Presented live on Tuesday, December 4, 2018
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Way more clients need long-form sales pages (LFSPs) than you – or they – know.
In this live Tutorial, conversion copywriter Joanna Wiebe is joined by copywriter Angela Cho to give you a behind-the-scenes view of how to write a long-form sales page – complete with templates.
Learn the nuts and bolts of writing LFSPs, starting with:
- Why ALL your clients need long-form sales pages (not just the ones that come to you asking for one)
- When in the process of working with a client you should pitch a LFSP
- Tips on how to sell your client on a LFSP
…that’s just in the first 5 minutes.
Get Angela’s process & VoC message-mining templates.
TRANSCRIPT
Joanna Wiebe: Welcome to this week’s Tutorial Tuesday Live. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are. We’ve got myself, Joanna here from Copy Hackers. Sarah is here as well. Hello, Sarah. People are filing in and we have our special guest for this week, Angie. Angie, hello.
Angela Cho: Hi.
Joanna: Hi. How’s it going?
Angela Cho: It’s going good.
Joanna: Yes, I’m so stoked about this. You’re going to be talking to us today about long form sales pages, and this is one that we were partnered on for a product so I’m just going to let you dive into that, just like take it away.
Angela Cho: Awesome. I should introduce myself. My name is Angie and I run a small marketing agency here in New York City. I’m actually home today but we’re based on, if you’re in the area in New York, we’re on 32nd and Broadway. We actually, we’re a growth marketing firm. So I started at three years ago and we’ve always prioritized copy just because we know that’s the secret to increasing conversions and bringing results to our clients. We found Jo, actually my partner found Jo and introduced me to her and it has changed so much in our business on how we approach copy and especially long form sales pages, which are particularly my favorites.
We’ll be going over that today and why it’s my favorite and why it should be everyone’s favorite and they should work on it. It can seem overwhelming, but today, we’ll try to cover as much to make it fun and not overwhelming as possible. I’m going to share my screen.
Joanna: Very cool.
Angela Cho: Hold on.
Joanna: Angie, if I’m remembering correctly, later on, you’re going to share out a couple links as well for people.
Angela Cho: Yes I’ll do that.
Joanna: Cool, cool.
Angela Cho: Can everyone see my screen?
Joanna: Yeah.
Angela Cho: Awesome. Long form sales pages used to make us really nervous. We would hire copywriters who would just go outside and look at the sky and get inspired and just write, and we would be like, oh my gosh, is this going to convert this, and finding the process with Jo, if you’ve taken some of her courses, it really outlines that so well for you. What we’ve done with that here for today is, if you know the high level or even if you don’t, we’re going to zero in on what we believe is the most kind of confusing, detailed part. It’s when you gather the research and you’re like, what do I do with this? How do I apply my research to the copy so the client isn’t arguing with me to the very end on why their opinions aren’t being implemented on the page?
We’re going to focus on that and actually when I presented this to the mastermind, our mastermind group. I know Jo mentioned that in the email today, that ended up being the biggest the biggest question was, I don’t really know how to take the research and then apply that to the big idea on the page, like why is this even here? How is it positioned differently from clients all the way to just how to section out the page? That is what we’re going to cover today. It will be no filter so you’ll see the mistakes I made as well. It will be fun.
Joanna: We love the mistakes. The mistakes are the best part.
Angela Cho: Right, we’re going to start with one question just so I know where people are at in terms of their copywriting journey with long form sales pages. If you can just write into the chat what your biggest struggle is with writing long form sales pages today and if you’re not writing it, and you’re a business owner or any kinds like you can just share what your goal is from being on the call.
Joanna: People are chatting up a storm there. They’re using A, B, C and D from here and some are writing in other things but we’re seeing a lot of As, knowing what to write, some Bs, some Cs, a few, not that many days. Someone said A, B and C, so yeah D is of course others. Yeah so some of the others are design and layout, getting clients interested in them. Some of my prospects have more than one reader, just getting started and then more about design so yeah the list goes on.
Angela Cho: I should write these down. Okay, we’ll try to cover all of them but what we’re going to really zero in on is the what to write and also touching on the client buying process and in the end, it won’t be a big mystery to you. You’ll see a long form sales page down the line and know exactly how it was pieced together. That’s what you’ll walk away with, so writing a long form sales page, that process making it clear and fun. That’s our goal today because they’re the absolute best to work on, and then if you’re a copywriter who chooses not to write long pages but hopefully after this, you can’t wait to write one.
