Content Writing And Copywriting Tips For Small Business Owners with Rachel Eubanks

Monique: Hey and welcome everyone to the Dragon Digital Marketing podcast. I am Monique and you're listening to episode number 18.

I've got a special guest here on my podcast today, and I'm super excited for her to be on the show. She's a consultant and copywriter and marketer and founder of Inspire to Engage. And she inspires small business owners to write engaging content every day.

And today she's going to share her most amazing tips with us. So you can write content and copy for your website. That gets you the engagement you deserve and converts your visitors into customers. Here is Rachel Eubanks.

Hi, Rachel, welcome to the show. I'm so glad that you're here. How are you doing?

Rachel: Hey cutie. I am doing fantastic. How are you?

Monique: I'm doing good too. Thanks.

Rachel: It is super hot here in Alabama, but I can't complain otherwise.

Monique: It's super hot here too. I'm so glad that you're here and joining us for this episode and I'm just happy to have you on my show.

Rachel: It is so good to be here. And I have to say to Monique, I had you on my podcast Inspire to Engage recently and you talked about SEO. In fact, you talked about it so well, I turned it into two episodes and I've had lots of compliments on your SEO episode. So thank you, thank you, thank you, and I'm excited to be with you today talking about copywriting. So yay.

Monique: Yeah. I'm super excited too. Thank you so much. I'm always so glad when I can help. So you are really a writing expert, you're a copywriter, you're a content writer, you're all about writing. You inspire to engage like your company is called, right? So you inspire people to write amazing stuff that gets them the engagement that they deserve and reach all their goals. So I wanted you to share a couple of tips and to share your knowledge with my audience, so we can all learn and improve our copy and improve our writing.

Rachel: Yes, I'm excited to do it. I'm excited to do it.

Monique: So, what would you say is copywriting? What's the definition of it and what's content writing and what's the difference? Maybe we could start there.

Rachel: Yay. This is a great place to start. So, let me back up just a little bit and say that I'm Rachel Eubanks and I own Inspire to Engage. Monique has introduced me a little bit and so what I do is, I'm a copywriter and a marketing consultant, and there's two ways that I help people. I either do the copywriting for small businesses.

So I'm hired to do the copywriting or I'll walk alongside business owners and I serve more as an educator. So I either serve as a coach or I have a product out right now that we're going to, we'll talk about it. It'll come up in our conversation later on. And so that's what I do, and so I'm excited that you asked me to talk about copywriting, and there is a difference between copywriting and content writing.

But I want to first start by saying that the copywriting Monique and I are talking about today is W R I T I N G. So it's writing versus copyrighting, R I G H T, where you're claiming that this thought or this product belongs to me. So I wanted to make that clear distinction. First people are confused by that.

So we're going to talk about copywriting today, and we're going to start by saying copywriting versus content writing.

Rachel: Copywriting is text and copy that you create with a mindset of selling. Content writing is content or texts that you create with the mindset of educating, informing, causing people to fall in love with your brand or business or yourself.

Rachel: And I like, what Alex Cantony says, it 's content that's meant to cause engagement. So copywriting is meant for selling purposes and content writing is meant for engagement.

And here's a little analogy for that:

Content writing is like taking a drive to the train station. You could get to the train station in lots of different ways.

So think about a blog post, whereas you're writing and informing people, you are going to link to other pages on your website that relate. So if you're talking about something and you get to a paragraph where you have a product, that it makes sense to mention it right there. Guess what? You're going to mention it and link to there. So that's like taking a ride to the train station where there's lots of different paths, and so your content has lots of different pathways that people can go down, versus, when you get to the train station and you get on that train. You are now going to be propelled very quickly to a point.

That's what copywriting is. Once you get people into your sales funnel, or you get them to the train station, you now have a very specific goal with your content, that copywriting is meant to sell. So there's a little analogy to show the difference between content writing and copywriting. But before I move away from this topic, I do have to say, the reason some people get confused by it is that you're definitely similar because good copywriting is going to educate.

And it is going to cause engagement, the ultimate engagement where they press buy now, or they pick up the phone old school and purchase it over the phone. That's the ultimate engagement. Content writing on the other hand is going to sell. Eventually, it might be the long way around, but it is going to sell.

So there are differences in your initial objective for when you sit down to do it, those are different, but there is definitely some overlap, so I think that's why some people get confused between copywriting and content writing.

Monique: All right. I love that analogy with the train station, and yes, you're so right. Like the content that you write as, for example, like your black posts, your articles, your case studies, like your content marketing, basically, that's what's going to attract people. It attracts visitors to your website. That 's what you write when you write for social media, that's writing your emails, that's writing, right? That's content that you distribute to promote your brand and to get people to fall in love with you and engage with you basically, and then once they're in your funnel, you've qualified them through your content and they become your leads.

Then you want to convert them, and that's when copy comes in.

Rachel: Yes, Ma'am you got it.

