264: Writing Copy That Works
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Summary:
What is copy writing for your business and what makes it work to get clients? Copy writing is more than just ad copy, as it includes all of the written materials you create. Producing consistent copy that works isn’t easy, so in this episode, we discuss how to attract clients through your messages. From using familiar language, to being crystal clear, a little planning (and maybe some help!) will ensure you build trust and authority. Then, Natasha answers, “What is a good reset for my personal and business life?”
Main topics:
What is copy writing?
How does it target my clients?
What makes good ad copy?
Ask a Pet Biz Coach
Main takeaway:The copy in your business should be something you worry about, because words matter more than ever.
Links:
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, pet, business, clients, writing, words, pet sitters, copy, language, work, jokes, associates, ad copy, confessional, audience, company, today, pup, emotional, blog
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan I'm Collin and this is Pet Sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hello, welcome to episode 264. Today we're going to be talking about copy. Hello, thank you to pet sitters associates and our wonderful Patreon members for supporting this show, the world is seeming to go crazy again. So hopefully you and your pet business are doing well. And if you need anything at all, please reach out, we would be happy to help in whatever way we can.
Collin 00:41
as Megan said, today, we are talking about writing copy in our businesses. A copy is really any of the written material that your business puts out. It's not always advertising, which I know is one of the first things that I think of when I heard hear the word copy.
Meghan 00:55
But it's anything that's written. So it's that's going to help your business connect more with clients. So anything about social media posts, or blogs, you write any emails or physical newsletters that you send is all of the copy. But it also
Collin 01:11
includes words on your website, your onboarding process for your new clients, emails that you send out, even your policies and procedures here. And it's something that we need to be worried about, because words matter. And everything that we put out there as a business, everything that's accessible to the public and potential clients is something that will either convince them to buy or convince them to go with us or, or maybe just convince them of our legitimacy and professionalism.
Meghan 01:39
Well, and it also reflects on us as well, not only as people, but as businesses. And we want people and potential clients to feel like they know us that they can connect with us and our business and that they can get behind what we offer. When you have consistent messaging and consistent language, it helps people to get to know you, they understand your viewpoint, they even kind of understand your personality a little bit as well, it can help them to see you as a professional and an expert in most cases.
Collin 02:07
But unfortunately, people are overloaded with words in our days. I mean, you experienced this just as much as we do. There's, you know, 1000s upon 1000s of tweets accessible to us, there's blog posts that go out every day, there's emails, there's millions of emails that are created every minute. And because of that, there's a lot of competition for people's eyes and brains to process what they see. And that's a hurdle that we have to overcome. As business owners there's there's there's a lot of noise out there that we are competing
Meghan 02:37
with. And we're not even talking about other pet sitters or dog walkers that may be in your area, we're talking about any kind of business insurance, or anybody trying to sell something, like you said, there's just a lot of noise out there. And so not only does a well written copy, or the right word choice break through to our target audience, it can also elicit a physical or an emotional response that can help them connect more with us, which then builds that relationship that know like trust factor that everybody talks about. And that trust is built and needed for them to decide to use our services. And so when it comes to writing good material for your business, the goal is to keep it as simple and clean as possible. Especially when you're writing blog posts or social media posts. People just want to scan and be done with it. No matter how good your content is, people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, especially with the you know, 15 second tick tock videos, people just want to consume the content and be done.
Collin 03:40
But simple does not mean easy. And simple does not always mean short, it means it's clear, and it's precise. What we're doing here is we are trying to dial in exactly what we are trying to say well exactly what we mean and strip away all the rest of those fluff words. Because time is of the essence, words are of the essence. And people's attention span is of the essence. It also means thinking through how your client will end up reading this. So here's an example of a copy that could be out there. Our company provides drop in visits, which are visits where we can come to your home to make sure your pet stays on their schedule to reduce their stress by providing them with the same kind of care that you give.
Meghan 04:20
We have to obviously that was a lot
Collin 04:23
of words was basically a massive run on sentence. But we have to ask ourselves, what's the main purpose of this message? What do we want the client to get out of it?
