Welcome to the first Digital Marketing University lesson on copywriting, where we’ll focus on the absolute essentials of copywriting for the digital age: explaining exactly what copywriting is and how important it can be for the growth of your business online.

I’ll also be showing you the most powerful component that all quality copywriting is based upon, and how you can utilize it to make all of your copy more persuasive and better help you achieve the growth your business needs online.

After that, I’ve got the exact steps for you to follow so that you can get inside your potential customers’ heads so you’ll know exactly how to write to them so that you get the absolute best results.

Let’s get started…

Copywriting Defined:

“Copy is a direct conversation with the consumer.“ – Shirley Polykoff

Technically speaking, copywriting is every piece of text on your website. It’s the script for your video or audio content, it’s the titles, headlines, subject lines, social media posts, sign-offs, and everything in between.

Take a look at the picture below to see what I mean:

Copywriting is how your business communicates, it’s the voice in which you speak to the world and that is a point that sometimes gets forgotten.

Always remember that you’re not in a classroom or a conference hall giving a lecture. Instead, you want to be having a conversation!

Why is that so important? Well, because we’re all creatures that are run by emotion first and logic second.

We act on impulse and then rationalize our actions afterward.

Understanding that concept is key to crafting compelling written copy.

Let’s Get Emotional!

Machines don’t buy things, people do. Remember that you’re always influencing people, no matter what product or service you’re offering.

Whether it’s children’s toys or corporate accounting software, people buy from other people and you want people to buy from you.

Even if they’re buying on behalf of a business or organization, there’s still a person on the other side of your copywriting conversation.

Because we’re all primarily run by our emotions (yes, myself included), that means that evoking an emotional response is far more effective at persuading people than relying on their rational response.

I’m going to lay that out for you again because it’s the very first lesson we need grow your business online with effective copywriting:

Emotions are more powerful than logic.

Take a look at this (let it sink in and I’ll expand on this in more detail after it)…

The above picture is a visualization of our emotional “hierarchy of needs”. It is split into four broad categories, ranked from the lowest emotional impact on the bottom to most emotionally impactful at the top.

If possible you want to include all four categories in your persuasive copywriting to establish the best emotional response, so let’s go through them tier by tier:

The bottom tier is our functional values. These are the practical concerns that affect our emotions but are hardly emotional concerns in and of themselves.

Offering something that saves times, reduces costs, and limits risks will have emotional value and responses, but those emotions come from the results of those values, not inherently from the values themselves, making this the least emotionally appealing tier.

For example, you don’t get excited about the latest model of golf club because it’s been re-engineered and built with a new titanium composition that makes it 20% lighter and will drive the ball 50% farther…

You get excited because this new club will improve your golf game just by using it, which in turn helps you achieve your goal of improving which makes you feel accomplishment and pride.

You still get an emotional response, but it’s not a direct emotional appeal.

Things start to get more emotional in the second tier, with values that directly affect our own personal emotional values and well-being.

These can be as simple as being entertained and having fun, or as complex as the intricacies of nostalgic longing and therapeutic wellness.

An example of this would be those frozen Pizza ads that sell themselves on that homemade taste like Momma used to make.

You get nostalgia tugging at the heartstrings, fond familiar memories that put you at ease, maybe even a memory of a mouth-watering smell, and all of those positive emotions become associated with their brand of pizza.

Next is the Life Changing tier, which includes both inward and outward facing values such as motivation, sense of community and belonging, and self-actualization.

These are the values by which we judge our own personal growth both internally and externally, and can focus on very specific emotions such as hope and belonging.

Frankly, any gym or fitness program would be a sterling example of this:

Focus on your goal of self-improvement and self-actualization, build on the hope that your goals and achievable and plenty of people have done it before you, then provide the motivation to achieve that goal through community membership and belonging.

All of that in a couple of seconds and soon you’ll be living that Rocky montage yourself!

Social Impact through self-transcendence sounds pretty profound, but this emotional element can be more clearly defined as acts of charity.

