#15: 10 Power-Packed Copywriting Strategies To Boost Conversions

Welcome to Episode 15 of The Growth Booth, where today we're talking about discussing how you can get better results from your marketing efforts by leveraging ten different copywriting strategies.

Now, these are things that you can layer on top of one another to get incrementally better results. These are strategies that can be applied to almost anything where you need to showcase value. That could be physical products on an e-commerce store. It could be affiliate marketing websites, it could be online marketing, offline marketing, it could be a blog post, it could be casual conversations in your life, basically anywhere where you need to communicate with people or engage with prospects to showcase value.

Let's dive in.

1. DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE

The first of the ten different strategies that I want to share with you today is to define your audience. It's really important to know who you are talking to, who is your offer designed for, and who is your ideal prospect.

Keep in mind that your offer could be a whole range of different things. It could be a blog post where you are again trying to showcase value.

It could be an e-commerce product that you're trying to sell in your store. It could be a service that you're selling or anything else. The point of defining your audience is so that you can speak directly to a group of people who are absolutely laser-focused, targeted for the offer that you've got. The offer that you've got is perfect for them, and this will mean that your message resonates with them.

For me personally, I would much rather alienate 80% of prospects, 80% of people who are listening to the message or reading the message, and laser-target 20% than have a vague message that doesn't really alienate anyone, but doesn't sell that well either. I think this is another case where the 80/20 rule holds true in that 80% of your sales are going to come from 20% of the audience who are looking at what you've got to sell. You may as well double down on focusing just on that segment of people.

The benefit of talking to a specific group is that you will get higher conversions. You're going to have fewer time-wasters, and you're going to have fewer returns or refunds. If you've got a product that you're shipping, you're going to have higher satisfaction amongst the people that buy or invest in your product or service. All of these things are important all the time, but they become vitally important when you are paying any kind of money to get traffic.

Another tip for you is to get to know your prospect by specifically engaging with them. Having conversations with the type of people who you think are your prospect. This is so that you can learn about what it is that motivates them, what they're looking for in a product or a service, or whatever it is that you could potentially offer them.

Another way of saying this is to kind of spy if you like. I'm saying this figuratively, of course. What makes your prospect tick, what puts a smile on their face, what are their dreams, what makes them happy, what keeps them up awake at night? What are the things that they are stressing about? If you can think through all of this and put pen to paper, you can actually create an avatar. This is a process that I like to go through quite regularly, actually, with different marketing projects where I write out a 500-word document about who my prospect is, and who is the ideal person that I'm selling to.

You can really get creative and into some pretty granular detail with these things. I could say my ideal prospect is Bill. He's a 56-year-old white male from Montana who likes hiking in his spare time. He's got three young children, and he works at a timber mill and so on and so forth. You can really get granular and start to build a visual representation of who it is that you're trying to target.

The process of doing this will help bring clarity, I think, in a huge way to who you are targeting and the kind of message that's going to resonate with them. Knowing who your prospect is means that you can cut to the chase and start addressing them directly without worrying about whether or not you're going to be alienating or annoying or pissing off anyone else with the content that you put out because you just don't care. You're focused on the specific audience that you have defined.

That's the first big tip for you here to sort of turbocharge your copywriting, and that is to define your audience.

2. APPEAL TO CUSTOMER EMOTIONS

Now, the second thing that I want to share with you here today is that good copy or good communication should appeal to the reader's emotions. A lot of people focus just on logic, and I think that's a mistake. Some people also focus on the writer or the marketer's emotions rather than the prospects. You've got to flip this around and always think about what's in it for them.

What good copy does is it taps into a customer's emotions, and emotions really are at the center of our motivation. Every copywriter wants a customer to eventually take a certain action. It might be a purchase, it might be a donation, or it might be to sign up for a newsletter. But whatever it is, there is an aim. Every copywriter should try to evoke an emotion that is going to motivate the customer to take that desired action.

One way that you can do this and really sort of tap into the emotions or another way to think about it on a little bit deeper level is what moves people. One of the things that move people is status. If you can elevate someone's status through the product that you're selling them, then there's a much greater likelihood that you're going to be able to sell that product if it's something that you're selling. 