Meghan 04:31
And you also have to consider the context because context matters. Is this an ad on Facebook? Is it the section of your website describing your services? Or are you at a meet and greet letting them know what they get for paying you? So keep in mind that something like 66% of people assume that copy that's vague or complex is deliberately written that way. They think it's hiding information. So using plain language is a lot more engaging. It gets straight to the point and it makes your content more attractive. What we were talking about here is the client experience of your company. So any confusing language that makes them trust you less, is actually going to make you work harder, and then work harder to commit to you. So the higher the stakes, or more costly the service, the clearer and more precise your language and your writing needs to be. And guess what petsitting is pretty high stakes and costly to your clients. So this is really an exercise in self restraint and thoughtfulness when writing. It is very important when you're writing a blog to not just sit down and poop out a bunch of words that they need to be carefully crafted. And it takes time.
Collin 05:45
I will say that this is something that Megan and I had a lot of experience with in our past careers as scientists, where we were doing research and writing scientific papers, where there was sometimes a word limit on the amount of text that we could put into any document that we were writing. So we had to be very clear and very precise about the experiments, the outcomes, and really what it intended for the reader to take away. So while we didn't have backgrounds in ad copy, writing scientific literature kind of helped us for this and is assisted us when we look at text and paragraphs and understand how to parse through them to make them more clear. Well, because
Meghan 06:23
every sentence has a purpose. And every sentence needs to say exactly what was done. And that is kind of similar here of you're trying to get your ideal client, you're trying to make your services accessible, so that the right people can end up going with you. So if you remember back to our example, it was our company provides drop in visits, which are visits where we come into your home to make sure your pet stays on their schedule to reduce their stress by providing them the same kind of care that you give. So in there, it says, Can Is it something you can do or you do do. So why have the word can in there, it's confusing, and it makes it seem like there are other options. So it's not needed. It also seems incredibly wordy. There's too much redundancy of the word visits in the beginning, our company provides drop in visits with our visits, it's the same thing over and over again. So one or both of those should be removed to make it easier for the person to parse. If you work through a process like this, you may get it down to something like drop in visits, ensure your pet has their same routine and reduces stress while you're away.
Collin 07:34
It's an iterative process, it's writing something and then reading it and then rewriting it and then reading it and then sometimes reading it out loud or putting it in a different format, having somebody else read it and ask what does this mean to you in a certain context does this get across my point. So externalizing a lot of this process is a really good thing. And it's something that Megan and I do an awful lot. So reaching out to somebody or just sitting and rewriting it as many different kinds of times as you can, all the while looking for ways to shorten it and reduce the length and make it more and more clear. Well,
Meghan 08:07
and this can be really hard if you're doing this with social media posts, and you're getting to the end of the day, and you don't have something for tomorrow and you don't want to sit there for the next 30 minutes and and think about the post and what you're going to write. But it is important because people do see your social media. The goal of all of this is to connect better with our target audience. And that can be hard, especially if we are not the target audience.
Collin 08:33
So for us, our business actually tries to target busy professionals and retired professionals who traveled to see family. However, I am not every tire professional. So in order to know what kind of words will resonate with them, I need to be putting ourselves in their shoes
Meghan 08:49
as much as we can at least right.
Collin 08:52
But you can start by doing things like looking at their social media habits, maybe view some of the same pages that on Facebook that they like following similar Instagram accounts imitate their online and in person activity. By spending time in your clients shoes, it helps us speak like them, and speaking like them as how we show our company is for them well.
Meghan 09:14
But there is a fine line though, because we still want to be our own individual company with our own personality and culture and all of that. So there is a balance.
Collin 09:22
We're using words that they're going to key into that they understand that are familiar with them that are the same lingo. We're trying to show I'm a company for you because I'm acting like you I'm talking like you I'm doing the things that you're doing. It helps them better associate themselves with our company and see how it's a better fit for them. We can do that all by expressing our own individuality and personality. But we have to have these connections with our clients because otherwise they're going to pass right over us because we're it's totally foreign to them. And as we do this as we look for these words, we can't be afraid to embrace niche terms or slang, especially if that's how our audience talks.
Meghan 09:59
Like if you're in Texas and everybody says y'all, you better say y'all.
Collin 10:04
Exactly a local dialect or maybe generational slang and terminologies I don't know how many people still use the word Davenport. But maybe you don't know what that is. Maybe that might be something for you to use. But if you're trying to appeal to younger generations or younger audience, you might find yourself using a lot more emoji, or you're needing to stay on top of a lot more pop culture. So you can make appropriate references in your social media or in your ad copy posts.