All right, so why a long form page? Let’s take a step back. Sometimes they can be 3,000 words, sometimes they can be 8,000 words. I’ve seen actually I think Jo one of your courses is 7,000 words and it can feel extremely long and then when you approach it with a lot of clients at least from our experience, they push back. They argue that no one could possibly want to read this, all of it but there’s a reason why they work and there’s a reason why the world’s best copywriters swear by them and the reason why the most respected copywriters today are doing it, so this is actually the center. The center sales page with the one on the right is Jo’s latest launch, her 10x Freelance Copywriter.
I didn’t do a word count on this but I’m guessing it’s about 6,000, but yeah, it’s a long page but as you scroll, every single point is so important for the clothes so it’s a really good one to see and then on the left, I put [inaudible] case. I believe her most recent launch I saw, which was also a very long beautiful page.
Why the long form sales page? Why do I love it so much? The beauty of a long form sales page is that it walks your prospects, so your potential customer that you want to earn down a complete transformation. That means from the point in which they feel a pain and they don’t know how to solve it, so they know nothing about you, nothing about the type of solution you’re offering. For example, you have a headache, you don’t really know how to solve it. If you are there, and you’re selling pills, you’re going to want to introduce the solution of even pills to begin with, and get them to buy into that first, before even introducing the Bayer products, right? It goes from pain to solution to product and to taking action.
These are pretty much broken down steps of the five stages of awareness that Jo also talks about on the course but we’re just going to call it pain solution products here, just so everyone’s aligned in case you don’t know the stages of awareness.
The beauty of it is pretty much all of that is happening on one page. There’s a lot to say if you’re transitioning your customer from just not knowing about your product and just feeling pain all the way to feeling this urgency, like I really need our product. While that all sounds great, if you don’t want to use a really long page, it’s still really beneficial to sit down and write one because it connects all your messaging points together. Many times, people might think, oh, I’m just going to start with this email. Okay, I’m just going to start with this ad and take them to this landing page but that’s only a piece of the big, big puzzle of your message, your customer journey and really, the long form sales page takes them through all of that.
You can use this long form sales page to sell as is. You can sell like Joanna does for her courses, or as our client actually preferred for today’s sales page in particular, they initially planned on breaking it down into shorter messaging sequences. They said okay, yes, fine. We’ll do a long form sales page. We trust you but we’re probably going to break it down, so you might see those patterns happening with clients who really push back on the long page and you just sell them on exactly what I said.
It’s like this is actually, you’re getting a lot of pages and ad ideas and just so much email ideas for one page, you can break that up into four pages.
Joanna: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a really good point, Angie that a lot of people don’t consider when they’re talking to their clients, like new clients in particular. When you write a long from sales page, you get all of the messages on a single page. That’s like from that point on, once the client’s like yep, that’s our message overall. That’s how we want to sound, all of that, and you can break that up and use it for other things, so a lot of if freelancers are out there, listening and wondering how to kick a project off and how to be more of a consultant, not just someone who is an order taker, I’m recommending that long form sales page as a starting point is phenomenal. It’s a great place to start.
Angela Cho: Awesome, okay and yeah, if you’re a copywriter, it really clarifies. I mean for me, I need to start with something like this. Otherwise you’re just going to have gaps later and you just have to fill it in. That’s the whole why we should love a long form sales page. Now we’re going to dive in, at least for me why this process is so important to really go for in detail is before everything was more conceptual, I’m like okay, I need to research, okay I’m going to do these steps to research, I’m just going to kind of check off the box but I didn’t really understand how to connect everything together.
What Jo teaches us again and again the Copy Hackers blog or courses on her mastermind that we’re in is using the customer’s words, so you’re not guessing. This isn’t just to help you shortcut yourself to better copy. I mean, it works. It’s also to minimize the back and forth with the client. So it’s not this opinion more. We’re going to go into how we actually do this.
Stepping back, the process some of you might be familiar with already is a big chunk of this writing process is actually the research. That takes about three weeks. I mean, everyone’s different, but this is how long we took for the sales page we’re going to go over today. Then writing is one week. Wire framing, I know someone mentioned design. That takes about a week, and presenting and making the changes so that means like giving the client two days to send changes. That happens at the very end, hence the shortest timeframe. This is how it should be. This is how it was with the client that we’ll show you today.