Giving someone the opportunity to have a positive social impact at a (minor) cost to themselves is very emotionally rewarding, especially when you can do so while still meeting your needs and goals.

Functionally these are charity drives and promotions vary from humble bake sales to the % of each purchase goes towards a certain charity, and everything in between.

Ideally, your copywriting should try to leverage as many of the values from this “hierarchy of needs” as possible, so long as they can be related to the product or service you’re offering.

It sounds complicated, but businesses do it all the time with astounding results… Let me paint a picture of how that works:

Let’s say you need to paint a room in your house.

You’ve narrowed it down and there are two brands of paint you could use and they’re essentially identical: same price, same quality, same color. The only real difference between the two is who is selling them.

The person selling Paint A found it for you and showed you the price in a professional manner. Quick, efficient, and all business. You got exactly what you came for, and where given absolutely nothing to complain about. What more could you ask for?

The person selling Paint B was excited to hear about your project, told you they used the same color in their home and loved it, recommended some brushes, rags, tape and a paint tray for your project.

Finally, they offered to put a can aside for you in case you couldn’t find any option that fits you better since you said you were shopping around.

They also let you know that you wouldn’t just be buying Paint B because 10% of all sales are donated to Habitat For Humanity and that Paint B was deliberately designed to be safe and non-toxic for the long-term health of you and your family.

Now, let me ask you… who would you buy from?

Time and time again people buy from who they know, who they like, and who they trust. Those three emotional bridges resonate with people and ultimately influence their decision-making process far more powerfully than any rational argument.

When you create an emotional connection you can get an emotional response, and people act on their feelings.

They “listen to their guts” and often rely on those feelings to make their final decisions and then justify those decisions with the logical part of their brain.

If your audience of potential customers know you, like you, and trust you, they’ll also buy from you. In fact, those three things can easily outweigh more rational concerns like price, convenience, and even availability.

The aim of any and all copy that you write should be to leverage emotion first and then utilize the logical side to justify it second. That’s how people work, and that’s what makes good copy work as well.

The paint example above showed how you do that in-person, but how would you go about that with online copywriting? Keep reading…

Defining Your Voice

If you know nothing about formal writing, believe it or not, that could be an advantage when it comes to copywriting.

If you do consider yourself a proficient writer, well it’s time to throw a lot of the rules you’d normally follow when you sit down to do some copywriting. Unless your audience is English teachers, of course.

The thing is, we don’t write the way we speak, and written language is far less emotionally evoking than spoken language as a general rule.

Keep it simple. Simple short sentences with simple short words. Get right to the point. Forget proper English and use slang.

Use cliches and idioms. Use color in your text. Bold, italics, and underline the important parts. These days, use emojis too. 😉

Here’s an example of what I mean, from one of the emails I send as part of registering for the Digital Marketing University:

Write like you’re talking to an old friend. Ask questions. Tell a story. Maybe even make them laugh.

Always keep in mind that you’re not the teacher at the front of the classroom lecturing, you’re at the back of the room chatting with your friends!

If you’re struggling with finding the right tone, try following these steps to get started:

First, just get something written down. It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good, just get a first draft done so you have something to work with.

Make sure it covers all the basics you need to get started: your product/service, the benefits of what you’re offering, important dates, etc.

Once you have a draft that hits all the points you need to cover it’s time for step two:

Read it out loud! Listen to yourself and ask these questions: Does it sound like something you’d say in conversation, or is it a lecture?

How would you actually say it if you were talking to someone else?

Rewrite based on how it sounds to you, then read it out loud again. Rinse and repeat until you’re satisfied with what you’ve got!

But how can you tell if what you have is any good and if it will resonate with your audience of potential customers? To determine that you need an Ideal Audience Persona.

Your Ideal Audience Persona

Who are you selling to? Another easy question with a very complex answer.

To write effective and persuasive copy you need a deep understanding of your audience of potential customers.

