Review

I love this book. The key message is to get your copy from your customers. It puts research ahead of copywriting genius. Some really helpful frameworks for Product Managers to think about Product Positioning.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Get to know your customers before you write a word.
• You’re selling your prospects a better version of themselves.
• The best copy messages come from customers and prospects, not copywriters
• People who won’t derive enough value to talk about your product after using it are not your target audience - don’t work at acquiring them.
• Your segment are the people who are most likely to become your customers.
• Knowing your market helps you shape messaging and position your brand
• Target a pain or reflect a motivation
• Once pains are known, start thinking how your solution benefits addresses or eradicates those pains. Use that info in your copywriting.
• The authors of ‘Pain Killer Marketing’ show that 12 to 15 one-on-one interviews will generate about 80% of all possible pain points for your segment
• You cannot create motivation on your site, so you must reflect your visitors’ primary motivation in the copy on your site. On the home page and on the primary pages that are part of user flow .
• You don’t have to motivate them anymore than they already are. All you have to do is remind people why they need your solution
• With highly aware visitors? You can spend less time educating... and more time closing
• With less aware visitors, you may need longer copy, and more artefacts
• As you move down the funnel, messaging gets tighter
• Your copy should be words your customers need to hear, words that express their pain and reflect their deepest motivations while matching their state of awareness

• Write Copy for 20 to 35% of Your Visitors – Not 100% of Them
• Answer the classic copywriter question: What’s in it for me?
• Not all visitors are prospects. You can’t write for all of them.
• Write for the visitors who are most likely to:
• Do what you want them to do
• Be pleased with the results of doing it
• Be open to talking about your product and spreading the word
• Go narrow to convert more visitors into Customers. Target your copy at the perfectly matched few. Take the risk of being highly desirable to a select few

• Keep this table close to hand as you write each customer touchpoint (pages, emails, app store descriptions)

• The best copy comes from visitors, customers and prospects and is:
• written in natural language
• speaks specifically to the very features that lead to certain desired benefits
• uses a tone and voice that influences your brand personality decisions
• The challenge becomes finding those messages.
• Where can you find the best copy?
• Testimonials
• Customer Support Channels (Emails)
• Tweets & Facebook Posts
• Interview Your Customers:
• Survey Visitors and Customers: Ask questions that will help you:
• Visitor Surveys
• Customer Surveys (e.g. by email)
• Responses will help you identify and document:
• Impetuses and triggers for wanting your solution
• Your most desirable differentiators
• The unexpected extras that will bring life to your copy and help set you apart
• The adjectives to use to describe your solution

• 3 methods for customer-free message finding:
1. Go where your prospects are and eavesdrop on conversations
2. Hire potential customers in some way, use that as an “in” to speak 1-on-1
3. Ask their permission to listen to their convos
• Mine any user-generated content available to you
• Use UserTesting.com to watch users interact with your site and your competitors’ sites
• Do a Simple Competitor Content Audit (Home Page Only)
• The companies showing up at the top of the SERPs for your keywords ARE your competitors
• Goal of audit: to understand existing messages about solutions similar to your own
• Limit to 10 competitors
• Analyse these 5 things:
1. Value proposition/headline
2. Major messages you know they’re trying to communicate to visitors
3. Primary call(s) to action – language, visual design and position on the page
4. Special reasons to buy (i.e., guarantees and assurances that might compel a visitor to take our their credit card)
5. Anything that jumps out
• Audit Outputs…
• Value Proposition Table

• Top Message Tables

• You can see what the most used benefits are and where the gaps are
• You don’t know if these are effective messages
• Primary Call to Action Tables

• Understanding your competitors messaging can inform yours

• How do you know what messages are good?
• Frequency is important. How often are people saying the same or similar things?
• Learn about rhetorical devices (make things sound good)
• Making copy good enough that people keep reading → so you can overcome their objections → neutralising their anxieties → and introduce benefits and features that will delight them
• 6 Literary Techniques:
• Groups of three.
• Hyperbole + Similes.
• Logic
• Comparisons to What People Know
• Anthimeria (forcing a word to ‘behave’ differently than grammar teaches us it ought to
• Living Sounds. Sound patterns are easily memorised.
• Rhyming
• You need to find a message that’s unique to your product and is compatible with what customers want to hear
• Talk about features and your benefits
• Think first about benefits
• What value will the user get out of using this? (benefit)
• What part of my product lets the user get that value? (feature)
• It’s not a one-to-one relationship between features and benefits
• Leave out features that don’t have clear benefits from your messaging
• Product Positioning Doc: track features and benefits. Your best friend when writing copy

