you're going to know what that is. I can't tell you. This is exactly the email or the type of content you should write. You should know this as the business owner, but really just put, put yourself in the customer's shoes and see what do they want and provide that for them. If you're a copywriter for another business, you're really going to have to understand the business and what problems they solve and use that within the email. Emails. It's, we've said this before about a lot of things. It's mutually beneficial. You of course, want those customers opening those e-mails to eventually buy products and services from you. That's how you sustain your business, but you have to give back as well to retain them, to nurture that that relationship. And if you give, give, give, you're going to receive at the end of the day to another tip is to speak directly to the reader, used the word you want them to feel like you as a business are speaking directly to them, understanding them and that you are important to them. And along with this, speak to their pain points, their wants, their desires. This kinda goes back to the content and writing content that solves their problems. But as much as possible if you're speaking to their pain points, if you're putting yourself in their shoes and they feel like that, they're going to feel connected. They're going to start to build that trust in you that's ultimately going to lead to future sales or purchases of your products. And a general tip, not necessarily for copywriting, but it's to make it visually pleasing, but don't go overboard. Now there's a right way to add pictures and colors, and backgrounds and templates. And there's a wrong way to do it. And it takes someone who knows what they're doing to make sure it's formatted the right way. So it looks good on mobile, it looks good on desktop. And so that's a little bit beyond the scope of this course in terms of how to actually do that, but make sure it looks good. Now sometimes a simple text-based email is the best thing you can do. You don't need the ant out a bunch of images or things to spice it up. Other times, if you have a very specific brand style and you can use that visually in your emails. That's going to work really well with customers who buy into your brand. Because when they see those colors, those fonts, that imagery, It's going to click with them. They're going to automatically know that this is from you and that relationship they've already built with your brand content on other platforms, the visuals that you use is going to help them when they opened that email, feel like they can trust you and they have that connection already. So let's look at a few examples to see how this is all put into practice. 32. Examples of Email Copy: All right. So I'm just using some emails that I get in my inbox. So this first one is from Scott's cheap flights. This is an email list where you get notified for inexpensive flights. And so this is a good example of a deadline in the subject line as well as emojis. So a lot going on in here ends tonight when an away gift card, blah, blah, blah, plus emojis. So multiple reasons why I would click this email. They use simple graphics. He uses his logo at the top. I've been using a logo at the top of an email can be good or at the end, it's not necessary in my mind, but it's just building that relationship. Again, you want people to recognize your brand. The use of the image here is nice. So this is an actual image. It's not text. It's a graphic that they created. And just visually, it stands out when a $300 away, a gift card. So that stands out, which is nice. And generally this email is short and sweet. There are two links, the sweepstakes page and then this link to a way which is the brand that they're partnering with. And I understand that that's there including that link because they're probably an affiliate with that company. But the main call to action is the sweepstakes page, which they included a link to at the beginning of the e-mail and at the end, which I think works well, especially if your email is longer, which this isn't that long of an email, but I would say it's long enough to include to warrant including a link multiple times. It's got all the standard stuff at the bottom, links to social media. But generally I think this is a pretty decent email. All right, Is Harris Johnny, and is Harris our content creators? I really love this for the style. But first let's look at the subject line. We didn't think this would ever happen. Curious, right? Builds curiosity. I don't know what this is about and so I'm going to open it. And the first thing you'll notice, likely if you see this, is how she uses visuals and graphics to sort of break up her email and two sections. Now this isn't going to work well for everybody. This works really good for her because she writes a weekly e-mail and it always follows the same structure. So if you're a subscriber to her e-mail, you know, if I go scroll down, there's going to be a playlist section. There's going to be a section about just general things that she recommends. There's going to be a section with links to her social pages. So you know, she has the structure and she has this very visual style across all VR content. So for her, I think it really makes sense. And this is an example of something where there's a ton of calls to action and she's not trying to sell one product or service. And I think if she were to do that, she would probably send out a different e-mail. But it's more of a general newsletter with all of the things that she does. And that she wants her followers to know about. All right, Here's a couple examples from wildest. I mentioned wildest earlier. It's a photography course company. So first this one, we have this subject line. This one's a first, short and sweet, curious. I don't know whether it's about, but I'm wondering what what first is this? Then you open it. They've got their logo at the top. Super, super basic e-mail and all visual. So these are actually all graphics, which is kind of interesting. It's not text, which is sort of a risky moves because sometimes photos don't appear in different email readers, but very visually pleasing. So the beginning is new workshop launching October 20th, 2020. So you know exactly what this is about. And then it adds a little bit to describe, join Charlie safely for an Alaskan adventure, adventure as she discovers remote corners where the wild realm. So remember when we saw while this Instagram account earlier in the class, there whole thing was selling this vision, this lifestyle of being an adventure photographer in this is clearly comes across in this email right here. Not only are they selling this course, they're not really telling you that. And they're teaching you how to take great photos of landscapes. Or they're telling you what gear to use. That sort of assumed through this e-mail or assumed through what they're pitching to us. What, what really comes across though is this idea that you get to learn how to roam wild, how to discover the remote corners of the world. And then there's an image of this wolf. And it's just totally selling this, this lifestyle more than just the class. There's a little bit more information about the class and then it says be the first to know when it launches. It kind of creates this exclusivity that if you sign up now, you're going to be the first to know. And generally people really latch onto that. They want to be the first to know to be exclusive. So that works really well for, for them. Here's another email from wildest, similar sort of style of subject line. This is it, short, sweet? Buchanan, don't know what it's about. So it builds that curiosity. It's not explaining a lot. But I would guess that amongst all the other e-mails that you might get, this would stand out because sometimes shorter email headers, if there's just one or two words, stands out when you're scrolling through all your e-mails. All of the other ones have a bunch of text and then a short one pops up. It's easier to read, more visually pleasing. So this is an early access and tonight deadline right there. I mean, deadline also is in the subject line itself. And then it's the storytellers guide to taking better iPhone photos. So a little bit more of a descriptive title of the course and snide. So there's a deadline and then also there's sort of an incentive to purchase because there's a discount. Similar visual style. There's a little bit more information in this email about that one, this course, what you're going to learn and then level up your iPhone photography. So this one's a little bit different than that other one because it's more selling the skills so on might learn rather than the lifestyle. All right, lastly, let's look at this video. This is a YouTube video, so this is my own channel. Obviously there's my face, but I wanted to show you this because this is the email that you get if you are subscribed with notifications turned on to any YouTube channel. Now notice the subject line. It includes this red dot and then the title of the video, that red dot stands out. And this is proof that emojis are an important part of copyrighting and that they actually work because if YouTube, the company with arguably the most data, the biggest amount of data, data and analytics about open rates and people in the world, if they're using an emoji at the beginning of a subject line, they're doing it for a reason. The red, I think ties into their branding, the red of YouTube player and their logo. So that's really the main reason I wanted to show you that. And then the email itself is just super basic. It's just really sort of the visual thumbnail that you would see if you are on YouTube itself. But I just wanted to show you that because of the emoji, I'll be showing you some more examples from my own emails in a case study coming up. But hopefully all of these best practices help you as a copywriter, writing e-mails for your business in the future. 33. Ideas for Emails to Send: Now that you know a little bit more about how to craft a better email things to keep in mind. What are we even going to write emails about? As a copywriter, you might be tasked with coming up with the content for your emails. And so here's just a big list of ideas. I'm going to leave it up on the screen and go through most of them, but just take them and use them as content for your emails. So progress update, this is just sort of updating people on the progress of product. You're creating a business, you're launching of a project, you're going through. People love seeing that sort of behind the scenes, which is another category. But they love sort of seeing the behind the scenes workings of a business. Sharing fun facts about your business, telling a story, personal, it making it personal. People love that personal connection. So whether it's you as a solo entrepreneur or if you're writing for another business and you can share more personal stories about the people working at the business or the founder. That's always good. Debunking myths about things that people might be concerned about if there's been any press coverage of your business. That's great thing. The share I already mentioned behind the scenes, a message from the CEO might be a good idea if you're working for a larger company and there's not that one-on-one connection typically with the CEO. Any free resources that you can give out, that can be PDFs, applications, downloads, really anything like that. Case studies of how someone can use your product or service, how it's benefit that benefited them. That could be also testimonials from customers, sending out surveys. People love answering questions, updates from your social channels. So if you're putting out content on other platforms, sharing that with your list and sort of related to that, a content roundup. So as businesses nowadays we're putting out content on all of these different platforms. And sometimes you sort of assume people are following you on all the different platforms, but it's likely not the case. And so if you're doing podcasts, if you're doing YouTube videos, if you're doing social content, making people aware of all of those different channels can sort of get more people to follow you on all of the different platforms. So just making people aware that you're on those different platforms. Team spotlights, I mentioned this earlier, but just highlighting different members of your team building that one-on-one connection, that personal connection with your brand. Frequently asked questions. And then of course, if you ever do discounts and deals, these are all great ideas for emails. So if you're sitting there and you don't know what to write emails about, just look back on this list and go through it. If you haven't done all of these, here is more than a dozen different ideas for emails and infer a lot of these. You can write multiple different emails for each one. So hopefully this helps you come up with ideas for writing e-mails for your business. 