Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Joanna Wiebe is the original conversion copywriter. She’s the co-founder of Copyhackers and Airstory.co, and she’s written for companies like Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Shopify, and more.If you’ve ever struggled to write copy for your landing page, you’ll want to learn from Joanna. Tune into our interview for her step-by-step guide to better customer research, more authentic writing, and increased conversions for your business.

Copy Hackers is where startups and marketers go to learn how to write persuasive website and email copy. Joanna teaches all things copywriting, growth marketing, and how to run a profitable freelancing business.

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3 Steps to Writing Copy That Converts

Conversion copywriting is about moving somebody to take action. Your role is to convince someone to say yes to your offer—whether it’s buying your product, signing up for your email list, or clicking a link to read your latest blog post.

According to Joanna Wiebe, it’s all about getting inside people’s heads.The difference between writing persuasive copy and “meh” copy is how much you focus on your audience. You should be thinking about your audience the entire time you’re writing copy. It’s not about the words you would use to describe your product.What words does your audience use?

How do they talk about what you’re selling? Writing copy that converts means you find out how your prospects talk about their objections, their problems, and what they’re going through in life. You find those words and phrases in your research—and put them into a framework that’s designed to make people say yes.In this interview, Joanne walks you through all three steps in detail.

The best copywriting starts with research and discovery.In fact, this is the most significant part of the entire process. It’s simple. Start with customer interviews and zero in on the parts you hear that are interesting. What are the things that make you pause and take notice?When you’re really looking for messages and the order you want to put them in.If you can’t do one-on-one customer interviews, you can send out surveys or dig into a process Joanna calls review mining. The point is, you’re never starting from scratch when it comes to copy. You’re just organizing raw, voice-of-customer data.

How do you organize your messages on the page?In this step, Joanna shares the frameworks she uses to pull the copy together. Her favorite is PAS, or Problem, Solve, Agitate. This method opens with the problem that’s being solved—and agitates it so your reader really feels these pain points.If there’s no major pain point, you can turn the classic framework AIDA. It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. You start organizing messages based on what will grab your reader’s attention.

The final step is editing. This is where you sweep through your messaging and edit it to prepare for AB testing. All you’re doing is taking the clunky voice-of-customer data and making sure it sounds smooth (but still sticky).In this interview, Joanna reveals her process called The Seven Sweeps. You’ll learn the 7-step framework for executing a fast-moving copy review, so you can edit quickly and confidently.

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