So, it’s nearly January 1, the day we make our annual vow that this is definitely the year we get our shit together. Before Christmas, I wrote about why productivity advice can be tricky for creative people. And yesterday, I wrote about what I consider the most powerful tool to improve your creative output —
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Psst … hey, Copyblogger is taking the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. At least, officially. I’m not supposed to be here at all. But, given that my schedule is always out of whack this time of year, I like to take advantage of the disruptions to think about what I want to make
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Today, as the team gets ready to take a few days off for the holiday, we’ve put together a massive buffet of marketing, writing, and strategy advice for you. Monday’s post put the spotlight on our editorial team’s favorite writing, content, and marketing blogs. (As well as one that’s an example of a creator who’s
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The task of selecting the top Copyblogger posts from 2017 is a bit like asking me to choose my favorite child. Each post is crafted with care, and I value all of them. But I rolled up my sleeves and devised a strategy. In fact, this year was all about the power of the individual
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I remember when I first discovered David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. I was holding down a challenging corporate job and working on a side hustle. I had a toddler at home and a mountain of stress at work. I was managing a team of writers (this is an oxymoron) and juggling complicated deliverables for
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Here at Copyblogger, we’ve always been in love with writers. So we thought it would be fun to wrap up the year with a collection of some favorite blogs and podcasts that teach writing, showcase writing, or help writers. This is very much a partial list — so if you have a favorite site that
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This week, we have lots of pragmatic advice for you on how to be a happier, more productive person. Because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, this joke has now been permanently rendered un-funny. On Monday, Morgan Dix (he happens to be one of our Certified Content Marketers) revealed what meditation
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“That idea is stupid. Your headline sucks. Your headlines always suck. Everyone else on the planet is better at this than you are. No one will ever want to read this trash. I wonder if Starbucks is hiring.” – That crappy inner voice in our heads In the late spring of 1997, I went to
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Introducing Academy Pro … the theme for online course creators, membership site owners, and educational content marketers. Academy Pro is the latest premium theme from StudioPress, designed specifically for people in the business of online content and community. Read on to discover all the features and benefits you get with this theme, and how it
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Today, a simple lesson that so many of us miss at great peril. In fact in your role, at this very moment, your company is making a mistake in terms of how it values your impact on the business.
The lesson is about the limitation of optimizing for a local maxima, usually in a silo.
We are going to internalize this lesson by learning from Microsoft. It is a company I love (am typing this on my beloved ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 5, using Windows Live Writer blogging software!). I bumped into the lesson thanks to their NFL sponsorship.
If you were watching the Oakland Raiders beating the hapless New York Giants (so sad about Eli) this past Sunday, you surely saw a scene like this one:
Quarterback Geno Smith using his Microsoft Surface tablet to figure out how he added two more fumbles to this career total of 43. Or, maybe it was him replaying the 360 degrees view of the three times he was sacked during the game.
The Surface tablet is everywhere in an NFL game. Microsoft paid $400 million for four years for the rights, and just renewed the deal for another year (for an as yet undisclosed sum).
For all this expense, you'll see players and coaches using them during the game (as above). The Surface branding also gets prominent placement on the sidelines – on benches, on movable trollies and more. It is all quite prominent.
Here’s one more example: Beast mode!
I adore Mr. Lynch’s passion. Oh, and did you notice the Surface branding?
Now, let’s talk analytics and accountability.
NFL ratings are down, but an average game still gets between 15 m – 20 m viewers. That is a lot of pretty locked-in attention, very hard to get anywhere these days.
The question for us, Occam’s Razor readers, is… What does the Surface Marketing team get for all this money?
If the Surface Marketing team is like every other team at every other company engaged in sponsorships and television advertising, it’ll measure the same collection of smart metrics like everyone else.
First one will be Reach. The Surface team is likely measuring it with deep granularity (by individual games, geo, days, times of days, and a lot more). I’m confident that their analysis will show they are getting great Reach.
The team will rightly be congratulating itself on this success.
Next on the list, having spent enough of my life with TV buyers, I can comfortably say that the Surface team is also expending copious amounts of effort measuring one or more dimensions of Brand Lift metric. Ad Recall, Brand Interest, Favorability, Consideration etc.
