How to script the third sales video

Presented live on Tuesday, March 19, 2019

So, you’ve learned the whats and hows of sales page videos… scripting the big idea, breaking the inertia and beginning the transformation, but, when in your video scripts should you be saying what?

When should you message the discount…When should you message the value prop… When should you compare to competitors… When should you list the ways to use the solution you’re selling?

When?

In this live Tutorial, Ry Schwartz answers these when questions to reveal how the Copy Hackers’ team keeps the momentum going in the third sales video to build trust, confidence and excitement leading into a launch.

TRANSCRIPT

Joanna Wiebe: One more look behind the scenes of the Copy School Sideways Sales Page videos. We’re going to talk about some timing stuff, in particular. So when you’re writing copy, it’s often difficult to know, and even that includes, of course, scripting these videos, it’s hard to know when should I say X? When? I know I have to say it, but at what point do I say it? So Ry is going to touch on that and hit us with a few other bits of awesomeness.
Ry, good morning.

Ry Schwartz: Good morning, Jo. Top of the morning to you.

Joanna Wiebe: Although, it’s noon where you are.

Ry Schwartz: It is good.

Joanna Wiebe: Good day.

Ry Schwartz: Noon oh five, actually. I don’t know why more people don’t say noon oh five. That’s totally legit.

Joanna Wiebe: I know. It sounds normal. It sounds good.

Ry Schwartz: It sounds more normal than 12:05 that’s so commoner, that’s so basic, 12:05.

Joanna Wiebe: …Brooklyn. I think in Brooklyn they say noon oh five.

Ry Schwartz: Noon oh five. They definitely do. All right. This is Copy School Confidential, Part 3. You got to sing some theme music as I pull this up.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh.

Ry Schwartz: Of course there’s shoulder pops involved. Yeah. Why wouldn’t there be shoulder pops?

Joanna Wiebe: There has to be.

Ry Schwartz: Has to be. Cool. Here we go. Are we seeing our screens being seen?

Joanna Wiebe: It is.

Ry Schwartz: All right.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes.

Ry Schwartz: Do you think this desk was set designed or do you think that person just keeps it like that?

Joanna Wiebe: It’s always like that with their glasses upside down. That’s going to be good for the lenses.

Ry Schwartz: God, this is such an impractical photo shoot. Is that a pineapple or an acorn? Who knows? No one cares. All right.
Scripting number three. So what have we covered so far in Copy School Confidential? So in the first one would be covered in video one which was all about the big aspirational idea, most profitable person in the room. You saw how we came to that idea and you saw a bit of a criteria on how you can come up with your own big idea to really fuel your launch or workshop series.
In the next video we showed you our second script, which has a much shorter video. I called it The 0-30 mile per hour skill sharpener. And that’s really about breaking inertia. Really kick starting that transformation of your audience or your reader or viewer, embodying that big idea you spoke about in video one. So something potent, something that can be absorbed really quickly and just get them started in that journey of being that big idea of being that most profit person in the room.
Now, video three is where you take that to the next level. So this is no longer the skills sharpener and are no longer that short, sharp skill that they can use right away. This is the big one. This is the 30-90 mile per hour skill amplifier. And that’s really that cruising speed that would let them embody that big idea fully. If they could do this one skill fully and completely, they have really achieved that outcome of video one. So that’s how these three work together and you’ll see why we ordered them this way in just a second.
This is the video in case you haven’t seen it. Maybe just a quick show of yes or no. If you guys have seen video three yet.

Joanna Wiebe: Video three. Megan, yes. Holly, no. Niya, yes. Yes, yes, nopes, and yeses. But lots of yeses, so woo.

Joanna Wiebe: Sarah just chatted out the link as well, if you haven’t opened it up because that is going away.

Ry Schwartz: Cool. Well, if you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty much in Jo saying big important things in small ways or sometimes in surprisingly deep ways. Wow, I love that it just blended in so perfectly while I just sit there and pretend to work.

Joanna Wiebe: You’re a natural Ry. You’re a natural.