All in all, it’s a six week process. We start with reviewing the control. At least my process is always I review the control before I take the client on. I hope everyone does that and just assesses, assess can I actually make an impact here. At that point, when we get the client onboarded, you start gathering data, and that’s data from internally within the company of what has worked and also external data of what customers are saying. At the end of your research, this is all on a high level, we’ll go into a bit more detail, at the end of your research, you’re going to establish the great things, that is who you’re talking to, how are you differentiating yourself from your competition? What is this really appealing offer that this reader wants that you’re giving, your promise that makes it a no brainer, and just all of that put into a beautiful logical flow that your client says yes to.
The other thing to note here is I put the asterisk of touch points with the client. We’ll go over that as well but there are three to keep in mind. One is prior to the research, you’re going to be interviewing them. Then at the end of research, you’re proposing or you’re presenting the final findings of the research and agreeing on the logical flow and then at the very end, when you’re actually presenting the copy and beautiful wire frames.
All right, so what are we actually going to focus on today because technically we only have 20 minutes and this is like a lot of really, really, actually it’s just information I wish I had before I wrote long form sales pages. Research into writing. I think that’s where writers can get really hung up is oh my gosh, I did my checklist of everything I had to do. I filled in this monster Excel sheet, how do I now write? At the end of all this, these are two kind of goodies we want to give out. We’re going to give this step by step process essentially of writing a long form sales page. That’s also tied directly to scoping, so if you enter your, I’m like pointing to my screen like you guys can see it but if you enter your hourly rates right there where it says zero dollars, I hope you’re not charging zero dollars but if you enter anything that you are, and then you populate the hours column, which is column E, everything should just auto populate and tell you how much you should charge at the end.
The beauty of actually outlining the steps when you’re pitching to a client is if they’re going to negotiate with you and push back at any point of this is too expensive, you can say all right, no problem. Which parts of this monster list that’s so important, every single thing that’s so important would you like to remove so they’re fully aware of what you’re removing because they’re paying less.
Of course that’s up to you. Sometimes, I’m not going to run a long form sales page if the client’s like I’m not going to take VOC research. Everyone has their own process of what they’ll take and what they won’t. This is the other goodie we’re going to give at the end but this is the exact VOC research template that we’ve used to write the long form sales page that we’ll show you today.
I pretty much Frankenstein-ed this together from a lot of courses just like a lot of writing and what works for me. Every document like this, I believe every writer has their own version of what works best for them. This works for me and I’ll show you how and then you can just modify yours to fit your process.
Awesome. Now let’s actually get into the fun stuff. We’re going to start. We’re just going to walk through the entire process from end to end in a really fast way. If there are any questions along the way where things are unclear, if you have a process that you think works really well for you, and you want to share it with people in the group, awesome, just chat it. This can be kind of this shared collaborative talk where we’re like, hey, this worked for me and we can all walk away just doing long form sales pages really great.
Going back to the process, step one, remember is look at the control. I wanted everyone to just take a minute, so taking the big picture of this page. This is the entire page actually laid out into three screenshots, and chat over general first impressions that’s related to copy.
Joanna: People are looking. The control, for everybody who’s wondering is what’s showing on the screen right now so if it’s showing small, make sure you double click on that screen to see it large. This one’s broken up naturally because we have to show all of it, so Sheldon’s reaction is it’s busy. Carla’s, its speech or heading not benefit or customer focused, Leanne is not sure that headline sounds like something an over eater would say. Don says the headline could be super offensive. Dave says seems choppy then there’s a lot more now, looks a lot like a brochure, too busy, who’s it for, I can’t figure out what the main message is. It’s pretty clinical. Headline is major issue here and not much flow, headline, keywords, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of reactions and it’s very, very easy to react. I think it’s good when we’re in the auditing mode.
Angela Cho: Awesome. Okay. All right. Here are just some notes that I personally took. Oh okay, so the page jumps to introduce a product really quickly. I haven’t really felt like it related to a pain but we have to play devil’s advocate and assume the best out of our clients, right? They could have messaging that’s sent to the reader before they land on this page so we all need to investigate that. When they scroll, the CTA shows up really, so the call to action shows up really quickly. Are they actually sold at this point? These are more questions and at this point, what I’m doing is gathering theories. I am not judging. It’s why I’m just with curiosity, which is kind of a theme with this offer in general, but I’m just wondering why certain decisions were made, and this is going to drive the interview with the clients that I’m going to have. I just want to find out what’s worked and what hasn’t, how they determined that. It’s just this big info gathering stage and the other points I found, yes.
