Presented live on Tuesday, Sept 24, 2019
So let’s say you send your customers a survey.
So now you’ve got all this survey data.
Great.
Quantitative stuff. And qualitative stuff.
Great.
And it’s time to figure out what exactly you’re supposed to do with it.
Which might not feel so great.
Because now you’ve got to face this really practical question:
How can I turn what my customers told me… into hard copy that convinces them to say yes to me?
How do you actually 1) highlight and copy what customers tell you in the survey and 2) paste that into a long-form sales page, creating, in the process, copy that is likely to convert?
It’s such a great question.
Anna Bolton, a fab conversion copywriter who recently wrote a long-form sales page for Copyhackers, shares her step-by-step process for filling the page with VOC.
In the live Tutorial below, you’ll see how Anna writes long-form sales pages using survey data.
Learn even more on how to survey to get conversion copy, right here: bit.ly/surveyvideowalkthrough
TRANSCRIPT
Joanna: Anna, hello.
Anna: Hello, hello.
Joanna: So you wrote 10x Facebook Ads, our sales page for that, back earlier this summer. After which, yeah, we had a bunch of discussions and now you’re here to talk to us about how you took Voice of Customer data and actually wrote the page. Yeah. This is going to be dope. I’m excited. We love the page. We loved how it performed as well. So let’s see what you got.
Anna: All right. Okay. I am going ahead to share. All right. So this is really focused on how we use the survey responses to write the sales page copy. There were other sources of data which I’ll mention as well. So I’ll be talking about the data that we did collect and then how we went from data to insight, the kind of high level insight that helped shape our theories about what would convert. And then also how we took Voice of Customer to write the copy. And as well you can get a survey walkthrough. I’m just going to mention before I forget, the link to the survey walkthrough, it takes you to a landing page. You click, you say you want the walkthrough, great. It’ll send you an email.
But because my domain is being transferred today when you get that email, the email will say like, “This doesn’t look like a trustworthy sender.” I’m trustworthy. It’s just that my domain is halfway between two sites. So all right. So the way that I approached this research was starting with the end in mind. All right. And the end that I had in mind was based on 10x sales pages, the course within Copy School. Which has two tracks, track one and track two. So Joanna teaches this expanded Problem Agitate Solution framework where you add Why Try Buy. But I also decided to layer in Ry Schwartz’s Coaching The Conversion, track two. All right. Why aren’t we move moving here? Oops. Sorry guys.
Joanna: That’s bound to happen. With something like that-
Anna: There we go.
Joanna: There you go.
Anna: Okay. I have so many controls here. So just for your amusement, this is the page outline. I was like, “Yeah. Just like totally reasonable.” It was very helpful to do this. This is like Problem Agitate Solution, Why Try Buy, with some bullets, Ry Schwartz’s Coaching The Conversion elements, right?
Joanna: I love it.
Anna: Like, “Yeah, I can do that.” And this is how I ended up with a 9,000 word sales page. But it was great. It was great. I love those, both tracks. Okay. So the framework helped me define the questions. And you can look at all of those questions when you go to the link that I’ll share. So I wanted to know a lot of questions about living with the problem for this audience. Like how they define it, what they think, feel, know. Also, there are a number of questions about what they think about the solution or the possible solutions, what that might deliver for their life. What benefits and features matter most? Their objections, triggers, outcomes, right? So that’s kind of how I felt, right, at the beginning.
So many questions. And all right. So my first step before the survey even went live was to do the kind of comment mining that Joanna teaches. And Joanna talks about Amazon comment mining for one. In this case, I joined a ton of Facebook groups for advertisers, for entrepreneurs, for copywriters, for people who might write Facebook ad copy. All right. And I also looked at blog posts on copywriting for Facebook ads. And those two sources, some good Voice of Customer turned up, but the issue with this is marketers often when they’re commenting in these places, they’re marketing themselves.
They’re very aware that others might find their comments and often they’re pitching their services or sort of bragging about the results. So they often weren’t very sincere comments. So I also looked in the Slack group for one of the Copy Hacker scripts that I man in. There you find more authentic comments, right? There was a lot of looking through those comments, a lot of data mining to get a few kind of pieces of gold. All right. So in a parallel we were developing this survey, and we ended up surveying members of Copy School. So anyone who has purchased Copy School since 2019, and I guess people who were kind of grandfathered into it.