Brand Lift is most frequently measured using surveys.
Given the number of times Microsoft Surface, or its branded presence, shows up in a game (52 times in my count in the OAK – NYC game), I believe the Surface team is getting very positive reads from its post NFL ad-exposure surveys.
After 52 times most people would recall the ad, surely answer the survey with some interest in the brand, and everyone (except Coach Belichick) seems to like using the tablets, a favorability that will surely transfer to a whole lot of viewers.
This would, indeed should, result in more congratulations in the Surface team.
The two-step approach above reflects the most common approach Marketers, and their Agencies, use to measure success. Did we reach a large audience? Do they remember anything?
The answers to these two questions power job promotions, bonuses and agency contract renewals with higher fees.
I believe this is necessary, but not sufficient.
I believe this approach optimizes for a local maxima (the media buying bubble) and does not create the necessary incentives to solve for the global maxima (short or long-term business success).
Let me illuminate this gap.
Here’s the global maxima question: How many Surface tablets have been sold due to this near-blanket coverage in NFL games via precious undivided attention?
That was the question that crossed my mind during Sunday’s game.
I had one data point handy.
According to TripIt I’ve visited 156 cities across 32 countries in the last few years. During these trips, meetings and meetups, I've never seen a Microsoft Surface tablet in the wild. Not one.
That’s not completely true. I have seen one frequently. The one I bought for my dad four years ago.
One data point does not a story make.
To assess a more complete answer, we turn to our trusty search engine Bing…
The picture above starts 12 months after Surface inked the $400 million NFL contract. The Surface's share of shipments is so small, it does not even show up in a graph.
Not being content with just one view of success, I tried other sources.
The data from IDC, shows no meaningful Surface anything. Statcounter provides an interesting view as it measures actual use the Surface when accessing the two million websites that use Statcounter. Surface is at 0.29% share.
This is a bit hyperbolic, but in the grand scheme of things… No one is buying a Surface.
Local maxima view of success: The Surface team’s NFL contract is a smashing success. The team is getting great Reach and great Brand Lift. Contract with NFL renewed for another 12 months.
Global maxima view of success: Microsoft is losing.
[Key caveat: The data Statista and IDC provide capture shipments. It is possible that the Surface is being sold directly in a way that neither of these two sources would capture those sales. Perhaps some kind of B2B sales. To overcome this possible issue I’ve used the Statcounter data to capture usage. Still, there is a possible scenario where none, or not enough, of the Surfaces sold visit those two million sites.]
Sadly, Microsoft is not alone in this local maxima focus. Most companies function in a similar manner. Yours. Mine. Other people’s. Our collective mistake is that we don’t think critically enough about what we really are solving for. Our company’s mistake is the incentive structure they put in place (which almost always rewards the local maxima).
Let me give you two examples of this sad local maxima obsession that crossed my desk just this morning. All in the space of one hour.
Local – Global Maxima Example 2: Gap Inc..
A report has been published on The Age of Social Influence. Its goal is to aggressively recommend the strategy of marketing via Social Influencers. Here’s the publishing company’s intro of themselves: “We are a powerful data intelligence tool that combines the knowledge and insights you need to deliver a successful celebrity and social influencer marketing strategy.”
Their claims of this wonderful Social Influencer strategy is based on a survey of 270 respondents. 270. It seems like an oddly tiny choice by a powerful data intelligence tool company (PDITC).
They have all kinds of numbers from the 270 survey sample showing glory.
The very first example in the report of a brand winning hugely with a Social Influencer strategy is Gap.
Here’s a screenshot from the report…
While we all love Cher, seriously she is special, this is a classic local maxima let’s only look at what will make us look good to pimp stuff we want to strategy.
What would be a global maxima if you are going to use a company as a poster child?
Here’s Gap’s financial performance over the last five years…
Gap Inc. has been struggling for years, flirting with financial disaster recently in every facet of its business.
I invite you to explore other financial data on the eMarketer Retail website. Look at Revenue, Earnings, Margins, Employment… Everything is super sad. For an additional valuable lesson, click on Digital as well. It shows the social performance of Gap (illustrating even the local maxima is quite suspect).