You need to know who you’re talking to if you want to have a meaningful conversation with them.

But unlike an actual conversation, you can’t just ask each and every person who visits your website those small talk questions that get the conversation ball rolling.

Instead, you need to establish an Ideal Audience Persona that puts a face and a story on the ambiguous mob of potential customers out there.

First, download this template to use as your Ideal Client Persona and re-label it to make it clear to you: Ideal Client Persona / Product – Persona Name.

Next, we’re going to start with basics, you know the government form stuff: Age, gender, marital status, location, job title, income, etc.

These are important aspects to keep in mind when you’re trying to find the voice with which to speak to your audience, and this is particularly true if your audience is a niche market.

This process can help you determine what type of examples, stories, and testimonials will be particularly effective to leverage, as well as helping you determine their priorities and mindsets.

Then try and figure out what kind of movies they watch, what books they read, and where they spend their time online.

This part of the list can become particularly useful for establishing what specific kind of language to use in your copy that will speak well to your target audience, especially if you’re already familiar with the material yourself.

It will help you determine what your audience knows already, what issues are common and popular, and what styles and personalities resonate with them.

If you’re not sure where to start determining your language and tone, grab one of those magazines or visit those websites to get started.

Now it’s time to move deeper: determine their internal drivers and what makes them tick.

What are their emotional triggers, their goals, and their underlying values? Essentially this will help you determine how to frame the benefits you’re offering them so that they have the most emotional resonance.

Knowing which emotions are driving your audience towards which exact goals is essential to getting the emotional response you want.

Understanding the emotional triggers and goals will also let you determine the underlying values your audience holds and that will put you in a position to align your brand values with their own personal beliefs.

Equally important, determine what problems they’re trying to overcome and what are their biggest pain points?

This is important for two vital reasons: first knowing the problems your audience is trying to solve is essential to determining how to position the benefits of what you’re offering them, making your offer both more compelling and persuasive.

Second, their pain points will also be directly tied to their list of objections that they will use against buying what you’re offering (in general, not necessarily from you specifically).

If you understand those beforehand, you can address those objections and dismiss them in your copy even before your audience is fully aware of those pain points themselves.

Finally, establish their buying process. Know what their current options are, and where you fit in. Understand the objections they have in general and also specifically directed towards your company/products. And know what role they play in the buying process.

Listing out your competition will help you determine what objections your audience will likely have towards you in particular. Understanding this will, once again, let you dispel their concerns even before they’re fully aware of them.

Knowing your audience’s role in the buying process will further help you determine both how to address their potential objections and how to position your copy to be compelling and persuasive by focusing on the benefits while removing their barriers towards making a purchase.

This is an exercise in narrowing down who exactly your business to speaking to because no matter how good the product or service you’re offering, there is no potential audience that includes everybody.

If you write specifically for everyone, your conversation becomes far less compelling and persuasive to the niche of people who are actually interesting in what you have to offer.

When you have the persona filled in, the next time you sit down to write some copy, take this out to remind you who exactly you’re going to be speaking to and it’ll become much easier to figure out exactly what to say.

Where to Look

Getting into the heads of your ideal audience is easier said than done, and you may find yourself with blank spots as you’re trying to fill in your Ideal Audience Persona.

That’s fine, you’re narrowing down what you know and what you don’t yet know about your audience of customers. But where do you go to fill in those blanks?

Fortunately, you don’t have to go out and survey people on the street to put together an ideal audience persona, it’s much simpler than that. There are plenty of online sources that will have all this information and more.

Start with a search on Google.com or Amazon.com of competing products and look for reviews.

Read them and take note not only of what people are saying, what they like and what they don’t like about a certain product, but also how they’re saying it.

For example, if we look at iPhones…

[Amazon.com]

The lesson here is that people leaving reviews for the latest iPhone are going to speak a lot differently and have entirely different concerns than people leaving reviews for lawn mowers.

It’s crucial to understand what your audience values in your product, and how they think and speak about it.

