How to be specific in your copywriting

Presented live on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 – register for our next tutorials

The best copywriting doesn’t happen in the writing stage – it’s during editing. In this tutorial, you’ll see how to use one of the seven primary sweeps to edit the awesome into your copy. Includes an example email that brought in 3.5x the paid conversions.


Joanna is writing in Airstory, the beautiful drag-and-drop document platform. 

TRANSCRIPT

Thanks for joining me for Tutorial Tuesday. We didn’t get a chance to do Tutorial Tuesday last week. So I’m stoked that we’re back and able to talk today about editing in the awesome.

When you’re writing copy, the goal is to make it awesome, generally. Awesome being, is it high converting? Does it engage people? And so we’re gonna talk about that today. Cheryl, hi! And people are saying hi, that’s very nice. Hello. We’ve got Sarah here as well, from AirStory. Sarah will be here answering questions, wherever possible as we go. If you have any questions, I’m also looking at them, if you chat them. So if you do want to chat over any questions as we go through this, I should have no problem being able to answer those as we go. Alternatively, we can talk about them at the very end.

This is gonna be about 10 to 20 minutes, with some time of course, if there are questions, it’ll go a little longer. If not, it might be shorter. So cool. So yeah, we are recording. So, other than that, I think we’re just gonna dive right in.

I will share my screen in just a moment. But I just want a quick reminder of the goal, right? So the goal is to help you see what copywriters, whether you’re a copywriter or not, what copywriters do to take their copy to the proverbial next level. But what do we do? And that’s … There’s a lot of stuff that happens during editing. But one of the things that comes up a lot are what are called “sweeps.”

So, after you’ve put your first draft of your copy down on the page, it’s usually pretty ugly. If you’re doing it right, you’re not proud of it, it’s just you’ve got all the stuff in the right order. You’ve used Voice Of Customer data to find your messages and organize them. Which we talked about in a Tutorial Tuesday, a couple weeks ago with Amazon review mining. And we’ll do more of that as we go through these Tutorial Tuesdays. Things other than Amazon review mining, different looks at other types of review mining, and things like that.

But, so your first draft is all about finding that and then organizing it on the page. So great, you’ve got that, you’ve stitched it together with some words, and now you’re left with, ‘Okay how do I make this really good though? There’s a lot of stuff here, what do I do now?’ So we’re talking about the editing part of the process. Editing in the awesome. So sweeps are part of that.

There are essentially seven primary sweeps. We’ll talk about those more over time. Today we’re gonna talk about one sweep in particular and I’m gonna share my desktop with you now. So, you should see my desktop showing, hopefully, you’re seeing it okay. If you can’t see it let me know, hopefully you’re also hearing me okay, but I haven’t seen any chats that indicate that you’re not, so that’s good too.

so, we’re talking about the specificity sweep. Now what is that? Great. People are seeing it, that’s awesome. Thank you. What is the specificity sweep? Okay, that’s where we want to go through, and once you’ve got your crappy rough draft down, you go through it and you look for areas where you could be more specific. Like this is nothing crazier than it sounds. How can you be more specific, with the goal of helping to bring to life, in the mind of the reader, your prospect, however you refer to this person, bringing to mind actual images. Actually engaging their imaginations is completely possible. The problem is, that so much marketing works against getting specific.

So there seems to be a sense of pride among a lot of marketers, nothing against them, I’m a marketer, but there’s a lot of pride in summarizing everything down to as few words as possible. It’s like, “Oh, we finally got that perfectly polished message that everybody is going to love.” But, in fact, it’s usually written by committee, and no one knows what exactly you mean.

So when we want to be specific, we’re going to do things like focusing on one topic. So it’s hard to get specific about anything if you’re talking about a whole bunch of different things. And so, I’m going to show you in today’s example. I’m going to show you what that really means.