There are a whole bunch of things that you can do to elevate someone's status. What makes people feel good and what makes people feel like they've got a higher self-worth is physical appearance. It could be intelligence. It could be the appearance of style, the appearance of wealth. What types of things will give someone the appearance of these factors? Wealth, style, intelligence, physical attractiveness, the appearance of power, the appearance of sexiness, and even the appearance of happiness.

This is why people like Oprah Winfrey and Ellen appear to be so happy all the time. Therefore, people follow that. People want to be like that. People want to have what they have. Generally, in life, 2% of people tend to sort of drive themselves and pave their own roads, and 98% of people really are slaves to what other people think about them. This is why our status is such an important factor to keep in mind when you are considering what is going to motivate someone to take action with the copy of the copywriting that you are doing for your product.

3. FRONT-LOAD VALUE

Now, the third tip that I've got for you here today is to frontload value by sharing insider secrets. This is something that works incredibly well.

What you're trying to do here is demonstrate that you've got or are able to give an enormous amount of value upfront without even asking for anything. When you do that, what you can sort of trigger in the prospect's mind is, oh my God, if I'm able to get this for free, imagine what's behind the locked door. Imagine what's on the inside. Imagine what I could get if I did this, if I actually paid to buy something here, a service, or whatever it may be. This is why a lot of the reason why a lot of companies out there do a lot of things by providing free information, free consultations, and so on and so forth. It's just a great way to front-load the value.

It also plays to this rule of reciprocity. There you go. Bit of a tongue twist to that one, but it also plays to this role of reciprocity where you do something for someone else and then they do something for you and it's a great way to help boost conversions.

4. TELL A STORY

Now, storytelling is another thing that can go a long way to being able to convert someone or move someone to take action. It's a great way to hold someone's attention. We've been trained since we were little to listen to stories and to engage with stories.

There are four key elements that the storyteller will typically have as part of the story. They'll have a protagonist. This is the main character. They'll have a problem that that main character or that protagonist is going to come face to face with a description of what happens to that main character when they are faced with that problem.

And a resolution: This is something that you can weave into a marketing script and a marketing story to accompany your product. It may be something that you want to leverage on the about page when you're telling the story of how you came up with what you offer, or it may be just something that you sort of weave into a sales letter or verbal communication that you have with someone.

Imagine, for example, that you've got a furniture store and you're the owner of the furniture store, and you've just opened it, and someone comes into that furniture store for the very first time. In many ways, you're obviously not the prospect. You're the owner, but you are the protagonist. You've gone ahead and you've opened the store. Why did you open the store? Maybe you did it because you were tired of not being able to find things that you needed and you could weave the story in and build that personal emotion, and stories stick with people. People remember stories.

I think there's a lot of power there, and storytelling is something that we could spend hours and hours talking about, certainly something that you should make a conscious effort of trying to weave in to your marketing. If you just remember that every good story has four main elements, there's the protagonist, which is the main character. There's the problem, there's a story about what happened, and there's the resolution. How would things resolve in the end?

5. LEVERAGE SCARCITY AND LIMITATION 

Now the fifth thing that I want to share with you here today is about scarcity and limitation. Now, this is something that is enormously possible because it leverages the feeling of someone not wanting to miss out. I would urge you to use this wisely. You need to make sure you're using this in an ethical way because it is one of those very powerful sorts of marketing weapons that I think a lot of people abuse, and that's very much a short-term mindset.

A good example of this is countdown timers. There are a lot of e-commerce websites out there that will have a countdown timer, and there'll be some special on, and that special is ending at midnight. But if you come back the next day, the countdown timer is going again, and it's counting down to zero the next day again and again and again.

I mean, that's one of the fastest ways to lose credibility because essentially, you're just pulling the wall over your prospect's eyes and they're probably never going to buy you from you again if it is that they bought from you in the first place. I would say use these wisely. You don't want to do anything to fake scarcity and you really don't need to.

