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Why B2B Copywriting Matters, Really Matters
58 Plays4 years ago
In an age of video and photos, words don't get the respect they deserve.
Words aren't sexy or glitzy.
But they do matter. Words provide the information, the context, and the guidance for customers to take action.
In this episode, I talk with Eden Bidani, a conversion copywriter for SaaS, tech, and direct to consumer brands.
One of the things that struck me is Eden's suggestion that the best copy takes time to create and a lot of the time is not writing, but research.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 20 minutes or less. In some respects, copywriting is the unsung hero of digital marketing. It doesn't get as much attention as video and photos, but words matter.
Meet Eden Bedani
00:00:18
Speaker
On today's show, I'm talking with Eden Bedani, a conversion copywriter and acquisition strategist for SaaS, tech, and D2C companies. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Eden.
00:00:29
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Mark. It's great to be here.
What is Conversion Copywriting?
00:00:31
Speaker
So what does a conversion copywriter and acquisition strategist do? All right. So conversion copywriting, we're really looking at
00:00:39
Speaker
at kind of the whole spectrum of copywriting. It's not specifically, it's not direct response copy in the way that we're really trying to push towards a sale. It's rather looking at every kind of customer touch point throughout the funnel or throughout the sale cycle and looking at optimizing the copy at that specific point to help drive conversions, not just to lift conversions at that point in the funnel, but to actually drive greater conversions across the entire spectrum.
00:01:06
Speaker
For whatever reason, copywriting is getting more attention these days. As someone who is a writer by profession, words have always been important to me, and copy has always been at the core of what I do. But it is interesting to see high-profile marketers like Dave Gerhart talk about why copywriting is so important. So why do you think the spotlight is being shone on copywriting these days?
The Growing Importance of Copywriting
00:01:32
Speaker
I think with all the crazy things that are going on in the world right now, I think we're really realizing just how much we actually depend on written communication. More than video, more than other things. It's text, it's emails, it's Slack messages, it's SMSes. We're using so much more written communication now.
00:01:50
Speaker
more than ever, even though even if we do weave into that as well, video and other forms of media, it's just it's really shiny. It's really helped bringing that to the forefront that if you're not, if you can't communicate clearly, if you can't get across what you're saying, and if you can't ensure that your message is optimized in a way so that your audience receives it in the way that you intend it to come across, then it's it's just going to fall flat. That's sort of the current situation has really brought copyright into the spotlight.
00:02:21
Speaker
It is interesting that when you look at platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok, video and photographs are seen as a proverbial bell of the ball. Everyone loves video, everyone loves great photographs.
00:02:38
Speaker
But words are kind of like the work horses, not terribly glamorous. I'm curious about why people are recognizing the value of words. Do they suddenly realize that words make a difference as it's harder to differentiate yourself? Are words becoming increasingly more valuable?
00:02:58
Speaker
I think words have pretty much always been, like you said, the unsung hero. I mean, a picture, they say, you know, it falls back to the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words. But if you don't have a caption for that picture, if you don't have an explanation or something to support that picture, it lacks context.
The Role of Copy in Visual Content
00:03:17
Speaker
And so copywriting adds multiple layers of context. You can have a beautiful image. You can have, you know, an amazing, engaging video.
00:03:27
Speaker
The copywriting is such the words and the messages that are enshrined or encapsulated in the visual, the concepts and the messages and the deeper underlying concepts that people want to express through images and through video. Again, it can be hard to get that message across.
00:03:54
Speaker
As a writer, I often think that writing is underrated and undervalued, particularly when it comes to the web. Over the last few years, the prices for content marketing from a freelance perspective seem to have been dropping.
00:04:11
Speaker
There's a sense that that is changing. Do you share this sentiment that writing is becoming more valuable and that people are putting more value in people who can write well, or is that just me being biased as a, as a professional writer?
Evolving Gig Economy and Content Quality
00:04:27
Speaker
No, I think so. And I think a lot of it has to do with the trends in the gig economy over the last few years. There have been, for probably around the last 10 years, there was a prevalence of content houses, content farms.
00:04:42
Speaker
like content mills as we sometimes call them from a writer's perspective that just the purpose I think it fits into the wider marketing perspective where you look at things like SEO 10 years ago is very very different to what SEO is today.
