Three Crucial Questions

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>> Okay, so in the first session, we will be really looking at was the kind of underlying psychology of conversion. What encourages people to take action? What puts them off? That kind of thing. In this session, we're now gonna start to build on those psychological principles to explore how to create a compelling offering.

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Because no matter how great your design is or how well coded your website is if the offering, the content of the website isn't compelling you're not gonna get anywhere. Ultimately, content is key when it comes to conversion. The problem is that most people have pretty bad creating good what web copy, and I include marketers in that.

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In truth, it is a very specific discipline to create really good compelling web copy. Fortunately, it's something that can be learned relatively easily at least to start off with and although ideally you'd probably want a professional copywriter to help you out that isn't always gonna be possible and to be honest it's probably better off you having a go.

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Then is some marketer, or some client, or stakeholder who really has got very little experience writing good copy. So in this section, I really wanna show you how to go about creating copy, how to give it a go yourself even if that copy is just draft copy. Okay, then somebody else refines and improves over time.

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So that's kind of the aim of this section. So the way we're gonna break that down, is we're gonna look at three crucial questions that you need to be asking yourself before you decide on what you're offering is, or how you're gonna present your offering, and in particular, before you create any copy.

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Then we're gonna look at the process of creating what's called a value proposition. And then finally, we're going to explore some different techniques and tips that you can use for creating great copy yourself. Now, my first piece of advice is, when you are asked to wireframe or produce mock ups or anything like that don't wait for the client to give you copy righ> t but don't you Use lorem ipsum either.

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Oftentimes when we do mock ups it takes forever to get any decent copy out of the client and even when they do deliver copy is normally not particularly good copy. So, actually a better approach is for you to have a go at creating the messaging and the layout and how all of these different parts work together.

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And then the client or the stakeholders involved could tweak and change that afterwards. But if you set the basis for it, then you can bake in best practice from the beginning. And you'll be able to have a conversation with the client rather than just sending you a word document with pages and pages of text that you copy and paste across and it's going to be completely uncompelling to anybody so with that in mind.

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You're gonna have a go at the copy what do you need to think about. As I said, there are three crucial questions you need to ask yourself before you have a go at creating the copy yourself. And the first question is who are your users? Who is it that you're trying to reach and appeal to?

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Now, I'm not gonna get into things like user research here or anything like that, because to be quite frank I could spend a whole day just talking about that kind of stuff. But having a clear picture in your head of who your users are, is really important when it comes to creating a compelling value proposition that will make them want to act, right?

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So you need to know who they are what motivates them in particular, you wanna know what questions they've got, what concerns do they have, what their ultimate goal is, what pain points they're hoping you can help them overcome things like that. Now, different people approach this in different ways.

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It might be that you know somebody Who is one of the potential group that you're trying to appeal to, in which case, as you produce your copy, you can just picture that person in your head at the most basic level, right? You could also use personas. As long as those personas are telling you truly useful information like that I listed above rather than just George has 2.3 children and lives in a semi detached house and reads the Guardian.

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That kind of information isn't necessarily gonna be that helpful in creating great copy. So you need to have at least an understanding of those tasks and objections and questions and that kind of thing. Another exercise you might find very useful is customer journey mapping. If you've never done customer journey mapping, I'd encourage you to google it and have a look but basically what it's doing?

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Is it's outlining the user's experience over time and the different questions they have and different tasks they wanna complete at different points within their journey. And that can be very helpful because not only does it helps you understand the user better but also help you understand the context of the website you're creating.

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Where does it fit into things? So for example, some websites will take the customer through the entire build up buying cycle and E-commerce website is a classic example of this, right? You go on to the website, you research your product, you select the product, you make a purchase, and then it's delivered and you can do returns of things through the website as well.

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In other cases your website might just do a part of the journey, for example if you're buying a service like if you are hiring a web design company. Then the contract would be to contact the people so part of the sales process is happening off the website. So you kind of, Helps to understand the context that the user is in when they're interacting with your website and actually understanding this journey and this that users go on is is a really fundamental part of kind of understanding the whole structure and how you present the different messages that you have.

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So, understanding where that website fits within the journey is really important. So, is I'm not expecting you to be able to read this slide, don't worry, but this is the a mock up that I did have a particular journey that I was doing for one of my own courses that I sell on my website.

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So there was a landing page of course, for the course I was selling but actually a load of happened prior to that. So I started off by surveying people about what they might be interested in, in terms of a course. And I got people to sign up for a pre-launch mailing list,to express an initial interest in it, and I kind of drip fed them a few emails before they got to the landing page.

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And then of course that is a big difference in their mindset when they hit that landing page to somebody who just come in cold. I'd already prepared them a lot in that journey so that they were ready to buy by the time they hit the landing page. So understanding what's happening around the particular website or page that you'll produce is really, really important.

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And not just what happens leading up to it but also happens afterwards what email communication so they can receive afterwards. How you're gonna update them about their order or whatever it is that the call to action involved. So essentially what we're talking about here is thinking about About the sales funnel, right?

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This is a concept marketers talk about a lot of the journey that uses going on and the different stages in it. So, step one in sauna was attracting people's attention it's grabbing their attention for the first time, right? So let's use this for example. So you're may be coming across me for the first time you've never had about me before, so I've attracted your attention actually through doing this course.

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Now, then the next stage in a sales funnel is to make a connection with people. So maybe because you have heard me speak at this course you might go and google my name and that will take you to my website. And then I want to make a connection.

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So I want to get you to sign up to my mailing list, for example, all right? So the landing page has to get you to sign up to my mailing list and that's the conversion point then, then I've got to keep you engaged, right? So I've got to keep you interested, until you're at a point where potentially you might want to hire me for my services.

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Okay, that's a typical sales journey of attract attention, make a connection, keep engagement and then encourage contact. Or make a purchase or whatever that final step is in your particular case. All of this provides the context within which your website sits and the copy that you produce sits and makes an enormous difference on what you say and when you say it.

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Because if somebody knows when they hit your website if they potentially know nothing about your product or service, you're gonna have to say a very different set of things than somebody who's already been pre prepared through something like an email campaign or something or even a pay per click ad Equally.

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If somebody is promised something in a pay per click ad then when they hit the website you've got to make sure you deliver that straightaway. So context is everything understanding your users needs is everything