7 Webinar Copywriting Tips – Sell Through Education Instead of Hype

Webinars can be a powerful a way to sell to B2C markets that aren’t yet over exposed

In our marketing bubble, webinars have been the #1 way to sell high ticket items for years. Yet in most markets, their selling power is largely untapped.

B2B folks seem convinced anyway.

A B2B Content Marketing Trends survey placed webinars as the second most effective way to sell, after live events and ahead of videos, blogs and case studies.

Why are they so effective?

• Webinars instantly position you as an expert
• People unfamiliar with webinars don’t feel they’re being sold to
• They can convert leads into sales within 24-48 hours
• They’re highly measurable and can be automated for consistent ROI

Webinars are common in B2B, whereas in B2C they’re still fresh and underutilized.

Let’s say you’re selling a natural health blood sugar balancing supplement. Just imagine how powerful a 40 minute webinar could be at educating people on the causes of high cholesterol, what foods to eat and how to naturally balance their ratio and reduce their risk of heart disease?

A lot of people would rather sit through a presentation that resolves something that’s bugging them than wade through 5,000 words of copy.

Webinars are only effective if you keep people’s attention

The challenge is overcoming the million distractions threatening to pull users a way. Your presentation has to go beyond plain vanilla advice if it’s going to keep people from flicking through Instagram, chatting on Facebook or checking their email. As always, harnessing emotion, intrigue and building tension are the keys to success.

Here are 7 webinar copywriting tips to help you keep viewers engaged and buying at the end:

1. Tell a Story

Stories engage at a deeper emotional level than a straight pitch. It’s how we’ve been wired since cavemen times. Share the background to devising your product or solution. Talk about the struggles, the failures and the Eureka breakthrough that led to your product.

2. Give Them an Easy Win

Give viewers a tactic they can implement almost immediately. This will give them an instant sense of advancing from where they are now. It will also make it easier for them to FEEL what they can gain from your product.

3. Frame the Price

Before you reveal the price, establish the costs of not taking action. Explain how much time and money they’re wasting without your solution. While they could try and figure it out for themselves or buy a cheaper alternative, explain how this will cost them more in the long run.

4. Crush Objections

In every sales letter, VSL and webinar, crushing objections is vital to clinching the sale. Write out a list of  reasons why someone might not buy and then address every one in a clear, objective manner. Then by the end they’ll have no excuses and will only see positives from having your solution in their life.

5. Lead Them Up a Staircase

Imagine your webinar is a staircase. At the start your viewer is at the bottom, struggling with a problem that’s preventing them from advancing in their career or life. Over the course of the webinar your job is to jump them up the steps by revealing what they can do to achieve the salvation that awaits at the top.

6. Track and Optimize

The beauty of webinars is the ability to track and improve their performance. Your goal is to get average order value (AOV) above your cost to acquire customers (CAC). Once you’ve done that then you can open the money hose and potentially scale to six or seven figures.

7. Test Live then Automate

Doing webinars LIVE is the best way to test and perfect your pitch. The interaction, unscripted vibe of live webinars naturally creates greater trust and engagement with your viewers. Just calling out their names and reading their comments has been found to increase sales. Then when you have a winning formula you can switch to automation for a consistent pipeline of sales.

Ready to Grow Your Business with Webinars?

Recently I completed Joel Erway’s Webinar Accelerator Program. Joel gets paid up to $40,000 to write webinars for elite marketers like Russell Brunson. And for them it’s money well spent. Russell generated $10 million from his webinars last year alone.

At $1,997 (it will soon go up to $2,997), Joel’s Webinar Accelerator ain’t cheap.

However, webinars are arguably the best way to sell right now. They’ve got huge potential in under served B2C markets. And you may make your money back on your first webinar project.

So whether you take Joel’s course or figure it out on your own, writing webinars is a high ticket copywriting service to add to your arsenal.

The post 7 Webinar Copywriting Tips – Sell Through Education Instead of Hype appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible.

from The Copywriter's Crucible http://ift.tt/2hfm2xs
via IFTTT

Live Event Networking Tips for Copywriters to Make Connections in an Extrovert’s World

Just Add Hustle Podcast Interview – 4 Career Crashing Mistakes for Copywriters to Avoid

If you’ve ever wanted to hear my dulcet tones, your lucky day has arrived.

