In this episode, Sarah Sal provides valuable tips for copywriters and marketers looking to improve their skills and create more effective ad campaigns.
Sarah discusses;
Name: Sara Sal
What Sarah Does: Freelance Facebook & LinkedIn Ads Specialist at Hootsuite
Company: Sarah-sal.com
Noteworthy: With 7 figures in Facebook ads spent under her belt in 10+ years, she’s run ads for companies like ClickFunnels and Strategyzer. When she started running ads for the latter, they struggled to make $0.40 for each $1 spent on ads, and she moved them to $18 for each $1 spent.
Connect with Sarah;
💡Leveraging Storytelling on Social Media
Sarah Sal highlights the challenge of using storytelling on social media platforms with character limitations like Twitter. She emphasizes that effective copywriting for long-term social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn requires a different approach to capture the audience’s attention and engage them.
💡The Concept of “Swipe” for Copy Inspiration
Sarah explains the concept of “swipe” in the context of copywriting. She describes how copywriters gather inspiration from various sources, such as emails, ads, and other content, and use it to create their own compelling copy. She shares her personal methods, including using Evernote and a fake Gmail account for email subscriptions.
💡Creating Ad Copy with Compelling Case Studies
Sarah discusses the importance of incorporating case studies in ad copy. She highlights that sharing real-life success stories or failures related to a product or service can significantly impact the audience’s engagement and trust. She provides examples of ads that effectively use case studies to illustrate this point.
💡 Validating Claims and Providing Evidence
Sarah emphasizes the importance of substantiating claims in copywriting. She mentions a specific example where she interviewed a course participant named Matt, who claimed to make $17,000 per month after taking a course. She explains how she validated Matt’s claims by asking for proof, such as the comparison between his old and new websites.
💡 Tailoring Ads to Different Stages of Awareness
Sarah introduces the concept of tailoring ads to different stages of customer awareness. She explains the various stages, including unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, and product-aware. She highlights that understanding the audience’s awareness stage is essential for crafting effective ad campaigns and messaging that resonate with potential customers.
💡 Segmenting Ads Based on Customer Needs
Sarah suggests segmenting ad campaigns based on the reasons why customers might want to buy a product or service. She encourages copywriters to identify five different customer motivations and create separate ad content for each one. This strategy allows businesses to address a broader range of customer needs and attract a more diverse audience.
💡Overcoming Ad Fatigue through Varied Copy
Sarah addresses the challenge of ad fatigue and the importance of avoiding repetitive ad content. She suggests creating multiple ads with different angles, stories, and educational content to keep the audience engaged and interested over time.
sarah sal 0:04
Twitter, you have like, I don’t know, like very few characters. So it’s really difficult to use storytelling I know for our other one is just a headline. So some social media is just a two word headline. So I’m talking about Facebook, LinkedIn, or any long term social media copy. Before I start today lesson, I have a question about the reading you assigned. I can put that in the chat. Sure, sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So the word swipe is basically, let’s say you love somebody emails, and you create a file with all those email or you like somebody asked, or even actually star to when there was newspaper ad, I mean, when, yeah, he maybe 50 years ago, copywriting was for newspaper, or even snail mail.
And people basically had a file where they kept 100 to 100, or 20. An inspiration. So that’s the idea of swipe. Now, maybe there is an app, I’m not sure about that. myself. I use Evernote. When it comes to story ideas, when it comes to email, I just have a fake gmail account where I subscribe to people I like their email. And then well, I wouldn’t say steal its inspiration, because it’s a public ad, right? You didn’t take their ad and republish it as you’re you’re just taking inspiration. So it’s not really steel, right?
I use email and I just put some tags. So I could find other people email if I want to read it, or I use Google Doc. But I’ll say use whatever you’re comfortable with. I know. If you ask 10 People 10 People will have different answer. Any other questions before go into the next week? Not Not next week, this week lesson.
matthew omeje 2:28
All right. Hi I have a question
sarah sal 2:31
okay. go
matthew omeje 2:33
So I found out that while using the Google Amazon to find some of the I can’t remember guy was talking about what he what he was saying. He was highlighting how you can be able to like highlights some comments that people make or popular comments that people make. So he was he gave a method. Okay, yes, yes.
Yes, while I was running out, I think the feature is Either is it is no longer the is for selected books to try this out. It’s a lot of books. So but I just saw so it was only one particular book, I saw that comments. I Saw those are popular comments. So I don’t know whether they’re ways or I am not doing it the right way.
sarah sal 5:07
I mean, let me let me just go on Amazon. And you could even do it on Google. So I think there is a shame I need to find it if you asked me on Slack and I’m gonna I’m gonna try to find it where you tell Google to search only amazon.com that the keyword review should be in it and then some other keywords but if I’m going to go I don’t know Whats a popular. And I’m just trying to think let me just type getty so I’m just typing something random. So this is not even a book right? You couldn’t do it also for book but let me find this one for example. It has like 61,000 comments and if I go totally to the bottom Come on. You see why says reviews? Let’s say I’m only interested in five star reviews. Let me click on that.