Someone mentioned the features before benefits. The product previews were really low res. I know it’s hard to see from your point of view, but for me, I just couldn’t even see what I was signing up for. As soon as you scrolled and you saw Dr. Judson Brewer, I was like, oh, he should be up higher. This is a big selling point. That’s my assumption that I’m going to now explore. The praise was really hard to read, so that white text italicized very small, it actually is small, very hard to read on that with backgrounds.
There are two CTAs, which are interesting. That’s just the role that people can walk away with just one CTA so it doesn’t confuse the reader. All right, then, because we’re making assumptions here, we asked for access from the client to Google, Google Analytics, any current campaigns, you want to understand what people are saying before they land on that control, past surveys, chat transcripts. We always ask for the products, we did use this product and ended up loving it. The more you believe in the product, the more you naturally want to sell it. You become the best salesperson for them. Also, you learn things about the product and the big picture new and fresh way that maybe the client hasn’t seen and you can add even more value and you get free stuff, so that’s cool. Then yeah, we scheduled the interviews with clients to really figure out what they think isn’t working. It’s really valuable information and then you can also start preparing okay, what are they curious about? What are their goals so I make sure I hit them?
That’s all that internal research that happens, and then you do that external research and I don’t know about you but I love scavenger hunts. I love it and I love escape rooms. I just love anything where we’re just finding things and putting them together, and so I just call this a scavenger hunt for sticky messages and it’s researching with a really organized purpose, and when I research and just put things onto an Excel and it’s not organized, I got really overwhelmed and I just don’t want to do it anymore so I’m going to show you how we already just started pre populating the sections of our long form sales page way in advance. I’m just going to click, hold on. Let me see if okay, I’m going to show you, this is where we get into way more detail and just reveal everything that we’ve done. It’s the Excel sheet where we gathered all the VOC.
Again, this is done very differently by almost every copywriter I know. This is just my process and this is what works for me and helps me shortcut as much as I can. Whenever, for example, I hear people asking a question, a really common question, I’ll throw it in the FAQ line. When I see quotes, any posts, I separate them out because this is so, so powerful to sell, anonymous quotes that are given that I thought were powerful. The video testimonials we can show, the sticky messages from that, written testimonials. It’s everything that I plan on using.
When you start researching all the great things people are saying out there already about the products that the client isn’t using, you’re just pretty much looking for that. This is a world changer and I just keep sweeping it to find the sticky messages unfolding and even though it might seem overwhelming to look at this fresh like you when you build it, you actually feel small, you feel fully in control of your information and then you just built this rightful intuition to start speaking about the product in an intelligent way with the client because you’re bringing them insights now.
Let’s see, this is how I start pre populating the page. You determine the framework you’re going to use so we decided to use PAS, so that’s problem agitate solution. The page will start with meeting the reader at the problem they’re facing. Then I’ll remind them why this problem’s really big deal, how it impacts their life in bigger ways and then it tells them how to fix it. Anytime that a customer mentioned exactly how they were feeling, how this was causing bigger problems, and how they define what it right now is, we just wrote it down, bolded what was really sticky and just like awesome. Then what I need to do always is I need to narrow it down even further. This is just my column here. I’m like, all right, they tried everything. Nothing works. This has been said so many times. People have tried every single diet, every weight loss program, nothing works. They’ve tried for decades. This is also another header and they hold themselves to really high standards, but they’re too busy to take care of themselves.
Whether they’re feeling heavy, struggled with weight for years, they call themselves an emotional either. I saw, I think it was Leanne who mentioned and then there was somebody else, I’m sorry I forgot your name but you both mentioned together that the headline of calling out binge eating in the control, it felt like we should explore that, so the VOC data did show that people call themselves more so as an emotional eater and a mindless eater and a binge eater.