00:04:59
Speaker
where it has a much more technical aspect. Then there was a lot of keyword stuffing. There was a lot of just publishing content for the sake of publishing content just to rank higher in search engine results, just to be present online in order to get that attention. But people have realized that it's not just having the content. It actually has to be good content. It actually has to engage people. It has to really speak
00:05:28
Speaker
to people on a deep level. It can't just be something that's just spun up over the course of half an hour. It really has to connect deeply, not just with the audience, but with the topics and express it in just a very highly engaging way. What do you see as the fundamentals for good copywriting? I'm sorry about that, but I had to ask. No, of course.
Research: The Backbone of Copywriting
00:05:55
Speaker
That's a good one. And I think actually the fundamental for copywriting is actually the research. I kid you not. Really? Yeah. It's not actually the writing. Copywriting is so far from, there's a creative aspect to it, but it's really far removed, at least conversion copywriting. It's so very far removed from
00:06:14
Speaker
branding, copywriting, creative copywriting, the research is easily 80% of the work. If you don't know who you're writing for, if you don't know what the purpose of the copy is, what goal it's trying to achieve, where it fits in terms of the overall, whether it's the contact marketing strategy or the marketing strategy or the funnel strategy. If you don't know those goals, you don't know who you're writing for and what it's meant to achieve, it's not going to move the needle.
00:06:42
Speaker
So you're saying that there needs to be some strategic thinking before you even put pen to paper, proverbial speaking. Absolutely. Like I said, the research is easily 80% of the work. That's an interesting perspective because people think that copy flows. I mean, I think we've got this image that
00:07:01
Speaker
Artists like David, David Ogilvy, somehow they were got a spark of inspiration and out came the copy. But the reality is that good copy takes time and iterations and a lot of, a lot of hard work and sweat. I think you're right. I think that good copy emerges because you've just immersed yourself in a topic and almost feels like you're, you've kind of given yourself a chance to digest what the key themes are and what the key ideas are. Let's say you're, you're writing a piece of copy for a client and it could be.
00:07:30
Speaker
website copy or blog post or something that requires. Creativity and thought how what's your what's your process how long does it take you to really get to the point where you're happy what you've done. That's a good question and i think it really depends on it depends a lot on the project and the depth of the project and again what are the what are the ten thousand foot kind of goals.
00:07:54
Speaker
for the project, how is it meant to help move the client's business forward or to help them increase more revenue or acquire more customers? It really depends. And it depends on how much customer research that they actually have. For example, this is not something that can be knocked out in a day. With most projects, we start off by interviewing customers.
00:08:14
Speaker
that the client actually has and actually speaking with them one-on-one, recording those, getting the transcripts, going through the transcripts, actually surveying their customers as well, collecting survey results, analyzing them, doing deep audience research. It's a process. It can be quite, it can be a few weeks.
00:08:32
Speaker
And why do marketers struggle with copywriting? Because it seems to be one of these things where people think it's really hard, really challenging. Is it because they're not natural writers or do they not understand the process involved? Can you explain some of the struggles that
Challenges in Copywriting: Too Many Ideas
00:08:47
Speaker
they have? I think why marketers struggle with copywriting is not because they don't know what to say because they have too much to say.
00:08:55
Speaker
Right. They know the business or they know the product or they know the client so well, and there's so many wonderful features. There's so many wonderful benefits they can communicate, but it's wait. If you're going to dump all this information on your audience, they're just going to lose focus. Copyrighting is about distilling that message down to the kind of one or two core points, like your unique selling proposition,
00:09:19
Speaker
and present that to the audience in a way that's going to encourage them to make a decision, to decide to move forward, to want to learn more, to decide to purchase. So it's not necessarily about what they say or to find ideas, it's that they have too many ideas and so to actually distill the message down and to pinpoint the kind of one or two pieces of information that
00:09:41
Speaker
that the audience really needs to hear in order to convert. I think that's the struggle for a lot of marketers because a lot of marketers by trade, they all write copy. What a marketer writes is copy. A writer or a creative writer might sometimes write copy, but most of the time it's a general content writing or creative writing.
00:10:04
Speaker
You know, it's interesting. I have a client and we were doing website copy for them. And one of their biggest pieces of guidance was we don't want generic copy. They're a FinTech company. So they didn't want to sound like every other FinTech company out there. So what we did is we took a step back and created a copy that we saw as user friendly and simplistic. And then we got into a bit of a philosophical war because they saw simplistic
00:10:30
Speaker
accessible copy as being generic because it didn't have big words. It didn't have all the industry acronyms. It wasn't trying to throw out all these inside baseball cliches. To me, that was an interesting struggle because you're, as a copyright, you're trying to be tight and you're trying to be concise, but a lot of entrepreneurs want to be very verbose and they want to tell everybody everything. And do you find yourself in, in struggles with entrepreneurs who just don't understand the tenets of good copy?