Meghan 10:30
And this will really help with SEO as well search engine optimization, because if you are using the same language as your audience uses, when they go to search for things in Google, you will likely show up something that has a lot of slang is insurance. And this episode is brought to you by our friends at pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Since you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom and running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today. At pets@llc.com, you can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and using the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off today, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets@llc.com.
Collin 11:27
So he started using the language that our clients that our target audience uses. Next, we need to be getting personal and think about common experiences among our audiences among our clients, especially ones that are rarely discussed. So in pet care, this could be talking about the death of a client the death of a pet, we don't see that a lot out there. So putting that kind of information out there, showing them that this is something that you've experienced or how to work through it well, and
Meghan 11:55
you can also use that as a blog post to highlight any pet crematoriums or pet funeral homes in your area.
Collin Funkhouser 12:01
Yeah, but it's a common issue that every pet owner will have to go through. So as a company by addressing overlooked struggles and issues, you'll appeal to those people who are in need, they will be drawn to you. These actually these unique insights that you're able to bring into and showcase as a business. These will set you apart from other people. And we'll build that trust with an audience that we all want.
Meghan 12:25
And then once you're acting and speaking like your audience, you can make your business exclusive. Because nothing attracts interest, like exclusive access. Everybody wants to be in the in crowd. So if you have insights or offerings that people can't find anywhere else, they will be drawn into that. So in pet care, especially, we have a unique ability to showcase our emotional and our vulnerable side, we really invest our whole selves in taking care of pets. So use these type of emotional bonds. And it's really powerful when you do
Collin Funkhouser 13:01
Yeah, think through marshals who show mothers watching their kids grow up or commercial involves any dog really, especially the Superbowl commercials, we're all left in tears. So although we may complain about the cheesiness of some of these at times, we still love as a group as a society emotional stories. Well as we're using this language that our audience uses, when we can start pulling these strings together, those aspects will really start hitting close to home with our audience, which is what we want. So we're using language of furry family members and other connective terms that we know pet parents and modern pet parents are using in their feelings so we can be eliciting emotional and physical responses,
Meghan 13:42
like dog mom or dog dad. And then don't forget about laughter as well. It can be just as powerful and sometimes even more intimate. So jump on chances to share inside jokes with audiences. Something funny that happened during your petsitting day is really a tactic that relates to exclusivity and emotionality. If they can relate to something, or if they can see themselves in the story that you told, they will relate to that if you're sharing a joke about a common problem, take it a step further and build engagement by asking people to share their stories or their solutions. And obviously, that's going to drive up the algorithm. If that's a social media post, it's going to drive up the algorithm if people are constantly commenting about their stories, and you
Collin Funkhouser 14:27
see this all the time to have the five things every pet owner experiences or the five things every dog owner wishes they would have known beforehand or things like that, again, these inside jokes. I know people will say avoid inside jokes in the bait crowd. But what inside jokes actually do as we've kind of discussed here a little bit is they help draw in people to help see, oh, I belong there. Because I understand that joke. I see myself in that. So those are my people. I want to hang around that group of people.
Meghan 14:56
Okay, so it's now time to start putting all of this together. Which means understanding what makes good and bad copy. So while context does obviously impact the nature of the structure and exact language that we're going to use, there are several characteristics that great copy will always share. And the first one is it gets to the point it expresses exactly what's important. So say you have a copy something like this, our two hour adventure hikes, let your pup explore new areas in a relaxed and safe setting. So it's getting right to the point there, you know that the hike is going to be safe, it's going to be relaxed and your pup is going to explore new areas
Collin Funkhouser 15:38
for two hours. This specificity here really helps get that point across. Good copy will also take your clients viewpoint and be relevant to them. So something like get started in three quick steps. So you have peace of mind while you travel. This immediately says, Oh, this isn't going to take very long. And I do wish I had peace of mind while I travel. We're trying to address some concerns and problems that we know our clients have, by putting them immediately at ease and that we understand them, we get you this is why we do this. And this is how we're going to work through our process.
Meghan 16:11
The third one we touched on a little bit ago, but it's uses familiar language. So plain and simple words, something like we're your pups fun and or uncle while you're away.