I’m just going to not go into too much detail where this is too overwhelming but just to show you a preview. This is a template we’re going to give at the end where you can start pre-populating problem, agitate, solution and just start building this knowledge of how you want to lay out your page. You’re going to refer back to this as you write your copy, but for now, we’re just looking for the big ideas and this is where we populate all of them as we think about it. How I do it is when I start developing theories, it’s usually, I mean these are all theories until you test it technically. I just start writing it down. When I start seeing, okay, there’s a pattern of three people who are from the mindfulness community, I’m going to write that here. There are several people who are binging, purging, but actually some struggle to say that so it could be an interesting test. You just start kind of writing your thoughts and organizing the data live. This is the purpose of it, you should always be referring back to this page.
All right. Hopefully that was helpful. I’m just going to go back to the presentation, these survey questions. This is actually where Jo really helped me. I don’t know if you know this but my survey that I drafted, first mistake was it didn’t take the reader back to the moment they signed up for Eat Right Now, which is an emotional decision. It’s very difficult to commit to something to lose weight after you feel like you’ve failed so many times so the way Joe crafted this question was please think back to when you first signed up for Eat Right Now.
Then I think my original was, actually I don’t even think I had this question. She added that and my original questions were more direct, like what were you doing when you signed up, something like that but that actual intro sentence I believe was the magic and that’s because we got amazing VOC gems out of this. We knew exactly where they were, what they were doing, what they were feeling when they signed up. Same with the other questions, so think back to, it’s a minor detail but it’s something that works.
Our VOC data showed us that our market is solution aware so obviously they know that diets exist. They know that all these different solutions exist and they have a very, very high level of market sophistication. In fact, if there was a fourth bullet of extremely high, that would be them because they’ve been around the block for decades. They’re sick of the plans and they’re just itching for a new solution that’s going to actually work.
After the VOC, we just write the bullets of what has to be on the page. We’re still not writing yet. It’s just still organizing what we found into a flow and we’re like, all right, first, let’s just write down everything that has been patterns that we found in the Excel, patterns of our interview talks with the customer. What is always mentioned, people join because of Dr. Brewer, they know him. He’s a big name in the mindfulness community, and he’s a very respected neuroscientist.
People hate diets. It’s a daily app so people love that they can check in with that on a daily basis. The transformative journey was very interesting to look into because people change in a few days, and then the changes are different in the month and then different in several months. It’s not just like hey, you’re going to lose weight, you’re done. It really transforms your life to go through this.
Yes, so these are just some examples of things to put on the page. We talked a bit about the client’s buy-in process earlier, so selling the long form sales page. Now, after you sell it, how you get them to just stay aligned with you on every step of the process. This is everything that we showed to the client what we’ve done, this is very important. We have done all of this and our information that we are recommending to you is based on all of this.
After you immerse yourself in all that data, this is our recommended flow, and what we did was we actually put the flow into a sample wire frame. The end page doesn’t look like this but it’s still a visual. Now the client is seeing the flow in a long form sales page format. Actually, I remember at this point Jo, I don’t know if you agree, that was exactly this point when the client said oh, and he actually felt relief, like oh, this is a long form sales pitch. It actually makes sense now. Every single section is so, so important and we can’t skip it.
Joanna: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really critical moment. A lot of people just present the long copy at the end of it all and you’re like, oh, okay, now I have wrapped my head around this whereas when you can present the outline, which is really just the cross heads even if you have, often when I do this, I have the page already drafted but I go through Photoshop and I just un-view. I hide sections of it so all they see are the cross heads, then you get the buy in on those, and if you have a few cross heads in there where they’re like oh that was well said, then you got the high fives going on and they get really excited. Yeah, totally, but this is that moment that an uncertain client gets sold on the long form page, yeah.
Angela Cho: Awesome. I’m going to quickly walk over what’s on the left here. The flow that we imagined because of all that we found in the VOC, we didn’t touch on that in too much detail but this market’s really sophisticated. They don’t believe anything in terms of weight loss claims. They’re very, very, very skeptical and in pain so we decided to start the page with just a ton of trust. It’s very blurry to see but on the wire frame itself, we mentioned this discovery by Dr. Judson Brewer that he’s tied to all these great universities, that he got 10 million views on TED Talk to add a picture of him speaking on TED, that people lose all this weight on average and then that they’re joining this movement with thousands of people with logos.
This is a weight loss claim. There are thousands out there. How do we position ourselves differently. What’s the number one objection? They don’t believe you. Okay, we’re just going to put that on top so they can scroll down. Then we start with the pain, we did PAS, so we did problem, deeper pain agitation into a reason for why this didn’t work for them. This is really important stuff for the reader is matching their beliefs and what we found from the VOC that we did talk about is that diets don’t work and they hate diets, so we’ve really positioned against diets and capitalized on this opportunity that this client is offering something that’s really fresh and new so if you combine that together, it just looks like the advantage.