34. Exercise 7 - Write a Promo Email: All right, It's time for another exercise, and this one's number seven. So pretty simple. It's to write a promotional, a product e-mail. So if you have a business of your own, you probably know what to write about or you can pretend and use soft and write a promotional announcement or e-mail for are a pair of socks. Or just pick a company or a product that you're really into and practice writing a promotional e-mail using all of the tips that we've giving given you in this section. So thinking about ways to write better subject lines to increase those open rates. And thinking about the different sections of your email from the preview text, the body, and the call to action. And of course, Brian and I will be going through our example coming up in the next lesson. 35. Exercise 7 - Review: Hey everyone, welcome back to another exercise presentation. We're going to take a look at a product email that we have written to our customers for soft. So Phil, you want to go ahead and kind of break down what is going on with this. So first the emojis visually will hopefully make this email subject line stand out. And then talking directly to the reader, you're using your that word in the very beginning of the subject line, I think we'll just connect with the reader and hopefully entice them to open it up. And then it follows with the preview text with which you can see actually at the top of the email that says, how did your feet feel right now? Seriously, take a moment and check. And depending on your device, we don't know exactly how many words you're going to see, but at least that very first line, how did your feet feel right now? I think it's a question that gets someone to engage with this email before they actually open it up. And if they continue with it, It's like seriously, we're asking them to take a moment, check yourself. Are they tires or hot, cold, getting people to actually do some sort of action. Right at the beginning of the email. Notice we're not just saying your feed deserve better here by our socks. We're trying to warm them up to that idea. We make it a little bit more personal. Talking about us. We're talking talking directly as myself. Like you, I've had a long day. I've been chasing kids, doing a bunch of chores, trying to get some work in. I even had to walk down to the mechanic to pick up my car. I hit my 10000 steps for sure. Like I wrote this on a very specific day when all of this stuff happened. And I guess we're bending the truth in a sense that where people might not get this on the day that I personally went to the mechanic. But I think adding the little personal stories, it makes us feel like real people and someone that someone that they can relate to. But then it goes onto more about our product. And talking about that by saying, But you know what, my feet feel. Absolutely fine thanks to this pair of 100% organic, ultra comfortable socks I'm wearing, they're made by soft. Heard of them. So this would be an email that people might get when we're trying to grow that brand awareness, they were assuming they don't know about us. Maybe they've heard the name before. So we're kinda just playing to that with that line or that question. And then we say, if not, it's time to treat yourself to a pair. It's good for the planet and it's good for you. A couple more emojis, they're click here to get 15 percent off your first pair. Don't like him, give him back and we'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. And then it's from the soft crew. So kind of a soft opening. Then we try to do the pitch at the end. But I think with a sock company, you're not going to be doing a ton of like email marketing. You're not going to get someone on a list where you're going to be sending weekly emails with tips about best practices for cleaning and dry. So Huxley, things like that. So hopefully this was a good example of one email that you could make sales from a completely cold subscriber who has never potentially heard of you or who just took the quiz on our website. All right, so that's our email. Hopefully, it helps seeing what we did. And we'll see you in another exercise. 36. Social Media Best Practices: Welcome to this new section about social media. Big topic, a big part of copyrighting for any business or copywriter. So quick disclaimer, though, this is not a social media marketing course, rather a guide to copywriting for social media. So we are going to focus on the actual writing of words and how to write better copy for social media, we're not talking about all the different aspects of using social media to grow a business. That being said, I have a couple initial tips and best practices and things to keep in mind at the beginning of this section. So the first is, how do you choose a platform? I think it's best practice if you are a solo business owner to focus your energy on one platform is just too much work to try to create content for all of the different platforms. There's ways to cross post and to batch schedule out content to multiple platforms. I'll give you a couple of tools in just a second. But I think in terms of the content itself, I would focus on one platform. Grab all the handles for all the platforms you can. It doesn't hurt to get your username or your handle on the different platforms. And it's hard to predict which platforms are going to blow up or not. So when new ones start to gain traction, sign up for them. Grab your handle and make sure you have it in terms of determining which platform is right for you, I have two main questions. One is, where is your audience? So you should know yourself if you are the business owner, Where are the people that are like you that are like-minded? Are you YouTube video watchers? Are you more into content that you listened to on different podcast apps? Is your audience more about sort of quick updates and news that might be on Twitter. Are they into Tiktok videos? You hopefully have a sense of what content you like or you've done the research to know what your audience likes, and then also what content are you good at? You don't want to struggle to try to put out Tiktok videos. If you hate video creation, Instagram might not be the best platform for you if you're not a photographer or don't have a good visual I or can't outsource that. And so I think it's a combination, understanding where your target audiences and picking a platform where the content that you create, where you write is going to be easy and fun. And other key point I kind of mentioned this earlier to make your life easy is to batch content. So batch creatives that setup one day a week, one day a month that create all of your social content that you can schedule out for the entire month or automate some of it. There's tools that allow you to automate posting when you put out a new blog article, to share it across all of your social media channels or YouTube videos or whatever other content you're putting out there. You can use tools like neat Edgar later.com HootSuite buffer to simplify your social media presence. All of these tools have different ways of automating and scheduling out content to multiple platforms at one time. So those are just some basic best practices. And the next lesson we're going to talk about the types of posts you might want to post. Say that 20 times fast as a content creator and then dive a little bit more into the copy in the following lesson. 37. Types of Social Media Posts: As a copywriter, you might be tasked with what content you should actually be creating, what types of posts you should be creating. So the first thing to understand is what are your goals? Depending on your goals, the type of posts you create or that you write will be different. Are you looking for more likes? Are you looking for comments? Are you looking for followers? Are you looking for sales of a product? More people are clicking over to your website. Depending on this, your posts are going to look different. So because this is a copywriting class, because we are talking about businesses, how you sell products with copy. Let's look at some ideas for promotional posts. One is a simple posts sharing your business product or service. So here's an example of a post that we put out for a course that we launched. So simple, descriptive of what the course is. Straightforward promotional. Another is a video demonstration of your product. Again, getting a little bit further away from copywriting. But maybe it's something that you script out a demonstration of your product or service, a webinar or live stream about a specific topic. Also kind of a stretch. You're not going to write out an entire script for an entire webinar. But you might write out aspects of it. And you'll also be writing out things like the video title or the posts that get people onto that webinar. So here we have this one which was start an online business, which is the main topic. And then a conversation with myself and my co-instructor, which gives it a little bit more context to what this is. You can set up a monthly recurring posts with your core products. So this is something that you can automate. Here we have, this is a little bit of an older post of mine, but a pitch for our membership where you can get become a member and get access to all of these courses for a low price. And ask me anything about a product or service. So you get people engaging with you. That's something that's super important with social media engagement. So try to get questions ahead of time or you can do it live. Or a case study testimonial from a customer. Here's some ideas for non promotional posts. I'm not going to go through all of them and you can pause the video and look at them. But these are great ideas for social posts and similar to the e-mail section, if you are tasked with coming up with content for social media and you are trying to figure out what to post. Come to this list, look at this list. And if you haven't done all of these, then start one by one and just go through this list depending on what your product is, depending on who your target audience is, a might work better. So funny memes might work for a company that has a friendly, funny tone of voice throughout their branding. Not so much for a company like The Economist, which we saw has a much higher elevated sort of sense of copy. So beautiful photos, inspirational quotes, those always work well. Questions and polls to get engagement. That's a good idea. Thoughts on current events and this, I see big name brands doing this all the time, sort of tying into what's happening in current events by having some sort of response and acting as if the brand itself has thoughts or reactions to current events, links to free resources, company accomplishments behind the scenes, photos and stories, contests, Industry News, holiday posts, tips and facts or FAQs Frequently Asked Questions on this day post. So this is sort of throwback. Thursdays is what we used to do it you would look back at something that happened that day a year ago or five years ago or 10 years ago, go back in your archive and see if there's anything you can pull from your history. And that just builds that trust, builds that relationship, shows that you're a real person and shows that you have been around for a while. So just an interesting type of posts, feedback requests asking people to provide feedback for your posts. You can see that these will have different goals. So funny memes and beautiful photos might get more likes. Whereas feedback requests and questions and pulls get more engagement links to free resources and behind the scenes photos or stories might get people back to your website. So depending on the type of posts, you can achieve different goals. Now this is all about types of posts. Let's move forward with actual copy for social content in the next lesson. 