I dearly wish the Gap survives, they make good quality clothes.
I also wish that the powerful data intelligence tool company would have chosen to focus on looking at the global maxima success before using Gap, and the other examples in their 40 page report. That would have made their drum banging for Social Influencers more persuasive. It would also have resulted in fewer clients of powerful data intelligence tool company shuttled in the direction of spending money on something that mostly likely will not produce any business results.
Local – Global Maxima Example 3: Amazon
A celebration was shared with me for 31 custom gifs created by Giphy for the up and coming retailer Amazon.
Here’s a non constantly looped, to ensure you’re not annoyed, sample…
The celebration was based on the fact that the total view count for these 31 custom gifs was 31 million.
[Sidebar: Always, always, always be suspicious of numbers that are that clean. 31 gifs being viewed a clean 31 million times is cosmically impossible. Seek the faq page to understand how views are measured. Identify that there is no clarity. Now, be even more suspicious.]
I’m afraid in my book views don’t even count as a local maxima. Even if they are in yours, I hope you’ll agree they are a million miles away from a global maxima.
I wanted to share this example from Amazon because you can’t use the global maxima of overall business success I’ve used above. Even if Jeff Bezos goes around hitting people with feather dusters, Amazon will keep selling more and more products. They have already reached perpetual motion.
What do you do when it is difficult to identify the global maxima from a super-tactical animated 31 gifs with 31 million views effort?
Try to move four steps up from wherever you are. Global maxima lite.
In this case, here’s a great start: % of Users who shared the gif who are not current Amazon customers.
So much more insightful than Views, right?
We are shooting for a deeper brand connection, by an audience that holds business value for us. Sure these people are annoying their friends, but hey at least as Amazon we can remarket to them – and friends (!) – and convert them to Prime customers!
I’m sure you can think of others that are five, six and eight steps above Views. (Share them in comments, and earn admiration.)
It does not always have to be revenue or profit. But, please don’t pop the champagne on views, impressions and other such primitive signals of nothingness.
On the topic of measurement, let’s go back to Microsoft and brainstorm some strategies for their unique use case.
What should Microsoft have measured?
Purely as an academic exercise I’m leaving aside the possibility that the Surface is simply not a good tablet. That would certainly impact sales – marketing or no marketing. But, since Microsoft went back for year five, it is safe to assume at least they believe it is a good tablet.
Ok? It is a good tablet.
Again as an academic exercise I’m going to ignore the four year horizon. There is no question that at the end of year two Microsoft had overwhelming proof from a multitude of data points that the NFL contract was not selling any Surfaces. They did not need Big Data or Artificial Intelligence to come to that conclusion. If they could not get out of the contract, at the end of year two a better use of $100 mil spend per year would have been to change the covers on the Surfaces to Xbox green, and change the numerous printed brand opportunities on the sidelines to Xbox as well. A great selling product, with a much bigger overlap with the NFL audience than the Surface.
Ok? We are not looking after year two.
During the first and second year, what could we have measured as Microsoft if we wanted to do better than the local maxima? Better than Reach and Brand Lift metrics?
Let me plant three ideas (please add yours via comments).
An enhanced survey would be a good start. Along with measuring ad recall etc., they could also ask how likely are you to choose the Surface over the iPad as your next tablet?
It is a tougher question than do you remember the ad or what tablets can you name. It is going head to head with the thing people usually say when they mean tablet. And, you are looking for switching. A strong behavior shift, a harder yes to get when I’ve done surveys. All this brand exposure, if its working, should shift that key intent signal.
Really easy to do. And, you can easily get thousands upon thousands of responses – you don’t have to settle for 270. It would have given the Marketing team a leading indicator that no one is going to buy the Surface as a result of the NFL partnership. The signal could have been received even a couple months in, and certainly by the end of year one.
Time series correlations would have been a great start right after the first week of the contract. How many people are visiting the Surface website on Sundays? Is that materially significant compared to weeks prior or weeks where there were not as many games? Was there an improvement on Sundays in digital sales? How about retail sales on Mondays?
This is simple stuff. Even visits to the site would have been a nice low level signal.