I sat down with Crucible reader and natural health copywriter Paul Buzan (who has the envied position of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’ copy cubs) to share my sage advice on how aspiring copywriters can avoid some of my near career ending blunders, on the madcap journey to where I am now.

This isn’t a podcast where I talk about crushing it. About writing million dollar VSLs (true story), meeting copywriting masters like Mr Drayton Bird or jetting around the world working on a laptop (well, maybe a little bit).

No sirree.

This is a warts and all, no filter confession on what can happen when you launch a copywriting business with no experience, no clients and no portfolio (like I did). And what career crashing speed bumps you can hit on the way.

What you’ll discover:

• What happened when I got sued by a celebrity TV chef (and learned an expensive lesson on the difference between food poisoning and a shellfish virus).
• How my misadventure into “black hat” SEO led me running into trouble with a collective of hackers (and how I resolved it without having my website hacked into oblivion).
• Why you should never guess who your target customer is and how to find out who they really are (following this advice will put you ahead of 90% of copywriters)
• The books I recommend you read multiple times. Why? Because they offer a better education than many of the $970 Facebook promoted courses out there. Times change. But the underlying principles of high converting copy stay the same.

>>>Listen to my Just Add Hustle Podcast interview on career crashing mistakes for copywriters to avoid

The post Just Add Hustle Podcast Interview – 4 Career Crashing Mistakes for Copywriters to Avoid appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible.

from The Copywriter's Crucible http://ift.tt/2vDBUD8
via IFTTT

Use Toll Free Numbers to Build a ‘Red Hot’ List of Prospects at Low Cost

A survey by the Direct Marketing Association found that 83% of people prefer to listen to a 24 hour free recorded message than speak to a live sales person.

Click costs are outta control.

On Facebook they’ve rocketed from a reasonable $0.27 at the end of 2016 to a budget busting $1.72 today. And with 2 million advertisers (and rising) all fighting over that sweet Facebook traffic, the costs are only going one way amigo. And that is UP.

Google stopped being profitable (in most markets) years ago.

Traffic from Outbrain, RevContent and their brethren may be cheaper. But it has the precision targeting of a garden sprinkler.

So what can you do?

You can focus on customer lifetime value and backend sales. And treat the initial sale as a ‘break even’ on your ad spend.

Or…

You can switch to channels few dare to mess with.

I’m talking about offline my friend. And using a tactic that gets grizzled veterans nodding approvingly and young bucks shrugging their shoulders, mistakenly thinking it went out of fashion with the fax machine.

Hire a ‘robot’ to talk to your customers (in a good way)

Through services like Telecenter you can setup your own Toll Free (Free Phone if you’re one of my UK countrymen) number.

You can then can record a message to convince prospects to leave their name and address for further info (i.e. your sales letter).

It costs a measly $40/month for this number to then generate leads around the clock. And if done right, it can be higher converting and cheaper than running an online paid ad campaign.

Here’s the strategy…

Say, you’re selling a supplement for joint pain. You’d run a small ad in newspapers (using low cost ‘remnant advertising’) saying something like:

Free Report – Repairs and Lubricates Your Joints to Take the Pain Away. Toll Free: (123) 456789.

People with joint pain are typically over 50 and still get most of their information from newspapers. They also trust printed coms a lot more than all the ‘fake news’ awash online.

And unless they’re sat at their computer, you’ll have their complete attention as they can’t be Liking or Tweeting when their phone is glued to their ear.

What to say in your recorded message

There’s no perfect length to a recorded message. As with a sales letter, you need to say whatever is necessary to get them to take the action you want – which in this case is to leave their name and address.

In the message simply:

1. Introduce yourself, your credentials and the reason why you created this message (never say you’re a doctor, unless you actually are one. Faking that you’re a qualified professional can get you in seriously hot water).
2. Discuss their pain, such as unscrewing a jar, getting dressed in the morning or feeling like a prisoner in their own home.
3. How wear and tear is the likely cause of their joint pain and how widespread joint pain is.
4. Give 3 lifestyle habits that may be making their pain worse (build the tension and raise the stakes for why they need help).
5. Tell them how your report shares the latest breakthrough research into joint pain and how best to relieve it.
6. Provide some proof with a stat from a study in your report, such as how X herb helped reduce joint pain for 8 out of 10 people.
7. Ask them to share their name and address and their biggest challenge of overcoming their joint pain (you’re getting pure old market research and lead generation rolled into one).