38. Similarities Across Platforms: Let's go over some best practices for copywriting for social media. First, I'll go over the tips and then we'll look at some examples. So consistently across platforms and here are some main tips. Brevity, keeping your, your post short and sweet is typically what's going to work well, especially the beginning of your posts. It doesn't hurt to have a longer post because social media platforms are paying attention to how long consumers eyeballs are on your posts. And so having short posts all the time isn't necessarily a good idea. But at least that introduction to whatever the post is should be short and sweet. Engaging. Obviously, you want to be trying to engage with your consumer is not just talking about things that you do, talking about stuff without any sort of call to action to engage. So things like asking questions, anything you can do to get people to, like comment on your post is going to be a good idea. Attention-grabbing. Obviously, you have to stand out on social media. People are scrolling through hundreds of different profiles and so you need to do a lot to make them stop and look at your content. And then things like exclusivity, urgencies, scarcity, the things that come across an email marketing. We'll also do really well with social media, especially for the more promotional types of posts. So let's look at some examples. First, we have Fujifilm and in stacks which are actually the same company, Fujifilm, the camera maker. And so you can automatically tell that actually the style for both of their profiles is similar. So if someone's going from a Fujifilm profile to the INS tax profile, it feels comfortable. So that's a little bit more talking about the visuals, but also the tone of voice within stacks in this post says, we're in the mood for something sweet. How about some macaron? And then on the other posts, it's actually Fujifilm sharing in stacks is post. Look so good, you can almost taste it. Sushi anyone, they're using emojis to make it a little bit more visually pleasing. They have a few hashtags that are specific to what the content is, but also a specific hashtag that, that they've created or used for their brand hashtag, many film. And then on the second one you see hashtag sushi. So trying to pull in viewers from different hashtags is a good idea. You don't want to go too crazy with hashtags, but use them sporadically and when it makes sense, but using them can get more eyeballs to your posts. The tunnel voice is super casual, super conversational, just like you're having a conversation with a friend. And that's what social media should be about. Even though this is a camera company, they're creating this personality that is someone you can relate to. Here's an example from bright trip. So bright trip is an online course platform for travel courses. This one is a good example of a question and creating engagement where the question, open thread, where did you have the best coffee while traveling? Asking for a friend. So that asking for a friend, a common sort of colloquial thing we say. And so that's just sort of makes it a little bit more relatable. And then of course the question is something that they're trying to get engagement, trying to get people responding to this post. They do this similarly in their stories. So on the left you see this post, Did you know this place using a survey feature that you have available to you on Instagram. And so using surveys creates engagement, which is great. And then on the right-hand side is a version of scarcity with Deadline exclusivity for a sale that they're running. And they he's the emoji, the scared face emoji with the big word R1. Trying to get people to take action and move quickly to buy something on during their Valentine's Day sale. Here's microphone company rode microphone. So you're getting a sense of the types of profiles that I like to follow in this class. But here is a photo of a cat with one of their products. And so they are using something that is very popular on social media, cats and just on the Internet in general to sort of try to boost their social media. And the text is Welcome back to the cast. And that's a pretty good role of the arm. If I do say so myself or someone who doesn't do that very well. So being a little bit funny, casual, you'll see this generally on social media, not necessarily what you'll see on your website. So sometimes the personality on the website, that tone and voice on a website might be a little bit more professional. Held back, not as funny and casual compared to social media, for sure. Here's a few examples from National Geographic, one of probably the most well-known brands around the world and super popular profiles on social media. So the first one is just a fun fact. Only 37 percent of the world's rivers over a 1000 kilometers long still run free. And so just fun informational facts. They're not trying to sell you anything. That's kinda what you expect when you're following Nat Geo. Interesting stuff about the world and they're delivering on that. The other one is love is everywhere you look. And the reason I included this is because it's specific to the day. So they're using current events or holidays to create posts related to that holiday. This next one, what are these wells sharks waiting for? If you remember back to our email subject line lesson, it's hinting at something, so it's giving us a little bit of information where we know it's about whale sharks. We know they're waiting for something. But in posing that question, it entices the viewer to want to learn more. So. Posing questions using all of those best practices, go back to that lesson about email headers and use those same best practices for social media to get more engagement. Here's a few from Coca-Cola. The first is the perfect occasion to drink an ice cold Coke is now. And so that's just like a simple phrase. It just sort of a, an action, a direction to go drink a Coke right now housing, it's the perfect time. The next one can't believe it's February and we've already accomplished our resolution with an asterisk that says our resolution was to have the best fans. And then we'll just go through last one. We're heading to the fridge. Anyone need anything? So throughout these, you see that the brand Coca-Cola is speaking directly to the followers. So there, it's all personal. I hope you see throughout all of this you're really trying to be personal, engage directly with the followers. Now, this isn't a direct YOU, they're not using the word you, but it's a general sort of you as our followers, but still building that personal connection. Now when you think about Coca-Cola and who they are as a brand, you think of this sort are like worldly, sort of just perfect, friendly maze company. They're not very edgy or anything like that, and that comes across through their posts with the February 5th post about our resolution was to have the best fans. It sort of makes my eyes roll a little bit, but it really is what I expect from Coca-Cola. They're trying to create, you know, this brand that is friends with the entire world and that comes across here. Here's an example on their Instagram account. So those other ones were on Twitter. You can see on Twitter short, sweet sort of thoughts. Nothing long. On Instagram, this one is more about engagement. So they are asking people to drop their New Year's resolutions in the comments. So this was, again, sort of playing to current events, holidays. Just if you're a copywriter and you're struggling to come up with ideas for copy. Think about what's going on today. Are there any holidays, anything coming up, any thing that we can tie into a current event. But here they are just directly trying to create engagement with posing a question to their audience. Here's an example of using copy in the graphics of an actual post. You're my favorite person to chill with. So it's kind of a plan words with chill being hanging out but also chill being ice cold Coke. That's one of the things they get across in their messaging is that Coke, ice cold refreshing. That's what you think about with Coke and trying to build engagement. So the text of the actual post is send to someone who's always down for an amazing time and to Share a Coke. So they're creating this advertisement. It's a total advertisement that they're trying to get people to share. But in the imagery in the text, it's going to be sharing their brand and that's a very creative way to do that. Create content that is sharable, but it has the underlying brand and promotion within it. Here's an example from a smaller company, sourdough club. And it's a strict, here's sort of a promotional posts, benefits of becoming a club members So that it hits you with benefits of becoming a club member. And if you're interested in this, if you're interested in making bread, you're going to want to know more what are the benefits? And so it kinda goes on to list all of the different things that you get. And so this is a different kind of tape of voice. They're not like coming up with anything funny. They're not creating this personal brand. It's really just a promotion of the product and that kinda works for them. Later on in the post, they add a couple specifics like that you can make from sourdough cinnamon buns to chocolate and hazelnut sourdough panda me. I don't know if I pronounced that right. If I were writing this, I would play around with putting that up at the front and maybe using an image of that as well, like, oh, it doesn't This cinnamon bun look delicious? Or do you want to learn how to make this cinnamon bun? Or can you imagine waking up to this cinnamon bun or surprising your loved one with the cinnamon bun and trying to really connect. And then being like become a member. And you can learn how. And by the way, here's all the stuff that you get as a member. So that's something that I would play around with to be a little bit more personable and not so in your face promotional. So hopefully looking at these examples, you can see that the things like being engaging, being attention-grabbing, having a sense of urgency or scarcity to a product, or having a deadline can work in promoting a product on social media. And these examples showcase how that's actually done in the real world. Thanks so much. And in the next lesson we'll look at some of the differences that you need to know about depending on what platform you're posting on. 39. Differences Across Platforms: In the last lesson, we looked at what is consistent across multiple platforms. In this lesson, let's look at what is different on the different platforms. First is character limits. This is clear, this is obvious, but you can only write so many characters on Twitter compared to Facebook. And each platform has their different limits, the visibility of texts. So if you're on Instagram versus Facebook, that preview text before you have to click More to see the rest of it is going to be different. So you have to be aware of that as a copywriter and know that you have a certain amount of characters that are going to be seen before someone has to engage with your post to see the rest. And so use those characters and those work first words, very wisely, voice and tone. This is something that you have to sort of feel out depending on what your industry is. It might be different on different platforms. But in general, Twitter is going to be a little bit more casual compared to something like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, sort of somewhat in the middle, Tiktok or a platform like that, super-duper, casual and low key. So your voice and tone likely will change if you're doing it right on social media. Also, the reason your customer is on a platform is going to be different. So you really want to tailor your content to the different platforms. People are going to be on LinkedIn, which arguably is not a social media platform, but it has a lot of social aspect to it. And so people are going to be on LinkedIn to find jobs to grow their career. Meaning the content you put out there is going to be a lot different than on Instagram where people are on there to find inspiration to sort of escape their normal everyday life. And then a platform like Facebook. People are really on there to build community, to connect with their friends and family, among lots of other things. But how can you play around and how does your voice and what you're writing? Can a tie