As the season went on, we could look for test and control opportunities. The NFL always has blackouts in cities/states where the stadiums don’t have enough attendance. This past weekend it was in two states, complete blackout of free broadcast games. Is there a difference in site visits, online conversion rates, offline sales, between states that had one game broadcast on Sunday, two games broadcast on Sunday and no games broadcast on Sunday?
A little more complicated. The site stuff is easy to segment. For store sales Microsoft could easily get data from its stores in malls, and likely also from retailers like Best Buy with a little arm twisting. This data would have shows Microsoft, a few months in, that the global maxima might not be reached.
If you don’t have this type of ubiquity, Matched Market tests are also fabulous in these cases to discern if a specific marketing strategy is having a business impact.
Three ideas that I hope will spark many more in your mind when you shoot to measure the global maxima.
I want to briefly touch on one refrain I often hear about these long term efforts, or short term efforts that are not working but are looking at a longer horizon: So what if the results are not there. This is a long term brand building play, Apple did not become a beloved brand in one year.
There is a kernel of truth there, brand building take time. There is a kernel of BS there as well, Apple is Apple primary because of its innovative products.
Let’s not talk about Microsoft in context of the above statement as even if we assume there was some long term brand building happening, it did not translate into business success.
When you hear a statement like that, after you launch a new underwear, cooking range, VR headset or whatever… Obsessively measure more than the local maxima to discern signals in the short term that illustrate that the long term brand building play is not just an excuse to flush a lot of money. Both the Gap and Amazon examples have ideas to inspire you.
Or consider that even your long term brand building play, in the short term should cause you to take noticeable amounts of market share. It won’t be 80% in the short term, but neither is that statement a reason to spend more money if all you got is 5% in year one and 10% in year two.
Don’t settle for opinion.
Use data.
You have data.
Bonus: The real winner of the Microsoft NFL contract?
The NFL of course.
Microsoft makes great hardware. To make it work for the NFL, Microsoft surely wrote lots of custom software for the NFL’s specific use cases. Microsoft likely invested in tens of millions of dollars of camera equipment, wifi/networking upgrades in every stadium, deployed a small army of Microsoft employees to do on-site tech support before, during and after the games in every single stadium. And, more and more and more.
The NFL should be paying Microsoft $110 million a year to upgrade the ability of its coaches, players and teams to have access to this state of the art technology to compete more effectively every Thursday, Sunday and Monday!
The NFL is slated to make $14 billion in 2017, they can surely afford to give $110 mil a year to Microsoft.
Back to the real world… Even when you measure short term success, please do not be satisfied with a local maxima. Even in the short term you can measure something better. On the long term, you have all the elements you need… Definitely measure the global maxima!
Do this because it is the right and smart thing to do for your company. But, a tiny bit, do it because in my experience (across the world) global maxima solvers progress exponentially faster in their career. Turns out, delivering business results matters. :)
As always, it is your turn now.
Do you have a suggestion for what Microsoft or Gap or Amazon should measure as their global maxima? If you’ve been successful getting your CEO to focus on the global maxima, what approach really worked? If you were the role of the Chief Scientist of powerful data intelligence tool company, how would you measure the impact of Social Influencers in a more intelligent manner?
Please add your powerful ideas, brilliant critique and innovative strategies in comments below. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you.
Smarter Career Choices #3: Solve for the Global Maxima! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
A quick note if you write for a living: This week you have the chance to get on our list of recommended writers by joining the Certified Content Marketer program. We will close registration on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, so if you’d like to learn about the content strategies that
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Late last year, I had the wild-hair idea to create a year of prompts that I called the Content Excellence Challenge. We’ve had a year of these creativity and productivity challenges here on Copyblogger, and I think we’ve all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically. The community has spent a year trying
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Lately, a common theme in productivity advice is bashing multitasking. “You suck at multitasking!” shrieks one headline. “Multitasking: the most dangerous productivity killer” hisses another. And they aren’t wrong. Studies have shown that trying to tackle different tasks simultaneously greatly reduces our cognitive abilities. But what if I told you there’s another type of multitasking
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This week is for our professional writers — whether you’re a freelancer or you work for a bigger organization. We’re tired of you missing out on the great gigs and the plum jobs, while you watch people zoom past you who can hardly type The Cat on the Mat. Poverty is overrated. Let’s get you
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I spent the last 4 days writing a long-form sales page for one of our Copy Hackers programs.