Feature	Unique to U?	Customer Pain Solved	Benefit	Priority

• Use the product positioning doc on every page you write.
• Don’t fall into the trap of summarising too much when you’re copywriting. Don’t dilute the message in order to squeeze it in somewhere
• A summary isn’t noticeable or memorable

• Visitors arrive to your site with objections in mind.
• A sales objection is the mental barrier created by feelings of opposition or disagreement
• 8 Most common objections:
1. I don’t really NEED this
2. I don’t have the AUTHORITY to buy this
3. I don’t want to be SOLD TO
4. I have to PRIORITISE this above other things
5. My EXISTING SOLUTION works well enough
6. Your company doesn’t have the CAPABILITY or CREDIBILITY
7. I don’t think your PRICES are reasonable
8. I will have to spend a lot of TIME and energy CONVINCING OTHERs around me
• Overcome objections by pre-empting and responding to each objection
• Use FAQs (on your pricing page) to redirect your visitors to to see the value
• Use ‘reasons to believe’ to help delight your visitors
• You can’t overcome every objection
• If you can’t call on ‘reasons to believe’ or ‘assurances’
• Money-Back Guarantee
• Lowest price guarantee
• Free shipping
• Next-day shipping
• We pay the tax
• Guaranteed secure
• #1 best-selling X
• #1 Most-trusted X
• World’s largest selection of X
• Start with 10x more info that you need, write and then cut.
• You can write copy in both the negative and the positive.
• Don’t give your audience too much credit. Not everyone is your worst critic.
• Customers want a magic button to press.
• The most important decisions you will make is how you’ll position your solution. Decide on positioning before you write.
• When writing starts to feel difficult you’re doing it right. Fluff is easy, high-converting copy is time-consuming and hard.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 1: Get to Know Your Customer Before You Write a Word

• You’re selling your prospects a better version of themselves.
• To do that, you need to get to know your customers and prospects (don’t focus on your solution too much)
• What situation are they in now? Where would they like to be? How will your solution get them there? (closer to their ideal self).
• Then sell your prospect a better version of themselves
• The best copy messages come from customers and prospects, not copywriters
• Take their raw statements. Use them or tweak them.
• Get inside their head by using their words
• People who won’t derive enough value to talk about your product after using it are not your target audience - don’t work at acquiring them.
• Who’s your target market? Or market segment? Do you know who your target customer is?
• Send your email list a survey: Ask about them, and why they’re interested in your service
• Using the word ‘favour’ and ‘please’ can increase response rates
• Get out there and talk to people
• Stay in your office and talk to people
• Get involved in forums
• Knowing target segments can help you shape your language – get specific
• Age, gender, marital status, number of children, education, annual income, disposable income / budgets, websites, pastimes, device usage
• Narrow your market into manageable segments - to determine whom to focus your energy on
• Choose the segment that will visit with the most frequency, be most likely to compensate you in some way for your service (revenue or referrals)
• The people who are most likely to become your customers.
• Knowing your market helps you shape messaging and position your brand
• Messaging is diverse because each segment has values and motivations that only a few messages will meet. You need to target specifically.
• There are two sides to crafting a message, targeting pain or reflecting motivation:
• Targeting Pain
• Your product needs to neutralise or eradicate a critical pain for your market or market segment
• Find out the pains that your target customer experiences AND that you can solve.
• How to uncover pains
• Ask what keeps your customers up at night?
• Audit competitor sites to see what pain points they reference
• Test PPC ads with different pain points to see which get clicked most often
• Monitor people in your ideal customer segment on Twitter and/or in their blogs to see what pains they mention
• Once pains are known, start thinking how your solution benefits addresses or eradicates those pains. Use that info in your copywriting.
• The authors of ‘Pain Killer Marketing’ show that 12 to 15 one-on-one interviews will generate about 80% of all possible pain points for your segment
• Reflecting Motivation
• Pinpointing one of their key motivations
• “Motivation” is the driving force behind the actions we take.
• When a user comes to your site, they are motivated to do so
• Motivated by forces that live outside of your website
• You cannot create motivation on your site, so you must reflect your visitors’ primary motivation in the copy on your site. On the home page and on the primary pages that are part of user flow .
• Society and external forces shape most of our internal motivations. Examples:
• Getting incredible results with very little effort
• Feeling connected to other people
• Keeping up with the Joneses
• Hosting the perfect family Christmas
• Reflect the existing motivations of your users → build on those motivations
• You don’t have to motivate them anymore than they already are. All you have to do is remind people why they need your solution
• Example of copy that plays to a motivation:
• Americans who use software to manage their money sleep better at night
• This copy will won’t convert each and every visitor, but it should…
• Confirm your solution is what they thought it was
• Remind them that they need a solution like yours if they want to solve their problem
• Help them stay on the page longer… and consider your offering
• Get them to begin nodding along with what you’re saying
• Move them to the next part of the experience, where you can work to convert them
• Your value proposition speaks to the unique, highly desirable solution you offer. Motivation is deeper than that.
• How Aware Is Your Market Segment?
• Gene Schwartz was a master of copywriting and coined the “state of awareness” model
• the extent to which your visitors are aware of:
• Their own pain or desire
• The availability of a solution for that pain or satisfier for that desire
• The availability of your solution as the best for that pain
• It they aren’t aware you have to help your prospects figure out everything…
• the reality of the pains they’re experiencing
• who you are
• why they should care
• how you can dramatically improve their lives.
• With highly aware visitors, you can spend less time educating... and more time closing
• With less aware visitors, you may need longer copy, and more.. .
• articles, videos/tutorials, competition comparison,
• to help them recognise their pains / desires
• If you’re on an email list you’ll notice as deadlines to purchase products get closer, emails get shorter, tighter, more to-the-point and focused on assurances, scarcity, incentives.
• As you move down the funnel, messaging gets tighter
• You need to know:
• Do visitors to my site recognise that they have a problem that needs to be solved?
• Do visitors to my site know that solutions exist?
• Do visitors to my site know that my product is one of those solutions?
• How to find out?
• Pop-up survey: Q: What’s happening in your life that brought you here today?
• Web analytics:
• A high % of direct visits implies high awareness
• Arriving via unbranded long-tail keyword phrases implies low awareness of you, but higher awareness of their pain
• Arriving after searching for your product/brand name shows high awareness
• Before writing copy you need to think of and align to the expectations of your target market
• Your copy should be words your customers need to hear., words that express their pain and reflect their deepest motivations while matching their state of awareness