What results can you expect?

With a toll free number, you should be aiming for at least 50% leaving their name and address. Trevor Toecracker Crook typically gets an 80% response to his recorded messages

Then when they get your sales letter with a handwritten post it note (in BLUE ink) on the front saying “Barry, thanks for requesting my free report. Call me if you need advice, Matt” do you think they’re going to read it?

You can bet the farm on it.

And their trust in you is going to be at ‘best friends’ level compared to all the snake oil salesmen they find online, with their unrealistic claims, suspiciously positive testimonials and ‘grinning couple’ stock photos.

If you can get a good rate on your ad costs (remember to use remnant advertising), getting leads this way could also work out WAY more profitable than buying a list from a list broker.

Because you see, bought lists can be of questionable value.

And when you’re sending letters to people who don’t know who you are or ‘when the heck’ did they give you permission to write to them, what do you think they’ll do with your letter?

It’s going straight into the ‘B’ pile compadre. Into the trash.

Hear from the masters on ‘Free Recorded Messages’

You can listen to marketing wizards Dean Jackson and Joe Polish discussing the Free Recorded Messages strategy in their “I Love Marketing Podcast”, and how they use it to generate qualified, red hot leads around the clock.

If you decide to try out this old school yet time proven tactic, let me know how you get on.

The post Use Toll Free Numbers to Build a ‘Red Hot’ List of Prospects at Low Cost appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible.

from The Copywriter's Crucible http://ift.tt/2f3RukQ
via IFTTT

7 Tactics Drayton Bird Told Me that Most Marketers Don’t Know About

Tactic # 4 – Always have a caption below an image

It’s unbelievable.

But the sad reality is that a lot of marketers don’t study.

They create campaigns based on intuition, creativity and hope, instead of studying classic ads from the last fifty years to see how selling in print is really done. Ask a crowd of ad agency folks if they’ve read Caples, Hopkins and Schwartz and you may as well be listing Renaissance poets.

Last week I had the fortune to be in the presence of a direct marketing legend. A real life Mad Man. A godfather of direct response copywriters, with tales that make Roger Sterling’s exploits seem tame. I am, of course, talking about Mr Drayton Bird.

For two days I was immersed in hardcore direct response training at Mr Bird’s swansong: the ‘Last Hurrah’ seminar. My pen rarely left the paper as I feverishly took down notes faster than lightning strikes the tree, not wishing to miss a single off the cuff comment that could explode response rates for my clients (and justify my rising fees).

My pen rarely left the paper as I feverishly took down notes faster than lightning strikes the tree, not wishing to miss a single off the cuff comment that could explode response rates for my clients (and justify higher fees).

Throwing gold nuggets like it’s spare change

Sharing the podium with Mr Bird was Trevor ‘Toecracker’ Crook. His no fluff, spit and sawdust attitude didn’t disappoint. And he threw golden nuggets into the air like they were spare change, with all of us lunging to grab and embed them into our notebooks (I believe just one of his nuggets will help me write more convincing proposals and double my fees at the same time).

Drayton Bird will soon be publishing the videos from his two-day seminar as a course. So I’m not about to share all my notes here and spoil the surprise.

However, I will share 7 moreish takeaways:

1. Have a case study or real life story at the heart of your promotion
2. Your competition is not other marketers. It is Spectator and Cosmo journalists. You need to raise your writing to that level to earn attention
3. Add incentives that are low cost but high perceived value (e.g. cruise ships make their income from drinks sales and excursions, they can afford to give the room away practically for free)
4. Always have captions below images
5. Cartoons for attention. Photos for conviction
6. Don’t accept ‘No’ as the reason. Dig down to find out why they aren’t buying.
7. Ask them to take the action you want at least 3 times

These are just seven tactics that can ramp up your response rates and moolah. I literally wrote down over 10 pages of notes (front and back) that I’ll be referring to every time I write a VSL or sales letter to try and inject some Drayton Bird magic into my copy.

I’ll post a link to the course when it goes live.

The post 7 Tactics Drayton Bird Told Me that Most Marketers Don’t Know About appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible.

from The Copywriter's Crucible http://ift.tt/2uxI6Jq
via IFTTT

Will I See You at Drayton Bird’s Last Hurrah?