Helping your prospect or reader, again whatever word you use, visualize the thing you’re trying to explain in their lives. Not just generally, but how it would work or what it would look like in their lives. And again, we’re gonna talk through all of this as we go through the tutorial, through the example. Engaging the imagination. This is a huge opportunity for every copywriter on the planet. And we’re not talking about going crazy, like getting really detailed or down to this deep, narrative level where you’re competing with J.K Rowling or something. Not that at all. But can you use your words to engage your prospect’s imagination? Can you do that? Getting specific can help you do exactly that. And that will, of course, then create those vivid word pictures.

A big part of getting specific is also reading through, doing the specificity sweep and asking, “Can my reader figure out what I’m trying to say? Do they know what I’m trying to say, or are they doing all the work? Am I putting the burden on my reader of figuring out what it is that they’re reading and what the point is in all of it and why this line matters? How that’s supposed to make them feel.” How much work are you putting on your reader? Connecting the dots.

We’re gonna see again examples of this stuff today. What does it mean if you say something like, “Look, we got an 18% improvement when we increased our prices, or changed something on our site.” Like, let’s say you were sending out a marketing email or something. And you give a quick summary of what you’re talking about, but people don’t quite understand what that means. And you can never be too obvious, I think, with what you’re trying to express, if you want people to understand you. And this works at every single level. So if you’re like, “Oh, my audience is really smart, and they’re all CPA’s and they don’t have any time to read everything.” But they also don’t have time to figure out what you’re trying to say or connect the dots, that you should be connecting for them. So, again, we’ll talk through that.

Unpacking summaries, too, if you say, “Look at this color.” And then the alternative is, “Look at the color, it’s hot pink.” There’s a very different thing there we can actually … One is more specific than the other. One brings something real to life in the imagination of your prospect, and actually fires something in their brain. And we’ve seen, we haven’t done the studies, we don’t work that way, in academic environments sadly, but we have read them, and using unexpected phrasing fires up parts of the brain that are otherwise just kind of dull.

Right? So, normally when we’re reading through copy and it’s all very polished and smooth, and the marketer feels very proud of him or herself, in fact what’s happening when a person’s reading that, is nothing’s really triggering, right? We’re not seeing anything. Nothing’s firing in our brain. So we want to get to a place where we’re so specific, at the right points, that people, that their brains get engaged. That’s the point. We don’t want to be invisible. We don’t want to be missed. We don’t want to be a wallflower. We want to be noticed and read and absorbed as well.

Does this all make sense? Is anybody like, “What? This doesn’t sound right at all”? We’re good? Not seeing any like, “No, this is weird.” Makes sense. Jessie says it makes sense. So, thanks. Okay. Cool. Good [inaudible 00:07:50] great. Elizabeth thank you, perfect. Okay, good. So we’re good. That’s awesome.

Now, let’s look at what we … what we’re really talking about for today’s tutorial. Okay so that’s the high level lesson. Pretty straight-forward I think. I think with just that alone you could go through something you’ve just written and do a specificity sweep. But, we’re not just gonna go there. Let’s go through and actually show you what that looks like.

So we … this is an example that I use sometimes because it’s a pretty good example. We did a test last year-ish, I think it was last year, where we worked with Wistia the video hosting provider. And we optimized their emails in their onboarding email sequence. So there were eight emails in one of the three sequences that were triggered during a trial user’s onboarding experience. The sequence that we worked on was … the end goal was to get the prospect, the user, the trial user, to become a paying customer.

Okay, so, our goal was to take the control emails, as they were, and optimize them, and then we tested it. And the result was, when we tested our eight against their eight, we got 3.5 times the paid conversions. 3.5 times. 350% lift. Big deal. And we’re talking about paid conversions, so it’s a pretty good example. It’s why I reference it pretty frequently. The majority of what we changed in these emails was just the way we were expressing the message. So what we were saying was basically the same, how we were saying it was different. With the exception of the one I’m gonna show you today, where we were focusing … we decided to also focus on one topic, instead of three.