There are lots of different ways that you can do this. I'll give you a few examples in a moment, but to give you some vivid examples of scarcity in action. When the pandemic hit and all over the world, supermarket shelves were being wiped clean, there was no product left because people were like, "Oh, my God, I don't know if I'm going to be able to get this product anymore. I'm going to stockpile. I'm going to buy as many as I can," and supermarkets in many cases have to put limitations on how much of something you could actually buy to sort of divide it out between people. That's an example of people going mad when there is an appearance of a limitation there. Black Friday is another time we see this every single year, like a stampede. You've got those classic videos of hundreds of people waiting for Walmart to open the door so they can rush in and they're throwing everything they can find into their trolleys because they want to get that deal. 

Then there's limitation. There are tickets for concerts. You see this all the time where concerts or sporting events, the tickets are snapped up in minutes. Website servers often come down when faced with thousands and thousands of people trying to make a purchase all at one time. There's a real limitation in that case because there are only so many seats or so many entrances that are allowed into a festival or an event.

Another one that comes to mind, recently I was shopping for a T-shirt, and I go to the T-shirt stand and there's just one-T shirt left, and it happens to be in my size. There are a lot of people sort of milling around looking at the different T-shirts. I just picked this one up and I hold onto it and I think this is the last one. This might be a good one for me. I'm not going to put that back down because someone else is going to grab it. But it wasn't even a T-shirt that I wanted. It was just human nature kicking in and being like a scarcity mindset, which is a whole other topic we can talk about.

The whole point of the story is just to try to emphasize the fact that this is a powerful emotion that you can use to your advantage when you're trying to sell something. A few ideas about different types of things that you can limit. You can limit the number of items that are available for sale. That may be a real limitation. Maybe you're selling something and you've only got a certain amount of quantity of that item.

The easiest thing I think to limit is time. If you've got an e-commerce store, for example, why not every single month, once a month, run a special sale? Maybe you've got 15% off everything store-wide or buy one, get one free, or buy two, get the third one free or something. By doing that and putting a timer and big-timers everywhere, you're not using any false scarcity because that offer is going to expire at midnight. You are putting a real limitation there. Then you can always repeat that again in a few weeks. You just don't want to be doing it every single day.

Scarcity and limitation are very powerful marketing factors that you can use to your advantage.

6. UTILIZE SOCIAL PROOF

Another one is social proof. Social proof is about conveying credibility, but it's also about allaying fears. People, if they don't know your product or if they are spending a lot of money relative to what they think they're going to get, then you can make the decision easier by making sure that they know that it's working for a lot of other people. If it's working for a lot of other people, if there are a lot of other people using it, then it must be good.

There are different ways that you can show social proof. Comments and testimonials and stories from happy users or buyers. This is a good one. This is something that you can easily add to websites. You can add this sort of manually, or you can have tools do it for you, showing that other people are buying. If you've got lots of sales coming in, then you can actually use this to show real-time sales.

"Joe from Montana just bought such and such of an item." This is also something that a lot of people fake though. I don't think that you should use it to fake your sales. I think it's just not a good idea. I think it's a short-term win if you're doing anything like that. But that's the kind of thing that you can use to convey social proof that other people are buying.

You can also use credibility like your website or your product has been featured on or has been used by. If you think about it, this is where influencers can become so popular. Influencers are people that have influence over their followers. If they're using your product, then this is like a vote of confidence. This is showcasing credibility and social proof. Clearly, it works because there are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands all around the world, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world now that actually make a living from being an influencer.

That's another way we see that popping up all the time and think about how other people in your niche do it. What Amazon sellers do, they leverage customer reviews. Now, this is not something that an Amazon seller can as easily control. You just better have a damn good product, otherwise, you are going to get bad reviews. But if you do have a good product or good products, and you do have lots and lots of good reviews, then you can use that social proof to command a higher price for the product that you're selling.