into what people are on that platform for? This is all what you have to do with copywriting. So let's look at some examples. So here's Fidelity Investments, and this is their Twitter profile. So you can see that a lot of it, if you go through their profile, a lot of it is just links to content that they have on their website. Very straight forward, talking about mostly the benefits of what you can get with fidelity. So estimating your Social Security income, planning and prioritizing your money goals. This is what fidelities there for, and that's what they're delivering on social media that you do have this one up in the top right, you see happy Lunar New Year. So they are doing a little bit with current events. And they tie that back to what they do with the actual copy on that post. Happy Lunar New Year, wishing you good fortune, happiness and health. Good fortune, that's a term that they use throughout their marketing, but it's also tied within that holiday, the one on the left, it's a strict here's how to estimate your monthly Social Security income in retirement. So it's just a fact. And so if you're interested in this, you might click it. If you're not, you're not likely going to engage with it. Now on the bottom ray, it's a more general how do you prioritize your savings? So it's sort of a more general rule topic. They're trying to get engagement, trying to get people to comment on it. And then they follow it up with their action or their call to action, which is to click on that link and find out more information or more tips. Compare that to what fidelity looks like on Instagram. You can see that their visuals are much different. And because Instagram is a much more visual centric platform, they're prioritizing that in where they put the copy. So there's one in the middle. You see six ways to ditch that and save. Really quickly. Compare that to what is showing up on Twitter where the visuals aren't as important. They're just using tech Blake, sort of normal text here. Now this is getting a little bit beyond copywriting into graphic design, but that emphasis on making the text stand out, being a little bit more visual is key to being successful on Instagram, which is a visual platform. Listicles. We talked about this before. Using numbers and email headlines is going to be good. Remember, go back to those e-mail header tips. That's going to be what you wanna do for social media as well. Six ways to ditch that, that, and save as a great sort of introductory Shen to what this, this post is. It's a carousel post where you click through. And just generally on Instagram you have more text, even though that preview text isn't that long. The paragraph they include on this post is a little bit longer. There's one on the left which starts with what day is the best to invest any day. And so it's sort of welcoming people to try to invest at any point in time. All right, let's look at Chipotle. This is a good example of understanding what audiences on Instagram compared to something like Facebook. Instagram is generally going to be younger. Therefore, maybe a little, it gives you the opportunity to be a little bit edgier, a little funnier it using things like memes and stuff like that in your copy and in your posts. So just generally you can look at this and say, see that it's kind of funny on the top-right me after deciding which Rice I'm getting at Chipotle, if you look at all of these posts, it's all just very funny. Sort of a super laid back type of approach to copy and content. Compared to that to what is on their Facebook account, which still has a somewhat casual tone. It's much more informational and maybe professional than what is on their Instagram account. You can just tell that by the tax, you can tell that by the images that they're using as well. And in terms of the actual content they're promoting. On the left, it's hay and apparel that they've created that gives back, and it's all donation to organizations that make farming and fashion more sustainable, which is part of their mission. Very sort of try to be eco-friendly, sustainable company. In the middle, it's tied into the Halloween holiday, the burrito. And it's sort of just a direct promotion of that. And on the right, it's a promotion, but it's tied to another current event. They're talking about some Sandiego Colorado baseball game that was happening right then and there probably in that moment. So all of these companies using current events, trying to be trendy on top of trends. You can see that works for them. Now, let's look at Twitter. So completely different content on different platforms. I think it's easy when you're Getting Started to just post the same content to all the different platforms. But if you really wanted to do copywriting, right, and to social media, right, you want to cater your content or do unique content for each platform. And Chipotle knows what Twitter's about. It's generally sort of PR, personal thoughts and things just going across your mind. And so that's what's happening here. Starting from the bottom up, today is a beautiful day to try cilantro lime, Cauliflower rice, just like a thought thrown out there on the right. My parents at 29. Let's have a second baby. Me at 29. Did you know that mixing sour cream and hots also makes dragon SaaS. So just funny, sort of down to earth, loci, branding and style here coming across on Twitter, different than what is on their Facebook, and also then that's on their Instagram. So in summary, you really need to tailor your content to the different platforms. You need to understand what audience and what generation, what type of person is typically on those platforms so that you can speak to them in a different way. And also one major key point is remember your core goal. Primarily you are solving your customer or your followers problem. That's really what all businesses and brands do. Whatever it is, whether it's a product that you're selling, whether it's soft socks that we're selling, whether it's online courses that I'm selling at the end of the day, you're trying to solve a problem and that's always a good place to fall back on with what you should be posting about and how you should be writing your content on social. 40. Copywriting Tips for Social Media: Here are some more copywriting tips for social media. First is be relatable. So even if you're a company like KLM here, which is an airlines company, you want to be relatable. You want to show that you have a personality, that you are real people trying to connect with your customers. So here you have photos of different employees. Our on some sort of zoom call. So this is during the pandemic COVID-19 and it's just showing that they are in it with you down below, definitely feeling the winter blues. So kind of a funny reference to the color of their airplane, but also just again, trying to be relatable. They're not just posting informational stuff about where they're flying or how big their engines are, whatever it's relatable stuff that even if you're not into Airlines or flying airplanes, you still might be interested in following them on social media. Include one call to action. This goes across the board for emails, for everything you do. Keep it simple, keep it focused on getting your follower to do one thing. If you give them too many options, they're going to be confused. And so everything in your copy should lead up to doing one thing. So here's Hello Fresh, where it's the meal delivery company or meal prep company. And they have, most of their posts are just examples of what types of dishes you can get if you sign up for HelloFresh. And it all leads to the menu That's for that week where you can sign up and become a member and actually get food delivered from them. Use hashtags properly. You don't want to go overboard. I think it's a good idea. If you have a specific hashtag you use frequently or one that you always use with your brand so that people can easily and quickly find all of your posts. But I will say that over time, hashtags have become less important. The initial idea was that people can click through those hashtags to find your post. But because most of the words and are common words have been used just millions of times now, it's not a really good way for someone to find your content. But here, Wendy's is a good example when they use this hashtag, national roast day, which is something that they've come up with. Wendy's roasts, other companies. And so it's sort of this event that is now known by other brands or by people following them are following trends. And so they've created this unique hashtag for this once annually thing that they do. And then I think the other time to use it is with current events, with holidays, things like that, where it shows that your company is in tune with what's going on. And so if there is a popular hashtag going around that particular day, if you can create content that speaks to that one hashtag, it again makes you more personable, makes you feel like a real person, even if you're just a big entity or a big business, improve visibility with emojis. Again, don't go crazy with them, but they can help. Make sure that you're using them wisely though, and they actually make sense. Here. Red Bull does this with a couple of their different posts that they share. On the bottom It's a copy and paste of four drool face emojis looking at these beautiful pictures or at the top where it has these siren lights are like these police lights that would be on the top of a cop car, just sort of highlighting that they have a big announcement. And then in the middle they have the down pointing button, which sort of reinforces the idea that there's more to do down below which they're trying to get people to engage and to discuss. So use them wisely. They can help make your posts stand out visually, but don't go overboard with them. And then, depending on the platform, used the features they have as a copywriter to create more engagement like pulls. So here Coca-Cola does a poll for their favorite new flavors. And pulls or anything like that, are going to be more engaging in general than just posting a question and hoping people submit comments down below. So use whatever features are available for you to increase engagement. 41. T.H.I.N.K.: Think this is an acronym that I want you to use whenever you post something on social media. Now I can't claim credit for this. I learned about it from local friend who runs a yoga studio. And I think it's a good idea as a business in general, as a person to be trying to make the world a better place and social media a better place. And I think your company or your business will have more success if you try to do that. Social media is a place where people tear each other apart so often. And they do that because they can hide behind their fake profile name or the digital wall that they have up. But in general, as a good human being, I think we should work harder to make social media a better and safer and nicer place. So when I say think, I want you to ask yourself, whenever you post something, ask, is it true? Is it helpful? Is it inspiring? Is it necessary? And is it kind? Not all of your posts are going to fill all of these, but if they can fit as many of these as possible, I think that's something that can sort of rely on to make sure that we're making the world a little bit of a better place through our own posts. 42. Exercise 8 - Write Your Social Media Posts: All right, Welcome to this exercise for social media. The challenge is to write copy, both for a Facebook and Instagram version of a product ad. So this is a promotional specific ad that you are doing and tailor it to the different platforms, facebook and Instagram. I'll be interested to see what you come up with and we'll be following up with our example for socks. 