And I ended up writing 22 questions, even though I tried to pair it back, there’s a lot that we wanted to know. And not everyone sees all 22 because there’s this skip logic built in. So my concern was, and often our client’s concerns will be like, “Who’s going to answer that many questions?” But we did get an 87% response rate. And people spent an average of 15 minutes on this survey. Now I would say that might be rare, you might not have such an engaged list. And I think Joanna’s list is really engaged and people love to talk about this stuff. So we got some incredible insight from this survey, right?
So we did not end up doing interviews, sorry I dropped my pen, because the timelines were quite tight. But even without interviews, this is what one tab of my VOC spreadsheet, my research spreadsheet looked like. This is where I was organizing the sticky messages and themes. And you can see that there are all these other tabs as well. So this is really kind of an overwhelming situation, right? And my question was does it have to be this crazy, right? So you’re cutting and pasting and then you have to do that again to make it presentable for the client. And spreadsheets are really just not built for this, for sorting qualitative data, right?
So what I would do differently is I would use a tool built for the purpose of tagging, and categorizing, and theming, and presenting qualitative data. And this is the tool that I have been looking at, which is built for UX designers. But I’ve been inside it, they’re really helpful if you get a trial. And they’ll show you just how you can make it quite simple to find what you need, and even to share it with others, right? But if you do want like a template version of this spreadsheet I use, for sure email me.
And I think Nikki has one available too, from one of the previous Tutorial Tuesdays in just a different take on it. So how did we go from so much data to insight? All right. So in a word, theming. That was the first big manual process. And because it takes a while to explain how I themed, I did a little Loom video on how you can theme your Voice of Customer data, and you can get inside that or get a view inside this spreadsheet and see the different categories. So yeah, just copy and paste that if you want to check that out.
Joanna: Cool.
Anna: All right. So before writing, the next step is to present your findings to the client. In this case to Joanna. So these are just some screenshots of my slides for Joanna. And these are kind of summaries. Now, I’m getting notifications that people are viewing this Reggie video. Okay good. All right. So these are like categorized basically in terms of the formula that we’re using, like problem, pain points, what else they’ve tried, solution, what they want in terms of short term outcomes, triggers to buy, objections, all of that, right?
And we also went into this page with a few theories. So Joanna teaches before you write the page you have to have these theories which include like what is the stage of awareness of your one reader, right? And who is that one reader? What’s the one promise you’re making? What’s the one big idea, which is really difficult. And the one offer was defined by Copy Hackers. But we decided that the stage of awareness is problem aware for the most part, so people know that Facebook ads are tricky, or as they say, “They’re a mine field.” All right. So then how did I… So now that I have this high level of insight and these kind of big picture theories going into it, how do I actually swipe the Voice of Customer to write the sales page copy?
So we’re going to look at three sections of the sales page that we’re particularly having via receiving. Okay. This is the finished sales page if you want to open it up yourself, if you haven’t yet. All right. So the intro is very heavy on that Voice of Customer, starting with the hook. And this intro toggles between what Ry talks about, it’s the moment of highest tension, and the moment of highest pleasure, right? So some of the survey questions that were used to find the hook, the problem oriented questions, are listed here. So we’re getting them to describe their experience. And people were really funny answering these questions. It was such a pleasure to read responses. If you’re out there and you answered, I was laughing at my desk.
And then we also have to ask. So if you ask someone to describe their experience, different people will answer sort of very objective, like fact-based way. But you also want to know how they felt so you can bring that feeling into the copy. So we ask a separate question, how did you feel back then? And then also the results. So they might talk about the process but they might not tell you what the results are. So a separate question for that. And then for those who said that they had not written social media ads before, what was holding you back? How did you figure out how to write them if you had? So you can see how these all fit together with the skip logic in this video walkthrough. Again, you’re going to get the weird message when the email arrives, you’re safe.
Joanna: Cool.
Anna: Okay. So other survey questions that helped with the hook were outcome oriented. So what are your expectations from taking this course? Or if you’ve already taken it, because there are some people who have taken it, some people part way through, some people haven’t started. So for those who have taken it, what’s changed in your business? And then this question, which has like a bit of a blank in it, can you tell us more about why 10x Facebook Ads was, blank, level of importance to you? So that’s a field where you can, based on their response to how important was it, the question that they get served will say like, “Why was it very important? Why was it somewhat important?” All right. So again, we’re trying to get at these hopes and expectations, and what this vision of the life after might look like.