I think you could share the reviews you see here where it says cherish customer reviews. So I’m going to type insulin for example. And so when and I have no idea see here now all the review with the keyword insulin is it or if you say frustrated was tears right or or pain, or happy or whatever. I mean, you could even instead of looking at the five star review, you could look at the one star review, right? Where you say, Hey, I ate this, and I had stomach pain, or it was a pain to eat.
or Now, if you find that a lot of people are struggling with stomach issue, and you’re writing ad copy for a new diabetes snack, you could come in and say, Hey, do you have a snack and then within half an hour, you, your stomach hurt you, not with us because of x y Zed? So, I mean, if you look at a book, let me find a book that is popular, right? Otherwise, let’s say TED talk, okay. I mean, well, TED talk is everything and nothing. But you would just click here with his rating, and let me go, you just click on any of the stars doesn’t matter. And it allows you basically to share the review for I don’t know, let’s the keyword money. I’m not sure why I’ve ever been, Oh, hey, go. You see.
But it still is still a manual is still a manual work, right? Because you don’t know what you’re going to find. You’re going to see things that are good that are bad, but it’s definitely a good way to get voice of customer. Oh, okay. But can you go to the Amazon website? I mean, you could still go to Amazon? What I mean? Well, you could use you could use them in a VPN? Probably. Yeah. I mean, yeah, if Amazon work, you could just change the review. I mean, you don’t care about the book. Any other questions? Okay.
So I’m going to start with a new lesson about ad copy. And it’s going to be heavy on case studies. Because one of the problems people have with ads, okay. Let me just do Hey, go ahead. Go ahead. Somebody somebody on detail something is, let me show you. So this was okay, somebody is trying to enter the room. This used to be a client of mine a few years ago. And if you look at this ad, they spent $4,000 and only made around $2,000. Bat. I mean, if you spent $4,000 make $2,000 back, you’re losing money. Another example would be this company that is a Shark Tank company. And let me find out okay, it’s still loading, still loading.
sarah sal 8:09
This is the ad and often what people do, if they sell tomato, they’ll have an other say this is tomato, please buy tomato. If they sell potato they sell. They say I’m selling potato, please buy potato, right. And if you want to increase sale, I’m going to use a strategy that was mentioned the Atlantic. This is supermarkets in the US called Kesko. And the other one I totally forgot the name. They found if they have somebody inside the supermarket that is screaming at people buy now buy this chocolate cake by this donut by this pizza. They’re not getting much sales, but if they give people samples, so let’s say they have chocolate brownie, they cut the chocolate brownie into small pieces.
They gave people a taste, people taste it and like oh my god, that chocolate brownie tastes amazing. It’s so rich and dense, and I love the flavour and so on. People were more likely to buy the product by 2,000%. So if we go here strategize, or it’s a business conference, where you have CEO of big company going there and so on. He’s a famous business teacher at the University of Lausanne. And the idea was to give people a pretest. So instead of having an ad that say we have a conference, see you there. I have this app where I said there was 100 Oil Company in 2016 That went bankrupt they exception is dark energy that they had an IPO in the stock market for 16 billion.
What did they do? When all prices was high, they invested in alternative energy like wind farm, want to know how smart company do the same come to our conference, and other ad like how Lego nearly went bankrupt and what they did to turn it around. And the result, we were making $16 for each $1 we spent. So let’s assume you have a client they want to add, what would they do? I would say look at their content. So if I go to the case of strategize errs. So I would look at their website, I would look at their book, they have an amazing YouTube channel that I watched.
I see here they have a knowledge library, and I don’t know what I’m going to find in it. I mean, since then they can change everything, but here, okay. I’m looking at their content till I find something interesting. And I don’t know. What is it yet, for example, here, they’re talking about why corporate acceleration fails. So I would open that in a new tab. They’re talking about mistakes CEO or CFO make when investing in innovation and so on.
sarah sal 11:50
Me and I’m just going to read this content right, here is a video with watch, you can I’m going to look for interesting story. So I know some of you ask for b2b examples. So I’m going to show you two ads. And even what I did, because I worked with them for a few years.
sarah sal 12:20
It’s needed like now all my pages are showing as wide just as I’m making the presentation. I mean, you prepare everything. And then when you really presented technology fail, calm. My slide oh why and her other side, good. Okay, now it’s showing.
sarah sal 12:50
So this is a picture I took from their conference in Berlin, where they were talking about how Kodak went bankrupt. So basically, I was pretending I was student, I didn’t pretend I’m an advertiser, I pretend I’m a student, I want to learn from them like everybody else. But this mean, I could be in the shoe of other people who are paying money to go to that conference. And here’s a true example. I took like one of their student built a medical device, where they found basically, this is a medical device that to test things like for a new baby, the heart rate, the breathing, and etc. And they find in hospital, there is a lot of wires. And because there is a lot of wires, it was really a pain in the ass to put it. And let me see.
