• The Secret To Writing Killer Product Copy
  • By Dave Gerhardt
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Translator: joyking7
  • Proofreader: devSC L9m

Many changes have changed the business world for the better since Web 2.0, but the way we create and sell product copywriting is still stuck in the mid-1990s.

I have two reflections on this situation, one more thought-provoking than the other.

The vast majority of people are not very good copywriters

For many people, writing is a cruel sport. It’s boring, and for these people, it takes a lot of time to write, but the results aren’t always good.

It’s actually fine.

What would be good if a team were made up of people with the same skills? Personally, I just mentioned that most people feel about writing what I feel about working with a lot of data in Excel.

Marketers are obsessed with technology

This is a thought-provoking point.

We get caught up in technology because everyone wants to “make something new” or be “data-driven”, and writing, one of the most important skills in business, takes a back seat.

But there’s a caveat here.

You don’t need to be a professional writer (read this twice).

I don’t consider myself a writer at all.

A lot of what I wrote would have been ripped up by English majors or AP style guides.

One of the most overlooked (and I think important) skills for a marketer today is copywriting.

“Here’s a simple trick to get more people to read what you write: write in spoken English.” — Graham

“The easiest way to get better at business writing is to stop writing in the business style.” – Seth Godin

“Let real readers follow our thoughts. At the same time, we want to make our message as clear as possible.” – Ali Mese

Customer-driven copywriting

In this article, we call it customer-driven copywriting.

It doesn’t matter if the email we’re sending is landing page copywriting or in-product captions. Everything we write must be written in a way that our customers understand and care about.

We always try and ask ourselves these questions:

Why would anyone care about my copy?

What information does the client get from reading my copy?

This is how you describe copywriting to a friend over a cup of coffee. Or you walk up to a stranger in a bar and tell it.

Here’s a welcome email to sign up for Drift.com. It’s as simple as what you would say to a person in real life:

Segment is a tool created for engineers. If they can do this for every highly technical product, so can you:

Stripe is the same, created for developers, but there are some things my mom can understand. Of course, she won’t know what “a uniform SET of apis” means, but the nice part about Stripe is that if you delete the first line of information, its meaning is still clear.

PillPack is an online pharmacy that delivers prescription drugs to your door. Although this can throw their business into a muddle, they keep things simple, clean and clear.

The key thing to remember as a marketer is that your job is not to dump your whole idea on someone the first time they visit your site. Your goal should always be to get him interested enough to take the next step. That’s how PillPack provides a better and simpler user experience – one that most people won’t get from a pharmacy.

Explore ideas for customer-driven copywriting

I’m going to share a little secret to help you with your next blog post, email, landing page, etc.

Your clients are writing on the Internet in their own words

Instead of trying to guess what the client is thinking or staring at a blank screen and thinking “What is the client going to say?” you can think outside the box and find the information to use in your copy, even if you’re not a good writer. .

There are some other caveats here.

Record the development of customers

Strengthen your relationships with product managers, designers, sales representatives, and anyone else who interacts with customers on a daily basis. If they’re good at their job, they’ll have a lot of notes that users directly refer to. Use these notes to write copywriting in the client’s own words. Why force the job harder? Just describe it the way they talk.

Quora

I used to spend a lot of time on Quora. It’s an incredible resource because the mechanics are great: a person comes to the Q&A page and asks questions about something. It’s one thing to think about it for yourself, it’s another to run off to Quora and ask a question.

We have a tool that helps us calculate our internal Net Promoter Score, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how people talk about NPS in their own words.

Quora is like a treasure trove of knowledge and there are many comments here to help complete this article on NPS.

How-can-I-increase-the-response-rate-of-Net-Promoter-Score

Product Hunt

There are few new ideas or products. You can use it to your advantage. Product Hunt’s reviews are an excellent resource for copywriting.

The best thing about Product Hunt is that it has a very active community, so there are often lots of reviews from users of specific products.

We recently launched a free tool that shows you who your VIP prospects are (you get daily email or Slack notifications), so I did a search in Product Hunt’s search box and found several startups that had done similar things before, but had gone bust.

These reviews will be a huge help in writing a copy for a new free app:

Social media

Undoing Twitter is easy. They’re great, we’re vain, it’s fun to see people tweeting about your product. But try to think further. – What did they say? How do they say this?

Most people use Twitter for two things:

  • Rewrite the tweet in your own words to make it seem normal
  • Rewrite the tweet in your own words so it fits the 140-word requirement

Sure, you can use tweets about your own products as inspiration for your copywriting. They describe things in the client’s own words.

That’s not a message we led with for Drift, but it’s a great message!

Amazon’s comments

Have you ever noticed how people write product reviews on Amazon? Every product – from books to shoes to shampoo.

Search Amazon for something relevant to your job, find a product, and dig through it for serious and meaningful reviews — directly from your potential customers.

Even if it doesn’t include a product you want to build, there are still plenty of other ways to find reviews.

Are you building a brand new e-commerce sales platform? Amazon doesn’t have reviews for e-commerce platforms, but it does have reviews for marketing books.

Hats off to Joanna Wiebe for writing the book Copy Hackers. If you’re interested, you should read all her sections on how to write.

It doesn’t matter where you look for ideas, but the point is, there are plenty of good ideas for copywriting. Sometimes we just need to think outside our box to find them.

That’s client-driven copywriting.