Effective Communication: Speaking the Audience's Language
00:10:58
Speaker
Sometimes, but then usually once they hear the research process, once they hear that it's data-based, that it's specifically conversion copywriting, it's a data-based approach to copywriting. So we first confirm the data, we confirm what
00:11:14
Speaker
language the audience is speaking, we confirm the verbal cues and things and the ways that they express themselves. And then we present this to the client and say, this is what your audience is saying. We need to make sure that the copy is matching their language patterns, matching the way they speak to actually capture their attention effectively and to help bring them to convert. If in the event the audience is also using jargon and
00:11:38
Speaker
long run on sentences and things. That doesn't mean that there's not a place for it on the website. That said, if the audience is using simpler language, if the audience in their day-to-day lives is expressing themselves very differently, then we present that to the client. They say, this is how we're talking, so this is how we're going to talk to them. It makes sense.
00:11:58
Speaker
That's an interesting take because I guess one of the things we talk about as marketers, particularly recently is being very customer centric writing copy and content that reflects their needs and interests. But it is interesting that you suggest that we should talk like they talk. We should write like they would write. So we're aligning ourselves with their sensibilities, the ways that the ways that they like to consume content. That's a very interesting approach.
00:12:21
Speaker
Thank you. I have a degree in anthropology and sociology, so actually I took that inspiration from there. With anthropology, the way they learn about different cultures and the way they conduct research projects is they do something called ethnography.
00:12:37
Speaker
which is where they actually immerse themselves completely in a culture in a societal group that is actually foreign to them. And they dress the same, they eat the same food, they speak the same language. They actually do everything that they can to actually understand their audience or who they want to communicate with from the inside out. And then they take a step back and then look at how they perceive the world and then apply that understanding elsewhere.
00:13:06
Speaker
That's a really interesting approach because when I think about doing marketing engagements, one of the things I talk about when I'm approaching entrepreneurs is the ability or the fact that I need to talk to their customers. Sometimes I get pushback because they don't want to consult in talking to their customers. Their customers are sacred. Their customers are theirs. But what I often find when the more customers I talk to, the better feel I get for what customers want, the way they talk. That engagement with customers is invaluable and I can see how it can align with marketing.
Recommended Reading for Copywriters
00:13:32
Speaker
Any suggestions about blogs or books or podcasts that people should read to learn more about copywriting or people to follow on LinkedIn for that matter?
00:13:41
Speaker
Oh, yeah, definitely. In terms of books, oh, there's a ton of books. There's a ton of good books on copywriting. Kind of the two fundamental ones, though, I think would be breakthrough advertising or Eugene Schwartz, which is not strictly about copywriting, but it contains so much golden information about how it's really about the nuts and bolts of good copywriting, what goes into it, about how to adjust what you're writing for the different stages of awareness, where a prospect is.
00:14:06
Speaker
and how to tailor the copy to make sure and how to tailor your messaging and your copy to meet, like you said, meet their interests and their desires. My other favorite book I would have to say is the Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman. He was a famous advertorial writer and direct marketer from a few decades back and the way he
00:14:26
Speaker
teaches you how to write long-form copy, how one sentence kind of weaves into the next sentence to create copy that people want to read every single word. It's really fascinating. And after reading this book, you immediately apply it to your own writing and it makes a big difference. Well, now I got two more books to read on top of the stack of books I've got on my bedside table for thanks
Connecting with Eden Bedani
00:14:47
Speaker
me for that. So Eden, if people want to learn more about what you do, where can they find you online?
00:14:52
Speaker
Best place would be to find me on LinkedIn. That's the best place. That's where I found you originally. Tell me a little bit before we go, tell me about your experience on LinkedIn, how long you've been writing copy and content.
00:15:03
Speaker
So LinkedIn really, I just stepped up the last, over the last year, I've been on LinkedIn for a lot longer than that, but then I really took, started taking a more proactive approach to marketing myself. And so not just marketing, not marketing myself in the sense of trying to push myself out there, but just trying to add value to the community, to the professional community
Conclusion and Feedback Invitation
00:15:21
Speaker
on LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe by iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it.
00:15:33
Speaker
For show notes of today's conversation and information about Eden, visit marketing spark.co slash blog. And if you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketing spark.co. I'll talk to you next time.