Okay, this is the AI assistant, talking. And the nurses were frustrated. So they would go and talk to the nurse. And they would say to the nurse, would you buy this and the nurse would say 100% when they went to the hospital trying to sell it the problem. The hospital director doesn’t care about the nurse. I mean, the person who’s giving you the money to buy the product and the person who are using it is different. So they went and talked to the hospital Delta said we don’t care, we’re not going to buy it. And then they’re like, what’s happened? What do we sell it to the parent? The problem with that parent, you need FDA approval because it’s a medical device.
And it might call something like half the price here, I think like $1 million, or maybe half a million dollar or something like that. And just by talking to parents outside of Mother care, which is a clothing shop for baby. They found that yes, parents aren’t going to buy it. But there was a way of creating it as an iPhone app that is not a medical device. And as a result, they got out of sale even before manufacturing the product. So I go to the conference, I listen to this story, and I turn it into an app. Another example is zappos, zappos is a very famous ecommerce store that sells shoes.
sarah sal 15:05
conference said,
sarah sal 15:09
build a business before you test the market. But actually, when zappos was started getting sales before they got any inventory, right? And what they just wanted to say, would people buy shoes online and what they did if somebody ordered a shoe online, the honour neck would go to a store nearby by the shoe and shipping. company by Qualcomm, they lost $1 billion, because they test their business ideas, right? And then I’m saying, Hey, do you want to know how to test the business idea come to our conference. And this approach work really well. And when we talk about B to B versus b2c, what I’m going to teach you, you could use it for both b2b and b2c. I’m going to show your visit, like two more examples.
And then I’m going to show us exercises that you could use to write a lot of ad. So this is an ad that was losing the company money. It just say you have back pain, I have a product for back pain you want to make to isolate your tomato, right. And here is the story right? Hey, this client by the name of Amanda Her back was killing her. She was working 12 hour night call centre. And because she couldn’t work anymore, she was on unemployment benefit, where she was paid almost nothing. And this look more like oh my god, this is a story of somebody who is in my shoe, as opposed to selling. It’s like in social media, you’re not here to buy, you go to chat with friends, right? You go to upload photo of your dinner, you go to look at cat picture, etc. You’re not to buy. But if you hear a story of somebody else had, oh my God, my back pain was killing me. They’re like, Oh, my God, they feel sorry about you. T
hat’s very different than, hey, I have a product, please buy it. Here is a difference between Google and Facebook. But if I go to Google, and I type back pain product, right? I’m actively looking for a product, right? You just raise your hand and say, I can’t give you what you want. On Facebook, you are interrupting people, you need to build a desire. And this is like the third example. It’s a client that helps people deal with depression. Again, we have a webinar next week. See you there. I watched the webinar, the webinar is telling her story that how for 10 year she helped people deal with depression, while herself couldn’t treat herself and her husband died from cancer and was depressed for five fear and antidepressant may they’re suicidal, and Insomniac, no energy and etc. Unless you want to learn my story, right, this ad got like 10 times more lead.
But this is what I mean, by creating the desire. You could do it by a store people lesson or a benefit, like I benefit here. People might think, Hey, I don’t need you, I don’t need your webinar, I could go to the pharmacy, I could go to the doctor and they gonna give me an antidepressant medication. And then here I have a study that as Doctor are prescribing more anti Depression, depression actually is increasing every year by 20%. So this is like to say, Hey, you think you could go to the doctor or you could go think you could go to the pharmacy and take the spill is going to make things way worse. Now, when talking about AD, I know you’re already doing copywriting.
But it’s really important to understand what we call ad fatigue. And I’m going to show you as an example here, ad fatigue, you write an ad for a client. And let’s say you’re getting sales at $20 per sale, and the client is happy. Three months later, the cost per sale go from 20 to $100. And now the client is unhappy and they say, Hey, your ad is not working like what do you do? Let me show you a graph here. So this is an ad you see when it started in the 13th of November, the cost per sale was under $25. profitable.