Chapter 2: Write Copy for 20 to 35% of Your Visitors – Not 100% of Them

• Answer the classic copywriter question: What’s in it for me?
• Not all visitors are prospects. You can’t write for all of them. If you try to make every visitor to your site happy, you’ll end up saying nothing compelling. Copy that tries to please everyone sucks
• Write for the visitors who are most likely to:
• Do what you want them to do
• Be pleased with the results of doing it
• Be open to talking about your product and spreading the word
• Go Narrow To Convert More Visitors into Customers
• Aim to convert a smaller number of better-suited people
• Target your copy at the perfectly matched few
• Own that fact that you speak to a particular segment in your copy
• Take the risk of being highly desirable to a select few
• Don’t let prospects slip away because you decided to “play it safe” by being vague.
• Vague is the enemy of conversion
• Write copy that will please your most qualified traffic - even if they’re only 22% of traffic
• You’ll have better retention if you target qualified traffic, giving you the ability to buy more traffic

Chapter 3: Your Goal: To Find & Organise Your Messages for Each Page You’ve Got

• Keep this table close to hand as you write each customer touchpoint (pages, emails, app store descriptions)

Chapter 4: How to swipe messages from visitors and customers

• The best copy comes from visitors, customers and prospects and is:
• written in natural language
• speaks specifically to the very features that lead to certain desired benefits
• uses a tone and voice that influences your brand personality decisions
• The challenge becomes finding those messages.
• Where can you find the best copy?
• Testimonials: are persuasive social proof and also where some of the best messages you can be found
• Customer Support Channels (Emails)
• Tweets & Facebook Posts
• Interview Your Customers: After conducting a few interviews you’ll start to see them as easier and even interesting
• Interview one person at a time, in privacy
• Establish rapport at the beginning
• Record the session
• Prepare questions in advance, but let their responses shape the convo
• Ask open-ended questions
• Notice emotions and motivations and push to find the deeper truths
• Let them do 95% of the talking
• Buy their coffee and thank people for their time and willingness to help
• Get the interview transcribed by somebody else - highlight key points
• Survey Visitors and Customers: Ask questions that will help you:
• Understand what compelled people to seek your solution (motivation, pain and desire)
• Know what features in your solution produce the most desirable benefits
• Get a list of your benefits (and order them by how valuable they are to your prospects)
• Use the words that your target audience uses to describe your solution It’s not market research
• Visitor Surveys (on site visit): Questions to ask…
• What are you hoping to find or do here today?
• Which of these best describes you? (Multiple choice)
• What do you most want from a [insert type of business] like ours?
• What 1 thing would you like to see us improve on our website?
• Do you think [product or site name] can help you save TIME or MONEY?
• Are you planning to purchase from [site name] today?
• Customer Surveys (e.g. by email)
• How long have you been using [product name]?
• Please think back to when you first started looking for a solution like [product name]. What was going on in your life that made you want to seek out such a solution?
• If you had just 10 words to use to explain [product name], how would you describe it?
• How would you feel if you couldn’t use [product name] anymore?
• In your opinion, which 3 of the following elements most set [product name] apart from other similar solutions?
• What 2 or 3 words would you use to describe [product name]?
• What, if anything, would you say is the most unexpected benefit or outcome you’ve realised thanks to [product name]?
• What 1 feature or tool in [product name] could you not live without?
• If you had to choose, would you say [product name] saves you TIME or MONEY?*
• What’s your title / role at work?
• Responses will help you identify and document:
• Impetuses and triggers for wanting your solution
• Your most desirable differentiators
• The unexpected extras that will bring life to your copy and help set you apart
• The adjectives to use to describe your solution