Then there are different types of social proof as well. You've got things like photos. The photo could be of someone using your product or just simply a photo of your product. You'll see these in reviews as well. It could be a photo showcasing association. If I were to have a photo with Warren Buffett and I was to put that in an article or something that I wrote about investing, then I would be leveraging his credibility to my advantage. Written accounts of things that happen, these are essentially testimonials videos from customers, screenshots showing a lot of happy customers, or engagement. 

Even if you don't have that kind of explicit testimonial, another type of social proof is just audience size. We've got a few brands that have got quite large audiences. Now, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people follow our brands on the likes of Instagram, Facebook and TikTok and YouTube, and so on. This is a form of social proof in itself in terms of e-commerce as well. 

Our products are featured in tens of thousands of stores offline. 

Now, we're not just online, so when we are negotiating and being put in new stores offline, we can say, "Hey, we're already in all of these stores and all of these different brands carry us." It makes it easier to showcase that you sort of deserve to be wherever you want to be in that instance.

7. WRITE IN YOUR PROSPECT’S LEVEL

Now, the 7th point that I've got for you here today is to not pay too much attention to the grammar police and don't try to sound too intelligent in your writing, because that will inevitably backfire.

I think as a rule of thumb, you should always write or communicate in a way that your prospects can understand you. This comes back to defining who your audience is. What level of reading ability do they have? Are they scholars, or are they people that have got a basic education and can read at a basic level? Whatever they've got, you should talk to them on their terms.

Try not to alienate people by going out of your way to sound intelligent. I see this all the time and it always backfires. You don't really gain many sales by using big words to try to sound intelligent, but you do definitely lose sales as a result of that when people simply don't understand what it is that you're saying, or if they just think this guy is trying to show himself to be overly intelligent and whatever else that may imply.

I think it's okay to write the way you speak. That's absolutely fine. You don't need to pay too close attention to your grammar. The main point is that whatever you do write, if you've got a written ad, it should flow and it should work like a slippery slide where people come in at the top and they just keep going down and down and down reading that's if they are reading. But a video should do something very similar where someone starts watching a video and they're hanging on every word waiting for you to get to the next point, to the next point, to the next point. The longer someone spends with you, the more likely they are to actually convert for the most part, and the more likely you are going to be able to get a higher price for whatever it is that you're selling.

This is a rule that really does hold true across different types of media as well. It's not just for written, it's not just for videos.

8. LEVERAGE BENEFITS

The 8th point that I've got for you here today is about features and benefits and specifically using something that I call the "So that..." rule.

Now, the "So that..." rule is a rule that you can use to turn any feature into a benefit and benefits, other things that are what are going to move people to actually buy your product. This comes back to again thinking about "What's in it for me?" or in this case, what's in it for your prospect.

An example of this is if you say this mug has a handle, that's a feature, the handle is a feature. If you then add "So that..." to this, then you can uncover what the benefit of the handle is. "So, this mug has a handle so that you can easily and comfortably hold the mug without burning your hand." The benefit is being able to easily and comfortably hold the mug without burning your hand. That's the benefit.

Or "This iPhone case is made of Silicon. That's a feature so that it never slips out of your hand." That is a really powerful couple of words that you can add in a really, really easy way, a tool that you can use to uncover what the ultimate benefit is of whatever it is that you are trying to describe.

9. ELIMINATE CLAIMS YOU CAN NOT BACK UP

The 9th strategy that I've got for you here today is that people look for reasons not to buy something or they look for reasons not to proceed or invest or continue learning about something.

In written sales letters or when people are looking at a product in a shop, what is one of the first things they do? One of the first things they do is to look at the price tag and then they go to the details. If it's too expensive, then they won't buy it. Or if it's too expensive, then they won't continue reading or finding out more information about it.

On a written sales page, what people tend to do on the web is a lot of people, probably over half the people will scroll right down to the bottom, check the price, and then they will start going from bottom to top. When they're going from bottom to top, what are they doing? They're learning about the product and they are looking for reasons not to buy it. If your offer doesn't sell and the price is good, then you know that there's something else in your offer in the middle of your offer.

