As a business owner, you probably already know how important copywriting is. But in case you need a refresher, here it is:
Pretty pictures aren’t enough anymore.
We’ve all heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe that was true at one point, but now as more and more people are leaving traditional jobs to do what they love for a living, that “thousand words” is slowly becoming more like a hundred. There’s a lot more competition out there and more choice than ever before. Pretty pictures just simply aren’t enough.
Great copy is the difference between piquing someone’s interest and grabbing their attention. In an age of Instagram and social media, pictures are perfect for creating interest. But you need to turn that interest into sales.
Your words are what will get people to stay. Great copy is what actually grabs people’s attention and ensures that people’s interest will actually convert.
Great Copy is the Key Ingredient You’ve Been Missing
As creatives, it’s very easy to make our brand and our work about ourselves. It’s certainly natural to do this and definitely not wrong, but when you think about it, who is missing from the story that you’re trying to craft?
When we’re writing our copy and building our branding visuals, we create a story that’s meant for our clients and our potential clients. If the copy we write is lackluster and only about us, it doesn’t give clients a good reason to want to work with us. Great copy is the missing piece that – when paired with your branding visuals – stands between you and your revenue goals.
Well-written copy affirms your client’s experience and makes them feel seen. It gives clarity over mystery. If you’ve ever been to the website of a competitor and that website is filled only with great visuals and a contact form, it creates a sense of mystery. But is it telling you what the actual next steps are in order to work with this person? Probably not. We know if people online these days are confused, they’re gone. Great copy can fix that problem.
As a creative entrepreneur, we need to figure out how to lean into our intuition to make better business decisions. Think of yourself as a channel. We are channeling the experiences, milestones, and feelings of our clients into something beautiful. As a creative, allow yourself to channel your own story as beautifully as you channel every other client’s story.
Great copy is what makes your offer unquestionable to your ideal client. In other words, it makes your offer no longer an option but an absolute must. Who doesn’t want that? When you craft a compelling story that shows exactly what you can do for your potential clients in clear, concise words, it paves the path for the way forward. If you can intuit all of the client’s questions before they can even ask them, you will roll out the red carpet to them working with you and thus, open your way to meeting your revenue goals.
How to Sell Without Being Sales-y
When you think of a salesperson, who do you think of? If you’re like me, it’s a cringey used car salesperson. There is a way to sell your offer without coming off as sleazy. I like to call it selling with soul and it starts with your mindset.
Selling with soul begins with giving yourself permission. Allow yourself to fully believe and encompass these words: I am qualified and worthy of selling myself. If your biggest concern about selling your offer is coming off as pushy, understand that you will never sell something to someone that they don’t need.
You are the only YOU that we have in this world. You will never be able to force someone into choosing to purchase what you’re offering if they don’t truly want and need it. The offer you’ve created is the perfect offer that someone out there has been longing to find, you just need to give yourself the permission to sell to them. You and your offer are the perfect solution for somebody out there. If you never give yourself permission to sell to them, they will never find you. And that is so tragic.
It helps to think of your sales pitch not as a sale, but as an invitation. This shift in perspective changes selling from an aggressive, car salesperson approach to something gentler. Instead of forcing your offer onto people, you’re coming from a place of abundance and extending a helping hand. The right people will take that hand and become part of the brand that you’re building. There will be those who don’t take it and that’s totally okay. What you offer isn’t meant for every person; it’s meant for the right person.
Understandably, shifting your mindset takes time. If this feels too esoteric for you, here are three tangible ways you can be more authentic in your ways of selling while you’re waiting for that mindset shift to settle in:
1. Aim to listen and connect.
When you go into a discovery call with a potential client, really hear what they’re saying. Listen to where they are right now in their own business and where they want to go and visualize how you can fit yourself in. If it doesn’t seem like you fit in, that’s okay. Remember you crafted your offer for the right person, and they have done the same. Refer them to someone who might be a better fit than you. This shows that regardless of whether you’re meant to be working together or not, you are putting the client over yourself and trying to serve them as best as possible with the tools you have.
2. Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”
Gary Vaynerchuk is an online entrepreneur and marketing expert. Even though not all of his ideals align with my own, I love his “jab, jab, jab, right hook” theory of selling. It boils down to aiming to serve your ideal client base before you try to sell to them. It’s “serve, serve, serve, sale”. You can implement this by perhaps offering a valuable freebie, which leads to a well-researched blog post, followed by a free webinar, and then you close in with the sale.
3. Understand Who Your Ideal Client Is
You can’t sell to somebody without knowing who it is you’re selling to. This is not a new idea by any means however, it’s more than just knowing where your ideal client would hang out around town. It’s about knowing what makes them nervous or how they want to be self-actualized as an individual. It’s having a deeper understanding of who your client is.
How to Write for One Person Only (Hint: It’s not you!)
When you’re writing your copy, you should have just one person in mind: your client. This goes back to understanding who your ideal client is and writing copy that aims towards serving them rather than everyone and hoping they’ll see it too. There’s strength in niching down into your specialty that serves just that one type of client. Even though it’s scary to think of turning away other potential clients outside of your niche, the strongest copy is the kind where your ideal client feels like they are the only one you’re speaking to.
We can speculate all we want about what our ideal clients are searching for; however, speculation is just our opinion without evidence to back it up. You need that evidence, and it all starts with research. Even when you think you know your client, give yourself time to research and really look into what your clients are looking for. You might discover that you’re writing your copy from the wrong angle and you’re not speaking to what your client actually wants.
Research can manifest in a few ways. Surveys are great because they literally ask your ideal client what they’re looking for and how you can help them. You can also ask pointed questions when you’re requesting a testimonial from a client. Along with regular testimonial questions, by asking intentional questions, you’ll receive feedback from a happy client while also doing some market research specific to your ideal client. Conversely, you can examine your existing testimonials to find the commonalities among them. Even searching through Facebook groups where your ideal client hangs out will give you common questions that keep popping up or what does and doesn’t work for your clients.
At the end of the day, remember that when you’ve done all of your research and you’re writing your copy, you are writing for one person – your ideal client. This is the epitome of human-centered branding. It’s the difference between writing with “you” language instead of “we” and “our” language. Clients want to know how we are going to celebrate them, make them look amazing, and feel liberated with your craft. When you put your client into your copy and how you can serve them, you are writing with the client as the one.
Selling Segues: Pivot from Storytelling to Selling
There is this idea (bear with me here) called the Oracle of Kevin Bacon. It comes back to the idea of the universal principle or theory that we are all no more than six degrees separated from everyone on earth. This started as a silly game of trying to discover how anyone in Hollywood is connected with Kevin Bacon to a degree of six. For example, Timothée Chalamet has a Bacon degree of 2 because he was in Worst Friends with Kathryn Erbe who was in Stir of Echoes with Kevin Bacon.
Now, what does this have to do with writing great copy? You can do this with your writing. Start with one topic – maybe something that’s significant to you – but then use that topic as a starting point to pivot into how it can help you help your clients. It’s the idea of pivoting from a story and moving it into the idea of a pitch while doing it really simply but really tactfully.
There are good and bad ways to do this. If it feels cheesy in the moment, it probably is. Ultimately, your goal is to try to see the links. As humans, we have this awesome, distinct capability to see meaning in everything. Turn this into a game or a fun writing exercise. Try to take something as obscure as your refrigerator breaking and turn it into a sales pitch. See the connections between two seemingly unrelated things. This drives home the idea that you can talk about anything you like and still craft it into a story that says, “I have a business and an offer that is worth talking about.”
As a creative entrepreneur, if you have an offer that you believe in, remember to give yourself the permission to sell it. Remember that you are worthy of selling and your offer is worthy of being sold. The energy that you’ll radiate when you give yourself permission to sell and believe that you are worthy will be unmatched. That mindset shift will help you craft copy that tells a story to market yourself intuitively and authentically. And when you put that energy out there, it will attract the right person who has been waiting for an offer just like yours.
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