And then on the seventh of December oops it went from maybe $90 per sale to 67 Right. Here is another ad we replace it with. And you see now that the cost per sale is down. It’s the question of the why, right? So this, this is the ad, it talks about people who are in an office, and they work long hour behind a laptop, and because of that, they have back pain, right? This is one reason people buy the product, but not the only one. The other one is somebody who’s playing baseball had the sport injury and this product, helping them recover from the injury, right? Totally different audiences. So when a client said, Give me an ad, or I see a lot of clients said, Give me 40 ad, and they just want small variation, where you’re saying the same thing, but slightly differently, not that’s not good. You need to, if you look at this ad, and this ad, it appeal to totally two different audiences. And the story that content and so on is different.
It’s better to write five ads well written where you do a lot of free shares, than basically writing 20 ads that are the same thing, but you changed it slightly. And by the way, if at some point, I speak too fast, if at some point, something is not clear, just put a message in the chat and interrupt me. So I know I need to slow down, or I need to clarify something because I’ve been, I’ve been doing this for 12 here, so maybe something is clear for me. I’m not for you. So ad, I want you to imagine Facebook ad that is not an ad, I want you to imagine you don’t have a Google document, right? I want you to imagine you’re in a coffee shop or interrupting people. What do you say to entrust them, right?
If you go to coffee shop your coffee shop to say by now by now by now, people are annoyed right? Now, if you sit there, and you have a conversation, and you say I used to be very tired, and I would sleep eight hour per day, and I would have coffee, and I would do this and that and nothing worked. And then I learned I have a hormonal imbalance. And since I fixed it, everything is okay. Now people who are on the coffee shop will have the same problem will be Oh, tell me more. Right. Now, let’s say a famous sitcom like Big Bang Theory imagines a play on Thursday, maybe 5 million people watch it right? Maybe they play again on Saturday and another 3 million watch it. Maybe they translate it to a few language and many people watch it.
But if every week is episode one, episode one, episode one, they keep repeating the same episode, people will get bored, and they would stop watching it. People watch it, because there is episode one, episode two, episode three, for season one, season two, season three, season four. And when you have a client who say I have AD fatigue the app used to convert well and didn’t stop. Think about that. It’s like you need to add one AD to AD three ad for where each ad have different angles, different story different educational content, because Facebook is interruption marketing. And you cannot capture people’s attention on a coffee shop. If you keep saying the same thing. No, no non stop, you need to tell them something new.
So now I’m going to show you let me close this so my computer doesn’t freeze. I’m going to show you some strategy with the ad. Imagine you’re writing an ad for a certain product or service. People who need that product, people who need that service. What is their struggle if you weren’t going to write what their struggle look like? What would it be? Now let me open this link and show you the example.
sarah sal 24:17
So the example here is for a language learning course. And the struggle is basically there is a British woman who goes to the doctor and start the equation by saying a blind Liz. A blank glaze it means Do you speak English? Right? The doctor give her a dirty look with a raised eyebrow as is to say you’re in Spain, you should speak my language. How dare you ask me if I speak your language right? And then a kid basically come and say sorry, I’m James. This is my mother. I need to translate her today. And what happened? Her kid Not to go to school that day, because he needed to translate for her. And then he say, Oh, I get email of such stories on a daily basis.
And this basically is very descriptive about what is the struggle of somebody who live in Spain who live in Mexico who doesn’t speak English. So that’s one type of ad, you could write. The other one, let’s, this one is a little bit harder, because you might read something in the news, you might see something on your timeline on Facebook, you might look at a video on Tiktok. And you’re like, that’s an interesting story. And there is a way to link it with your niche.
And this is why I asked last week to read the book about hooks. So I’m going to show you this ad. So basically, this was this is something I’ve seen in my newsfeed because a friend shared it and it had to do with Trump world, right? You know, Trump want to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. And it was the story of parotta. Actually, this one who flew from the south of the United States to Mexico, came back a few years speaking Spanish, and a friend shared this article to saying,
You know what, Trump wall is not going to prevent parents from speaking Spanish. And this is basically the story that, hey, in Southern California, there was a parrot that used to speak English with a British accent. He got lost came back a few years later speaking Spanish, what does this teach us about learning Spanish? Let me open. I have a blog post with all those examples. But I want to show it to you one on one, it’s better, but I’ll share the link in the chat, not the shot of the zoo, but in Slack.
So yeah, that’s one thing you could do. The other thing, the other thing, the other thing, you might want to look at the common section of out. So I’m going to show you two example here. So one example, I mean, let’s say you have a client, they’re already running ads, you could ask them, Hey, can you send me a link 234 ad with a lot of comments. And if you read the comment, you might get a lot of it. And that’s good, because this is direct feedback from the people who are targeted without. And I’m going to show your vision here. Awesome.
sarah sal 27:47
So in one of our ads, somebody said, maybe dating a native Spanish speaker help us speak the language faster. And suddenly, we had a lightbulb in our head, we’re like, Oh, my God, should we write about that? And I wrote this ad for this client. And even here, you see you have all, not all the ad have a lot of comment. But yeah, this, this could give you a lot of ID. And a good example is an insurance broker that I still work with, actually, he was paying 92 British pound per lead. And I reduced that by 80.