You have a little bit of preamble there, but let me show you what that first email was. So one of the emails that we optimized, this was the control email that’s showing now on the screen. [inaudible 00:09:50] possibly can’t see that much. I’m just gonna zoom in a little bit, so everybody can see a tad bit better. Hopefully that’s good for everyone.

Okay, so this was the control email. I’m just gonna scroll up and look at what the copy was. “Ready, set, engage. Want to turn your passive viewers into an active audience? Timeline Actions are an easy way to get your viewers to take action. You can add annotations, great calls to action, or collect emails through turnstile, all within the video player. Learn more in this quick overview from Jeff and Emily.” Then there was a video player there, then a button that read, “I want to engage my viewers”, then help and support, then a button that read, “Visit the help center”.

Okay, so that’s what’s going on. You already saw it, that’s how it presented on the page. Good, right? I think for a lot of people, today … Okay, cool [inaudible 00:10:37] just said that that’s cool. So, this is a perfectly acceptable email. This kind of email goes out all the time, especially in onboarding sequences, where the point seems to be to say everything as quickly as possible and hope that something you say in that very small space sticks somehow. So that’s a problem. That’s the opposite of what we want to do. Now, we always want to use as few words as we need to use, but we need those words to be really intentional, and that’s what the specificity sweep is all about. So, let me show you how you would do a sweep.

If your goal first is to go through and write your draft. Cool. Or you get a control like this and you’re going to write a new variation to test against it. Okay cool. So you have that initial draft in place and then you want to look for those things, again back to how to be specific, these things … Oh, I’ve also got … I didn’t mention these, as well. So what that actually looks like. So I’ll show that, leave that there on the page so you can see it right now. But then you want to go through, and instead of just starting to edit, you want to comment on the parts, or highlight the parts that need to be optimized. Or that could be optimized.

So, here’s what that means. So the sweep itself, this is the same copy we just saw. I’m gonna close this so we can see more of the comments. All you do is go through and you leave comments to yourself. Little notes to self, that are like, “Okay” … When you’re doing the specificity sweep, you’re really asking, “Is this specific? Is this bringing anything to mind for my prospect? Can we push it further so they might actually visualize what we’re talking about? They might actually get it without having to sit there and think about what we’re tying to say. Which we know nobody is ever going to do. They are too busy for that. They do not need to spend time figuring out what we’re trying to say as we’re marketing to them.

“Ready, set, engage.” Go through and ask questions. In this case, does this come to life in a reader’s mind? That’s my question, it’s a note to self. “Want to turn?” Is turn a specific enough word? “Passive viewers, active audience.” In this case, again I’m just … you can see what I’m going through, but the idea here is not to start making edits yet. It’s to go through and say, “Okay. Is … can we get more specific with this? What’s a passive viewer?” We’re almost at a point with that where we can understand what a passive viewer might look like, but not quite, right? It’s 75%. What’s a passive viewer? That sounds … it could happen anywhere. There could be a person, a bystander on the street passively viewing a Ferrari going by, right? It’s not specific enough to our prospect’s life, to what they’re really doing and why we’re connecting with them right now.

So, how can we bring that to life? How can we bring active audience to life as well? And as you go through this, and as you make comments on all the stuff that feels summarized and not specific, as you’re commenting those, your goal won’t necessarily be to change every single phrase that you identify into something more specific. Your goal, for now, is just to look through and see where the opportunities are. You might then, go ahead and say, “Okay, there are three or four key opportunities here. I’m not going to change everything. I’m going to change some things strategically.” And then make those decisions. Which, I’m going to show you right away.

So, “take action”. Is there a better … “Take action” is right here, is there a better way to say that? “Add annotations, create calls to action or collect emails though turnstile”. Now, that’s the key point here, where one of the points, while being specific, is being specific about one key thing. So if there’s one overarching idea, your reader can better understand it than many ideas. In this case, they’re saying, “Something called Timeline Actions, which I don’t know what that is, is going to help me do three things. ‘Add annotations’, what does that mean? ‘Create calls to action’, okay I know what that is. I can’t visualize it, but I know at least what that is. ‘Or collect emails through turnstile’, what is turnstile?”