Monique: So in order to write good copy, you need to know your audience really, really well. You need to resonate with them 100% so you get that moment where they just think like, yes. That's exactly what I need. They totally get me. That's exactly what I mean. I need it and I need it right now. I want it.

They feel a sense of urgency and it just all makes perfect sense. Ideally, you even use their words and their phrases to describe whatever it is that you offer instead of your own words, and maybe some industry jargon that's commonly used in your industry, but your customers and the people that you want to reach and you want to win over don't use them.

So would you agree that copy is something that is more assembled rather than written? So you get to know your audience really well, you learn about the stages of awareness and the psychology of people, and you really dive deep into your personas, have super detailed buyer personas, and then like, assemble the copy. Whereas content writing is when you're actually writing.

Rachel: Yes and no. I think content writing is a great place to do some testing. Not that you don't do testing in copywriting too, so I'm not saying that but what you can tell with your content when it becomes very popular when you know certain things are being visited over and over and over again on your website or on social media, you have posts that continue to get likes, even though maybe it's older means it's still resonating with people, or it just gets a ton of engagement.

That lets you know right there, That's copy. Some of the texts and the communication that you're doing in there may really be good for gathering and moving over into that copywriting stage, that sales page. So, yes, I do agree in that sense that it can be assembly. It is taking different pieces that you hear your ideal clients say, things that are resonating with them, that you've written.

That part is assembly.

But I will also say that it's writing in the standpoint. You do have to designate time to do it. So many times, we just assume as small business owners that we've created the product, we know the product, and that's enough. And so we're just going to put it on our website, or we're just going to write a quick, quick email and send it out there.

That's not copywriting. That's not taking time and designating that this is what I'm going to sit down to do for this next hour or that I'm going to do this. I'm going to test it. And then I'm going to come back to it and revise it. We do that with so many aspects of our business, but for some reason with copywriting, we just think it's going to do itself.

And I can talk about that because I've lived that. Okay. I lived that in, especially in my own business when you are doing other people's work like your client work, and you can maybe speak to this, Monique, as far as from the digital marketing standpoint, you treat other people's work, your clients work with high priority and you use all the things that you've learned over the last couple of years to make their work perfect.

But then when it comes to our own business, how we need to digitally market our business or the copywriting I need to do for a product or a service line that I have, I just kind of overlook it. And so I'm preaching to myself here and to anybody else that's listening that just assumes the copywriting is going to do itself.

It doesn't. Designate time to sit down and do that work, that thinking, and that assembling. If you already do have some good pieces out there, some headlines that are resonating or tips that are resonating, grab that, assemble it, If you want to call it that, but take time to do it. So yes and no. To answer your question.

Monique: For sure. I love your answer. Absolutely. It takes time. You got to put in the time you got to put in the effort. The content and the copy doesn't write itself. People put a lot of thought into it and words that work and that convert. There's a lot of thoughts behind that. And it's like a whole process.

It's not just, um, okay, what am I going to write? And you're just going to improvise it or just write it in the moment that you need to write it. Not really having thought about it a lot. It's definitely something that's super, super important and that you need to pay attention to, and also measure and track it and see what resonates with people.

What gets the most engagement?

Then you go ahead and you want to save those headlines like bookmark those tweets, save those posts, and like really work with that and iterate in a strategic way so you can always tweak and improve, and you no longer just leave it up to chance. If it works or if it doesn't work, and that's what a lot of business owners just disregard and underestimates so much, the importance of your written words, words are so, so, so powerful.

Words, can make you look smart, they can make you look dumb, they can get people excited and all hyped up, or they can get people to think like, oh maybe that's not for me, if you don't get the message across in the right way. Right?

Rachel: Yes, Ma'am. I agree. Totally agree.

Monique: That's why copywriting and content writing is so important.

So would you say that some people are just writers, some people are not writers, or would you say everybody is a writer?

Rachel Eubanks: Oh my goodness, Monique. I am passionate, passionate about this. Everybody is a writer.

Rachel: And in fact, the thing that brought Monique and I together is a book by Anne Hanley, says Everybody Writes, that's the title of her book, and she and I both can strongly suggest buying that book, and I am passionate about that just as Monique is passionate about that everybody can learn to do digital marketing. Especially if you're in the initial phases of your business and hiring somebody to do the copywriting or hiring somebody to do SEO for you is not in the cards.

Rachel Eubanks: We can all start with some foundations.

Rachel: And so what I would say, I have a couple of steps that I would tell anybody that's listening, and if you do want to hire somebody, these are things that you need to listen for a copywriter to talk about.

Rachel Eubanks: Number one is you've got to do research, and you know, I've already kind of touched on this.

When you talked about the phrase buyer personas, I call them ideal client stories. And this is a step that a lot of business owners skip because we'd done the research on our service or on our product, and we know it well, but what we forget is, on the other hand, we're not buying our own product or service.

We have to figure out about the person that's on the other side of the product or service. They are the ones we want to buy.

So you cannot skip the step of learning about your ideal client.

Rachel: And so that takes time, but it doesn't take years, and years, and years, and years. It takes dedicated time.