Chapter 5: How to Find Your Message If You Don’t Have Customers

• Go find your prospects, and listen in on their conversations.
• We need to know the voice-of-customer: their pains, possible fears and objections they may have, motivations. What they value most and desire.
• 3 methods for customer-free message finding:
1. Go where your prospects are and eavesdrop on conversations
2. Hire potential customers in some way, use that as an “in” to speak 1-on-1
3. Ask their permission to listen to their convos
• Review Mining: pore over online reviews people leave for your products and for products like yours, and swipe messages from there
• Amazon, App Store, TripAdvisor, AirBnB
• Collect: Memorable Phrases | What People Want | Pains or What Makes People Mad
• Forum mining, blog comment mining … mine any user-generated content available to you
• Use UserTesting.com to watch users interact with your site and your competitors’ sites, you learn about:
• Which questions need to be answered but aren’t
• Great messages that stick
• Confusing or unclear messages
• Price objections
• The messages that stand out Weak or invisible elements, like testimonials or social sharing buttons
• The negative impact of a lack of social proof
• Do a Simple Competitor Content Audit (Home Page Only)
• Know who your competitors are and what they’re saying, what expectations they may be setting, what claims they may be making.
• Be aware, be informed, don’t copy
• The companies showing up at the top of the SERPs for your keywords ARE your competitors
• Make a list of your primary competitors and audit them. It will help you see
• What visitors to your site expect to see
• What messages might soon be white noise (i.e., repeated too frequently)
• Gaps in messaging What sort of tone or style others are – or aren’t – using in their copy
• Auditing your competitors’ content will help you write kick-ass copy on your site
• Professional copywriters charge $20K for them for a competitor audit
• Goal of audit: to understand existing messages about solutions similar to your own
• Limit to 10 competitors
• Analyse these 5 things:
1. Value proposition/headline
2. Major messages you know they’re trying to communicate to visitors
3. Primary call(s) to action – language, visual design and position on the page
4. Special reasons to buy (i.e., guarantees and assurances that might compel a visitor to take our their credit card)
5. Anything that jumps out
• Audit Outputs…
• Value Proposition Table

• Top Message Tables

• You can see what the most used benefits are and where the gaps are
• You don’t know if these are effective messages
• Primary Call to Action Tables

• Understanding your competitors messaging can inform yours

Chapter 6: How to tell swipe-worthy messages from junk

• How do you know what messages are good?
• Frequency is important. How often are people saying the same or similar things?
• Learn about rhetorical devices (make things sound good)
• Making copy good enough that people keep reading → so you can overcome their objections → neutralising their anxieties → and introduce benefits and features that will delight them
• 6 Literary Techniques:
• Groups of three. Things sound better when grouped in three. Repeat the same word at the start of 3 sentences.
• Hyperbole + Similes. Exaggerations grab our attention. Similes help give us critical frames of reference. They create word pictures
• IfTTT. We make decisions emotionally, but justify them with logic. Phrases that cue logic – such as “If this then that” resonate especially well in web, email and mobile copy
• Comparisons to What People Know. Hollywood pitches tend to take an existing movie and twist it. Aliens was pitched as “Jaws in space”. Introduce something new by framing it in the context of something that’s already known.
• Consider comparing yourself to what’s already known, or to the incumbent.
• Anthimeria is the effect of generating rhetorical flair by forcing a word to ‘behave’ differently than grammar teaches us it ought to. Examples:
• The future of awesome. (Xfinity)
• Think different. (Apple)
• Living Sounds. Sound patterns – words that ‘create’ a sound in structures that have a corresponding rhythm are easily memorised. “The soft sounds lulled my little one to sleep”
• Rhyming people believe rhyming phrases more accurately describe human behaviours. Rhyming phrases often stick.