At my day rate of $5000, that’s a $20,000 investment.
Given what a long-form sales page can do for revenue generation, $20K is money well-spent.
But not everyone would agree with that. Few would. And, to be honest, even yours truly would have a very, very hard time paying a freelance copywriter $20,000 to write a sales page. I’d need… well, we’re gonna get into what people like moi would need in order to pony up what is effectively a quarter of the average marketer’s annual salary.
But forget $20,000, which is a lot for almost anyone to pay for a single deliverable.
What about a $5000 invoice?
Is $5000 a lot to charge – or to pay – for a sales page?
I decided to ask a few top marketers. Here’s what they revealed.
We reached out to some of the thought-leaders, marketers and general powerhouses growing today’s coolest (and most profitable [read: they can afford $5K invoices]) businesses online.
Among the handful of questions we asked them was this one:
If a freelance copywriter quoted you $5000 to write a sales page,
what do you think your reaction would be?
Although two declined to answer (because the question was optional), the other 12 reacted like so:
You’re probably not terribly surprised by those reactions. As you’d expect, there’s no consensus. There’s no certainty. There’s no definitive takeaway – no sense that, yes, freelance copywriters can always safely charge $5000 or, no, you never should.
The surface reactions aren’t the point.
The stuff BEHIND those reactions – that’s the point.
That’s why we dug into why these marketers reacted as they did. If you’re trying to get prospective clients to sign off on projects like $5000 sales pages, listen closely to what they told us. And see what you can do to put yourself in a better negotiating position.
Surprise! Most people aren’t in the top 1% of expertise in their field.
Bigger surprise! Most copywriters aren’t in the top 1% of expertise in their field.
Biggest surprise! Marketers and founders are wise to the random guesswork that happens too often in the copywriting world.
When I’m talking with marketers about how they hire freelance copywriters, a strong distrust of the freelancer’s skills comes through time and again. After all, there’s no reliable third-party stamp of approval for copywriters. No degree in copywriting. No peer-reviewed portfolios. So until clients see proven, measured results, they don’t really believe that their new freelance copywriter knows how to, well, write copy.
(And even when the results are present, there’s still this strange sense that, somehow, it’s a fluke.)
Perhaps the biggest reason for this distrust is this:
There are just far too many people calling themselves copywriters.
Check out how many freelance copywriters are listed on one of the most popular spaces for finding freelancers, Upwork:
And how many of those copywriters have data or proof that they’re actually skilled at the job?
When you refine your search for job success (a form of proof), you see this:
So 2000+ freelance copywriters have “experience” getting the job done right.
Which doesn’t help a prospective client make a decision.
Because there’s still no PROOF that you can do what the client needs doing. Job success is not synonymous with proven results.
You either need to have a great portfolio of results. Or you need to do pay-for-performance – as in, you get paid after the page performs well.
A few of the marketers who were NOT in a rush to invest $5K in sales page copy said they needed proof + results:
“It better make me at least 2x that amount or at least exponentially more than it was making before. If it does the job, I’m happy to pay it.” – Nadya Kohja
“Ouch! Unless I know they’re great.” – Oli Gardner
“You better be damn good at what you do! ROI matters more than cost, so you better be able to produce ROI at that cost.” – Barrett Brooks
Clearly your prospects need to KNOW that you’re gonna do great work. They can’t take on all the risk in hiring you; they need to feel confident that their investment will bring a return of, as Nadya said, at least 2x. I’d push that 2x further to something like 10x. Why? Because most people considering proposals for a page think exactly like Peep describes here:
“Some freelancers will quote 2k, 3k – and that’s the hard part: it’s often VERY difficult to see how the 5k quote would deliver a better result. As they say, if I can’t tell the difference, why pay more?” – Peep Laja
You’ve gotta answer this question: “Why should a client pay more for me than for the next freelance copywriter?”
Your results need to justify your rate. Period.
Your clients need to believe they’re going to get a 10x return on their investment. Period.