Read a few different reviews and you should start noticing some recurring themes, words, and even phrases.

Doing a text search on a review page can help you hone in on specific jargon, lingo, and terms that you can take and incorporate into your written copy.

This way you can speak the same language as your target audience, creating familiarity and showing them you understand their concerns and where they’re coming from.

Next, you can use sites like https://www.quora.com/ or social media platforms like reddit.com to search for the exact questions your potential customers and asking, directly from their mouth (or keyboard).

This way you answer their questions before they even know they want to ask them with your copywriting.

[Quora.com Search]

Explore these posts and take note of the recurring questions, themes, and of course the actual language itself.

Use the most frequently recurring questions or pain points to fill in your Ideal Client Persona, and take notes of any patterns you see in the language both of the people asking the questions and from the most highly rated answers.

[Reddit.com Search]

Creating a separate document specifically for language patterns, keywords, questions and highly rated reviews and testimonials can be an excellent cheat sheet that you can refer to any time you have to create some new copy, without having to do all the research again and again.

These steps go a long way in building the three emotional bridges of being someone your audience knows, likes and trusts. They will trust you because you take away their objections even before they can voice them.

They will start to like you because you’re speaking their language and understand where they’re coming from. And they will feel like they know you because you already know who they are, what they want, and why they want it.

Of course getting direct feedback from your customers is generally the best practice, but if you don’t already have a sizeable pool of clients to draw from then all the websites and tools above will work in a pinch.

Sending out surveys, asking for written or even video reviews and feedback is absolutely invaluable when you’re trying to get a handle on exactly who your customers are, what’s important to them, and what they like and don’t like about your product and even your competition.

Once you understand the psychology and general context of the people who are reading your copy, you can start to speak to them in their “language”. When you do this the benefits are threefold:

1. They’ll begin to like you because you can address their specific concerns, needs, and goals in a way that shows them you understand them and want to do your best to help them.
2. They’ll begin to trust you because you can address their objects and pain points before they even get a chance to voice them, showing that not only do you want to help them, but you’re also capable of doing so because you understand their struggles and how to overcome them.
3. And through all of that, they’ll start to feel like they know you because you know them the same way you feel when you strike up a conversation with someone who you end up having a ton in common with.

And when given the option of choosing someone else, even if you’re a bigger, more established and familiar competition, they’re not going to pick them.

They’re going to pick you because they have an emotional connection with you and your brand. They like you, trust you, know you.

That’s what good copywriting does for your business, and these are the very first steps to take towards creating highly-persuasive and compelling copy for your business to achieve the growth you need online.

Exempli Gratia

Now let’s go into an actual step-by-step example of the process of building both an Ideal Audience Persona and an Audience Language Pattern document.

For this example, let’s say you were in the fitness industry and had to write some copy to sell a new protein powder supplement.

First, search Google for protein powder and you get these results:

[Google Search Results]

You can already see you have a list of the most popular products and the most frequently asked questions.

You can check the reviews customers have left on Google where applicable, but searching on Amazon is an even better place to start gathering reviews, both positive and negative.

[Amazon.com Search Results]

Once on Amazon pick a product, usually, it doesn’t hurt to start with the Best Seller since that will likely be your biggest competition. There are two sections on their product page that you’ll want to pay particular attention too.

First, the Customer questions & answers section. Take note not only of what people are most commonly asking but also how they’re asking.

[Amazon.com Product Page]

Next is the Review Section itself. Scroll through and look for patterns and themes in both the positive reviews and the negative ones. Recurring concerns and praise will let you narrow down what makes and breaks a product in the eyes of the people buying it.

[Amazon.com Product Page]

Even a quick look at our protein powder example above should let you narrow down on at least two major area of concern of this audience… Taste and quality of ingredients.

Once you’ve gathered as much info from Amazon and Google as you can, it’s time to head over to a site like www.Quora.com that will let you further explore the most common questions and concerns people are asking about your particular product and/or industry.