And I talk about creating a story, which means you really start asking yourself questions.

Like, what is his or her name? How old is he or she, and I don't mean, this is what I hear a lot of, Monique. “Well, Rachel, she's a female in her thirties.” Oh, okay. Do you know how much happens in your thirties? I mean, you could be finishing a grad degree and starting a brand new job, you could have just had your third child.

You could have been in a job for 10 years and looking to move on to another career. All of that can happen in your thirties. So when I say know their specific age, I also say go deeper. What is their phase of life? So are they in the middle of raising children, and if they're raising children, how many? What are the ages?

Think about it. Raising a child that's in diapers is very different than raising children who you're running back and forth to play dates with. Obviously, not as much right now during COVID-19, but, or you're running back and forth to baseball games, very different life, phase of life. So that's where I tell people to start.

And you can start as simple as asking questions of your ideal client. If you already have a couple of sales underneath your belt, pick up the phone, get an email address and start some conversations with the people who have bought from you, and when you do that, you are going to start pulling out similar traits of the people that love doing business with you, and you love serving them.

That's another thing too. So that is your ideal client. So you start there with that research and knowing their phase of life. You build out a buyer persona, or as I call it, ideal customer story. Why are they buying from you? Why is this product going to be legit for them?

And it's not just their external motivations, not just what they'll tell you. There's normally something deeper. I call them internal motivations for buying. So that's your first step is you cannot skip over the research of who is going to buy this product or service.

And here's a silly, really silly example, Monique.

And I almost skipped it, but I'm just going to say it out loud anyway. It's like your best friend calling you and saying, “Hey, I'm about to bring some fantastic people over your house. I think you are going to love them. I met them this weekend. I cannot wait for you to meet them too. We're going to come over pretty soon.”

Okay?

And so you start thinking, Oh my goodness, I'm going to fix a dinner for them. And so you started going to the grocery store and you started buying all of this different stuff, and you just assume.

You realize when you put the phone down and go, uh oh my friend didn't tell me what time they're going to get here.

She didn't even tell me how many people were coming. Okay. So you just do your best, you think in your head? Well, maybe six they'll be here at six and I mean, she wouldn't bring any more than four people.

Guess what? They show up at five 15 and there's 10 people there and there's somebody with a severe allergy to something that you've just cooked and prepared or that you're in the middle of preparing.

This is a silly example, but this is exactly what us business owners do. We create a service or product that we know inside and out, but we have forgotten to ask the most simple questions about who is going to buy this.

And we get in the doing all of the work. In my analogy, it's all, the chopping, the shopping, all of the work, Monique. For us, it's the website, the social media, the packaging. And yet we didn't stop to ask some of the most basic questions that would have really got it, how we went about selling this product, the copywriting that we would have done.

So that's the first step I would tell somebody to do. This is the step I do as, as a copywriter.

Rachel Eubanks: The second thing that I would tell people to do is take the features of their service or product and turn them into benefits because you and I both know, Monique that's what sells. The benefits, not the features themselves.

Rachel: So if you had a 14-page ebook with 700 tricks on how to be better at social media, those are features. The benefit, the way you would put that in copy, just a quick example would be, stop wondering why no one sees your post.

Okay. Cause that's a common pain point that a lot of us have, like, why am I killing myself to write all of this and nobody ever sees it.

Okay. So let's talk about the benefit. So the benefit would be. People are going to see what you're writing or attract the right people to your social media. So you've taken their features, 14 pages, 700 tricks and you turned it into benefits. And what you put in your copy, or at least that's what you start within your copy.

Of course, later on down that sales page, or in that sales email, of course, you're going to list your features, but take the features of your service and product and ask yourself why are those features important to somebody that wants to buy this and turn those into benefits.

Rachel Eubanks: And then the third thing, and I talked about this already, is that you actually then have to sit down and start writing.

You really do. You really do.

Or like you said, you have to start assembling. What are some things I've heard from people that, um, in the research that I'm doing? What are, what are some things I'm going to put in this writing, but you really do have to take time to sit down and write it, Monique, and then you have to put it out there and be willing to see what happen, and especially if you're new to DIYing your copywriting.

You just have to start.

One little trick. And I don't know if you would agree with this, but one thing I do is I sit down, I mark off a block of time and I'll write, and then I make myself leave it alone and come back a couple of days later, or a day later, and reread it, and start asking myself those hard questions.

Is that really what, fill in the blank, whoever your ideal client is, is that really going to speak to Natasha or Jasmine or Bill or whatever, because sometimes you come in with fresh eyes, right? And it, and all of a sudden you can see some of your, some of your mistakes. And definitely, this is silly, but definitely check for misspellings because those do kind of matter in copywriting.

So just going to say that.

Monique: Yes, so, oh gosh, you mentioned so many gems right here. So let me sum this up again.