Then the solution and just your standard price drop, your promise to make it a no brainer, FAQs and close to buy. If you have questions, just feel free as you think of it to add it to the chat, so a reminder, this is all before you write and that’s why the research process is three weeks but you’re preparing to write. You’re almost done so when you get that approach of the step by step bullets that we would share, that was actually the exact bullets we shared with the clients. You get that approved first with the wire frame preview if you can, and then your page is 85% done, and I remember Jo, we were presenting this just like, Jo said that to the client. We are almost done with the page because everything largely is being pulled from the VOC that we found. This is preparing them to understand we’re not guessing and this was huge because they feel confident that okay, this is based on data. It’s not based on your inspiration from being outside.
All right, so this is going to be a bit fun. We’re going to show you our evolution, so from draft to final copy. I want to start with the big idea because I know for some copywriters out there, this tends to be a very important step that is more abstract and out there, and then so people can skip it sometimes. I just want to show how we evolved in our big idea thinking, and where Jo came out and was like, yeah, I don’t really know about that, Anj, so it was a really fun thing. This is my personal favorite part of the process is how do you differentiate yourself in a land of thousands of weight loss programs, how are you going to be different.
I started with when I felt the spark, so I was like Jo, this is the big idea. It’s just knowing the right portions to eat without trying or wanting the right portions without trying and just like you know, that’s an interesting point but that’s not the big idea and that’s where the big idea tends to be the part where after you immerse yourself in the data and you obsess over these little points, now you’ve earned the right to go outside and be creative and I think at that point, you can start thinking about the big idea rightfully and that’s what we’re doing. We’re like wait, what is the connection here that ties everything together and some copywriters might call this. I know I heard marketing argument, central thesis. This is just the thing that you convince your reader of believing and then convincing them that your product actually fulfills that, and it’s the magic. It’s what makes you different.
Do not skimp out on thinking about this. This is the big picture stuff that your client is paying you for, and there’s so much in the weeds of details that they probably are missing something that might feel very obvious. You never know.
Anyway, we went from this like that big idea I had, which was just the point. It was a bullet point, and so I’m like, okay, maybe it’s the benefit, what people want most. It’s indulging in your favorite foods while losing weight, but then we’re like that’s not really accurate. It sounds appealing, but you’re not just eating your favorite. It’s not that simple. Then this is where I felt kind of some sparks was this is the feel good weight loss program, like you actually feel emotionally good at every step of the way. This is not a diet. You’re actually going to feel happy doing this.
That’s where we kind of evolved. I think there were many more ideas but that’s at a high level. The final angle we chose to take, that is your body’s been taught to eat wrong all your life. In a few minutes a day, this app rewires your brain to enjoy your favorite foods and lose weight while you feel that every step of the way. The reason why I say the final angle and not the big idea is because I don’t believe, and Jo, maybe you can push back with me on this. I don’t believe this is a strong, big idea, and when we talk about ideas that are going to be magical, I know what David Ogilvy, his book he said, he’s only thought of 20 big ideas in this life. It’s supposed to move industries, it’s supposed to just rattle, it’s supposed to just boost conversions by a magical number. I don’t think we quite got to that magical state but at least we aimed for that and that’s my take.
Joanna: Yeah, I fully agree. I think that’s a really good call. We still try, right? You still work really hard. You don’t abandon the idea like, oh, there’s no way to find the big idea. We’ll just write. It will work itself out. Don’t do that. That’s not going to work.
Angela Cho: Many times now, the big idea’s tied to the product offering and the product being positioned strategically in the industry. Sometimes yes, it’s hard. There’s just so many pieces with that but really fun to think about. This is I’m still thinking about this to this day. Oh my gosh, so funny. Okay, so how did the headline evolve? I want to ask you guys to guess what you think was the final headline based on the five minutes VOC that you may have seen?
Joanna: Okay, voting happens, A and B. We’re getting these lots of Bs, lots of Bs. Two As, a couple more As, and now a lot of As. I think I may be biasing things by reading these out or people are seeing things. Just a total split here. Yeah.
