 Goodness gracious real quick. Can I get a shy like whoo-hoo if this is your first time at mozcan? All right, see that's less you guys have been all day. Let's keep that going so in 2012 I was you and the first mozcan I came to I decided that being right here right now was gonna be a goal for me So I pitched and I failed and I pitched and I failed and finally I pitched and I get to be here And I'm super super excited about that fact and the moral of the story is please please pitch community slots Wow, all right, but I've got 15 minutes to blow your mind to potentially change the way you think about not only How you write copy but the words you put into it, but if we're gonna go on that journey together It's gonna start by us agreeing that Maybe we've been thinking about copy the wrong way and here's what I mean by that When you think about writing a landing page you probably think about it something like this You need a headline you need a strong sub headline that adds to that headline and then you need a hero image that brings Context to all of that and then in your body copy Yeah, you want to talk about the benefits of your product and then you need to have a call to action to tell people What to do next and then you need to have some social proof to give credibility to everything that you just said And that's not necessarily wrong But the problem is you can have all of those components and build something totally Useless something that doesn't convert Doesn't have an impact and doesn't do what you need it to do and so as a copywriter I used to think about copy that way and I started hunting for what I called the holy grail I wanted to have a framework that any business could use any one in any business could use to go from that white little blinking cursor to writing a page that was intelligently organized and built to convert and I found it when I realized that every conversion is a conversation Every conversion is a conversation between the questions in your lead's head that they brought with them and the copy on your page And how well it answers those questions Answer those questions. Well, and you're on your way to a conversion Do a bad job of answering those questions and you've potentially lost that conversion So I did a little bit of digging and I narrowed it down to These six questions. These are the six things every lead comes into the page asking depending on their level of awareness So what the heck is this? Who is it for or maybe better? Is it for me? Why should I care or how will it make my life better? How does this work? What's the process? What's the catch? And if I see how it works, why should I believe a single thing you've told me? And if I do believe a single thing you've told me, what do I need to do next? So if we use this framework to evaluate a landing page, we can see that hey here unbounce does pretty good They've answered all of these questions on this landing page for an e-book. We can see all right We know exactly what it is. It's a ultimate guide to conversion-centered design And then we can see who it's for we can see why we should care They've given us the takeaways and the different chapters Then they've got a video that kind of breaks down how it works what the takeaways will be how the books put Together and finally they've got a call to action that says what next and then on the bottom there We've got some social proof that tells us why they're credible to teach us this in the first place But I bet if most of us took this framework and looked at our own websites, it would look more like this All of a sudden we see some gigantic gaps in the information that we've put together For example, this page does a good job of saying it's a new e-book. I give it a pass on that It's good enough that it's an e-book They don't explain who this is for I was really generous in giving them the question Why should I care because they've got about ten words that say one thing you'll learn in this book Absolutely nothing that tells us why we should trust them and then a big giant button where if we decide to trust them anyways Hey, we can download this we can go for it But there was a problem with this framework And that is if you think back to your last conversation It probably had a logical flow. So for example, if you came up to me and said Joel what do you do and I said I have 10,000 customers And then you said yeah, okay, but how will that make my life better? I said sign up today The problem is I'm answering your questions, but not in the order. You're asking them. I'm not having a conversation with you I'm forcing my facts on you. I'm not making this a conversation. I'm monologing at my own terms So if you want to make this framework useful, you have to think about it Logically, what are the questions that need to be answered first before they're ready to have those next questions answered? So as a rough flow if your good lead doesn't leave your hero section Understanding why they should care about what you're offering them what it actually is and if it's for them you lose You've already taken steps backwards Then once you've gotten that buy-in from there You've answered those questions now you have the ability to get into how their life will improve or how it works Or why they should trust you and finally once you've answered all those questions now you can show them okay? Here's what happens next now. I'm not presenting this like hey calls to action in the hair. We're bad That's not the case But what I want you to think about is are we answering the questions people need to have answered before they're willing to Do something and if there's a marketer in this room that really gets that it's will Reynolds And I'm so excited that you guys get to watch him tomorrow Even if you drink too much, please please please show up because that talk is gonna give so much context to all of this So how do we get answers to those questions? How do we make it all meaningful? Well here we have a problem too, especially if you're an SEO because in SEO and especially other marketing disciplines We tend to look at our leads as these outlines these things that we've drawn and we try to shove real people into them So they're the people we wish our customers were but for copy It's not useful really to know that oh, they're a 40 year old marketing director who makes 60 grand a year And it's a single mom who drives a minivan and looked for a recipe for cherry pie none of that is helpful in tapping into motivation and Motivation is what we really need to understand if we want to write copy that converts the why behind all of those queries The because that's not usually attached, you know, so someone might