And the reason I mentioned the number and etc. You don’t want to be a copywriter who just write copy. If you have case studies, where you’re able to tell the client Hey, I wrote ad copy, and I saved that client 100,000 Suddenly your price increase, they no longer look at you, as somebody who put words together, they look at you, oh my God, I want this is an expert that could help me get better results. You’re not writing ad copy, you’re writing ad copy that get results. So this is their ad, we’re basically saying, Get income protection insurance if you get sick. And when looking at one of the common somebody say I don’t trust insurance company insurance company never pay.
Then I’m like, Hey, how do you answer this objection? And basically, we’ll look at the objection that are in the Add Comment section. Like if I’m looking here at the comment, and when I see. I’m like, Okay, let’s come out. And we have this ad for example. And this basically saved the one and a half dollar in AD cotton ad spent. Yeah, so this work analogy. This route you see in front of you is pomelo. And if you’re in Europe, most people never seen it right? Let’s say I have a friend who asked me what is pomellato? How do I explain it? How does it taste? Like, and then I could say is the same as a grapefruit. But it’s not better, right. So here we had an analogy about running a marathon.
And when twin running fast and learning a language, where we said at your maximum speed, the match the longest, you could run a 350 metre and after that you’re forced to slow down. But a marathon, you could run for 42 kilometre, and we said language learning the same, you’re motivated, you think you’re going to learn for three hour. But then life gets in the way you get busy and you stop learning. While if you want to learn for five minutes per day, no matter what happened, you always have five minutes and chances are 1234 years later, you’re still learning five minutes per day. So this is an analogy that we used to explain how to learn language. And sometimes you might have, you might need to write an ad. And you look at this, like, Oh my God, that’s complex. How do I explain it using an something people already understand to make it easier to understand and assimilate? Yeah, yeah. You could use fun fact. Some tribe? Yeah. Yeah.
sarah sal 31:44
And here’s another example. Actually, there is a moment there was a study about popcorn done with coconut oil. And the Centre for Science in Public entries. They said, this has 37 grammes of saturated fat. Is this too much? Is this too little? I don’t know. Right. So they said, This is the same as taking bacon, egg, Big Mac, fries, and a steak. All together, right? And then this was on the front page of many newspaper and TV because if you said this is like taking French fries, egg, hamburger and fries and steak all together, people understand it. So I use them for knowledge. And then I said, Hey, and ology are a powerful way of writing. And then I linked to a blog post I wrote what is a common mistake people make?
Let me assume for one second, you’re not content writer. You’re not a copywriter. You are a chef that teach people how to cook right? You’re teaching people how like tourists. Let’s say you have tourists from the United Kingdom or from America visiting your country. And you’re teaching them how to make Jollof rice or you’re teaching them how to do biryani, right. And then you tell them bring some tomato paste with you. And then whenever they come to the class, every one of them bring a bottle of ketchup and then you’re angry and you’re like, for God’s sake, who makes jello for biryani with ketchup right? And at some point you’re sick and tired of that mistake and you’re like, How dare you use ketchup I want you to take real tomato fresh tomato not ketchup and then you write an ad on why ketchup is horrible to make Jollof right here it’s a mistake.
He told his story that he was in a restaurant in Mexico City and there is someone who come to me said hey, you speak good Spanish How do I ask without onion? And he repeated a few times. And then he said yeah, that’s good. And then the waitress come and want to take the order and the person panic and switch to English instead. And hey, he got on here because the waitress they understand his English and he said this is a mistake. You think your Spanish is not good enough so you continue speaking English No, no no no speed use your bad horrible Spanish from day one make as much mistake as you want or need because otherwise you’re not going to improve it’s like saying don’t make Jollof rice using ketchup use you do it using fresh tomato right what is a miss conception people have around your industry. So a misconception is that kids learn a language faster, no kid have a lot of free time that are very persistent. Imagine a kid they want something, they don’t get it. You maybe you don’t understand how they want tried. They keep repeating themselves till they cry.
me if I go tomorrow to Barcelona and Spain and I try ordering a coffee at Starbucks. They don’t understand me. What would I do, I would switch to English. This is why I could learn a language faster. So we learn, we wrote an ad about the misconception that it’s not true that children learn a language faster. And then we explain why right? And people might agree or disagree. But hey, it’s good for engagement. What is a question people ask? And this you might not know, because you’re not promoting your own business, you’re writing for your client. But you could always ask your clients, what is a question your client or customer nonstop? asked you? And what do you answer? Right? So here, the question is, oh, my god, okay, I could the screenshot is not working, or the link is not working. It’s like, should I learn word by word when learning a new language?