So, first of all, I love your analogy. I'm so glad that you didn't skip it. I think this is really something that most people can picture. So you don't want to do all the cooking and the chopping and the shopping and everything and it all goes in vain. Like you did it all for nothing, and then your guests can't eat it or they don't like it because you didn't make the effort to just ask, just ask the simple question.

And you also answered the next question that I wanted to ask you. I wanted to ask you about the process and you gave us an amazing three-step process.

So the first step is doing research and you do that just by asking questions. Don't be shy, send people like a quick text, quick email, Just look at the opportunities. If you open your eyes, there are opportunities, always, everywhere. Like if you're on the phone with the client, you know, just ask them. Just make it your routine, incorporate it in your routine, in your communication.

That is so important, and then collect the answers and actually use them and do your research, and that's how you do research to write.

And then the second step is you have to translate features into benefits and values because people are emotional. Everybody's emotional. Even when some people don't want to admit it, and they're like, no, I'm a hundred percent rational. I just look at the numbers. I just always buy the best product out there. I compare everything.

No, it's not true. It's subconscious. You may not realize it but everybody is an emotional person and we're emotional buyers. We buy the products that we can identify with and that resonates with us.

And we buy a lot of brands and a lot of branded products.

And why are we so drawn to brands?

Because brands, they just convey that emotion, and they translate all of the features into benefits and values and emotions. People are just not connected to hard facts and make it numbers like you can't do your argumentation with 79.6% of this and that.

That's not going to persuade anyone. That's just going to confuse people, like, you can't influence people the way that you want to influence them and draw them towards you and get them to like you and to get to know you as a first step.

So you really, really have to do that and ask yourself those questions, and to do that, you have to put yourself into your customer's shoes and view things from their perspective, They're not the expert and they don't talk to me.

Right?

You're the expert and it's your job to educate them and make that clear, and you have to put thought into it.

Rachel Eubanks: Well said, well said.

Monique: That's really amazing. You really broke it down really great.

And then the third step that you said, right, is writing, and comparing. Look at the results, look at the engagement, compare your results, go back, tweak it, iterate it, find a strategy. You find a process that works for you. Find out what works for you and what doesn't and keep track of everything.

Rachel: That's a great point that you're making as far as to keep track and as far as to try it out. I think a lot of times people don't want to write because it is subjective, meaning it's not like two plus two equals four. We can prove that all we need is a handful of beans and we can prove that two plus two equals four.

So I think a lot of people are nervous about writing, but the thing I would tell you is, set yourself a deadline for when this copy has to be finished and back up from there.

You know, two weeks out, make, set a block of time that you're going to sit down and write it, and then schedule opportunities to share that copy with other people. Start with your inner circle that, maybe aren't, they're probably not your ideal clients, but you know what, they make great proofreaders.

Okay.

Your husband, your best friend, your neighbor, they make great proofreaders because they don't know the product as well as you, They weren't sitting there next to you as you were writing it. So they're going to catch your misspellings or where you added a weird apostrophe that they said, I don't think that apostrophe goes there.

And so you'll do a little looking in.

Then the next course of action that you want to take is to then, possibly if you're really nervous about it, show it to some people who may purchase from you.

Be bold and brave and ask them, what do you think about this copy? Would you buy if you saw this? I'm hoping that you would buy, I built this product or service with you in mind. And show them.

Another way, and I know that you're familiar with this trick, is that you spend just a little money. I mean, just a little money on Facebook and Instagram and test two different copies, or if you really can't decide on a headline, or a hook to that question that's going to grab people and bring them in, spend just a little money. Test it and see which of the two perform better.

And then you feel much more confident going into that sales email, or that sales page, or if you're truly doing a launch, that's going to give you a little bit of encouragement and just gumption. A lot of copywriting has to do with confidence.

You had talked to me in a previous email about some of the classes like Ogilvy, and Schwartz, and Halbert, and you would ask me, what can we learn from these guys?

And one thing, Monique, when you start reading about them and you look at some of their copy, their long-form copy letters, then. These men had gumption. Like they boldly put on their copywriting cloak and went to work. They did not hold back the fact that they were selling something.

And so that is what we have to understand when we are in the small business or large business or medium-sized business, micro business.

I don't care what you call it. Side business. As soon as you call yourself a business owner and that you are in to make profits. Guess what, you're in sales. You are now officially in sales, whether you want to be or not, whether you just want to be a jewelry designer, or you just want to create people's websites.

I don't care. You're now in sales.

So from those classic long-form letters, what you can learn from is that you have to be bold and brave and say out loud what is that you're selling and then get really detailed about the benefits that you're selling.

So that's what I would say to people who want to shy away from writing is that, or any form of communication, because the same thing about video, you're like, okay, Rachel, I don't want to write, I just want to create a video.

Well, that's fine. Guess what, you still had to sit down and get your thoughts in order. That's still copywriting. Ads that are made for TV. Guess what? Copywriting right there.

Okay. So Monique and I keep saying the phrase writing, but we're talking about any form of communication where you are busy trying to sell to your ideal client. Does that make sense?