search for Jim gear, why do they want that Jim gear? Maybe it's because their old Jim gear was uncomfortable And they're trying to get back in shape We don't get to see that because if we stop at the search query if we never talk to these people So there's four things that we need to understand if we're gonna get to the heart of motivation We need to understand our customers pain points. We need to understand their anxieties We need to understand the priorities because not all anxieties and pain points are created equal And then we need to understand the outcomes they're coming to us for so you might read that listen go great We know those things. I'm gonna hop right in but there's a problem with that and I want to illustrate it this way Let's play a simple game. I want you to watch and tell me the difference between the copy on the left and the copy on The right so on the left we have sales made simple and on the right We have you hate guesswork and busy work. So we made sales less work What about this affordable time-tracking payroll software that's sexy stuff, right? Or the time-tracking tool that pays for itself What about this breakthrough native reporting limitations now? I was on this project and even I don't know what that means It's like it was tossed out of an angry jargon robot and then on the right We've got get the reports your CRM can't give you without the headaches it does And I think if we're honest most of us would agree that the copy on the left is more generic Clichead it doesn't really pack an emotional punch It's boring and the copy on the right is more specific interesting human Well, I mentioned there was a problem earlier and this is it all of the copy on the left was written by Marketers and copywriters from real projects and all the copy on the right is almost verbatim pulled from customers So am I out of a job? The problem is that you are not your customer. So stop trying to think for them and Start talking to them So real quick, I'm gonna cover three different tactics three different tools to gather the information you need I'm gonna show you how to organize it to make it useful And then I'm gonna tell you what to look for and wrap it all up with a case study that makes it all real so Three different ways that we can talk to our customers the first is customer interviews And I love this because this is the deepest dive You can possibly take of any channel because you're face-to-face or on the phone and you have the ability to ask why? Why is the single most important question you can ask when trying to gather customer insights? Then email surveys and I love email surveys because you can collect mass feedback at scale It's less personal than an interview. So you need to choose your questions carefully But you can quantify qualitative things especially good for priorities for example What feature is most important to your leads when they're evaluating you what almost kept them from buying what comes up over and over again? It's much easier to recognize patterns with mass feedback at scale and finally reviews and testimonials And I love them because they're free and you don't need a whole lot of them to start gathering some really interesting information But that's not good enough How do we know what questions to ask and when if I just told you yeah go do an email survey? You could go blast out a terrible email survey learn nothing and then come back next year and say what you told me was totally useless So there's a structure what we want to get to when we're talking about motivation is people's Experience not their opinion. We're not looking for opinions. We're looking for experiences That means getting people to tell us their story and the way that we do that is by ask asking questions in a logical format What was going on before they came to us? What was their experience like working with our product or service? And then what happened after we need to get them to share the narrative of their decision So I'm going to share eight questions that across thousands of survey respondents and hundreds of interviews have proven to be really Effective at capturing the information that we need and the wording here is really important So first for capturing pain points What was going on in your business or in your life that sent you looking for a solution? So instead of someone saying oh, we needed a new time-tracking software Now they're telling you about the problems that they have that sent them looking for something like you What else did you try and what didn't you love about it most marketers stop at what else did you try? And they get the solicitor compares like great. We know who we're up against Well, while you're talking to them ask them what they didn't love about it That's your pain point that you can solve better than your competitor can For anxieties what almost kept you from buying from us What almost stopped you from making the decision to work with us? Or if you want to flip this to a positive which tends to get really great responses as well What made you confident enough to give us a try? What was it about us that made you go? Hmm, you know what? I think these people can be trusted that is a powerful insight to have when you're structuring your copy We're talking about priorities. What made blank the best solution for you So again, what was it about us that made us better than the competition? What priority did we meet that other competitors just couldn't and then when evaluating blank whether it's industry or solution or whatever? What was most important to you especially powerful when used in surveys to gather hierarchies of priorities? What can you do now or do better than you could before please never ask your customer? What have your results been? Because they won't know they won't know what to tell you they'll be grasping at straws Ask them what they can do now or do better than they could before and if you want even better insights Follow this question up with and what has that meant for you? What has that meant for other departments? And finally give me an example of when blank your product or service made a difference for you again Get them telling a story that brings context to all those features and benefits that make your product matter So you can go out and you can ask these questions, but the problem is you're only going to be as good as your analysis So really quickly there's a downloadable template that you can use when gathering this information to make it meaningful And there's a link there that you can go download this and a whole shwack of other resources I'm going to talk about but the gist of this slide is copy and paste the quote Classify it as