Again, assuming this is a written sales page that isn't working, that's causing a disconnect. Often, it's that one thing or two things. Two claims that you make that you don't actually back up could result in losing sales. This is something that you want to be pretty careful of. Any claims that you make, you want to make sure that you back them up. If you can't back it up, if it's not clear why or how you can make that claim, then it's probably better just to leave it out of your sales and your marketing messaging.

People don't care how tools work. They care about what the outcome is. No one cares about the inner workings of a toaster. They just want the toast. No one cares how a drill works. They just want the hole. Going down these rabbit holes and providing too much information can actually be counterproductive when it comes to making a sale.

A good four-step sort of flow that you can use here is to 1) show people the results, and 2) talk about the benefits of using this. 3) Talk about the rise in their status. As we spoke about earlier, what this product or service is going to do for their status. It's going to give them more money, which is going to make them wealthier. It's going to allow them to do this, that it's going to make them more beautiful by giving them a six-pack of ABS, whatever that thing is.

Ultimately, when you combine these things together, 4) it will allow you to sell more.

10. USE THE ‘AIDA’ APPROACH IN MARKETING

The 10th and final item that I've got for you here today, and I think this is something that will really help you tie all of this together is to use a structured approach in your marketing.

The approach that I'm going to give you is hopefully one that's going to be easy for you to remember because it's almost exactly the same as my name. It's AIDA, A-I-D-A. My name is spelled A-I-D-A-N. If you just remember that, knockoff the N, A-I-D-A. AIDA.

That is an acronym that you can use for when you are crafting marketing messages. The A stands for attention and you want to gain the reader or the prospect's attention from the get-go. This is a whole other topic that we could dive into.

You then want to hold interest. The I is for interest. The D is for desires. You want to tap into the desires, and then the A is for action. You want to convince them to take action.

Attention, Interest, Desire, and finally, Action.

This acronym, this structure is something that you can use on a social media post. It's something that you can use on a blog post. It's something that you can use on an e-commerce page. It's something that you can use in a conversation that you're having in person, in your life or anywhere else, sales, videos, whatever it is. You can use this structure anywhere, and you can expand out on these things.

If you couple this with the idea that you want your marketing messages to be a slippery slide where people come in at the top and they keep going down until the very end when you've convinced them to buy something, I think you'll do a lot better with your marketing. Again, this is something that I keep coming back to really, really easy one to remember, AIDA, and you can use this to great effect.

What I want to do right now is to recap everything that we've covered here. We started off by talking about defining who your audience is. Who is it that you are trying to connect with? That was the first tip that I gave you.

The second was to appeal to their emotions. The third was to front-load with value. Demonstrate that you've got so much value to give, and you're actually giving some of that upfront.

The fourth was to leverage storytelling. The fifth was to leverage scarcity and limitation. And again, I think you should do this in an ethical way. It's a very powerful conversion mechanism, so use it wisely.

The 6th was to use social proof, and we discussed a whole bunch of ways you can do that. The 7th was to speak on your prospects level and not above it. Not to get hung up too much on what the grammar is, but rather write the way you speak. That's absolutely fine.

The 8th was to focus on benefits and to leverage this so that rule so that you can pull out the benefits into your messaging. The 9th was to eliminate reasons that would stop people from buying, and the 10th was to structure what you're doing using the A-I-D-A, AIDA acronym.

This has been, I think, just a brain dump of marketing information here, specifically around copywriting. This is a topic that I'm quite passionate about. I've been a student of copywriting for probably 15 to 20 years now, and I've used it in lots of online businesses and offline businesses as well.

I hope you've been able to get a few nuggets of wisdom from all of this. What I would urge you to do here as we wrap up is to take just one of these strategies, one that resonates with you, one that you can find easy to implement immediately and use it. Then once you've started doing that add another one in and what I would also suggest you do is head over to TheGrowthBooth.com remember this is Episode Number 15.

Go to Episode Number 15 and have a look at the transcript. Download the transcript so that you've got all of this laid out for you in an easy-to-use form and then you can even print that off if you want to and use that as a reference to come back to when you are crafting your marketing messages.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Growth Booth. Do make sure that you tune in again next week for the next episode.