Angela Cho: Cool. All right. Keep in mind this hasn’t been tested but the thinking behind why B is the superior headline is because we are doing PAS and it’s meeting them at their belief and their pain. What A is doing, this is actually something I wrote on the left and Jo wrote on the right, what A is doing, it’s doing what I believe we can all do at times. We just want to get to the points and we can really, like for me, I was like this is the benefit, this is the solution and I just wanted to summarize it but this is a headline and we’re following a proven copywriting framework and formula that teaches you to focus on the pain first, and that’s what we did.
All right, so we’re going to do one more. It’s how the pain story evolved. We did PAS. After the headline, the reader will scroll and read a story that should relate to them. Again, based on the VOC that you guys have all learned in two minutes, which one do you think was the final copy?
Joanna: This will take a while.
Angela Cho: Yeah, sorry about that, guys.
Joanna: No, that’s good. People are staying on. It’s amazing. I think everybody’s really loving it. We’ve got one C. Kate just plain loves that. You’re showing the evolution of the copy, which I agree it’s very useful. Another C, C. Amy Posner says, Angie rocks. Okay, lots of Cs, some Bs too. Yep, some Bs and Cs. I don’t I’ve seen an A yet. Now we’ll see an A. No? Still no? Lots of Bs and Cs, Angie. Back to you.
Angela Cho: All right guys, so B is the final. The thinking is, I’m actually going to show the evolution. This was the order in which it evolved. When you look at food, do you always feel something about it? That’s fine or wrong, good or bad so I want you guys to take a specific look at whether it’s anxiety at a social event or loss of self control after a long stressful day or guilt after that midnight chocolate craving. This was the first draft where I was trying to piece together VOC examples that I thought were colorful, and I think this is a common thing people do. It’s I want to talk to everybody. I want to talk to the person who feels anxiety at a social event and admittedly, when I was writing this, I was imagining a different person at every example that I personally know or that I’ve interviewed, so it was speaking to too many people.
Two, much better in that it is following a clear path instead of throwing you in different picture scenarios at every line, and then the reason why three was chosen, actually, this is insider knowledge but the client came back and said, hey, honestly, I can’t explain it but this pain story isn’t really hitting the mark. I was like, whoa, I wonder why. We followed VOC. This is exactly what people talked about but they said there’s something more emotional there, and the person who pushed back on those actually was a user of this product and now she works there and I interviewed her. She’s wonderful, and even though she didn’t have very good reasons, I’m like I’m going to explore this.
I went back to the VOC, and I’m like, yeah we do need to have something like, where’s the most emotional point of this person’s experience? What can everyone relate to? Then this is where the magic happens but I went to GA, to Google Analytics and saw that people are landing on the control page shortly after midnight or early morning. I’m like, so if you see in the control, like I mean, the very, very first draft, the third example down the line is talking about midnight cravings because that’s brought up, but now it’s just taking that example and just putting that person in that one scenario and it’s in play.
All right, cool. I know we have not that much time so I skipped an important slide and my back button’s broken so hold on okay, so when you’re ready to present your copy and you’ve written your copy all based on VOC and the pre populated forums on Excel and connecting that all together, you wow your clients with copy in hi-fi wire frames. I don’t know if you guys recall we had that lo-fi kind of tentative wireframe without a copy it it, just the process and the headline. Now we’re flushing it out. We’re recommending the hierarchy of the messaging, where things are going to be placed so people are reading it, any imagery that we must have. For example, Dr. Brewer, please put him up higher, the selling points. Yeah so you just show that in the gray.
I don’t know what’s happening there.
Joanna: We’re back to the start. I don’t know if you want to escape on the deck and just glide through to the slide. I do, if we can chat out those links, I think, Sarah, you’re going to be chatting out some links. Sarah, if you can go ahead and do that, looks like that’s happening. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Then we have so many questions that I don’t think you could answer because we have a hard stop at the end of the hour but thank you so much for anybody who’s staying on. Angie, I’ll let you get back to the deck.
Angela Cho: I’m going to hurry up so we can end it.
Joanna: No, it’s all good. It’s great stuff.
Angela Cho: How do we break it down? How does it look at the end? This is a reminder of the control page. To refresh our memories. This is what we were working with two beats for our client. All the stuff that we actually highlighted as opportunities for the client to capitalize on, I don’t know if I mentioned this but the app has five star reviews compared to their competition for mindful eating. This just blows everything out of the park and it’s like why aren’t you showing this, so all of this is just stuff to piece together. It’s not because the client is just like not seeing the big picture. It’s just they need help with seeing it because they have so much going on and that’s our job to help them piece all that together.