Monique: That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. It's all content. Content comes in different formats. There's text content, there's audio content, there are images, there's video, but at the end of the day, you have to put your thoughts in order. Write something out, take some notes, write a script, no matter how vague and loose the storyline may be, but that's writing, right.

If you have a website, and you need a website if you own a business nowadays, you can't be a business owner without a website. You are a publisher, which means you're a writer. If you're on social media and you post things, you're a writer, you have to write that, right? Everybody emails, you write emails, you're a writer, and you don't write for fun. Right?

We own businesses. We want to make money. We make our living that way. So that means you're not just in writing and marketing, but you're also in sales. And those are just some crucial skills that every small business owner has to have because it's so important. And you want to have at least some knowledge about it.

Even if you have like, an internal team and some helpers to help you, you can't be completely clueless. You also need to be able to judge things.

And I also love that tip that you gave us, to come back the next day or a couple of days later and look at your copy or content again with a fresh perspective, and that makes a huge difference.

You're going to see typos that you have completely overlooked before. You're gonna really be shocked if you do that, what you're going to find. So that makes a huge difference too. That's a great, great tip.

Rachel: I have two points. You made some good points yourself too. When you talked about the fact, even if you have an internal team that's doing copywriting for you.

I heard Amy Porterfield in an old podcast episode, so I can't even tell you what number it was, and she was talking about copywriting and content writing and in ads, creating ads.

And she was very clear to us listeners that for the first three years of her business, she did all of her own copywriting. And this was her reason. Because she knew that ultimately she had to know the art because, in order to hire a good copywriter, she had to be able to talk business with them. And so I'm not saying that you three years is a magic number, but most of us are familiar with Amy Porterfield and she teaches how to do online courses.

The point is that you can then go out and talk to your internal team, or you can hire copywriters when you have been in the weeds already. It also will allow you to understand the timeframe it takes for good copywriting. I think a lot of people think that you're going to hire a copywriter and then in about an hour and a half, you're going to get back that sales page, or that sales email, or that home page where you're really trying to get straight to the the benefits that you offer somebody above the fold, and that's not reality because a copywriter is going to take those steps to research.

First, they're going to learn about the product and service, but then on the other side, just what we've talked about this whole episode, learn about who is buying the dang thing, because they know that if I don't spend time thinking about that and considering that, that this copy is going to be garbage.

And so, number one, it takes time.

And I like what you said that you need to know enough about it, that you can interview somebody who's going to be a copywriter or you can have intelligent conversations.

And the other point that you had talked about, with us coming back a day or two later, you also get to add those power or those emotional words.

And here's an example I jotted down really quickly. If we said something like "looks great". Well, that may be your initial when you sit down and you're writing that copy. Maybe you're talking about a necklace, right? It's like, looks great. Well, two days later you come back and you realize that great is just an okay word.

It's just okay. You yanked that word out and all of a sudden, you now can think about the word stylish. You look stylish, or you look fashion-forward, or, another phrase, you might even go a little and say, look like you walked off the pages of Vogue, or look like you left the set of The Real Housewives.

So now you're getting very specific. That's where you know your audience too. Are they Vogue readers? Do they watch The Real Housewives? You're going to put there, you're gonna take out that word, great, and insert something that speaks directly to that person who's going to be reading that copy.

So that's, that's a reason why you want to go back and look at it with fresh eyes a day or two later.

Monique: That's an amazing tip too. So you don't want to just use generic adjectives that are overused. Like those words have lost all their meaning. We say that every day to anything and everything. That's great or that's amazing, or this and that, but if you switch it up and use words that are not, as usual, it gets people to stop thinking about it.

Like who says suburb or phenomenal? Switch it up. Don't you say great and things like that, that makes a huge shift, and that's a great right there, Rachel, thank you for that.

And also the better of a picture that you're able to paint in the reader's head, the better.

So when you say you're going to look like you just walked off the cover of Vogue magazine, that makes you imagine it in your head right there, and it really paints a perfect picture in your head, and that's what triggers the emotions that you need because people are going to remember the emotions. People are never going to remember the exact thing that they saw, or how it looked, or the exact words they read.

They're going to remember how it made them feel, how you made them feel. That's what people remember, the feelings. So you want to get all of the senses involved, like really have them paint a perfect picture in their head and get super, super specific and describe a specific scenario and, you're going to know what to write by having a super detailed buyer persona. Right?

Know what magazines they read, what TV shows they watch, their culture, their hobbies, their interests, their education, what social media they use, what they use it for, what people they hang out with and associate with. If you're in B2B, know the report line of that person, know who's the decision maker, get into all of the goals. You connect little things and then you get the perfect picture, so you really have to get super, super detailed, and then reference it again and again, and that makes the perfect whole thing.

And that just takes time and that's what you have to do.

And you know, if you're passionate, most of us are passionate about our businesses, right. I can just assume that we're small business owners. We take on risks to even have become small business owners. So you have to take the risk, the same with your copy. Risk it and you can risk it when there's not much on the line.