Chapter 7: Find & Document Your Features and Benefits

• Don’t focus only on the things customers want to hear
• You need to find a message that’s unique to your product and is compatible with what customers want to hear
• Convince your visitor you understand their pain → connect their pains to your solution
• Talk about features and your benefits
• Think first about benefits
• What value will the user get out of using this? (benefit)
• What part of my product lets the user get that value? (feature)
• It’s not a one-to-one relationship between features and benefits
• Leave out features that don’t have clear benefits from your messaging
• Product Positioning Doc: track features and benefits. Your best friend when writing copy

Feature	Unique to U?	Customer Pain Solved	Benefit	Priority

• List every feature you have
• Unique to U → check if. the feature is something only your feature offers. If offered by competitors, list them.
• Note the main customer pain that products solve, if you have multiple segments make clear which one you’re referring to
• Use whatever form of priority rank you need to. How important is that feature to your customer?
• Messaging Hierarchy: The order in which your benefits, features and counter-objections should appear on each page and across your site
• Use the product positioning doc on every page you write.
• Don’t fall into the trap of summarising too much when you’re copywriting. Don’t dilute the message in order to squeeze it in somewhere
• A summary isn’t noticeable or memorable
• Don’t forget benefits that don’t relate to a product feature (donating to charity on each sale)

Chapter 8: Stomp Down Objections, and Give Prospects

• Visitors arrive to your site with objections in mind. They can also form them as they move through your site and read your copy.
• If you don’t stomp down the objections, you won’t be able to sell to them
• A sales objection is the mental barrier created by feelings of opposition or disagreement
• They’re either misunderstanding or under-valuing your product or service
• 8 Most common objections:
1. I don’t really NEED this
2. I don’t have the AUTHORITY to buy this
3. I don’t want to be SOLD TO
4. I have to PRIORITISE this above other things
5. My EXISTING SOLUTION works well enough
6. Your company doesn’t have the CAPABILITY or CREDIBILITY
7. I don’t think your PRICES are reasonable
8. I will have to spend a lot of TIME and energy CONVINCING OTHERs around me
• Overcome objections by pre-empting and responding to each objection
• Prevention: off your website in your marketing and PR
• Pre-emption: takes place on your site, generally speaking
• Responding: takes place in your sales support channel
• Use FAQs (on your pricing page) to redirect your visitors to to see the value
• Remind them of how your offering solves their pains or satisfies their motivation
• If an objection is difficult to conquer, give it an entire page
• Show don’t tell to overcome objections.
• Use ‘reasons to believe’ to help delight your visitors
• You can’t overcome every objection
• If you can’t call on ‘reasons to believe’ or ‘assurances’
• Money-Back Guarantee
• Lowest price guarantee
• Free shipping
• Next-day shipping
• We pay the tax
• Guaranteed secure
• #1 best-selling X
• #1 Most-trusted X
• World’s largest selection of X
• Reasons to believe appear and should appear across your site and key moments
• Example: On a pricing page:
• 5 Reasons to choose us:
• We save you money
• Give you more time
• Improve your profitability
• Convenience and flexibility
• Delightful and dedicated customer service
• For best results, make reasons to believe as tangible as possible

Chapter 9: 9 Messaging Tips

• Start with 10x more info that you need, write and then cut. Overwriting is key. Write more than you need and cut.
• You can write copy in both the negative and the positive. ‘ Tastes great, less filling’
• Don’t give your audience too much credit, not everyone is going to arrive with a super critical eye
• Keep your offers simple. Offers shouldn’t have ambiguity.
• Copy worked best when readers believe it. Nearly un-believable is OK, copy should never be impossible to believe
• Customers want a magic button to press. People will buy anything that makes them younger, sexier, more powerful or richer. People are willing to believe that you have it
• If it’s in the news and related to you and you can use it in a non-nasty way, use it.
• The most important decisions you will make is how you’ll position your solution. Decide on positioning before you write.
• When writing starts to feel difficult you’re doing it right. If it starts to feel easy you may not be pushing yourself enough. Fluff is easy, high-converting copy is time-consuming and hard.