So they learn complete sentences. And he say you learn complete sentences, because then your brain learn the language faster. And here is why right? Another one? Actually, too. It’s like, what’s unique about your business? What I tell people is like, hey, whatever you do, chances are, there is 566 other companies that do 100%, the same thing. And I would even say it in a provocative way, why would anyone even buy from you? And then the client become defensive? And they start telling me, yeah, we’re different, because 123 Other? Thank you. You gave me an ID for ads, right? So this was a client that sell Asian clothing, right? And normally, you have either you go to a tailor, and it’s expensive, because it’s made only for you, or you buy already made.
And what he says is no, no, no, we made deals with a lot of famous fashion designer, you go online, you tell us how tall you are, how big your shoulder are, how long your feet are, how big your stomach or waistline is, you send us to that and we’re going to make you exactly for you. And it’s cheaper than tailor made. So what is unique is like it’s mass customization at a price cheaper than going to the tailor. Another one ice cream. I mean, maybe in every country that is 500 Ice cream brand. I love belly ice cream. I mean, there are a copy, right? This is not an ad, but the principle is the same. So they say ice cream is normally mixed with air because if you don’t mix the liquid with air, you get an ice block is very hard like rock, right?
And what they say that most people is 110% error, right? Other one are between 60 and 8%. US we only put 30% error, which means our ice cream is more creamy, it’s more dense. So it’s like hey, there is 50 Ice cream brand. Why should I want to try belly ice cream? Because it’s more dense and it’s more rich and it’s more cream with Elavon why also they have vegan option. They use cane sugar, there is no artificial colour that etc etc right? Always whatever business you have, it’s about disqualifying the competition and telling them why they should consider you and to view your client to get their stories, I mean, not always possible but I’ll show you a few example. A take this on here
sarah sal 39:45
so there is a course called the copy writer accelerator that was launched by the copywriter club that costs $2,000. And when I wrote ad for them, I asked them Can I interview and talk with a past customer to give their story, because I tell you there is a lot of businesses that are very lazy, they might have a lot of good clients story, amazing story. But if you never spoke to the client in detail, you would never know that story. And the beauty of this is low story, you could use it as an ad, you could use it as an email copy, you could use it for the website, they could use it on a sales page, and etc. So that’s like a lot of value like, Hey, I’m client, instead of me writing just an ad for you.
Why don’t I interview your client know their story know their case study, and hey, even after you’re no longer using the ad, that story is on your website five years from now, and it’s still convincing people to buy from you. So that’s one way of getting extra work. So for the copywriter accent, I said, Hey, who can I interview? They said, Okay, go interview, Matt. I talked to Matt. And he say thanks to the course I make 17,000 per month. I’m like, everyone make claim on the internet, right? Anyone on the internet can say they have five Ferrari, right? So you want to not believe the claim for it? So I said how he said they helped me develop a new website.
I’m not stopping here, right? I’m like, Okay, can you show me your old website? Can you show me your new website and show me exactly the change? And I summarise the change here right? Now people believe me, because I said, they redesign his website. And this is exactly how he did it is because when everyone makes a claim, I support my claim, and I don’t just make a claim for the sake of it. Or even here, he said he was a journalist and he was miserable. Because you know, as a journalist, who would work for 12 hour as a slave last minute deadline, and even they gave him like boring jobs. So there would be a petrol station, because the petrol station bought some advertisement with the newspaper.
They say go there and make a story. And there is nothing to make as a story. But he was first in to cover for boring things. So notice when you interview you need to ask a lot of follow up questions. So when he say I started as a journalist kind of was miserable, and then just said, Okay, thank you. Goodbye. And isn’t why oh, I work 12 hour per day. Okay. My work was boring. Why? Give me an example. Right? So you always want to dig really, really, really, really, really deep. You want to know that before the after? And how of the transformation? Yeah, why? You remember for the back pain where we said there are two reasons people buy the product. One is people who stay in front of the laptop for very long hours.