So these three things alone stacked up here, already putting all sorts of friction in your reader’s mind, because they don’t know what any of that stuff is. They know what one of those three things are. Do they care so much that they’re gonna sit here and go, “I wonder what … so is an annotation like … is that like a thing? Is that what they do on YouTube, where you can add a little note for people to click? And collecting emails through turnstile; what’s a turnstile? Isn’t that the thing I go though on the subway? I think that’s what I go through on a subway.”

So we’ve got all these questions, and this is where we’d say, “Okay. Let’s choose one. Not three things. Let’s choose one big idea for them to wrap their head around.” You’re still going to have the same call to action, still really gonna be about Timeline Actions, except we’re only gonna talk about one. Because one might sell them on it. Three is just going to introduce a topic that they don’t really understand anyway. So we’ve focused on one.

And then Jeff and Emily, those are two people that maybe we could bring to life. Who are Jeff and Emily? Who are they? Is Jeff tall Jeff? What might I need to know to care about these people? Get specific with me. A name is a good thing. It’s not just saying, “Hey overviewed from two people at Wistia”, but rather from Jeff and Emily. We’re getting there. But can we do more? And then “learn more” of course is another one.

So, I’ve gone through and you can see that the notes I was just talking to you about are all highlighted here as notes. That’s the sweep. That’s the actual sweep itself is when you go over it and you comment on the things that need to be updated. Okay? Cool. Tyler’s loving it. That’s awesome. That’s very good. So, now, for the purposes … just like with a cooking show, we’ve gone ahead and done this in advance, but of course we’ve actually done it in advance to the end that we did this before and we tested it. And we already [inaudible 00:16:30] what the results. Jessie, that’s awesome, glad you liked it too.

So what’s our new version? Once you’ve done the sweep, you go back over and now you start writing stuff in … haha. Thanks Veronica, it’s very specific. Yay! Here’s what we did. We decided to focus the entire email, not on Timeline Actions, excuse me, but on turnstiles. What’s a turnstile? And that’s largely because people love turnstiles. Sorry, excuse me. I love turnstiles, their users loved it, we read through a lot of user feedback. And turnstiles are a big deal, once you know what they are. When you don’t know what they are, you have no idea. Most people call this gated content. So to call it a turnstile, is introducing a new term. We have to help them understand what that is. Because it’s going to be really valuable to them.

Here are some things that we did. Instead of “ready, set, engage”, which was their old headline, which I was like, “What are you … I don’t know … What is that? I don’t know what it is.” It’s trying to be clever, it’s not specific in any real way. Here’s something specific. Can I get this? “Video marketing with Wistia turns viewers into leads.” Is that specific? Do I get that? Do I get it? Video marketing might be brought to life differently. Viewers might look different, leads might look different. But as a headline to pull them in, is this specific enough that they’re going to get it without having to sit there and go, “What do they mean?” Video marketing with Wistia turns viewers into leads.

Now, if I don’t care about collecting leads, this isn’t going to matter to me. But then turnstiles won’t matter to me at all. So it’s okay for those people who are like, “Hmm. I don’t really know. I don’t get it. I don’t know why I would want a lead. What’s a lead?” That’s okay, because then a turnstile would never matter to them. So it’s okay for them to open this, go, “What?” And close it down. But people who care about leads will go, “Oh. Video marketing with Wistia turns viewers into leads. Okay I wonder … What does that mean? Like how? What are you talking about?” And that’s how we get them to keep reading.

Then we get into some specifics like, “What if you could double your leads?” Specific. “Without doubling your PPC spend.” That’s specific. In my real life, I know what a PPC spend is, as a marketer. I know what doubling is. I can visualize what two times something is. “Without double your content production.” We could get more specific there. But again, you don’t have to make every single line pop, because there’s also the break, the time when people are like, “Okay, I saw that thing. Came to life in my mind. And let me take a bit of a breath.”