“Drayton Bird knows more about Direct Marketing than anyone in the world … His talks are highly instructive and hilariously funny” – David Ogilvy

Drayton Bird is an original Mad Man.

In a career spanning nearly six decades, Drayton Bird has sold everything, from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig, for brands including American Express, Procter & Gamble, Deutsche Post (me too), IBM and Microsoft

His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, has been the UK’s best-selling book on direct response marketing since the early 80s.

He’s won countless awards and accolades from the best minds in direct response marketing, including Ogilvy, Schwartz and Bencivenga.

And this week it all comes to an end (speaking wise, anyway) because he is giving his last ever seminar aboard the S.S. Great Britain this Weds and Thurs.

I’ll be there in my best shirt, polished shoes and notebook ready. Will I see you there?

The post Will I See You at Drayton Bird’s Last Hurrah? appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible.

from The Copywriter's Crucible http://ift.tt/2tcyBSy
via IFTTT

Why I Don’t Charge Per Hour

If you’re charging per hour, you’re undercharging.

Why?

Because in this madcap world of freelancing there are all manner of tasks beyond sitting down and writing copy.

Try this for a week: Track everything you do on a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just write down what you do in hourly segments.

I think you’ll be surprised to see how much time you spend answering emails, keeping track of receipts, dipping into Facebook groups, reading the news, staring out of windows etc.

You may find that only two thirds of your time is actually spent on client work. And with all the distractions, writing a press release or advertorial can take you half a day, rather than the two hours you billed the client for.

Do this instead: Charge project fees instead of hourly. Recognize that writing an advertorial or email sequence is actually a half or full day’s work. Then bill accordingly. Remember to include all the deliverables in your proposal so they appreciate all the stages that writing copy entails (more tips on writing proposals).

Most copywriters undercharge (and then grumble about it in social media). Don’t be one of them. Charge what you’re worth.

If you’re writing for a player, with, say, an email list of 100k or an ad budget of $5k per day, consider how what you’re writing is tied to revenue.

And if you believe you can do a better job than someone they could pick up from Upwork for a pittance, charge accordingly. You’re worth it.

The post Why I Don’t Charge Per Hour appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible - A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose.

from The Copywriter's Crucible – A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose http://ift.tt/2rPHuB2
via IFTTT

Schwarzenegger on Marketing

Schwarzenegger and ‘Jim’ Cameron will be teaming up on a new Terminator movie. At least we know the marketing will be great.

Recently I’ve been reading the autobiography of the prior Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And it truly is a rags to riches story. His work ethic, ambition and promotional nous led to him amassing millions before he was even a movie star. His appointment to Governor of California was no fluke (whatever your opinions on his performance in said role).

Anywho. Enough eulogizing.

I want to focus on one chapter in particular on turning around the fortunes of the movie Total Recall (as it relates to my recent post on dealing with failure).

At the time, Total Recall was the most expensive movie ever made. It was a bold attempt at bringing sci-fi to the masses, and a lot of careers were riding on its success.

But the pre-launch test scores were BAD.

Even after weeks of trailers and advertisements, its ‘awareness’ score was in the 40s, when it needed to be in the 90s. Unless they did something drastic, Total Recall was on track to be Turkey of the Year.

So what did Arnold do?

He switched the marketing team.

Out went the team who were clueless on how to market such a weird, over the top story (this typically comes down to a lack of research in our world), and in came a team that devised new hooks, big ideas and taglines.

The result?

Within two weeks, Total Recall’s awareness score rocketed to 92 percent. It went on to achieve the biggest opening weekend yet recorded, earned over $300 million worldwide and even picked up an Oscar.

All from switching up the marketing.

As Arnold writes:

The experience proves how important marketing is – how important it is to tell people what this is about; really blow up their skirt and make them say, “I have to go see this movie”

The post Schwarzenegger on Marketing appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible - A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose.

from The Copywriter's Crucible – A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose http://ift.tt/2t9cKbi
via IFTTT

What Separates Amateurs from the Pros

Research.

That’s what makes the grizzled veterans standout and is the key to higher conversions.

Within a few years (or months, in some cases) of hand copying sales letters and working from templates, you should be writing out decent sales letters that keep most clients happy.

But to reach the creme de la creme of clients (and fees), you need to be offering big ideas, hooks and triggers on an epic scale that few can match.