All right. So thoughts on the hook. This is how I felt. The hook is hard, right? I found it got so much easier the further down the page you got. But most of your frustration and time will be spent on the hook. And the specific problem with the hook is, we found through research that there are several big problems that people face with writing Facebook ads. But there are emotional problems that have to do with their competence, lack of confidence, feeling like they’re faking it, their reputation with their clients or their perceived reputation, if they’re not an expert they can’t answer questions. There’s the pain of wasted time, right?
How long it takes to write Facebook ad copy. And then feeling like, “Well it’s not performing anyway.” Or it gets disapproved by Facebook or it comes across as spammy. Lots of people felt that way. And then there’s the pain that we ended up settling on, which is the pain of wasting money, which you can see in the hook up here. After wasting thousands on Facebook ads your funnel is still not bringing in leads and you’re stuck. So that was ultimately a judgment call, and that was based on Joanna’s knowledge of the audience and her experience. So Joanna, do you have any comments on how you landed on that hook?
Joanna: No. I think that the usual way, and this is where having a copy chief around can be really helpful. Obviously we all want the science side of conversion copywriting, but sometimes it is just a matter of like, “Okay. Put all of the right pieces in place and then read it.” Right? Then read over it. And what was we had so much, and this is the case if you go through my track in 10x sales pages, is the page when you’re taking Voice of Customer data you will find more than if you don’t use Voice of Customer data. You’ll find so much information and so many pains, all these agitation points. Agitation points around solutions, everything. So your top of the page gets enormous, and your job then is to go in and of course find the hook. And sometimes you do start with the hook, but sometimes the hook is buried.
Burying the lead is a really, really common thing. So for me, when I was reading through your first draft, it was awesome and I got it. But it was when I landed on that line that was around after wasting all of this money, I was still stuck. I still wasn’t getting anywhere. I don’t remember if that was exactly how it was phrased at the time, like what you have finished with. But that felt like it. And I feel like the more you write sales pages, the more you’re able to kind of identify the hook. It doesn’t mean that I’m right, I might’ve been wrong about it. It might be something else. But because it was based on Voice of Customer data, because it ended up, because it felt, that’s the art side, it just felt right, that’s where we went. And in effect we ended up chopping off a whole bunch of really great copy at the top of the page. But that was the sacrifice that we had to make to get to that hook and pull people in. Yeah. So those are my thoughts on it, if it’s helpful.
Anna: Yeah. You have to kill your darlings or whatever.
Joanna: Kill your darlings all day long.
Anna: All right. So we are moving along. So Agitating the Pain section right after the intro. This was just, it was like an embarrassment of riches with this survey data because we had so many juicy bits of Voice of Customer to pull in here. And I was able to swipe direct copy and also kind of rephrase, reframe things in here. So for example, people seeing through the BS, that’s a big concern that people have that when they write their ads it will sound like BS. So that kind of helped us transition into the solution, all right. So people are going to see through it. You need to be authentic, but it’s hard to be authentic on demand. So you need a framework and a process, which is what 10x Facebook Ads provides.
So the buy section. So the solution section, I could largely just describe the product itself, a lot of that was already in the course to write. But the buy section, there are lots of fun closes from Coaching the Conversion. And yeah, I really loved using those. So things like the upgraded FAQs, a lot of those were directly from objections that people had voiced. Things like self doubt, people feel like even if they do this, of course they won’t be able to master Facebook ads. Anyway, there were so many. The perfect for you if direct swipes from the copy. So what people had said about their particular situation right now. The risk mitigator close, which I merged with the final confident appeal, that’s just pulling direct Voice of Customer in.
All right. And some of the questions that helped me with that final section are right here. So like what if any doubts or hesitations did you have about learning from 10x Facebook Ads? And then if they had said that this course wasn’t very important to them because they got it as part of Copy School, which is not the case for anyone who bought it as part of a standalone launch. If they said it wasn’t very important to them like, “It was a nice bonus.” I wanted to know why so that I could address those objections. So this is again the video walkthrough. And this is like a little message that you’ll get. And anyway, so my point with this video walkthrough is that, like Joanna’s hand was in this survey. And anytime you can swipe something that is Joanna endorsed or that she’s created, you should do it.
Joanna: Thank you. That was nice. Today’s session was amazing. I know we’re at the very end of it. Anna, thank you again so much for coming in, for sharing all of those links too which people will be going over for a long time, I think. This is like a master class crammed into 20 minutes. But that was amazing. It was great working with you as well.
Anna: Thank you.
Joanna: We will see you then y’all. Have a good one.
Anna: Yay. Thank you. Bye.
Joanna: Bye.