whether it's a benefit a pain point and anxiety so that you can group them later If there's themes that emerge you want to classify those there so all the quotes come up together If it's tied to a feature mention that take notes on why you like that quote because I promise some of them You will forget why you pulled that in the first place And then the single most important column next to the quote itself where you found it so that you can go back and get Context on it later because when you're doing this over a hundred different things. It's really easy to lose quotes So what are we actually looking for in these responses? The first thing is frequently used words What words your customers say over and over and over again talking about themselves talking about you the problems of benefits? Because if they use those words you probably should too Look for recurring themes. These are real responses to a survey. We did for inside squared So because of inside squared we've been able to close higher value deals on a faster timeline than before KPIs used to be a time-consuming part of my workflow It saves me time every morning we saw time coming up again and again and again as a theme and we could work with that Look for things that are well said so instead of saying we can analyze data better We can twist turn and dig into every aspect of the sales process and Instead of all the learning curve is short. That's not bad But you could literally turn your sales intelligence on tomorrow You'll know these because when you read them they hit you in the gut It feels different when you read this kind of response and lastly look for quotes They're insightful that reveal that hidden because that I mentioned earlier. It has very detailed reporting somewhat useful Why does that matter because before everyone thought over what the true booking number was but now it's a given This is a problem We didn't even know customers had internal conflicts over numbers and now that we know they have it We can talk about how we solve it and none of the competitors are talking about that So I want to wrap this up by showing you a case study of how we brought this all together in real life So I was brought into work on the housebot comm CRM page as a small project with Matt Barbie And we took this exact process So if we first we conducted an email survey of existing clients getting them to classify who they are how they use the software What was most important to them? Then we mined reviews and testimonials out in the wild and one of the most important things I can tell you here is don't just mind your own testimonials Go read your competitors bad reviews because not only is it great whiskey reading. It's fantastic For figuring out what you can solve that people are frustrated with about your competitor and put that front and center and say hey We do this better Then we reviewed interview transcripts so the HubSpot team had already talked to a pile of customers We poured over those to see how people talked about the problem the solution over and over and finally Check out your chat logs. If you're not running live chat on your site Commit to running it for just one week give it resources for just one week because it's an anxieties Goldmine no other channel is going to tell you the problems your leads Don't think are being solved on your landing pages or website Quite like a chat log because the questions that come up over and over again aren't being answered in your copy So I answer them in your copy So there's a few things we learned the first thing was that customers cared about different things than we do The features and benefits that the internal team thought were the most important weren't exactly the ones that the customer Talked about the most or even said were most important to them That was interesting and then the serum was heavily marketed on the word free and yes That's a huge selling point, but free wasn't even the biggest part of the equation when we talked to customers There are other more compelling reasons they signed on and then we learned that some tasks were coming to all segments some Outcomes every segment wanted to have everyone in every group mentioned these as things they wanted to achieve But some benefits were unique to decision-makers and if you're gonna only write a page for one person Write it for the person who can actually buy from you instead of all the people who might go this is interesting So here's what we did we changed the messaging to mirror the priorities and pain points of the audience We talked to instead of pushing on the word free We changed it to an outcome that came up over and over again Close more deals with less work and that came literally verbatim from feedback from a customer Then we moved from features to benefits so on the old site We talked a lot about customizing views dealing task boards being in sync with the platform We changed that to talk about here's why you're gonna love the house. What CRM you can learn it in minutes Not months and you can automate the boring stuff and you can track every interaction you have with the customer And yep, that stuff's all directly stolen from customers, too Then we restructured the landing pages based on customer priorities the things that they told us were most important to them got talked About first instead of the things that internal teams or that the copywriters thought we should really push this it's important We let customers to find that we let the customer drive And then we use those customer outcomes that we learned to write better crossheads to make it more enticing to pick this up And work with it so hey, you can see your entire pipeline at a glance you can customize deal stages to your sales process Well as a result we saw a 20% increase in signups to the CRM Which is no small number when you're dealing with that volume of traffic? And Matt Barbie who's a real person and is here and speaks later this week can verify that if you go and ask him So that got us buying internally to do a larger project when HubSpot was redesigning the site We used the same copy framework to overhaul the copy and in working in tandem with their design and their new sign-up flow We doubled HubSpot site white conversion rate. We doubled their inbound call volume We saw a 35% increase in demo requests and 27% more product sign-ups, and if you take nothing else away from this session today Take this slide away This is the power of shutting up and listening to your customers And then taking the words that they're saying and putting them into your own copy Thank you guys so much. This has been a dream come true to talk at Moz console. Thank you guys very much You