And the other it’s people who want to recover from an injury or surgery. Right. So this is a naturopath so she’s like a natural doctor. And people might hire for different reasons. Some because they’re tired some because they’re swollen other people because they’re moody other people because they gained a lot of weight other people because they lost hair. So you want to think like why somebody want to buy that product write on a piece of paper or Google Doc or whatever five reason and then make an ad for each reason. Stages of awareness, stages of awareness, you cannot sell to somebody who doesn’t know they have a problem right? So let me pay for example, let me urandom to his example magnesium magnesium
sarah sal 44:13
So, apparently, if you don’t have enough magnesium in your body, you cannot sleep or you have insomnia, right? So unaware is somebody who has a problem. He know he doesn’t know why he No he doesn’t know he need magnesium. He doesn’t know that magnisium help people sleep better. Then you have the person who’s problem aware. He is somebody who knows she or he needs a solution but doesn’t know how to solve it because hey, magnesium, maybe if I eat 10 kilo of potato or 10 kilos of banana I have enough magnesium right? So that’s somebody who know there is a problem doesn’t know the solution solution the problem no Bye doesn’t know what product right? I just know I need. Magnesium product is somebody who already consider a product as in, somebody wants an electric car. And they think about Tesla, but you want to tell them no, no, no, I have something that is better than Tesla, right? And then you have the person who is the expert, right? So an example could be vitamin, let’s say, let’s go here. See, and I want to say num. Since synthetic.
Actually, what does non synthetic mean, a lot of the vitamin you have sold today are not real vitamin, they use Chymical product, they use oil, like you know, they’re all that you are the fuel that you put in your car or motorcycle. Basically, a lot of the vitamins there are not made from oranges, Mandarin, pineapple, etc. They are done from Chymical product like all right. So non synthetic, it mean it come from fruits and vegetable and plants and so on. So, most people have no idea about that. So if I’m on Google and I type vitamin C non synthetic, it means I know a lot, right? I’m not the average person, or none all sorts or something on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
You don’t have that information. So on Google, based on what I typed here, you know, what is my level of awareness on Facebook? You don’t know. So you could really write ads for each stage. Because remember the picture that is here of the coffee shop, right? Imagine there is 100 people and tried, you cannot say that everyone in the coffee shop know that they need magnesium, you cannot say everyone know that a lot of vitamins are made from oil. Maybe out of 100 people can know what nonsense thetic Vitamin C is. And the other don’t know. Some don’t even know why they need it. Some know they need it, but they think just eating oranges enough.
And they don’t know that they need to eat 20 oranges to have enough vitamin C, I’m making up the example. I’m not saying you need 20 origins, right? So what you could do is write an ad for the different stages of awareness and the client by testing it, they would find that one of them has a bigger audience. So that’s another way of writing ads. Now I’m going to catch your breath. And I see if any question you have, feel free to type them into the chat. Sure, sure. Sure, as many as you want. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. I asked the customer, I asked the customer and let’s say I worked for a customer for a while. And what I would tell them like Hi, I’m writing a case study for this. And that website, I would make you look good. Because that question about how do you create the desire for the customer wanted? I’m going to talk about you and I would make good publicity.
So for them, it’s free publicity, right? So you have this blog post, let’s say 10,000 people read it, right? And now that they read like, oh my god, that person here is really it’s free publicity, right? And then I would say I’m going to give you a backlink like, Hey, um, can I write a case study about you, I would make you look really good. I would have you look at it to approve anything. And I will give you backlink is good for your SEO. Now somebody wants to share I mean, you cannot force them. I mean, if you worked in marketing, I mean, I work with some marketing agency that are they don’t want to share anything because they’re afraid other people are going to steal the secret and they would not need them anymore.
And well, what can I do? Right? You could do an anonymous case study, right? I mean, while you remove, I mean, let’s say you work with a client three years ago, you’re no longer in touch. You could write about it and remove their name. Right. So you don’t mention them. I mean, yeah, you could make it anonymous, but myself, I asked, and I know that some of them are going to say yes, some are going to say no. And that’s life, basically not much I could do about it. No, no, no. I mean, it’s not a call. I mean, you know, you run an ad, right? The ad does well or not. If it does, well, the client keeps spending money if it doesn’t run well. They run another are dried. And some time I got mistakes. Like I said that if you’re a veterinary doctor, hiring people is very difficult. And that was true two years ago. And there was a lot of the comments saying that’s not true today, there is way too much.
I just post the ad, right? I mean, but this is why sometimes I get the client to approve the ad. Because they’ve been in their industry way longer than me and they know the industry better than me. But if it backfire, I could always pause the ad but you know, nobody is going to the police is not going to arrest you if you make if you got something wrong. And sometimes you know, what you need to testing as a business you it’s better to test files make mistakes than never test because you want everything perfect. It’s like it’s not a PhD dissertation, right? You run an ad, you put some money behind it, the ad does well, or it doesn’t do well. And that’s it. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Go ahead, Jade. If you can.
jadesola kareem 51:08
Okay, hello, can you hear me?
sarah sal 51:10
Yeah. Yeah, I could hear you. I could hear you. Yes. Okay.
jadesola kareem 51:13
I joined the class a bit late. But I wanted to ask about SEO for copywriting. Do copywriters need to know SEO or use SEO tools?
sarah sal 51:25
Not for No, no. I mean, not for not for ads. I mean, it’s good if you have a website and you want to get traffic, but if you’re running ads? Not really. Not really no, no, no, because ads are paid are either paid? No, you don’t need the metric name of how much money can I make from the ad is called ROI return on adspend? Or CPA cost per acquisition? Shoot for next week? Okay, can we get linked to the sample? Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll just post them on Slack. I’ll post the link on Slack right after the end of the call.