Of course, you don’t know how your page will perform until you put it out there. And that’s where pay for performance can be an appealing option for you and your prospective client. But let me be honest: P4P is super-tricky. I wouldn’t rush into it. And even clients who perk up at the idea of it lose interest when they realize how much work it’ll be to track it – to say nothing of the % of their revenues they’ll be sending your way.
Instead of pay for performance, bring a strong portfolio of results to those early convos with your prospects. Results sound tricky to collect. In fact, they are not. There’s data about your work all over the place – you just need to go grab it. Quickly assembling a list of your results over the course of, say, the last 6 months is actually pretty easy, and it doesn’t require that you start participating in complex A/B tests or funnel optimizations.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Start measuring your work immediately so you can reduce the risk for your clients and charge more. A few ideas for you:
BTW, showing results is not optional.
No one would hire an SEO who couldn’t point to the traffic growth s/he had generated for clients. No one would hire a CRO consultancy without first reviewing highly persuasive, data-rich case studies. Possibly the only role that does get hired sans numbers is the role of the designer – but even that’s changing as marketers abandon gut reactions in favour of hard numbers.
Sorry, punkin, but there’s no escaping it: businesses dig numbers.
CFOs love numbers. They obsess over numbers like it’s their job.
Your skill with words will only get you so far as a freelance copywriter. Ultimately, you’re hired for the numbers, not the words. Here’s proof that measurable performance is everything when choosing a copywriter:
“Does this writer have evidence to support their claim that the copy will perform well? If yes, I’m ready to sign the quote. If it ranks and converts, $5K would be a bargain. ” – Andy Crestodina
“The biggest challenge would be to make the investment without knowing how the page would ultimately perform.” – Nate Turner
Lars Lofgren is the Senior Director of Growth at IWT. Unlike a lot of tech businesses and agencies, IWT uses long-form sales pages heavily – they’ve got a big ol’ team of copywriters – so Lars knows full well the power of a high-converting sales page. When I asked him the $5000 question, he said:
“If someone told me their salespage would cost $5000, I’d assume it would actually cause damage to the brand and not generate any tangible revenue. It’s going to hurt more than it helps.”
I couldn’t agree more.
When copywriters quote me $3000 to $5000 for a sales page, I know I’m going to have to do a lot of work on it. And truth be told: I’ve never had a freelance copywriter quote higher than $5K for a long-form sales page.
Now here’s a question.
Why is Lars the only one who said $5000 is too low for a sales page?
Is he just terrible with money? Has he got nothing but cash to burn? …Or is it something else? Is it that he’s not only written sales pages himself but also overseen the creation of some of the most profitable sales pages in online marketing?
That no one else reacted like Lars reveals one of the bigger issues underlying resistance to a $5000 invoice for a sales page: Not a lot of marketers have SEEN what a killer long-form sales page can do for their business.
And even worse?
Not a lot of COPYWRITERS have seen it, either.
The reality is that a long-form sales page is a one-page funnel. Imagine optimizing your funnel for just $5000. If someone quoted you $5000 to optimize your funnel, you’d have the same reaction Lars had: it’s not gonna work. Yet somehow a long-form sales page – which moves prospects from TOFU through MOFU to BOFU – isn’t obviously worth AT LEAST $5000 to many people hiring freelance copywriters. Do I blame those marketers and think they should all turn into Lars as soon as possible? (I’m actually pausing as I consider my answer.) …No. We copywriters just need to do a much better job of:
To justify solid rates for writing sales copy, copywriters need to connect their work directly to two things: lead generation and revenue generation.
We asked this group of marketers:
What was the business objective you were trying to solve for
when you recently hired a freelancer?
All answers fell into one of these 3 categories:
The third category shows that, in some cases, businesses just want to hire you to do the execution work of writing copy. Four of the marketers we talked to simply wanted a freelance copywriter to execute without a direct success metric; for example, one freelance copywriter was hired to remove the jargon from a landing page.
But ten of the 14 marketers hired a copywriter for an outcome directly tied to growth: revenue or leads.