So, “Without double your content production, without doing anything more than switching on Wistia turnstiles.” At this point, we’re still getting specific, okay. Now we’re getting into it. But I still don’t know what a turnstile is. Then we talk a bit more about it, we’re building anticipation with specifics. “When we stopped using on-page lead generation forums and started using video turnstiles, we went from” specifics “a 6% conversion rate to an 11% conversion rate.” Okay, we’re getting specific. If I did a sweep of this, I wouldn’t really have anything to say about this because we’re actually getting very specific.

I’m saying the word specific a lot, I’m very conscious about how many times I’m saying it. “That’s nearly double the leads.” Okay, great. “Without any extra effort.” Okay. This is more summarized, and we could say, “Okay, what does effort look like?” And we could bring that to life further, if we were to optimize this further and test it against this one. “‘Sounds great’ you say, ‘but what on earth is a turnstile?'” That is us bringing it back to them. So it’s specific to their lives, to what’s actually going on in their minds, and then we show them.

This is where … when you’re like, “Okay we need images on the page or in the email. And we need videos as well.” This is how we recommend to use them. In support of the message. So, if this little screenshot of a turnstile, which is actually a GIF, if it was up at the top of the page, because you thought people needed to see a video or a GIF or something sooner, that’s not as necessarily as great for conversion as if it actually fits into the flow. Like, we’re really demonstrating or using this email as a demo to get people on board with using turnstiles and how to use them, what that’s gonna look like. So by the end of this, they’ve got an education in what a turnstile is, enough that they can go over to the Wistia account and use it.

Then we get really specific here, and exactly how to turn … how to use these turnstiles. Great. No questions in my mind as your reader. If I’m still reading this, no questions. And we go through and do other things like, instead of using not positioned next to an ugly forum, or not positioned next to a forum, where this is a line here, so they see your video front and center and not squished next to an ugly forum, could have again been not positioned next to a forum, but we wanted to bring it to life, right?

The problem is, having a squished little forum on a landing page, that’s a lead gen page, and the forum is ugly and long and tall and ugh and it’s really hard to fill in because it’s been squished in there. So we want to use those kinds of visual words to bring ideas to mind so people aren’t trying to figure out what’s wrong with having [inaudible 00:21:37] lead gen page.

Okay, so we get through that. It keeps going all the way to the end being specific the whole way through. That is the way that we move from having a perfectly fine control, great, to the sweep, right? Where we’ve gone and marked it up, to the new version itself, which is what we got here, which is where we had .. this is one of the eight emails that brought in that 3.5 times conversion rate lift.

So, that’s really it for this tutorial. The specificity sweep, just gonna put it back on the screen here in case you didn’t get a chance to look at what that looks like, because I forgot to put it in there sooner. But do we have any questions? Or is everything pretty clear? I’m getting comments here that it’s clear, it’s good. What did Paula ask? Sorry, Page asked, “How did you do VOC research for this particular project? I’m assuming it was a lighter version of what you would do if you were creating something from scratch.”

No! It’s still the same. So, we’re trying to get to a place where we’re … The control is what it is. And when you’re writing new copy, you’re only mildly concerned about the control. So … the control is, it exists, you’re trying to beat it, but your job is still to go in and write the ultimate email, in this case, or landing page, or whatever it is that you might be testing. And so you still do the same amount of research you would do any other time. So, for us, we went through and we did the usual reviews of what people were saying about using YouTube, which is a big competitor of course for Wistia, it’s the free option. I don’t think that they would necessarily call it a competitor, because it’s a free option with a different value prop, but it is what prospects … I don’t know, maybe they would call it that. But it is what prospects are considering.

So, we went through and looked at what’s problematic. What people are saying is problematic about using YouTube for their business videos. We went through a bunch of testimonials, a bunch of other reviews of using video marketing. So the same stuff that we always do for Voice Of Customer data research, did the same things here. And that’s how we surfaced a lot of this stuff, including some … I mean, I didn’t get to show you … I showed you one of many emails in this, so yeah, there’s more we’ll talk about at some point.