Okay, let me go here and question. Do I need five variation angle for the same, you could have 20 variation, right? It’s just that you don’t know in advance which ad is going to work. So you’re testing. But hey, if you only if you’re running ads for yourself, the more variation is the better. The chances you’re going to have clients are going to say here is some money write me three ads, right? And you don’t want to write three ads that are very similar, right? For example, I am vegan, right? If you give me a sausage sandwich, and you put my arnaz instead of ketchup instead of mustard on top of the sausage sandwich, I will not eat it because I’m vegan, right? Or maybe I’m gluten intolerant. I cannot have gluten.
So you want to have different ads and the way people think about ad a wrong. They want to have 40 variation where they start with a question. And then they have the same ad without starting with a question. And then they have capital letter? No, you don’t want that you want different stories? How much time? Does angle variation? Yeah, yeah, as much as possible. As much as possible. You need variation. How many ads you write depends on your client. How much time is needed to measure the metric of every ad, the client will I mean, if you never run ads before the client, we know because otherwise, I’m giving a course on how to manage Facebook ad and sort of how to do copywriting. But it depends on two things. It depends on their budget, it depends on their current cost per conversion. And then we go into mathematical statistical analysis. The higher the budget, the faster they get data.
They lower their cost per coloration the fastest. But that’s something the client will no no, no, You never know. I mean, you know what a client will tell you. I mean, let’s say you would have a client. And the client would say, I’m only targeting my email list. And people who are on my email list, this is their customer journey. And then you write for that, right. Now, if the client never mentioned the customer journey, and you’re writing out to a cold audience on Facebook, you don’t know because there is no way to know it. This is why I went to Google. And I said if I go to Google and I type this keyword it me I’m very aware, right? But Facebook is not Google, Facebook is not shares driven.
Facebook is not keyword driven. So you have no ID. I mean, I didn’t say you need to create an ad for all the stages, or the exercise I gave you today have different way of writing it is just one way of having variation, right? There are businesses I worked for for two, three years. I never ever wrote ads for all stages. It just if you’re stuck, and you’re like, I don’t know what I’m going to write about write, then you could get ideas, but saying, let me imagine myself and each stage and write out so it’s more How To Get ID, but it’s not you must. I did fall into it gradually, did you start writing Facebook ad or did fall into it gradually? Because what I did was running out, right. But then when I look at people copies or copies horrible, and if their copy is horrible, the ads are not doing well.
So I started by running out and then writing the ad, but it’s something that yeah, the more you do it, the more you learn. Good ad is like like I said in the first lesson is 90% reading 90% listening, and 10% writing this is I know some people who came late or their internet connection was not good. So the replay is going to be there in maybe like 30 minutes, something like that. And this is why I said if a client have a webinar, I would watch this client have a book I would read it if a client have YouTube video would watch it if the client has podcast interview, I would listen to it. So it’s basically learning about the industry. You’re studying the industry before you do that. Okay, for next week, should we do an exist? Okay, next week, I’m travelling to a conference.
So there is no lesson next week. The next lesson is in two weeks. For the lesson two weeks, do some of you want to write ads that you’re welcome to share in Slack back before and then I would criticise it because to write good ad, you would need feedback. Okay. Do each of you who want to do with have an idea what you want to write about? Or do you want me? Okay, let’s turn to slack. If you have an app, you could choose any ad you want. Okay? Okay. Why don’t you think about it for one day or two? And you could write an ad about anything, right? If after thinking about it for one day or two, you don’t have an ID, and just tag me on Slack. And I would give you some ID for ad to write. Okay. Okay, so what I would do, I would post on Slack, too.
So your homework is three thing right? Here is all the example of the ad. I posted here. It’s a second blog post I want you to read. So I want you to read those two blog posted and then work on an ad. I mean, you put you have two weeks to do it. If you have an ID hallelujah. If you don’t have an ID tag me on Slack and I will give you some thing to write about. Okay. Okay, perfect. Then we’re done for today. Five minutes late and we switch to slack. Okay, I will see you in two weeks from now. Okay.