Like just tweet out a certain thing and see how people react to it and what you get back, what reaction, what engagement you get back, and then you can also draw conclusions from that. And do some A/B tests, of course. With your ads it's like, you're already set, you can spend little money and just see the amount of clicks that you get and how people react to it, like with little money, and then tweak it from there.

Another thing that you can AB test is not just the ad copy, but also the audience. That is super, super important because a lot of people didn't even get their targeting right, and that's the issue. So it's not even that their ad copy is bad, or should we improve first or whatever. It's that the target audience that you've set is not accurate, to begin with, because your buyer persona research, your ideal customer story, as you call it, original research was not done properly or not detailed enough.

So really, really go back there and do it right, and that's the foundation. And those are like the documents, and the information, and the materials that you collect that you use over and over again, and those are going to be your reference tools. Like your brand voice chart, have that for your brand, like build a brand, your buyer personas all of those documents.

They are so, so, so crucial, and they're the pillars of all of your other business operations. You need it for your writing, for your marketing in general, for your communication, just talking to people. Also in the offline world, if you're like on a trade show, you have to talk to people, you have to communicate, and you want to make sure that it resonates with the person that you talk to.

So, therefore, you have to know the person and you have to know exactly what to say, and that's kinda self-reinforcing because then if you're prepared enough and you've done your research right, you're not going to be like, hm, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to write.

You lose that insecurity because then you become secure because you know exactly what you're doing, you know exactly where you're at, you know exactly where you stand, you know exactly who you're talking to, and that gives you that confidence and that security.

And you only earn that by taking risks and testing. That's like the whole cycle, right.

Rachel: Oh my goodness. I'm so excited that you talked about the confidence thing and about taking that risk because I think a lot of people get really nervous about buyer personas, and ideal clients, or an ideal audience because they feel they're niching down so much that they're going to leave people out.

And what we learn, and I've learned this the hard way when you talk to everybody, you're talking to nobody. And so that's where good content marketing and good copywriting gets where it's, when someone reads it and you have really niched down and you know, your buyer well, they think to themselves,

Oh my goodness. Did she get in my head just now? How did she know about that thinking?

And another, another part that you brought out was the fact that we have to continue revisiting this. This is a rinse and repeat, that just because you get your buyer persona or you get your ideal client's story, you still need to set a date on your phone that every six weeks or every six months, you go back and revisit and analyze. Has my biker changed some? Has my ideal client changed some was I off a little bit, but like you said, you only get the confidence to get that copy out there when you get really clear with yourself about who it is that you serve.

And it's funny, you brought this up because in the course I talk about, the course is called creating an ideal customer story, and in the course, that's what I talk about is that you gain confidence and clarity because you're now real with yourself. You're not just walking around blindly in a field and just hoping and praying that you find somebody that you can sell this product or service to. No, You know who you're aiming for now, Does that not mean that sometimes you have to go back, and realign and figure out what was my aim off a little bit?

That's fine. That's fine. You'll adjust it a little bit, but guess what? You can go back out and you've got a target again. So you brought out so many great points with that conversation. I just had to add to it a little bit, because I was so excited about the confidence thing and that's what we want.

Small business owners have to have the confidence to put out their copy and let it sit out there. I attempt to sell and then come back and revise if you need to.

Monique: Absolutely. Absolutely. If you followed those tips, that's going to diminish your insecurities and your fear. That's what it all comes down to in the end. So now you got something, you got actionable steps that you can do and into work and make them work for you, and it's all going to turn out well like you're going to see.

Like you said, your buyer personas have to have to be super detailed. You have to niche down as much as you can. This is due to the competition. We have just a lot of competition. We live in a digital world now due to COVID, even more digital than it has been before, and everything has been online before that even, so it is super, super important.

You're not competing with just the local businesses in your area and like the towns around you anymore. You're competing with people from all over the world, like people selling on Amazon. With your product, It can come from France, it can come from China, and you're competing with those people and their businesses.

So you have to be shut down and find your tribe, basically. That's what it all comes down to. I know we love our product and we're believing in it. We're so convinced and passionate about it, and we want to target everybody and show it everybody and have everybody love it, but that's just not how it works, right?

You're not Heinz ketchup. Right, everybody likes ketchup. You can 't be Heinz ketchup.

You have to start small, and you're going to expand over time. If you have big dreams, I love that. I also have big dreams, but step by step, like baby steps and you can expand and add new products, add new features, add new services. That's not how you start, you built that over time and you have to stay at it. Always combat, fine tune and refine, set a reminder on your phone.

That's an amazing tip. That's how you do it.

One more thing that I would like to ask you, everybody is super busy nowadays, right?

People have a lot on their plate and it's not getting any less. It's getting more over time. So people have the attention span of a goldfish, literally. I think I've heard that in a study or something.

Rachel: I think I've heard that too.

Monique: Right, or they just don't want to read and they're too lazy to read, right? What are your tips on that?

What do you have to do to still capture their attention and get them to get your core message, even if they're just skimming through.