Nancy asks, “Is there a preferred order in which to do the various sweeps?” Well, we haven’t got into the other sweeps, but yeah. They all have to work together, and sometimes they will conflict with each other. So you need to have a sort of hierarchy of which one’s most important, where clarity is the number one sweep. It’s always clarity as sweep number one. That’s like the most important sweep. But we can talk more about those as we go through doing other Tutorial Tuesdays. Cool?

Marian asks,”How do you differentiate important industry jargon from language normal people understand? Do you tend to find that’s doing more casual and simple converts better?” I mean it’s the sixth grade reading level thing, right? For everybody, for everybody, the message sticks better when it’s easier to consume. So that means I don’t have to do work to understand what’s going on. And you’ll know that if you’ve ever worked with enterprise level businesses, like B2B for enterprise. You’ll have seen how bad some of that copy can be because there’s this big, built-in assumption that people need … that when you’re a big, important person or something, you need big, important language. And it’s just as … it’s deadly dull.

So we do recommend that you focus on the sixth grade reading level, at most. Like most people, do. That’s the way to get people to understand. And so when you’re looking for casual language, we’re not talking about necessarily informal, but rather just simplified to a level where it’s really easy to consume and nobody has to go, “What? I don’t think I … I don’t get that.” And they’re not stuck on words. So, hopefully that helps a bit, Marian.

Whoops, sorry. I have to go back to this. Okay, cool. Let me see, there are some other ones here. Great. Okay, cool. Thanks, guys. I’m just reading through, there’s some nice stuff here, thank you. So, Patricia says, “Sounds like the specificity sweeping would fit in any situation. Email optims …” Yeah. Absolutely. So it’s a sweep that we do on any copy that you write, anytime, anywhere. From a cold email to a long forum sales page. Absolutely. Yeah.

Erin says, “When you do your sweep, are you the only one doing the sweep, or do you have your staff peek in with their thoughts as well?” We don’t have like a [ginormous 00:26:11] staff, so we do have … if it’s … we tend to have more than one person reviewing copy that we write, yes. And so … but we haven’t formally done like, “Hey, you’re getting the clarity sweep. You’re getting the persuasion sweep” or anything like that. So, no. It’s usually just me, when I’m doing my writing for it, I go through and do my own sweeps. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong to do other ones, but the whole writing by committee thing, you have to have the other people who are doing the sweeps, you have to trust them to be … to do it the way that you would do it, and to understand the sweeps you’ve already done. And it can be just really hard to write with other people. Which, I’m sure anybody who writes has found. So hopefully that helps.

Linda. So Linda asked, “Can you talk what triggers some?” I assume that means triggers for the onboarding emails. So there were just three different triggers. It was based on what you did in-app for Wistia. I don’t really have the specifics on what the other ones were. But the whole idea there was that you would just … once someone has uploaded a video, then you’ll get emails triggered so that will move you from that key moment to the next moment that you need to have in order to get toward that ‘aha’ moment. Which we talk about of course when we’re writing emails.

Cathy asks, “What are examples of …” Oh, personalized triggers. So Cathy asked the same question as Linda. We can talk more about that at some other point when we do more about segmentation, let’s say.

Veronica asks, “How to ask really good questions when it comes to editing the first draft.” Well, we’re talking about specificity questions. So we’re really just saying … turning all of these bullets that we’ve got here under the specificity sweep, all of those become questions. Right? Is this focused on one topic? Is my reader going to be focused on one topic here, or dealing with a whole bunch of different topics? Is it helping them visualize what we’re trying to say? So in the Wistia case, is it helping them visualize the turnstile and how that will work in their life? The control wasn’t and the new variation was.

Did it engage my imagination? And sometimes it will engage your imagination the whole way through, like story-based emails. Other times it will only engage at certain points, right? Like this one did, where there’s little points that bring to life visuals. Creating vivid word pictures, same kind of thing. So all of those just turn into questions. And that’s how you can go through and do those.

