Presented live on Tuesday, February 2, 2021
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It’s crucial that you know how to make your prospects take action…
Because it’s way too easy for your prospects to choose to do nothing.
And it’s what stands between you and your new prospects…
And growing your bottom line.
So it’s your job to drive them towards your solution…
And away from their current solution with the RIGHT messaging.
In this Tutorial Tuesday, you’ll see how to do just that.
Let’s get your prospects to take action t’day, shall we?
Transcript
Introduction [00:00]
Joanna Wiebe: We do a lot of thinking about “the switch” so that’s for anybody who’s in Copy School or thinking of joining the new Copy School, you will hear a lot more about “the switch.”
So this might feel basic but just because it’s basic doesn’t mean it needs to be more complicated than this etc. So i’m going to walk you through this right away, let me share my screen.
What to Expect in This Tutorial [00:33]
Joanna Wiebe: The golden arches for moving switchers. So I don’t want to get into a whole big thing about the importance of the switch. But every single person is switching from a solution to your solution unless you’re selling, something that is purely for delight, such as a novelty item.
There are not a lot of things that most of us are writing for that exists purely to bring delight to our users or customers, etc. Which means that in almost every case, your prospect is switching from their current way of doing things, to your way of doing things. So you need them to take action and switch to your way of doing things
So they have a current way; you’re the new way. They have a status quo, you have to get them to take action – move them away from that and we’ll talk a little bit about that, but again in the new Copy School you’ll get a lot more on this.
What is The Switch? [01:50]
Joanna Wiebe: So the switch comes from Jobs to be Done if you’re familiar with Jobs to be Done – jtbd or jobs.
And so there’s this whole concept, I’m showing their graphic here. I meant actually put the little reference on that i’m sorry I didn’t.
The whole idea here is we’re not going to dig too much into this, but we have to recognize that there’s a current way and there’s your new way. There are forces that are going to push and pull people toward your new way.
But inertia and anxieties will keep them from saying yes to the new way. So what are the things that are holding them back from the change? And any concerns that they have that will keep them from saying yes.
We also oftentimes, we talk about the pull, right. And that’s where we’re saying like oh cool look at all our great stuff inside of it, but we rarely talk about the push. As conversion copywriters, we do a lot. But I’m not going to get too much more into this.
But the push is really like digging into their problems like. Here is everything that’s wrong with the way that you’re doing it. Bringing into life, the things that they already know are suboptimal.
What is Inertia? [02:51]
Joanna Wiebe: But then there’s also the force of inertia as well. So inertia is going to keep them from taking action, and we know that that’s a huge barrier to conversion. Getting over inertia and anxieties are also a barrier, so a lot of marketers focus on everything going on on the right.
But we don’t really talk about or address the fact that there are problems on the page. We don’t address the fact that there are problems with the current way. And that there’s a force of inertia, so what we want to do when we’re working with our clients when we’re working in house wherever that is, we need to recognize that there’s a need to take action.
How to Make Your Prospects Take Action [03:17]
Joanna Wiebe: But how do you actually do that? So here is a simple way to get your prospects take action – the golden arch way to do this. This is our end state, this is what we’re looking for. I’m going to walk through how we actually fill this in. Slides.
But with the golden arch we don’t talk about the black part. It’s like fight club, we just don’t talk about it. And we’ll get into that as we go. This is what you’re aiming for, as you can see it’s a Venn diagram with a line down the middle and a section of that diagram is the golden arches.
Venn Diagram: The Golden Arch [03:48]
Joanna Wiebe: That is clearly the part where we’re going to focus on our switching high level messages like big ideas and on page messages as well. So let’s walk through how to do this we’re going to do this. So we have a Venn diagram, really basic thing, so you have their current way, the current solution that they’re using.
And your new way, that’s the thing you’re trying to sell so just like any Venn diagram you put what is true for the current way on one side, what’s true for the new way on its side and then where there’s overlap that goes in the actual overlap. Pretty straightforward Venn diagram.
Now we’re going to add in a way to organize what’s true, like the traits for these two ways. So we add a line, horizontally with weaknesses on the bottom and strength on the top. Okay, so all of the strengths of the current way go up here.
All of the strengths of the new way go up here and the overlapping strengths go in the middle.
Weaknesses go below and overlapping weaknesses go below. And these are good to know, even if they never make it on the page.
To be fair, everything over here with the current ways weaknesses will probably make it on the page in a snarky way. of story will come forward. Then we layer in the prospect what the prospect cares about.
So it’s one thing to have this sorted out, but just because you have cool stuff like oh here’s our new way with all these strengths, if the prospect doesn’t care about those strengths you’re not going to switch them. So we’re talking about switching messaging.
We have the prospect that we have to think about. Now, we start organizing our messages in that spot and this area here. Is the golden arch, this is the part where we pull our switch messaging from. And this is the part that we ignore entirely.
So it’s obviously weaknesses about our new way that we don’t want the prospect to care about, they shouldn’t care about those weaknesses. Hopefully not. So this is the area your reason to switch will be found all right now let’s do an example, you are selling oranges, you need to switch your prospect from.
Example of The Golden Arch [06:24]
Joanna Wiebe: Let’s set an example. So we’re selling oranges, we’re switching our prospect from apples. Pretty straightforward, everybody knows the basic features strengths weaknesses apples and oranges.