43. Exercise 8 - Review: Hey everyone, welcome to exercise 8. For this exercise, we're going to present the copy that we came up with for our social ads. So filled, you want to go ahead and take it away with this first one we have here for Facebook. Yeah, So first of all, notice the graphic on the right-hand side. We use our headline that we have on our website. We use the imagery as well. And then remember from the last exercise review, we're using some of the same language. So we start with, how did your feet feel right now? We're using the emojis, we condense it because people's attention spans are super short, especially on Facebook or on any social platform. So instead of writing out, are they hot or they smelly? Are they tired or whatever, or just using one word answers. And then just continue with sort of similar content. We add the three facts that we had on our website, here on the post as well. And then at the bottom, it, the call to action, which is get 15 percent off your first pair with whatever link we would include to the website. One thing we added here though, is their big foot approved and great for the planet. And that might be something that probably switch in our email as well to tie in the character that we've added to as our company Big Foot. And I think too, this is just an example of sort of the branding evolving over the course of the campaign and over the writing you'll do, especially if you're working for your writing copy for your own business. You can have an idea of where it's going to go into the beginning. And the more copyright and the more content you put out there, the better sense you get what your brand is and what it's going to become. So we've kind of really leaned into the Bigfoot theme here, as you can see you, which I think makes perfect sense for a company. It also speaks to nature in the wilderness. So kind of all of that ties together in a cohesive way. It's a lot of fun to what, which is what we're trying to go for. So yeah, I'm one of the things with social media just it's all about that engagements. So asking the question, not sure if people would really respond with how their feet feel, but it'd be nice to get some sort of engagement that way. And so this is more of like a promotional piece of content. As socks, socks brand, we would be putting out a ton of other social content as well. This is more what the challenge was, was a product odd? Now let's just look at it for Instagram, it's basically the same thing, but I just wanted to just show a couple of differences. And these things change over time depending on how things appear on social accounts. But with Instagram, you really only see the first couple of lines of text compared to Facebook, where it, you'll see more of the post. And so you the simple change of not having a line break after the first question. I didn't include that here in the Instagram post because I wanted to make sure that we got a little bit more text in here. And then also this is just like a social media thing. You can't include clickable links on Instagram, so you can include links in your bio or using stories. And so I changed that up here and added that a little bit higher in the text because people might not get down to the bottom. And it's actually a good thing to include if you do have a call to action, include that even higher up so that they see that on Instagram or whatever platform you're on in that preview texts, users are going to have to click this More button to see the full text. And so that's just that extra step of engagement that you might not get. And so having whatever it is, click this link or whatever the call to action might be a good idea to try to move up even higher on this post. But I just wanted to show you like how we have basically the same post but tailored to different platforms. It's a smart thing to do and not just assume that the same exact post is going to work cross-platform. Alright, so hopefully this helps you and we'll see you in another exercise. 44. What is AV Content?: Welcome to this new section of the copywriting bootcamp all about audio visual content. So what is audio-visual content or AB content? Although there's video content and this could look like a commercial, sometimes called the spot, which is a promo for a product or service. It could be tutorials, explainer videos, behind the scenes, videos, product reviews, announcements about your business or a product or branded content. And this is where you create videos that are not necessarily specifically about your product, but a product of yours or your business shows up in that video. So it is apparent that the product they're using is a specific brand, but it's not a hey, buy this specific product type commercial audio content could be radio spots, so advertisements on radio or podcasts, or a podcast itself, audio books or series is probably not so much of a popular idea, but that's also considered audio visual content, visual graphics content like social media posts, stories, real Tiktok, print ads, magazine, newspaper ads, posters or billboards that you see. All of this is that visual content that goes into growing a business. Why is AV content so effective? Because it's eye-catching and if there's a video element to it, the audio and visual element to it. It's tapping into multiple senses which captures people's attention more than just reading words on a website or reading words in a magazine. It's hard to capture someone's attention with just words on a page. Also, I believe video content is for most products and services, the best way to showcase what it is, what it actually does. You can truly build a connection with your audience, especially if you, as the copywriter and business owner, if you're running your own business, are on your videos, are presenting videos and building that connection, looking through the lens of that camera and trying to get that one-on-one connection with your potential customer. 45. How to Write for AV: How to conceptualize and script effective audio-visual content for your campaign. Let's start with an example. So you'd see here the tagline of this video, the beauty of no artificial preservatives. I don't know if you remember this spot. It was a very popular one within the past couple of years. And that's from Burger King. You can see here the Whopper, it looks pretty nasty, right? Well, let's look at this spot together. What a wonderful, what a difference. Grandma, hot, different scenarios of use. So this is an example of a spot with not many words. There's not really any scripting or voice-over. There's a simple Thailand, the end, there's a countdown that starts in the beginning. You don't really know what's going to happen. But then you watch it and you instantly see that this burger starts to degrade and get moldy. And this is effective because compared to their competition, there's this stigma that there's so many preservatives in their burgers that bell last forever. And there has been experiments and things done where people leave out a burger post on social media that it looks exactly the same after months, which is pretty gnarly in my opinion. And so capitalizing on that idea and putting out the simple commercial with simple text at the end. The beauty of no artificial preservatives, which is really interesting when you're writing for AV content. If you're writing for another company or a client, they'll probably give you some sort of brief. So they'll have a campaign. They'll explain what the campaign is, who the target audiences, what the goals are. And then from that information you come up with different ideas for a script, and that's going to be the copy. And then from that information, once it's chosen, you move on to design of graphics, of video, of any of the visuals and that kinda stuff. So this is typically how it works in an agency. But I will say from my experience, sometimes I work backwards, so I have an idea for something, some visual, and then from that, I start writing scripts or content that matches the visual I have in my mind, I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong way to approach it. But if you're working in the copywriting marketing agency, you typically are going to start with a brief. One thing you'll typically do. Utilize the same content across multiple platforms. So what does this look like? Social media, the video might be short and snappy. Maybe you in five seconds long. Youtube, if it's a long YouTube video itself and not an add on YouTube, it'll be a little bit longer, maybe 23 minutes plus. And if it is an ad, then you'll have to write copy where that first five seconds before there's the Skip option are really captivating. And then commercials in general, attention-grabbing upfront because people tune out to commercials. And so you have to put something interesting, something, some to grab the attention at the very beginning. So there's a couple of approaches that you can take to converting content from one platform to the other. So here's a couple of examples of what this might look like. An interview that someone in your company does broken down into shorter YouTube frequently asked questions or tip videos. And those individual videos are broken down into shorter bite size instagram Reels or Tiktok videos. Or a more traditional look is a 60-second YouTube spot. You might film and edit or right for a 60 second commercial that has to be cut down for Facebook. 30-second video, and then a 15-second Instagram. Real because these platforms have different time restrictions. So of course this is more of like the video producer, the editor's job, but it might be something as a copywriter, you have to be aware of so that if you know your spine is going to be condensed later on, you have to make sure that it contains all the information in 15 seconds worth of footage. Obviously, a lot of how practical this is has to do with your skill level and your budget and assets available to you. If you are working with other people. I'll be showing you a DIY promotional video made for one of my courses that shows what you can do with a simple camera setup. Now I do admit that this is my background. Video production is what I do professionally, but it's still a good thing to see that you can do this all pretty much by yourself with basic technology, even with a phone, if you have any modern smartphone, you can shoot great quality video content. And so there's really a low barrier to entry for creating AV content. I mean, going back to one of the very first examples in this course, paranormal activity, the actual feature film that was shot with a $15 thousand budget compared to what most movies costs that end up on Netflix or on the big screen, millions of dollars, especially if there's big name actors in it. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. Your equipment shouldn't limit you in creating a great AB spot. It's all about being creative with what you have. And at the end of the day, it comes back to the writing. And a great script can overcome any limit and technical ability or tools that you have. So looking back at our example that we watched the brief was to show how burgers are made fresh with preservative free ingredients. There's lots of other ways this could have been done. You could have simply shown beautiful images, slow motion of nice vegetables falling down, landing and creating a perfect burger. You could've added some context by showing that these ingredients come from a beautiful all natural farm. You could have had a voice-over that explains that are burgers are made preservative free, but they got more creative with it and a completely different route, as we saw, this video is multiplatform friendly because it is just sort of a time-lapse that could be condensed into a shorter video. And it's very visual. This spot is going to do really well across all platforms, whether that's on a television screen or social media platforms. And it's also fairly budget friendly. Now, I know Burger King probably has a big, big budget for their videos, but every company is trying to pinch a penny and this spot is a lot less expensive than doing something maybe with a celebrity guest or like that worry, you have to pay actors and so on all this is a great example of what a creative copywriter could come up with for brief. All right, Let's look at another example. Here. We have a kid running when her, what it could be four, if people say your dreams are crazy. If they laugh at what you think you can do. Good. Stay that way. Because what non-believers fail to understand is that coin a dream crazy is not an insult. It's a compliment. Don't try to be the fastest runner in your school or the fastest in the world. Be the fastest ever. Don't picture yourself wearing LBJ's jersey. Picture OBJ wearing yours. Don't settle for homecoming queen or linebacker. Do both. Lose a 120 pounds and become an Iron Man After being a brain tumor. Don't believe you have to be like anybody. To be somebody. If you're born a refugee, don't let it stop you from playing soccer for the national team. At age 16. Become the best basketball player on the planet. Be bigger than basketball. Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything. When they talk about the greatest team in the history of the sport. Make sure is your team. If you have only one hand, don't just watch football, play at the highest level. And if you're a girl from Compton, don't just become a tennis player. Become the greatest athlete ever. More likely to ask if your dreams are crazy, ask you for crazy. All right, So that spot, take it all the politics from it is an incredibly written spot that takes what Nike is known for and sort of elevates it to an even next level and it's on-point when, when I say that. So you take there, Just Do It campaign and slogan and you add to it. It's only crazy dream until you do it. And you can see here examples of visuals that they shared. It's only a crazy dream until you do it. Don't be the fastest runner in the world. Be the fastest runner in history if you need a reason to dream crazy, Here's 11. And this is cross-platform use of this campaign. So they have the spot for this video spot, and then they create these graphic ads as well. That compared to our whopper commercial is much longer, much more intricate in terms of writing. And I encourage you to go watch it again. You just have to go look up the crazy Nike, Just Do It ad and really listen to what the script is saying. And it starts out, you're not really sure what he's talking about. You know, that he's talking about just sort of breaking barriers, not letting anything hold you back. And you're seeing visuals of athletes that don't, aren't recognizable. But then it builds into these famous athletes or teams that have over Km obstacles and have done such incredible things. And like I said, the rider was able to take their Just Do It campaign and take it to an even further level with pushing people to do the absolute best, not just for themselves, but the best in history, the best in, in the world. So I thought the writing for this file was really incredible and something we can be inspired from, we're going to be looking at some more examples coming up. But hopefully these examples provide a good sense of what good copywriting for AV content looks like. 46. Tips for Writing for AV: All right, So let's get into some specific tips for writing for audio visual content. And again, I want to start with a, an example. What did you want to be? An agro own file all day. Middle-management, price gamma, we want to have a brown No. I want to be a yes. Yes. Yes. They're coming say anything for a raised Serve America grew up. I want to be under appreciated graph together, I guess. All right, so that's a little bit of an older spot from Monster.com, a place where you find work. What works there is the contrast between what you're seeing, which are these young kids, which you, who you would expect to be talking about, like these lofty dreams, wanting to be doctors and astronauts and things like that. But what they're actually saying, the words coming out of their mouth, are these like ultra realistic, sad visions of what the reality of most jobs are? And it all starts with this line, what did you want to be? Question that. You read that and it probably strike some memories, stirs up some memories and thoughts in your own mind. And so the first thing you wanna do it, writing a, for a spy is identify the message you want to convey in a single sentence. And I think for me with this by it's what do you truly want to do in your life. And that's ultimately what their goal is, or it's never too late to start the career that you dreamed of. And so they took that sentence, they took that message and they visualized it. They wrote a script that, that explains that and showcases that. But if you're writing for your own product or business, you really have to be focused in one direct message. So think what is the one thing you want your viewers to see or understand about you? And turn that into a video spot. Next, identify the contents, intended purpose. Are you trying to get people to go to a specific website? Are you getting people to buy a specific product? Is there like a sale that you're having with a deadline? Are you just trying to make people have better brand awareness of your business or have a better feeling towards your business. If you go through this Super Bowl commercials, of the Oscars of commercials, they're usually people spend the most money putting together high-quality commercials during the Super Bowl. And if you watch all of those on a particular year, you're going to see lots of different purposes. You're going to see some ads that are promoting specific products. You're going to be seeing ads that are just general sort of musings about the world that build credibility and respect for accompany. But it's important to know what the purpose is. And if someone comes to you and says, Okay, write a script for my company. You need to ask them, Okay, well, what's the goal? Is it just to grow awareness about, accompany or to sell a specific product? Because the video is going to look much different. You want to identify the emotion you want to instill in your audience. So do you want people to feel nostalgic? Do you want them to feel happy? Do you want them to feel sad or angry about something? Sparking emotion is what AB content is good at. And so make sure you pick and choose specifically what emotion you're going for. And then find comps. Comps or comparables are add references that you might use for inspiration or before you even start writing. In more of a traditional copywriting setting, you might share those comps with whoever's the lead on the project and see what sort of route there they're looking to go for a couple more quick tips. Try to think what will make this different. Most stories have been told. They haven't been told in your unique way though. And so I always feel like there's ways to do things a little different. I mean, just with those three examples we've seen so far with the monster.com, the Nike and the Burger King ad, those visually might seem similar or what they're selling might be similar to other things. The way they did them were quite unique actually and very clever. And especially the monster and the Whopper commercial. It was very clear and simple. The Nike one was a little bit longer, not as clear and simple. It was more of a journey. And again, this is an example of where longer-form copy it has its place. But generally short, sweet, or clear and simple is what you're going for. Let's look at another example that really displays this. So you guys grew up together since third grade. A few, you look for something else. What do you think? Supermodels. Supermodels, pretty long gloves. What do you eat a Snickers, because you get a little angry when you're hungry. So ladies, so losers, Stacy, relax. You're not you when you're hungry, snicker Satisfies. All right. In that spot they used that line. You're not you when you're hungry. And they went with it for a number of different campaigns. But they did it in a very clever, unique way. So they, instead of just having an active, they're being grumpy and doing this exact same ad. They did something visually and creatively that will connect a little bit deeper with the viewer by throwing Joe patchy in there to act as this person. And you get Joe patchy in the Joe patchiness that you have come to know and love from him, from his other acting and other movies. And I just think this was a very clever way to sell the idea that if you're hungry, eat a Snickers bar, it's going to help you be yourself. And that in itself is a very clear and simple message. You're hungry, eat a Snickers. Alright, a key point is to write, write, write. When you're starting, write down every idea you have, no matter how bad you think they are, it's not easy to come up with great concepts or to come up with great lines. But you never know what's going to spin into a better idea. Or maybe you'll get some inspiration or help from another coworker or someone else that you're working with. So just keep writing. The more you write, the easier it will be. You don't have to try to get it down perfectly when you get started. All right, so hopefully these tips help you when you're writing your own content for your own ads. I really just hope that you start to think outside the box in terms of what you can do, especially for those of you who are running your own businesses. I think it's just common not to try to get that creative. You think that's for the big businesses to do. But even as a small business, you can create creative content and that hopefully can add to the viral factor that you might get when you're posting your videos on social media. Thanks so much for watching. 47. Exercise 9 - Come Up with a Video Spot Idea: All right, welcome to exercise 9. This is your last exercise. And our task for you is to come up with the concepts for a product spot. So just come up with a few different ideas. You don't have to script out the entire thing, although you can if you're interested, but just more of the premise, what's going on? What's the message? What's the emotion that people are trying to get? And if there's one concise line that you're trying to get across with that spot. We're so excited to see what you come up with and hopefully you're excited to see what we came up with for soft. 48. Exercise 9 - Review: Welcome to the exercise 9 review, which was all about coming up with ideas for a video spot. So if you haven't done so yet, make sure you go back and download and read through our examples. We have written out number of concept ideas as well as a full script for the one that we chose to move forward with or pretend to go forward with. And so pause this video if you haven't done that. And otherwise we're going to move forward with analyzing what we chose and the concepting and actual scripting out of and the script. All right, so let's first take a look at the concepts. Pretty often if you're working in AB or special shoot type assignments, you're going to be asked often to just write a handful of concepts. Sometimes more than a handful, sometimes just one or two. So we just did five in concepts usually involve writing just sort of paragraph summary of what you envision the spot being. So we're gonna say these are for a 60 second TV spot or YouTube spot, or wherever it might end up living. And these are the concepts that we came up with. So this first one, I think we just really lean hard into the branding that we've sort of established so far for ourselves. It kind of just takes the whole treat your feet in Bigfoot theme and put it into action with a script in a, ideally a spot based all around that. So I think that's a pretty fun idea and I think it kind of encapsulates everything that our brand is trying to communicate to our audience and to our customers that we're having fun with this, that we're environmentally conscious in that these socks, rule. Number two are going to position a spotter on the theme. You'll never want to take them off, which also just speaks socks in, kind of presents it in a humorous way with this dad like character who's doing dad like things in wearing his socks entirely too much. Not a problem anymore. Now that I'm a dad and I understand it. Yeah. Socks or, you know, they come in handy. Number three, it would be just a more informational spot promoting the socks like any other product, but with a sort of soft public beam. And that's just finding kind of a way we could use socks in a fun, unique, clever, weird, quirky way, which could make for a pretty fun spot if executed correctly. And then number four is to do a stop motion animation. Or the SOC, growing from nature, which speaks directly to the natural element of our socks, is a little bit less of the like offbeat, importantly humor that we might want to have. But it kind of is a really interesting image to just highlight the natural elements that go into making our soft. And then number five is just kind of embraced in the natural element again, but with some of the quirky offbeat stuff with this organic farm. In all the farm animals are. Very happily wearing our socks as well as the farmers who were attending to them. So I think something to keep in mind when you're concepting is to come up with very different ideas. You don't want to have a bunch of ideas that are doing the same thing. They all need to kind of position the idea