Ry Schwartz: Yeah, I’ve made a career of pretending to work. It’s really … Don’t do it. Cool. So that is video three. If you haven’t seen it yet, you could watch it and you could actually … yeah, it might be a cool experience watching the behind the scenes before the actual scenes. Interesting.
All right, so five things that make video three work. Once again, I said this in our last one in case you weren’t there, a lot of these ideas have been built upon from Jeff Walker’s stuff. So full credit there. He’s the original product launch formula guy. We’ve taken that model and we just really added our own tweaks to, our things that we think will resonate most with our audience and what they want to achieve out of this type of workshop series. So credit where credit is due. But what we will do in this video or what we have done in this video as we started like last one, recapping the big points from video one and two, don’t assume your viewer has watched it. So that’s step one.
Step two, sell the biggest and most specific when your course program product can deliver. Sell the value of it, why that matters. Then back it up with ample case studies, proof examples. Don’t just don’t just state what it could do. You got to approve what it could do and really disarm a lot of that skepticism and then give the most practical starting point. So not the full roadmap of how to get there, give the most potent practical starting point, and then guide the next steps to continue that journey. So those were the five things that went into it. Let’s go a little bit deeper on each ingredient.
So recapping video one and two. So once again, you’re not recapping everything that went into this series. You’re really just giving the most salient points in a short three to four minutes. Now a lot of people get a little bit iffy on this. They feel like it is getting super redundant if they just keep repeating the things over and over and over and over and over and over again. We felt the same. I felt the same when scripting some of these videos as well. But you got to remember that scripting it is a lot different than actually consuming it. And there’s a time lapse between these videos. So even if someone has seen it, the reminder, the reinforcement of it is important and valuable.
It’s only really annoying to you as the writer who is writing all those things and wonder two or three or four sittings in a really compact way. But other than that you got to kind of get over your own, you’re being redundant and make sure that reinforcement is being drilled in. And then you’re going to preface the skills that you’re about to teach as really the biggest, most ambitious result your product can deliver. And you’ve got to do that by adding context to it. You’ve got to ground at that in the overall journey you’ve already taken, not just in a silo of that big result, but add context.
On video one, our audience, our viewers accepted the big idea of the most powerful person in the room and a three-step path to get there, which is cool. And then video two, they started embodying it by learning that low hanging fruit scaled that gives them that liftoff off. Now, based on that, based on those two things, they’ve now earned the ability to chew on something bigger and more expansive. So there’s a natural arc there. There’s that sense of exclusive empowerment, which we use so much in our sales emails. But remember, even your non-paid stuff, you’re still selling attention. You’re still selling your audience on the fact that they, and they alone, based on what they’ve done are empowered to take that next step.
And that’s why we frame this big skill, this big ambitious result that they can get from video three, as something they’ve earned based on what they’ve consumed or done or performed earlier in that funnel, even if it’s not paid. So that’s how we came to that. And that’s to recapping section. You want to make sure all that is covered in three to five minutes, ideally with your business partner just sitting in the background pretending to work. That’s bonus points. Yep. Cool.
All right. Next, you’re going to sell the biggest and most specific win your product can deliver. So now you’re actually going to talk about it. Sell the importance, the potential impact of what you’re about to teach, via case studies, proof and examples. And you’re going to sell the unique advantage they’ll have by investing time, attention and learning about it. So we didn’t just dive right in and start talking about sales pages. We sold the importance of learning how to write them before we dive into any amount of practical training on it. We sold the advantage our audience would have and learning how to do it.
Most people avoid sales pages, we call it the Lord Voldemort of this sales funnel. It’s a place where marketers and copywriters, they’ll just freaking avoid. But if you are armed with the skills and competence to do it, that is a crazy big advantage. And that is something that we were leading with in this video, really selling the importance and the value of investing time and attention and learning that big skill. Remember, the bigger the skill to learn, the bigger time and energy investment you’re asking your audience to, invest toward learning it and you have to sell it in a bigger way than you would in video two, which is just a really short, practical, compact thing. You don’t need to oversell the value of learning that, but you need to sell it in a bigger way when you’re asking them to make a bigger investment, even if it is just time, energy, and attention.
Cool. So what makes a good 30-90 mile per hour skill sharpener? Well, it should be simple enough to give a potent taste and that’s where they’re at. Taste in 10 minutes. So you’re not teaching it end-to-end. You’re giving just enough to build momentum into the next step. Like video two, like anything you teach in your prelaunch series or your workshop videos, it should be unique and specific to you, not something that your prospect has literally seen before a million times or confined in a quick Google search or in a million blocks. It should be specific to you and something that you do better than anyone else in your industry. If you can find that, that is what you want to be teaching.
In this video, the skill amplify or should on its own with nothing else, it should be able to fulfill the big idea. So for example, if one can write a long form sales page better than anyone else in their industry or in their niche, they do ascend to most profitable person in the room status. So it is that big skill amplifier and it does fulfill that big idea even with nothing else in copy school. So that was one criteria to look into and it has to be provable. You can’t just make those claims about the importance of this skill, or the way you teach it or you’re a unique take on it without being able to prove everything you’re saying. So you do need to have some degree of case studies from someone who took that skill that you’re teaching in this video, took it all the way, so beyond what you’re able to teach in this video and actually earned a really promising outcome out of it. So that’s what makes a good skill amplifier for the third word shop.
All right. And then of course you do need to back it up with those case studies. So you can do it in two ways. It could be kind of the more macro view and talk about how a lot of influencers in your industry or bigger companies are using that thing. Some more credibility to the opportunity. And in this video we talk about how Amazon and Apple and all these big multi-billion dollar companies are using long form sales pages. Why aren’t you? So first, if there’s credibility to the opportunity that can come from the outside and then you zoom it back in and get what I call more contextual social proof, which is how your customers or your students were able to generate an outcome, with the fullest expression of that skill.
We mentioned Brad Wages, we mentioned Chanti Zak and Patti Haus and all these students who took the full version of the sales page training and got these very inspiring results. So that’s contextual, social proof related to the value of the skill that we are teaching part for it. You want to give the most practical starting point, so you can’t obviously teach a whole sales page training in 15 minutes or maybe you can, we haven’t mastered that.