The only way to uncover these ideas is through deep, unrelenting and obsessive research. The top copy dogs typically spend 1-2 weeks (or even a month) on research before they even write the headline.

So what are they doing during this time?

Here’s my 12 step checklist for completing the research stage:

1. Send the client a questionnaire
2. Send their email list a ‘Deep Dive Survey’
3. Review the results with the client (optional)
4. Review all of the client’s current marketing and best-performing pages and emails
5. Research competitor websites and sales pages to identify their key hooks and benefits
6. Research the market for challenges, problems and language (Amazon reviews can be a goldmine)
7. List all of the problems the product solves and how it does it
8. Research the market again to assess how aware they are of the solution to their problem and my client’s product
9. Writing out pages of benefit bullets and headlines
10. Identify what ‘big idea’ will help the product stand out
11. Write down all the objections a customer would have before buying
12. Plot out the sales letter in Scrivener

Boom! Once you’ve done all that the writing part is easy.

As you can imagine, working through all these steps eats up a lot of time.

In fact, you should be spending two-thirds of your time on research and only a third on the actual writing.

Try working through all these steps on your next big project and let me know how it improves your conversion rate (and praise from the client).

 

The post What Separates Amateurs from the Pros appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible - A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose.

from The Copywriter's Crucible – A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose http://ift.tt/2rwl6Yo
via IFTTT

Dealing with Failure

Campaigns are a marathon. Not a sprint

We all have to face this at some point in our working lives.

We work our fingers to the bone to get a campaign launched, only to see it fizzle for a while before dying completely.

The clickthrough rate is abysmal. We barely get a 1% conversion rate on the sales page and we start questioning whether we’re cut out for this gig at all.

I’ll let you in on a secret: It happens to all of us. Even the grizzled veterans who’d assume haven’t had a campaign fail in decades.

But the reality is that failure comes with the territory.

You then have two options: Kill the campaign entirely and start from scratch or seeing if you can test your way into turning it around.

If a campaign has bombed it’s typically due to one of these reasons:

1. Not enough testing

The gurus may not tell you this, but few campaigns succeed straight out the gate.

You need to test them out to find out what’s working and what’s dragging your stats down. Test the big things first, like the headline, lead and bullets to see if that gives you a bump.

Then focus on tightening the fundamentals of your offer, the guarantee, the close and the PS. And don’t forget to test images with a caption too.

2. There isn’t a starving market

Too many times I’ve taken on projects where the client hadn’t tested the market to see if there was a demand for their product. It’s then up to me to, supposedly, wave my magic marketing wand to make people want something they don’t feel in their gut.

Its not gonna happen.

Not unless you start making outrageous claims that will only book you a visit from the FTC.

The first step in any product launch, is to check if there is demand, or a ‘starving crowd’ as Gary Halbert called it.

Thankfully, you no longer have to go door to door or walking around a store to interview customers to find out. You can simply write an advertorial about the challenge your product solves, have a signup form for people to register their interest in the solution and then spend some gold on ad traffic. Then see what the signups tell you.

A simpler option is to run a quiz, poll or survey to find out your market’s biggest challenges. This is also a great way of building a list of prospects to mail when you’re ready to roll.

3. Haven’t got to know the customer

Creating a buyer persona based on best guesses will only get you so far. You need to study the market and find out who your customers are if you are to be successful.

Spend 1-2 weeks lurking in your market’s Amazon reviews, forums, Facebook groups and YouTube channels to understand the language they use, who the villains in their market are and what they need help with.

Then when you sit down to write, you’ll have a clearer idea of who’s sat across from you that you need to convince to buy your new widget. Your copy will then naturally resonate more, be more conversational and higher conversions will follow.

Turning failure into success

Failure may come with the territory. But that doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

It’s always wise to set clients up with the right expectations before you launch (e.g. 1% of conversions on the front end, majority of profits from the back end).

But if they start freaking out because a campaign is failing, advise them to stay calm, to work through the three steps listed above and to treat it like a marathon, not a sprint.

The post Dealing with Failure appeared first on The Copywriter's Crucible - A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose.

from The Copywriter's Crucible – A Melting Pot of Punchy, Persuasive Copywriting by Freelance Copywriter Matt Ambrose http://ift.tt/2sWlv7B
via IFTTT