We have the strengths of the apple, the apple is the green, it’s the current way. The orange is the new way, so we list out the strengths, we list out the weaknesses. We can see that strengths, for the apples are high fiber and it’s got an edible peel.
Whereas an orange has an inedible peel. Apples are good for baking, but their juice is only okay. Kids like apple juice, but most adults don’t. Whereas the juice for oranges is beloved in the US, etc.
The things they have in common: health, protective peel, no refrigeration needed. And then a bad thing is the seeds, what are you going to do with the seeds? You can’t do much with the seeds; they’re terrible. Weaknesses as well, we have there.
Now we want to go through and organize this for our prospect. What does our prospect care about? Okay, so we move everything out of there. It’s likely that they still will care about the things in the middle, the overlap.
We don’t really have to worry about moving those aside. All we want to make sure we’re doing is taking this and we’re going to start filling in these gaps here based on what we know about our prospect.
Your One Reader [07:45]
Joanna Wiebe: So everything that you learn about your one reader is going to go into ordering those traits. Now you’ll have to identify who your one reader is, as usual. if your prospect, that one reader is somebody who loves baking, then it might be a tricky sell to get them away from apples toward oranges.
It is very hard to bake with oranges, it’s very easy to bake with apples. But let’s say that they are something else. Let’s say our prospect is healthy. Cool, we know that there’s overlap between the two. We’re going to message the reasons to switch for this person are largely like, hey they’re so healthy.
So yes, apples have high fibre, but oranges have high vitamin C, like ridiculously high, and then we have other things that we know are true. So basically, our vitamin C is going to attack their fiber, or ignore their fibre.
We’re not going to talk about the things below here’s what’s going to black that out. We’re not going to worry about it, we’re not going to think about it. No one’s ever going to hear that there are bitter strings in oranges, or an inedible peel, that doesn’t matter. It’s not going to help our case.
So we’re not going to worry about it, our prospect doesn’t care too much and we don’t care too much, and if they do we’ll figure that out. But this is assuming that we’re just going to focus on the things that matter to them.
Reasons For Your Prospects to Take Action [09:05]
Joanna Wiebe: Okay, the golden arch, everything here, these are all the things you’re going to focus on is finding how to get them to take action and make the switch. That’s it. This is a healthy prospect, we’re going to get them to a new solution, and that is oranges.
So reasons to switch for health, if we take it from here, you can go back and review this afterward when you’re trying to do your own switching exercises. But if the reason to switch for a healthy person is hey this has high vitamin C, so do research on all the great things vitamin C can do for you.
Your body literally dies, without it, so this is where we dig into more things about the history of scurvy. What else does vitamin C and everything to do with apples actually help you with. And then the healthy sugar.
So we’re not too worried that an apple can also be seen as a healthy sugar, we’re not going to necessarily dig too much into that. We will look for examples of too sweet apples, too sugary apples versus oranges.
And trying to paint a picture of those being quite straightforward. So because we were able to identify these things, which happens pretty quickly, this is again a basic exercise. But you get to this place, and you can see, the one thing that is likely to move this person is we have high vitamin C.
Tell a Story [10:00]
Joanna Wiebe: If we want them to take action, we need to tell a bigger story than just hey switch for high vitamin C, so we’re going to look at the other things and try to find from this quote unquote data in here, try to find a story in that. What else is there that we can say that is interesting?
Like you have it to fight scurvy and that there’s no real core, that could be something, probably not for this person. Refreshing, it’s juice, whatever that might be, and that its sweetness is very different from the thing that you’re switching from.
Summary [10:52]
Joanna Wiebe: So that’s how we get there. You fill in the Venn diagram and that’s how you get big ideas and value props come out of this. Quick wrap up, the switching Venn that has this golden arch in it is a basic really fast way to pull together hypotheses for switch worthy big ideas for emails, ads, pages, etc.
Particularly for people who are at the later stages, which is where they’re typically thinking about the switch and where we need them to take action. We want to use the current way’s weaknesses, to push leads away from it. So we’re going to say here’s how our solution is better for this person and we’ll tap into some of those negatives on the current way in order to move people away.
We’re going to recognize that the current way’s strengths will create anxieties and inertia, so your copy will have to fight that. That is our job, this isn’t to be overlooked. I know everybody loves a good trick, but this is actually the job that can bring in real changes, strong positive changes to conversion rates.
It’s not a trick it’s the work it’s pretty basic work and it gets the job done. Great and then, when you identify strengths in the current way that can also help you put together a content strategy for top of funnel content. So if we knew, for example, that our prospect was a baker.
We’re trying to sell oranges to somebody who loves apples and does baking. So probably include apples in there, that might be a good opportunity for us to start seeding the prospect on pinterest and in other spaces with like you know 322 amazing recipes for baking with oranges.
I don’t think there are 322 of them and i’m pretty sure they’ll all be super gross but maybe they can look cute too right. So that’s the idea here, you can take what you know that your prospect cares about in your competition and start doing things to figure out how to move the needle on top of funnel, so they start thinking about your solution and take action.
Alright, thank you all for participating today, for showing up in the cold. Hopefully, where you are you’re staying warm and happy and all those good things. We will see you in our next Tutorial Tuesdays next week. Have yourselves a great week. Thanks everyone.
Slides: Make a copy.