Start typing your product/service into quora and you’ll get a list of questions related to it. Take note not only of the answers given, but of the questions themselves, and the language used both in the post and in the replies.

[Quora.com]

You can get similar, although usually more casual (which can actually be better for copywriting purposes), results from finding a community on www.Reddit.com by searching for your product or service there.

[Reddit.com Search]

Head into any applicable subreddits and search again within that subreddit. That should net you some useful results and reviews to draw from.

[Reddit.com]

After following these steps for the protein powder example, here’s what we can put together based simply on the examples used here:

This is a great starting point when it comes to getting to know the audience that you’ll be communicating with through your copywriting.

Remember that the Persona above fills in most the categories, but it’s by no means complete at this point.

Also keep in mind that while the persona has very specific ages, genders, etc, that doesn’t actually mean you’re only writing for the individuals that fit that mold.

While the specifics will obviously vary from person to person, their goals, emotional triggers, problems, and drivers are the most important aspects to focus on and will remain largely unchanged.

Traffic, Leads, & Sales

Copywriting can be used to increase every single aspect of your business online, and you can find all of that in the DMU Copywriting section in detail, but for now, we’ll just go into the big three concerns for all online businesses: Traffic, Leads, and Sales.

Quality compelling copywriting is the key to improving traffic. Period. If nobody is clicking your ads, opening your videos, or reading your posts is most likely that your copywriting is to blame.

If your short copy (headlines, email subject lines, clickable links, etc) don’t grab attention, arouse interest, and create a desire in the minds of your audience, you have some work to do.

Fortunately, I’ll be covering exactly how to do all of that in the copywriting modules coming up, and it’ll be easier than ever to achieve thanks to the tools you’ve created for yourself today.

Always remember that when it comes to traffic and copywriting: creating curiosity is key!

So you got the traffic to actually visit your site, but how can you use your copywriting to capture some quality leads for your business online?

They’re interested in the product or service you’re offering, but they’re not interested in you…yet! You need to win them over, and this is where you should leverage as many of the values from the “hierarchy of needs” as possible.

You want to give them as many emotionally evoking benefits as possible to get them interested in you and your brand.

And for sales, your customers have found you and gotten to know you, now you just need them to take that last step and convert from lead to sale.

There are a number of useful techniques to accomplish this (which we’ll go over in detail in a later post!), but the essentials are simple: do as much as you can to remove their objections and show them exactly why you’re the best choice to help them achieve their desired result.

Recap

The key takeaways today about copywriting are the fundamental foundations on which you can build quality persuasive and compelling copy that can be utilized to grow your business online.

Copywriting is how your company communicate with your audience of customers. Copy itself encompasses everything from text on your website, the stories in your emails, the script for your video content, titles, headlines, and everything in between.

Copywriting is most effective and persuasive when it’s evoking an emotional response. This is because people act on emotion first, and rationalize those actions second. For this reason casual, conversational style is generally the most effective.

The three key emotional bridges your copy needs to cross to get through to your audience are Knowing You, Liking You, and Trusting You.

The best way to get your audience to feel that way about your business is to know exactly who they are, what’s important to them, how they speak, etc.

To establish this and keep it in your mind when creating the copy, create an Ideal Audience Persona and an Audience Language Pattern document after thoroughly researching your audience.

You can get started by searching sites like Amazon, Quorra, Reddit, or any other online hub your target audience uses.

Once you have all of these things established your copywriting will instantly become more compelling and more persuasive, no matter what you’re selling, what industry you’re in, or what more advanced copywriting formulas you utilize.

With an Ideal Audience Persona and some Audience Language Patterns in hand, you’re more than ready for the next step, which we’ll cover in our next lesson on the core elements and formulas that define quality copywriting.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope you get value along with a step by step plan now so you can comment below and let me know: What is one key idea that you got from reading this?

OR if you have any questions on how you would apply this to your business then you can comment below.

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