Collin 16:22
This also may make them chuckle. But these are familiar to them, they can immediately associate Oh, I get that I get this. It's also a little inside joke about the fun and the fun Uncle, this is going to help us better connect with them to
Meghan 16:34
another good characteristic of copy is that it feels informal. So off the cuff remarks or something a little humorous. Like booking with us is so simple, your cat could do it. They're also
Collin 16:45
going to be original, maybe one of a kind. So something that we use is join the bunch today and become part of our family. It's language it's kind of these taglines that we use that we can pull in that are going to start people queuing into Oh, that's that that's that company, they say these kinds of things. The
Meghan 17:01
next one is needs no further explanation. It has an immediate and unmistakable meaning. For instance, the best care for your pet while you're away. That's it. Nobody needs to explain further because it makes sense. It's the best.
Collin Funkhouser 17:19
And then all throughout these and again, hinting at this, we need to be bringing in some laughter and some levity here, generally good ad copy is going to make you smile. And it's going to be kind of humorous. So something like will care for anything as long as it's legal. A phrase that I say a lot. When people ask me what kind of pets we care for, why do you care for a bird? Yeah, a lizard. And I'd say probably probably draw the line at a caiman in a bathtub. But we're trying to help them understand that we relate to them that we understand. And again, building some a lot of this just personality as a business, which links back to company culture, and what we want the goals for the business as well. So while all of these things represent good ad copy, you can put them in different places. And you might not use them all the time in all contexts and circumstances. But they're point things to point to and look to when we're thinking about how we want to structure the words that we're putting out there for our clients
Meghan 18:14
well, and it can take a while to find your voice as well. No matter how many years you're in the business, you may not know exactly what to put in that next social media post or what to write the next blog on or what to put in your h1 tag on your website. Don't go there speaking from experience, but there are actually some amazing virtual assistants out there or even dedicated copywriters that specifically do small business work. So you may want to reach out to one of them if you're really stuck, because you may find that working with someone else will help get you better ideas and get you to where you want to be.
Collin Funkhouser 18:49
And if that's not something that you want to do just yet there are actually a ton of copywriting Facebook groups and blog sites that give specific hands. Or if you're ever curious about how something sounds and how it reads, throw it into our group sitter confessionals on Facebook and get input on what you're thinking about using from other pet sitters. There's an amazing group of people in there. We absolutely love and adore every single one of them and they will give you great and honest feedback.
Meghan 19:16
So we would love to know if you find writing copy easy or is it a slog? Let us know this log on Facebook and Instagram at petsitter. confessional pet business coach Natasha Banyan is going to answer the question, what makes a good reset for me and my business?
Natasha 19:35
Yeah, a really good reset is completely stop it. You know, I really enjoy nature. So when I reset I completely stop. put myself in nature. And I write down my list my two columns, what has been working and what part of this really fills me up and I truly enjoy it. Write that list down first because you get all those endorphins. You're like yeah, this is why I'm limited. Okay, and then your other list is what part of that is not working or does not make you feel good. And then you can start there, what I find is I only can design my business from my own subconscious. But that's still the subconscious that made those problems. So it's really hard for me to fix that, because I created that based on my lifestyle. So I tend to reach out to different people. And I'm like, Listen, this part is not working. What are you doing that works? This part is causing me a huge headache. You know, Have you have you come across this before. So that is when we are solopreneurs. And we're running for years by ourselves. And we never reach out to a mentor and never reach out to a trusted source or, you know, I have mentors in every asset of my life. It's not just business, it is literally my diet right now is going to hell. I'm like, listen, someone's gonna put me on course. Okay. So write down the things that you're great at. And then the things that you're not so good at start to get help, because literally, that's really the only way I believe is asking for help is okay, it's okay not to be okay. And the sooner that I've asked for help, the sooner that I'm like, Oh, this pain went away immediately. Why didn't I ask for that earlier? So that'd be my advice.
Meghan 21:13
If you would like to join Natasha's monthly membership group, you can do so at start scale sale.com and use the code P SC. 20. For 15% off. We are so grateful for you listening to this today. And if this is your first time or if you've listened to all 264 of them. Thank you. Thank you.
21:31
Thank you so much.
Meghan 21:32
Thank you for listening. We are so grateful that we get to share our experiences. But most of all get to share other similar stories. It is so much fun to hear. Every business is different. Every person is unique. And so if you ever want to be interviewed, we'd love to have you.
Collin 21:49
And we also want to thank our wonderful patreon supporters like Claire, Adriana, Doug, Laura and Katherine.
Meghan 21:56
Thank you so much. And thank you also to pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode. We'll talk to you next time. Bye