All right, so this is our New Hero, oh you guys are going to get to see my notes too so that’s good. This is number one goal, trust. I just have one point on every slide. Trust, get them to scroll. Pain story, so they say that’s so me, like that midnight craving. This is something we talked about together already, the Google Analytics showing that. That’s the time to talk about copy that’s pulled from VOC. I don’t know if people saw this when I was sharing that VOC for a few minutes the restrict, rebel, repent, repeat. Juicing carrots, prison sentence, hopeless cycle, all of these are pulled from VOC, when you eat a few M&M’s, VOC, yeah, we do just piece. It’s like a puzzle. If you like puzzles, I love puzzles, it feels like that.
Then diets are the common enemy. This is the reason for past failure that we talked about. Diets are impossible to keep up with and you start seeing the big idea playing here. Then when you introduce the solution, we bring up Dr. Brewer. We mentioned that he has worked with Brown and Yale and MIT. He’s, I believe, now currently at the Brown University Labs. The other interesting thing to note is when I interviewed Dr. Brewer, he explained the story, the back story behind how this product was created.
This is why interviews are goals, but it apparently was found accidentally through his, the users of his quit smoking app, where he helped them break bad habits using mindfulness techniques to quit smoking, they were accidentally losing weight. That’s actually the beginning of this product. What he did, unlike most startups I know, he started testing his theories of how he’s going to help people quit mindlessly eating for a year. He tested with live groups for every single week. It’s insanely thorough, it’s not shown in the control but that’s the story that we want to tell so people buy into the solution.
Then they buy into the product, so solution then to the products. At this point on the sales page, it’s fine, I start saying if they’re here at the long form sales page and they lasted, they probably already believe you. They trust you. Your page has been set up to take them from pain to reason why they feel the pain to this is a solution that’s different and new and why you can trust it into now the product. The product is the opportunity to convince them that they can do it. They now trust you, and that’s the second half of the page. We show the screenshots of the product on how easy it is, how different it is, how everyone’s changing through it. It’s convincing them that this is the journey that you can expect to go through in not just a few days, will you change, in 30 days, you’re going to lose all this weight and then a few months into the program, you can’t see the copy here but food becomes fuel for your body and it brings a real piece to your life.
Life changes. People actually say they just stopped thinking about food entirely. It’s crazy. Here are just some examples of how we close the page. The price drop at this point after all that benefit kind of hammering in is like it’s only $24.99 a month and you want them to get that feeling, and a strong, strong close. Start with 10 easy minutes right now and see how easy weight loss should have always been. Feel yourself change in as little as four days with Eat Right Now guaranteed.
This is where the non big idea, with is a good point through, it’s try the number one proven feel good weight loss program today risk free and then our best testimonial, we kept for the end. It’s under that bullet. It’s I feel like I’m finally in the driver’s seat with food, not the other way around.
Joanna: I love it.
Angela Cho: Five minutes left, I’m sorry.
Joanna: That was bad ass. That was obviously, we’re talking about long form sales pages, what are you going to do? You went through the whole process so people are freaking out in chat. It’s awesome. Thank you for that. Angie, thank you for this today. How can people, because I’m sure they will have questions because there are 22 unanswered questions here. How can they follow up with you and learn more from you, what you’re going through as you’re writing copy?
Angela Cho: You can email me, I’m just going to type, oh there we are. Thanks Sarah. That’s my email address. We don’t have a website as a business, as an agency yet. We’re working on that but our vision is, because the vision is so big. I want to create a creative corner where you can get resources like this for free. We have this vision of having, we’re very close where just email me and once that’s up, I’ll share everything with you with the wire framing, templates for that. We just want to make it super easy for you guys.
Joanna: Yeah, that’s awesome, okay so email Angie at that address that Sarah shared. There are also links. People who are asking questions about pricing, how you would price a page like this out, Angie has that whole spreadsheet there so fill that in and make sure you use the template. Angie, thank you for all of this awesomeness. That’s amazing. Thanks everybody for staying on for the whole hour, for the 20 minutes to bring up and it was ambitious and we’ll see you next week for the last Tutorial Tuesday of 2018. Have a good one, guys.