Marnie, “Do you use a readability tool to check that your writing is at the sixth grade level?” Not anymore. I did in the beginning. Word had all … back when I used Word. It had those built-in. But you can run that online. Just pop your copy into different tools and it’ll do that. Yeah, I don’t use it anymore. What’s the one called that’s in-app? The other readability one? All I can think of is Myers-Briggs and it’s not. What is it called? If anybody knows, let me know.

Lance:                     [inaudible 00:29:06].

Joanna:                  No. The actual … It’s two …It’s hyphenated two names inside …

Lance:                     Flesch-Kincaid.

Joanna:                  Flesch-Kincaid Score. Yes. Exactly. Yay! Lance gets the point. Yes. Flesch-Kincaid score is what runs in Word usually and you can do that to see if your copy is at a good level. Hemingway app has that built-in as well. Yeah. Cool.

Oh, no. Cheryl. Cheryl asked, “What do you mean by ‘more words’? Isn’t shorter better?” No. Shorter’s only better when, and then big asterisk next to that, so all of our emails, every single email we wrote, except for one … no. Seven of the eight emails were two to three times longer than the control. Shorter is better is a myth. It’s an illusion, it’s there to make people write bad copy is what I’m absolutely convinced of. No, shorter’s not … I wouldn’t ever definitively say … I wouldn’t say either or longer’s better either. Do you have the messages on the page that will engage your prospect in such a way that they’re gonna keep reading to the point that they take action? That’s what we’re really looking for. Hopefully that helps, Cheryl. As we go through and do more Tutorial Tuesdays, we’re definitely gonna see more of … a more words philosophy. If they’re the right words.

Brian asks, “As to why to write it simply for the sixth grader, is not because people are stupid, of course not. It’s because you only have part of their attention and simple language is right what gets the message through.” Right, exactly. So, Brian was just explaining something about using simpler words. Totally. But it wasn’t a question, so okay.

Veronica already asked that. Yay, other people are saying nice things. Thank you, guys. Frank asked, “Do you account for SEO?” You know, you’ve got an SEO on staff, if you’re … or on contract or whatever, if you’re a copywriter and part of your job is to worry about SEO, then you could do that as a secondary sweep. But, my job isn’t to worry about SEO first and foremost, and when I do, that tends to mean that the headline has to suffer because it needs to get a force keyword phrase in there. We use Voice Of Customer data to drive our copy and that is generally the key to doing well organically is using natural language that people actually use. So that’s how we account for SEO. Cool. Oh, I see Cheryl’s like, “Yeah, I see too much on the page as an editor.” Awesome.

One last question. Mandy asks, “Totally off-topic, do you like Hemingway or Grammarly better?” I don’t have … I don’t use them. Not that I’m against using them, I just … I don’t. To me it feels a lot like, Googling for an answer when it’s like, “No! Just make your brain do it.” So, for me I want to test myself with what …’cause I really like grammar, so I like … and plus, when it comes to tests to reviewing what I’ve written, grammar and copywriting don’t necessarily … they’re not really great friends. Trying to push grammar onto copywriting is like … it’s not gonna work, there’s too much friction there. That’s why … that’s one of the reasons I don’t, but the other reason is simply I like grammar. So when I’m doing writing outside of copywriting, I like to do it myself. Which means I get it wrong sometimes, but then I feel like at least I’m doing it myself.

But yeah. I get it, that it’s a cool tool, and a lot of people love it. And I’m probably gonna come around to it at some point. Just not at this point in my life. I’m also somebody who’s like, “No! Don’t Google it!” When you want to find an answer, and the of course I go off and Google it anyway. Okay. So I know we’re at the end. Thanks, I know people have to go. Thanks for everything, and we will get this recording out to you guys. Thanks for all your questions as well. And we’ll see you next week for our next Tutorial Tuesday. Thanks, guys! Bye!

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