Nobody said they hired a freelancer to build their brand. Or to revamp their voice. Or to generate creative concepts. That doesn’t mean that other marketers on the planet won’t be looking for the creative side of copywriting… but 14 out of 14 marketers (in high-growth, profitable businesses, with a history of hiring copywriters) said absolutely nothing whatsoever about hiring a copywriter for creativity.
So you know you need results to woo clients.
But what else can you do, say and share to tip the scales in your favour?
You can use what marketers want and don’t want to write more persuasive sales copy for your services.
And what follows can help you with alluhthat…
So if you’re writing a sales page to sell your email copywriting services… or drumming up testimonials and wondering what to ask your past clients to focus on… or putting together a proposal and trying to figure out what to say under “About Me,” you should use the words your prospects would use / have used. Because you’re a copywriter. And that’s what copywriters do.
We asked these 14 marketers how they’d describe their ideal freelance copywriter. These are the words and phrases they used, in alphabetical order:
And a few more insights into what clients want when they’re hiring freelance copywriters:
“A “dual-threat” SEO/conversion copywriter!” – Andy Crestodina
“Someone who ‘goes deep.'” – Nathalie Lussier
“In the past when I was looking for some help increasing conversions on a pricing page, I was looking for the best pricing page copywriter there was, and my search queries followed suit. So my ideal copywriter knows who they are, their strengths, and as a result, knows how they can help me better than everyone else.” – John Bonini
“Committed to staying a freelancer, able to write in multiple “voices”, good on the phone so I can trust them to call clients.” – Dana DiTomaso
If you’re wondering why your prospective clients are skeptical about your value, chances are insanely good that they’ve been burned before.
Here are some of the frustrations these marketers have felt when working with copywriters. They may be the very same frustrations your next client wants to avoid. So consider them all when writing copy for your freelance services and/or talking to your prospective client on the phone.
‘Member all that stuff above about results? Yup, lack of results / lack of expertise is the #1 frustration people have with copywriters.
Tara Robertson, head of agency partnerships at Sprout Social, put it this way:
“Copy tends to be the hardest function to outsource for multiple reasons. For one, while loads of freelancers state they are ‘data driven writers,’ my experience has been more so that finding writers who are also great marketers is generally very hard to come by. Couple that with the need to learn a potentially new niche, product, or industry, as well as find your brand’s tone, really means you’re looking for a unicorn.
“There aren’t a lot of people in the world that truly “get it,” which is why this process can be both hard and cumbersome. I look at my outsourced team the same way I do as my internal team, and therefore it’s almost more important that your freelancer is able to deliver quality work as they’ll already be working at a disadvantage (less internal training, ramping time, etc).”
Nadya Khoja, Head of Marketing at Venngage, said:
“It’s hard to find someone who not only knows how to write well, but to write in a way that engages audiences. Naturally this can be said for any job or industry, but many people looking for a job tend to over promise and under deliver. When people claim to be a “writer” and we take a look at the copy written, it’s either overly academic, or poorly written in general.”
Nate Turner of Sprout Social said:
“[The most frustrating thing is finding] the right expertise and fit. There are plenty of resources available to source freelancers but it usually takes more time and effort to find people that have some expertise in your industry and can fit your objectives/tone/style.”
And Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media said it like so:
“[The most frustrating thing is] finding someone who can back up their recommendations with data.”
Your portfolio can help showcase your expertise. So can a case study cleverly disguised as a blog post (and shared in multiple places, not just on your blog). But be careful not to rely only on showing your expertise! Most people have no idea what goes into the work you do to create high-converting copy. So take the time to talk about and describe your process. Do as your math teacher said in elementary school: show your work. Don’t let your client guess at your expertise… ‘cos they might just dramatically underestimate you.
Your competition isn’t necessarily another freelancer. When your prospective client is considering you, she may also be considering simply training someone in-house to write the copy. Or getting her niece the English major to do it. It’s not that she thinks anyone can do your job; it may simply be that she doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of training a person who may not even be a great copywriter (see #1 above). Think about everything you need to know deeply as a copywriter:
Oh, and you’ll have to be introduced to the team and integrated into it. You’ll need to use the right meeting tools… get added to specific Slack channels and kept out of other channels… get added to the right Trello board… not get in the way… know when to get in the way…
All that for a sales page?