Rachel: Okay, great question, because this is reality. This is reality. One of the first things that we should all do is break our content into short sections. That's why you see it everywhere. That's why social media captions are broken into short sections, blog posts are written in two and three and four-sentence paragraphs because those are very scannable.

Now, obviously when you break down your sales page or your sales email, then definitely make that first sentence of each section each paragraph your most important of that paragraph, because honestly, that's where their eyes are going to land. Make sure also that you are bolding very important words.

If you're making points about these benefits, bold each benefit, just one or two words of each benefit, but therefore when their eyes are going through that sales page really quickly, or they're going through that sales email, boom! They are seeing the benefits really fast and they're moving on.

So those are my first two tips.

Is definitely break down your copywriting into very short chunks. Treat, I say this to my clients a lot, treat other readers how you want to be treated. Okay? So you like things chunked. Do it for your reader too. So do it for your ideal client.

Another thing is definitely if you're working on a sales page, make sure that their sections, so that first section above the fold is going to be your really hit them hard kind of area. That's where you have put your hook up there, you've put your main benefit or two, and then you're going to have sections, and you see this a lot of sales pages where it has customers and then it may have more detail about the benefits and then it makes have some more customer reviews, or it says, this is what buyers are saying.

And then it may have a feature set, but it's done for a reason because they know that the longer someone goes down that page, the more interested they are. In fact, one of the gurus that we talked about earlier like Schwartz and Ogilvy, some of the classic long-form sales copywriters. David Ogilvy. If you look him up on the internet, he loads like straight out of madman.

If you see a picture of him from like the 1950s, so picture that, but one of the reasons, someone asks one of those guys, I want to say, and then in the nineties or the early two thousands is the long-form copy dead?. He said, no, he said attention spans have changed, but when people read the long-form copy, the longer they get into that sales copy, the more interested they are.

And the longer they go into that sales copy, the more likely they are to buy. So that's why the sales pages are important. That's why your, your long sales emails, the one that you get when you get put into somebody's funnel, that's why they are important. If people are only scanning that first little section or two that's okay.

They may be interested and they may be an ideal client, but they're not on the, they're not in the buying mindset yet, but someone who's in the buying mindset is really going to take in all of that information and you are going to convince them to buy. So that is with the goldfish mentality that we have is to break things into chunks, bold, the important words. Don't be scared to use different size fonts.

I'm not saying change your font up. I'm not saying that, but different sizes are very important. and then it goes back to this copywriting that we've talked about this whole episode. When you know the words and phrases that your buyers are using, and you're putting that into your copy, then that's also going to garner their attention.

But if you're using phrases that are industrial based, it's what you as an owner of the company know, but they don't know it. Then even all the chunking and the headlines and the bolding, you can do all of that and still not keep people around to read your sales copy. So it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about knowing your buyer well, spending some time with them, even if it's just jumping on zoom calls with people who have bought from you in the past.

I think it's Pat Flynn that says every month, he calls 10 people. And I don't remember if it's from his email list or if it's from people who have purchased a certain product from him, but he calls 10 people. And he says, sometimes the conversations are five minutes and sometimes it's an hour, but he calls because he does not want to lose sight of who is buying from him because it doesn't matter if he loves the product and service if he cannot convey the importance, the benefits of that product is service.

It's not going to happen. So those are things, treat another rate of the way you want to be treated, but that means that you still get your information in there, but you use the words that they are going to use. You chunk you use bold when you're listing things and don't be afraid to use different size headlines and pictures. Pictures speak a thousand words.

So don't feel free to put pictures in there as well to break up copy and to hold interest.

Monique: Absolutely. You have to take advantage of everything that you can use to style your text. Use headings, use the correct heading hierarchy. So you want to have a main heading, breakdown the points. You have H1, H2, H3, and H4 headings and so on, bold text, you can italicize text. Underlining is not even, it's not that in anymore, but you know, if it fits.

Rachel: Okay.

Monique: Right. Try it. Use lists. Lists are amazing. You can use order lists or unordered lists, breaking things down in a list is amazing. Use short paragraphs. You can still have long-form content that engages people and you can tell people everything that you want to tell them. It can be your message in a long-form sales letter, or in a long article or in a long black post, you just have to break it up better and make it scannable, skimmable so people will actually read it and not get intimidated by a huge wall of texts.

Like a long paragraph, I would say three to six lines is a good paragraph length. Also, take advantage of different font sizes. Don't switch up the font too much. You want to have two at the most, one for your heading, one for your body text, and not more. Don't use display fonts.

They're not meant for that. I see people use that a lot too, fonts that you can't even barely read. They are just display fonts, but fancy things not to actually write more texts.

Those are great tips.

Rachel: Well, I want to add one thing. I know we're running out of time. Another thing, Monique, is to create a file in your email or just a Google doc where you start collecting sales emails and landing pages that are doing it well. Those serve as inspiration for you, and that's easy to do. Of course, I have to put the warning that you don't dare copy word for word.