that you're trying to get across in a different way. They need to position the message that you're sending to your audience in unique and effective ways and focus on different elements of your branding and messaging. So I think all of these kinda do that. All of these have a little bit of a different tone in all these, say a little bit of a different thing while being pretty cohesive in their overall message. But obviously, I think number one is just the most on par with everything we've done so far. So that's the one that we've chosen to move forward with. And I think now would be a good time to kinda take a look at what a script for a 60 second spot might look like. And I think, like you said, it just makes sense that we would choose the number one option. And I think if we were a more established brand or company over the long-term, we might make spots using all of these different concepts over time. But to have one cohesive campaign, I think it makes sense to have it all sort of tied together and the headlines that we're using and the imagery and choice of characters are things that we're using across the website and social campaigns and video spots. Absolutely. So, yeah, I think before scripting, the things you need to kind of think about are, what are you trying to say? What's every element of the script gonna deal? What's the audio and the visual or going to do to further your message and speak to your audience and communicate the information that you need to communicate to get them engaged in what you're selling. So a quick note just I'm formatting every company or agency is it's probably going to have sort of a different format. If you're a freelancer, you can have a uniform format that you submit to different agencies. This is the closest to what I've always used in my job. And I think it's just to kind of clear way to, to get across the breaking up of the narration versus the imagery. So now that you've read through this, we can just see, Let's just take a little look at the open here. So you have big for just wandering through the forest and he's got his feet of ragged and gnarled and he's been through a lot. He's on a long journey and he's Catholic fit does as he does. And he's just kind of having a hard time in a bad day. And I think this also speaks to the nature element that even though Bigfoot has had his trials and tribulations with nature in whatever journey he's just been on. He still loves it very much as do we as a company. And so this is why he helps the small tree that he sees cracking under the snow and gives it a hug just to show that big fat has a soft side or a soft side, if you will. Okay. Let's keep on moving on. For a embarrass myself. So the narrator continues to just sort of tell you about big foots predicament, and sort of his disposition towards nature. Whether or not nature loves him, depends on how you look at it. Big, but it's been through a lot, but he still loves nature very much. And he even waves to this Diener who runs away afraid from him, as is often the cases, he's traversing the wilderness. But each part of this is not just trying to be funny or do funny things. It really is building on a message that we're, we're leading towards with this. So at this point you have Bigfoot loving nature. His feet are really, you know, his feet have been through a lot in you don't really know where he's going, but you know that he's going to hopefully get some form of redemption in the end. So you're getting home that like sore feet in the nature aspect. So let's move on. So obviously, big foot finds the pair of Sophists. And the narrator continues to talk about the mystery from where they came, which is just sort of a fun way to get them in there. And then he's very happy, which makes us happy after seeing the big heart that he has, his heart as big as his feet. And then this all ultimately leads to acts of kindness towards nature not going unnoticed, which is sort of a pillar of what an eco-friendly company is all about. And then that's going to lead into our main positioning headline of treat your feet to the finest socks nature has to offer. So that last line two is just a little addition to our main headline to drive home the point of what we're all about. And I think kind of knowing what you're writing to and knowing that this whole spot was positioned around a treat, your feet in a nature theme dictated everything else that happened in the spot. So hopefully, this gives you a pretty good sense of what writing effective audio visual scripts will do or will entail. You really need to kind of think about each step of the way. It's the same thing with any other copy. You need to think about every single word you're using an every moment that you're writing to and why it has to be in there. So this might be a little bit more offbeat and quirky, but it's all purposeful in the long run for what our brand is and what we want to be all about. At this point, it's time to actually get some investors and start producing some prototypes for our SaaS company because we have an entire campaign ready to roll when we want to actually launch this company. And hopefully you've put in the work yourself as your own business or practicing for another business. And you can see that you have pretty much all the different pieces to the puzzle, to an actual campaign. And so throughout it, you've been practicing your copy. Maybe you didn't realize it, but you've been practicing, you've hopefully been getting better. And I'm just really excited for you to hopefully give you a sense of accomplishment that you've done all of these exercises. So that wraps up all of the exercises we have for this class for you. But we do have a couple more lessons and we'll see you in those ones. 49. Crafting a Campaign Roll Out: Welcome to this new section all about crafting a campaign. So in this section we are basically helping you understand what are the steps that you need to do to put everything that we've taught you so far into practice, depending on where you are as a brand or a business. So this is what we'd call our rollout strategy. And a couple of things to note, every campaign is going to be different and there's no one size fits all strategy. It really does depend on where you are, what stage you are in creating your brand, creating your business. And this really is going to be if you, yourself are an entrepreneur that's starting your own business or you're working for a business, if you're just trying to learn copywriting, it's good to know this. And potentially it's a skill or just knowledge that can help you in whatever job you might be doing for another company. In this section, we'll examine broad strategies for three different types of campaigns. One is starting from scratch. So if you have no audience, a limited budget, just getting started. Second is if you have a small to medium projects that already has somewhat of a budget and some limited brand awareness. And then lastly, if you're an existing larger brand and you have a decent budget, we're gonna go through each one and tell you what we think. If you're rolling out a campaign or just trying to grow your business, what you should be doing. 50. Campaigns with No Audience: What should you be working on if you are starting from scratch? First, you have to understand what your goals are. So first it's finding your audience, understanding where they are. Second is growing initial brand awareness. You've gotta get people to know that you exist. And then lastly, proof of concept. And I'll talk more about what this looks like. First, finding your audience. What does this mean? This could be finding, if you're in a specific city or location, a physical location, where are they also? What social media platforms are they on? So understanding, are your followers on tiktok? Are the YouTubers? Are they on Facebook? Are they across multiple platforms? This is going to determine what types of coffee you actually have to write, what websites and forums does your audience already use? And then also looking at your competition's content strategy and looking at as for inspiration, but also how you can differentiate yourself. We've already talked a lot about this in the course. It's more just putting into practice and this is what you should be doing right now if you're starting a business from scratch. So once you know where your audience is, it's about getting your name out there, increasing that initial brand awareness. This could be for you as an individual, if you're your own brand or if you have your own business, you want to try to become a thought leader in your industry. So on those social platforms where you've found your, your audience, start putting out content. Get your name out there. And it doesn't necessarily mean putting out crazy videos or social content that goes viral. It's about engaging, commenting on posts, commenting on YouTube videos, putting out your own ideas and trying to connect with people that are already in this space so that they start to recognize you as someone who's a part of that space as well. So later on in your campaign strategy, when you do start putting out higher-quality content, copy videos, that kind of stuff, they're going to be more willing to check it out because they've already seen your face. They've already senior profiles on these platforms, on these forums, on social media. And then while you're putting out those failures, connecting with people in your target audience, you should be working on your actual content, your website, writing out the sales pages, writing out the landing pages, writing out your e-mail sequences that you'll be using, create pillar content related to your product. What I mean by pillar content is think about the problem that your business solves. Think about what are the four or five questions that a customer is going to ask about that product or service. So for me, I teach video production and some of my courses. So some of the main questions someone might ask are, What's a great beginner camera? What settings should I use for XYZ type of video? How do I set up lighting for my video interview? Those key questions that someone getting into this topic might ask, those are the questions I want to answer in my pillar content. That could be a blog article, that could be a script for a video that we put on YouTube. That could be a podcast, episode or a series that we put out. And each of these pieces of content, these pillars can be its own funnel where you add an opt-in or a call to action and get someone on that email list or get someone to take that next step with you. And then the last thing you shouldn't be doing if you're starting from scratch is a proof of concept. And I'm not talking about proving what your business or product actually does. I'm talking more about your marketing funnel, your copywriting. So setup each stage of your marketing funnel, starting with your website or a YouTube video, whatever that entry point for a customer might be. And then your opt-in form, your email opt-in form on your website, your email sequence that song gets added to once they sign up for your email list, go through it yourself, sign-up with a dummy e-mail address and make sure all of those things, all those steps to the process, the links that people have to click. Everything works so that it's a smooth process for your customers. And then a good idea to, is to actually try to have someone buy your product or service. You could ask a friend or a family member to do this to make sure everything works out. So in summary, a couple of key tips when you're starting from scratch is you're working on developing your brand identity that is unique and stands out from the crowd. So everything you are doing right now, all the website copy the social pose, your profiles. It's all about position yourself and your business as uniquely your own. Secondly, create web content that delivers your brand's voice and style. Remember, start from the beginning, understanding your brand, starting with that one headline and make sure that it comes across in your website. And then lastly, stay up to date with your competitors to see what strategies are working for them, what's not working for them. This is something you want to do throughout your entire campaign, throughout your entire business life. But when you're beginning, it's a great idea to just start to see who's out there, what are they doing so that it can be inspiration. And also, as I always say, something that can help you differentiate yourself. 