Joanna Wiebe: Not us. We can’t.

Ry Schwartz: Not us, not us. We can’t even get through the intro in 50 minutes. But what you do want to, what you do want to be able to offer your viewer here is really a practical starting points. This sense of so close yet so far that’s what we’re doing by literally giving away. And this was the first time we ever gave this away for free anywhere, which was the full 15 point sales page and a day template.
So this was directly related to the case studies that we spoke about earlier in the video. And it’s literally right here, like these 15 steps are what produced it. So there’s this sense of literally having it in your hands. There’s proximity to the solution, you’re handing the keys to the car, but you haven’t taught how to drive it yet. So there’s a sense of so close yet so far, they have it, the full roadmap, but they actually still have that gap. They need to learn how to fully use it and leverage it and do it properly and with confidence and speed and all those other things we speak about in copy school. So, when you do that, to me that’s the difference between what I call, practical omission where it’s literally impossible to teach all 15 steps on a single call, and no one would expect you to, this is an eight hour course.
So there’s no sense that you’re holding back or withholding what I don’t like in marketing videos or sales videos or workshops is where the thing that is missing, the gap could be filled as so easily, but isn’t, where they’re consciously withholding something that they could literally say in one minute. To me, that’s what feels a little bit cheap, a little bit contrived, like they’re consciously creating this gap, which is great marketing, but also doesn’t make you feel great as a consumer. We’re giving that full roadmap. But I mean, it’s indisputable that it’s impossible to actually deliver it all on one call. So it’s not like were withholding and saying, “No, you’ve got to wait until the paid thing.” We’re saying this is as much as we can literally give you here without making this the full thing. So, yeah. Yep. That’s part four.
And part five. You always want to keep leading the process, especially when your workshop series spanned multiple weeks, you do want to keep orienting your viewer, making sure that they know where they are in the process and what’s coming next. And especially what must they do to sustain that momentum. Never make them feel lost, never make them feel like they actually need to figure out what they need to do and guess at what they need to do. Everything about this is supposed to be anti-guessing. You do need to maintain that leadership role and make sure everyone knows what they need to do to continue on that journey. The next step of that journey should be a potent dose of the user experience. And more importantly, it should help your prospect identify as a successful customer by literally helping them become one.
And those last two points that actually carries over into the next part of your funnel, whether that’s your sales Webinar, whether that’s your live writing workshop. In our case, it is literally the live writing workshop, which is a potent dose of the user experience. We want our viewers, we want people who have been with us this long to actually know what it feels like to be a student inside copy school, to be receiving pieces of the training that are literally on the other side, and to actually start identifying and viewing themselves as the most powerful person in the room by taking the actions that align with it and even seeing the results.
You’re not going to be able to write a wholesales page in 60 minutes on the live writing email workshop, which is a little different. There is a conceivable chance that you can walk away with a really strong draft, but at the same time you are literally pulling back the curtain and giving your viewer a chance to experience what they’d experienced on the other side. The confidence to speed all those things that go into doing it.
That’s it. That’s what went into scripting video three and that’s the end of Copy School Confidential.

Joanna Wiebe: That’s the music. You’re welcome.

Ry Schwartz: Stop share. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay, coolness. Thank you, Ry. Yeah, really interesting points there about some of those easy or things you see with people. I don’t think they were intentionally being skeezy, but holding back on such a small point that could be taught. Yeah. Awesome. And that was in less than 20 minutes.

Ry Schwartz: I know, right?

Joanna Wiebe: That’s a first for Tutorial Tuesday’s. We try so hard to do it in 20 minutes. It doesn’t work. Ry, thank you for joining us once again for this backstage pass of Copy School Confidential.

Ry Schwartz: There is nothing I would rather do in this set-timed thing called life.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Excellent. On that high note-

Ry Schwartz: On that high note.

Joanna Wiebe: … we’re going to close this out. We will see you guys in all of our training sessions, hopefully this week and otherwise next Tuesday, [Juahita 00:17:59] is in to teach about something to do with a new program that might be inside coffee school that I didn’t mention. No, I did. Okay, so we’ll see you guys-

Ry Schwartz: Cool.

Joanna Wiebe: … in many other sessions. Have a great rest of your day.

Ry Schwartz: Thanks so much guys.