That is wrong. That's plagiarism. And that is not treating another business how you want to be treated, so you don't copy it. But when you come across a good sales page, whether it's in your niche or whether it's outside of your niche, In fact, it's sometimes more helpful for it to be outside your niche because you're less likely to accidentally plagiarize them.

Sometimes we don't do it on purpose. We just didn't realize that two weeks ago. The reason that that was in my mind was because I read that email two weeks ago. Sometimes it's unintentional. So start keeping a folder of things that you know are good examples of sales copy.

And that helps us to combat the goldfish problem that we all have. If it caught our attention, then we know, okay, if I can tweak it to my niche, it really may garner other people's attention as well that I want to attract to buy from me.

Monique: That's an amazing tip, for sure. That's really amazing. For the content writing that you do for your website and another tip that I want to add to that when it comes to your email marketing.

Create an email address and subscribe to other people's newsletters, subscribe to other people's stuff, and then save that as well.

Save the sales pages and the landing pages of people that are, you can also follow your direct competitors. I mean, why not? Of course, you don't want to copy from them.

You want to be unique anyways and have your own unique value proposition, your own unique sales proposition, and your own unique brand in general, but you can definitely use it to just, keep up with what's going on and for inspiration, and then do the same thing with your email too. Have an email address, subscribed to all of the newsletters, to get some inspiration, subscribe to your competitor's newsletters, other people's newsletters, people who are not your direct competitors, even in your niche.

it definitely makes sense to keep on top of everything. And in social media too, like I already said, bookmark things, say things, screenshot things, and keep that organized and go through regularly. You want to stay on top of your game.

Awesome. I love that. Is there anything else that you want to add to our writing discussion?

Rachel: I would just definitely encourage people to take time to actually block it out. I mean, we block out time for shipping. We block out time for bookkeeping. But once again, we assume that the copywriting is just going to do itself or that, because we created a great blog post or a podcast episode like you and I do. A podcast is content.

This is content marketing, a podcast is content marketing. So I would just encourage business owners to set aside time to do it, treat it like the task it really is, and don't just assume that it's going to happen.

And the only reason I can talk about this so passionately is because I am preaching to myself, I live this for the first three years of my business, and I'm constantly on the rinse and repeat cycle of doing it. And you just don't want someone else to struggle through it like you did. So take time to look at this as a task that you need to do to sell your product or your service.

Monique: Absolutely. And that's also a great chance for you to stand out. Now, you've got all of those amazing pro tips. You know, most people disregard it, they underestimate it, they don't do it properly. That's your chance to step in and just nail it. So really do it, really take action.

We have had a lot of super, super actionable tips in this episode, I love it so much.

One more thing, Rachel, how can people reach out to you? How can they contact you?

Rachel: Well, great question. Okay. So if you just want to see content, you're like, I just want to learn more about this Rachel girl and hopefully engage some, head to Instagram. I'm most active on Instagram, inspire to engage. So it's all lowercase, spell out too, and it's all together. No spaces. And so head to Instagram inspiretoengage.

So that's content marketing. That's where I'm putting out the education. I'm hoping to garner engagement there. If you are interested in buying my course, this course was created for small business owners who have realized I have continued to just overlook this step of identifying my ideal customer and creating a story about this person so I can bring it back up when I need to sell something, or heck even when I'm sitting in social media going, what am I going to write? Guess what, when you know exactly who you're writing to, you've got confidence and you have a purpose to your writing.

So if you are ready for that, head to my site, inspiretoengage.com forward slash online courses.

A couple of features. I started with a benefit just a second ago, but a couple of features it's only $19.99 as of July 2020, which is when Monique and I are recording right now. And it's only an hour and a half long. So honestly, Monique, with some thinking, and by the time you gather your tools in less than two and a half hours, you were going to save yourself a ton of time in the long, in the long run.

And a lot of heartache and a lot of questioning yourself all the time. So if you want that course, it's inspired to engage.com forward slash online courses.

And then the third thing, I don't have this on my website right now because I've pulled back from client work right now, but if someone is truly interested in working with me, send me an email to hello at inspire to engage.com. So it's [email protected], same thing, all lowercase, all spelled out altogether, no spaces.

Monique: Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this interview with me. It was an amazing interview. Super insightful, super actionable as well. No fluff,

That was great. That was amazing. Thank you so much.

Rachel: Oh Monique, I had so much fun. I'm a huge fan of yours, so to be here with you today, just made me really excited. So thank you. I love what you're doing for your community, and you have been so helpful to my community already when you talked about SEO and actionable stuff there. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Monique: You're welcome. Talk soon.

Monique: Thank you so much for joining us in this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing podcast. I hope you liked it and have learned a lot. I have a buyer persona template that you can use and download for free. So make sure you grab that because it will help you to make your copy and content so much more effective.

And let me know about the results that you get from taking action on the tips we've mentioned. I love to hear your feedback. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. It's all linked down below and that's all Dragon Digital Marketing. I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much. Bye bye.