51. Campaigns with a Limited Audience: So let's examine some campaign rollout strategies for a brand that has limited awareness. So the key things that you're going to want to do if you have a brand that has limited awareness, is increase brand awareness, grow your following and convert more customers. This is just simply about finding ways to use copy to grow your business. So first let's talk about increasing brand awareness. I think obviously effective headline copy is going to be the most essential tool that you will have to sort of increase the awareness of your brand and let people know what you're all about. Obviously attention-grabbing social content that's more informative than engaging is going to be a great way to increase brand awareness. Business to business emails, reaching out to those other businesses where you can have a mutually beneficial relationship and telling them what you're selling, who you are, what you're all about. And then obviously effective AV spots that can just live on YouTube, on social, on anything at all, is a great way to just increase the awareness of your brand growing you're following, obviously a very central component of a brand that has limited awareness. Effective call to action. Probably the key element to doing this in having something that's very customer-focused, that can get people engaged, that can benefit them and can grow your e-mail list is a great way to do this in an engaging social content to pair with the informational stuff is also a great way to get people interested in communicating with you in your company and your brand and engaging with the content that you put out there. This is just going to help you grow your following and get people more interested in what you're doing, and then convert more customers. So if you get the awareness out there and you get people interested in your call to action in your website. How do you convert them to becoming customers and not just viewers of the copy and content that you're putting out there. This is where really effectively written email promotions come into play. Sharing and referral call to actions which encourages people to refer your business to someone else. And then you both get a discount in a customer service centric business to consumer, copy in e-mail, website, whatever. Just letting people know that you care about them as customers and not just as likes follows. Anything more superficial is just a great thing to keep in mind when you're writing copy that is aiming to increase your following. And also just a great thing to keep in mind when you're writing copy in general. So in summary, if you have a limited awareness brand, I think a good way to begin is with headline. Copy that position to your product. Utilize your social content to inform and engage with your audience, drive social followers to your website, and then offer a beneficial call to action, leverage the following that you grow in your business to business emails so that when you're reaching out to other businesses, they can see that you are serious about what you're doing, about what you're writing, what you're aiming to do ultimately with you, copy, with your product, with your business, and then create audio visual content that really solidifies your brand and kinda speaks to what you're all about cells, what you're trying to sell, communicates the messaging that you're trying to communicate in just sort of continues to increase awareness of who you are in this industry, in what you're doing and what you're all about. So these are just all kind of things to really keep in mind when you're writing copy for each step of the way and how you can kind of go about implementing that copy in effective, in useful ways for your business. 52. Campaigns with an Existing Audience: So let's talk about a campaign roll-out strategy. If you already have a pretty solid existing audience. In this situation, what you're going to want to do is increase your brand recognition that you've already established. Retain customers that you already have in communicate to those customers what's coming next and what they can expect from you. So let's talk about increasing brand recognition. This is going to come mostly from further headline explorations. I think if you think, if you look back to the example we had with Navy for instance, with the just do it line. This led to so many other campaign lions, headlines, ads, commercials, everything just built around that one idea. So if you have a headline that you really like, how can you further explore that positioning in, further develop it into something bigger and more deep and more in depth than what you already have. Consistently updated webpage copy. No one wants to keep going back to her website that just says the same thing over and over again. So how can you keep people interested in what you're selling? How can you keep them engaged? What can you write to them that's going to tell them that you're still there, that you're still doing new things and that you still care about their customer experience with your product or business. And then he just want to read really good social and AV copy. That's going to solidify this identity that you've built in, that you're continuing to build like anything. Things are just going to evolve over time and your identity in the market that you're currently in is going to continue to develop, to solidify, to become something very unique in a little bit more defined and it might have been in the earliest stages. So continuing to explore that in your social and your AV copy is a great way to just increase that brand recognition and awareness. Customer attention from a copy standpoint is all about engagement, appreciation and writing more effective business to business copy. I think engagement is key because if you already have an existing audience, you don't want to just leave them hanging in the dark. So what kind of copy can you write for social, for email, for anything that's going to get them engaged in your company and keep them engaged and interested in what you're doing. In an appreciation. Utilizing this, especially in emails and promo emails or product e-mails or just general emails to your customers and telling them that you appreciate them supporting your business is key, and communicating that in a genuine and authentic way is a really effective form of copyrighting to help you grow your business further. And then business to business emails. Once you're more established in people, kind of know who you are and what you're about. You can rate effective business to business emails that are going to speak to what you've already done in what you're doing next, which is our next step, communicating what's next. This is kinda, it's all encompassing through all of your advertising, through all of your writing. You just don't want to keep people in the dark. You want to keep them informed, keep them updated on what you're doing in on what they can expect from you and communicate this in an effective way across all platforms. So in summary, begin of copy that solidifies your brand recognition. This is just also all across the board. Headlines, web copies, social, audio visual. You want to make sure that that headline continues to position your company in the marketplace in a unique and profound where you are. Keep customers engaged in appreciated with e-mail, social and business to business copy. And you want to utilize all forms of writing that we've covered in this course to communicate what's next in avoid stasis. Want to just keep people engaged and keep them going and keep writing things that are going to speak to them without being overbearing, which is a fine line to walk. But the more you do this in the more you write, the more you understand your audience, the better copy you can rate to speak to this and to communicate in an effective way with them. 53. Finding Work as a Copywriter: All right, So getting paid to copyright, basically, how do you take everything that we just learned and turn it into a job as a professional copywriter. So there are a few pretty common paths to becoming a copywriter. The first, and I put this first because this was my personal path is to work your way up in an agency. I started an agency at the lowest possible level you can start at and you're getting coffee, walking dogs, doing all that kinda stuff. And then a lot of agencies foster growth within their company and want their employees to grow and want them to move up. If you take the initiative and you can start from the bottom and work your way up into a copy position. So that's a pretty standard path that a lot of copywriters take, and I would highly recommend it because you also get experience working in an agency in the industry and get a good sense of what the ins and outs of the job are before you're actually doing it. Another is to just build a portfolio with as many projects as you can. So if you want to reach out to local businesses who might need help with their advertising. Doing internships at local agencies are big agencies. Or if you have any family or friends that have businesses that want to let you take a stab at copy for their projects, I would just recommend taking as much work as you possibly can. Start to build up a portfolio even if small projects and that can help you get freelance work down the road. And it's one of those things where the more you do it, the more you put yourself into it, the better you're going to get at it every time. And then there are a lot of online resources. And I personally have never used any of these resources, but I know other writers who have. And this is a place where a lot of companies, businesses, et cetera, we'll be looking for freelance copywriters. So if you wanted to take a look at those, that could be great just to see if it's right for you. But I personally think the first two methods here are the best way to get your start as a copywriter and as a copywriter who's getting work in doing it as a profession. Quick to make a website to showcase your work. This is pretty obvious, but if you want to be a copywriter, you should have a website that demonstrates your ability to write copy for yourself because you are selling yourself to these clients. You're trying to convince people to hire you to write for their project. So having a website that showcases your work in your ability to write is a great way to just get people hooked right off the bat and let people know right off the bat who you are, what you do, what you're about, what your style is, and all that. So let's talk about clients for a second. The client will always be right. That is going to dictate the writing that you do even if you disagree. And I think that's just a really important thing to keep in mind, especially if you're going to be working freelance, that the client is going to have ideas that you might disagree with. But it doesn't matter if you disagree with them because there'll be another writer who won't. So listen to the clients and respect the client's, which is going to be another thing here. Be professional, be respectful, and be reliable if you want to continue to get work. These are more important almost then copy. Probably not more important, but as important as writing good copy. If you're not professional, if you're not respectful and if you're not reliable, then no one's going to want to work with you. So simple things to do, but just very important to keep in mind and always make sure you're practicing. And then lastly, always put your best foot forward. As a professional copywriter, there's going to be a lot of times and you're going to get assignments that you don't want to do, that you don't care about, that, don't interest you, whatever. It doesn't matter, you still need to treat it as you would an assignment that you would want to write more than anything else. Putting your best foot forward and making sure that you're always doing your best work, regardless of any of the, any of your personal feelings about the assignment, is going to be essential to you getting more clients and more work in earning a better reputation as a copywriter and the business. So I hope that if being a copywriter is your goal, that this course has given you a little bit of insight into what the job is, how to do it well and has gotten you started on the path towards your ultimate goal.