🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (19 tweets)
The inimitable @copyhackers wrote about landing page copy for us: https://t.co/yHXf8GHz73 I think you'll particularly enjoy the combination of real-life motivating examples and the theory behind what works and what could use improvement.
Geeks of my acquaintance often tolerate copy which is egregiously less-than-performant and/or overuse "Who could possibly know what works? Just A/B test it.", generally without doing the statistical significance math or understanding what that would do to operational cadence.
As someone who has a lot of love for A/B testing, much like science doesn't generally start from proving the existence of gravity and the chemical composition of water, I'd encourage you to reserve your testing budget for high-leverage interesting decisions.
I think taste can largely be improved by exposure, and one of the tactical recommendations for getting better at copy is simply keeping a "swipe file": when you find a sales message landing hard with you, copy it and see if you can reuse elements of it later.
One of the hardest things to operationalize with copywriting is convincing writers (and other stakeholders) to allocate effort accordingly, which generally means dumping INCREDIBLE amounts of effort on specific elements of landing pages and one-and-done almost everywhere else.
The way to get e.g. the right brand voice in drip email #6 is not to aggressively rewrite it with six people and several layers of review, it is to articulate the voice, execute competently the first time, and spend the marginal brainsweat on a landing page header or CTA.
(Also honestly the amount of marginal effort required to not sound like a big soulless megacorp in generally unremarkable interactions is so low that you can trivially accomplish it the first time. "Would a bank OK this email? If yes, don't ship, they suck at writing.")
Just the quote in that last tweet has at least three things an editor would flag: 1) OK -> okay 2) Replace ship with something that is not industry-specific jargon 3) Use a nicer word than "suck" This is why editors don't copywrite.
This often involves making technically incorrect statements. Experts often hate that. I'd encourage a bit of comfort with it, because the buyer is hiring you to provide an abstraction layer over the truth anyhow. (An alternative: fully correct but only partial truth.)
Stealing a @copyhackers recommendation, a great way to find the language buyers actually use in your space is searching Amazon for related books and then reading only the reviews, looking especially for how people describe their mental state when thinking about the problem.
An unreasonably useful exercise I sometimes do with colleagues: prior to reviewing copy, print out a copy of it. Say that you're going to read it together but, before you start, ask them what the copy is supposed to say. The answer is often WILDLY BETTER than the paper.
"You mean most professionals can just extemporize better copy than most places ship?" Well another articulation would be that being steeped in a problem for days or weeks gives you a lot of unconscious understanding of it which the ritual of writing the copy didn't entirely tap.
Hilarious experimental proof on this which I don't feel bad about quoting because I'll be the only one embarrassed: I was once giving a coding school a pro-bono lecture on A/B testing and used my home page for live coding exercise.
Just to proceed with the exercise I said something to the effect of "I need a new headline here. Just shout something out; you're not going to beat the thing I've been iterating on for years but it will demonstrate the mechanics."
"This sounds curiously convenient and non-specific." I know, because I no longer run the business and therefore can't quote you the exact details, but trust me on pain of losing Internet karma: it actually happened substantially as described.