John Bonini of Databox breaks down his experience onboarding freelance copywriters like this:
“You’ll spend a good deal of time chopping the wood with a copywriter in order to get them up the learning curve as quickly as possible… Everyone sees the output of a copywriter, but what they don’t see is everything that goes into defining the market, understanding the customer, and solving then real challenges businesses are facing.
“For example, improving plan mix for a SaaS company isn’t just about making the premium plan sound better – it’s more about understanding the motivations of their current buyer, the aspirations of the buyers they don’t yet have, and how to best position their plans to influence both.”
And Laura Roeder of MeetEdgar said that the learning curve is one of the hardest parts of working with a freelancer:
“When you’re working with someone for the first time, there’s so much to learn about each other’s needs. A lot of the time, it’s easier to work with someone you’ve worked with in the past and with whom you already have even a little bit of a professional rapport. Working with someone new can be great, but even in a best-case scenario, there’s a learning process involved!”
If you have reason to believe that the client you want to land is worried about the learning curve, what could you message in your copy? Do you have a unique system for integrating yourself into their world? Do you offer incentives for repeat work, given that the hard learning-curve stuff is out of the way after the first few jobs?
The really, really good clients you want are the ones who 100% respect the work copywriters do. They don’t think you’re a wordsmith, and they don’t think they could do your job if only they had more time. They are hiring copywriters because they value copywriters. They have actual line items in their budget for “Freelance conversion copywriter.”
These hiring managers want someone who cares at least as much about the art + science of copywriting as they do.
No, scratch that. They insist that you care 100x more than they do.
As in, they need you to be hardcore.
Lars Lofgren explains well his frustration with hiring non-hardcore copywriters:
1) They don’t talk to customers. You know how hard it is to really get inside the mindset of a target market? You have to talk to HUNDREDS of people. Not surveys, not dumb Reddit threads and Amazon reviews, you have to actually talk to them and really dig deep. Great copywriters take every chance they can to talk to as many people as they possibly can. They feed off it. Most copywriters don’t and their copy is terrible. It’s just a collection of random copywriting templates they learned from the popular books.
2) They’re not willing to eat a giant dose of humble pie. You may have read all the books and collected a swipe file. Who cares? You haven’t even started yet. Until you’ve built funnels from scratch to six and seven figures by relentlessly failing and iterating until you finally succeed, pay very close attention to the folks that have. Most copywriters think they’re rockstars. Only a few are.
(Side note: Lars added that you can refer to surveys, reviews, etc. His frustration is when that’s ALL you look at – when you don’t actually immerse yourself in the head and heart of the customer.)
How can you prove you’re hardcore? If I were you, I wouldn’t start by being particularly subtle…
“[It’s hard to find] samples of their work in the right format.” – Oli Gardner
“It’s important that anyone I work with understand the mission of my blog.” – Nir Eyal
“The hardest part is finding someone who can understand my market, and also ramp up to the technical aspects of our software. I’ve hired from referrals, after seeing someone’s work in a Facebook group, and these have generally panned out… but it’s hard to tell how someone will write in a totally different market than their previous work.” – Nathalie Lussier
“It’s difficult to evaluate whether someone is a good fit for a particular gig.” – Peep Laja
“[It’s frustrating when a copywriter] checks the box to get the work done, but they don’t treat the work like I think they would if it were their own. In other words, the quality of output is often underwhelming.” – Barrett Brooks
The people who were most enthusiastic about spending $5000 on a sales page had this in common: they’d written long-form sales pages before. They know how hard it is to write a great sales page. And they know how well a well-done sales page can perform.
Which means that if you can, in early conversations, get a sense for who on the client’s team has been doing the writing, you may be able to pull those people deeper into your conversations. And nudge them to share the challenges of writing this kind of copy. So the person making the hiring decision doesn’t rely on assumptions and her calculator when it comes to signing the proposal or not.
Now I gotta wonder…
…would you balk at a $5000 sales page?
What would you need to know about a copywriter before you’d agree to a $5000 invoice?
What’s the most you’ve paid for copy, and would you pay the same copywriter that amount again?
Featured image by:
Bryan Apen
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