Copy And

14. What NEEDS To Go In Your Copy (and What to Leave Out)

• Samantha Burmeister @ Nomad Copy • Episode 14

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In this episode, I break down why “I don’t know what to write” usually means “I’m disconnected from my audience’s language,” and how to fix that with simple, sustainable practices that make your copy sound like you and convert better.

You’ll learn how to use client voice to fuel your content, how to gather the right feedback at every point in your customer journey, and how to turn that language into copy that builds trust, connection, and sales.

We cover the practical side of collecting feedback, the psychology behind why your audience’s words work better than templates, and real examples from accountants, ops coordinators, and service providers who transformed their messaging by speaking the way their clients actually think.

By the end, you’ll know exactly what to write the next time you feel stuck — because your clients have already given you the words.

Resources Mentioned:

Copy On Demand: https://nomadcopyagency.com/copyondemand

Find Donna and the CEO Sprint podcast at this link!

To find Danielle at DM Squared Media, go to dmsquaredmedia.com/nomad. 

Connect with me:

Nomad Copy Services → sales pages, emails, websites, and more.

Get on my calendar → if you’d like me to write your sales copy for you!

Free Opt-In Copy Bot → Write high-converting opt-in pages in minutes

Watch episodes with subtitles on my YouTube

Nomad Copy Agency writes copy that CONVERTS for service-based businesses. Inquire about done-for-you services here.

Hey friends. Welcome back to Copy and the marketing podcast where you learn how to write copy that sounds like you, but converts better. Today we're talking about what to write when you don't know what to write. So a lot of times as business owners, we write a lot of copy and I'll have people come to me and say, Sam, I would love to work with you. I would love to join Copy on demand, but my business isn't that complicated. I have a website and I don't really have anything else to which I then ask, do you ever host events? Do you have a lead magnet? Do you welcome people to your list? After they join the lead magnet? Do you have an email funnel? Are you sending weekly or monthly nurture emails and newsletters between our funnels, our webinars, our website as a whole, and all of those emails that we send in between. We as business owners do write a lot of copy, and it's important to keep that copy on brand because when we go to, say, our branding experts or our branding strategists and they lay out what it means to be a brand and we lay out our brand values. Our copy gets to drive that message home every single time somebody reads what we have to say. So when you don't know what to write, it then means that you're just writing something that somebody told you you should write and not something that's coming from your core messaging, not something that's coming from your brand. So that's why we're gonna talk about what to write when you don't know what to write, because I've got some really strong starting points for you and I've got some tips that you can implement today. You have a business and you need to write something. You have an idea and you get to write a sales page. You have an idea for a freebie or a lead magnet, and now you have the opportunity to welcome people into your ecosystem and hopefully buy something from you or take another action like get on your calendar. That is what your copy does is it encourages people to connect with you and encourages people to convert and buy from you. So whether that's your emails, sales pages, websites, ads, or other marketing materials, you need to say exactly what your clients need to hear in order to make a purchase decision. However, when we're told that we need to write something, a lot of times we go to outside sources. We Google or search on an AI platform, what goes on a sales page. But the problem with that is that they're going to give you generic advice. They're not going to have the context of your business when they tell you what to write. So what ends up happening is people write these really long sales pages or these super long emails. And they don't convert because they end up being so long that you lose people's interest along the way. So when you don't know what to write, my encouragement for you is to ask your audience. I know that asking your audience sounds a lot like sending out a boring survey that people give generic responses to if they click on it at all. But we're gonna talk about how to ask your audience and then how to use what your audience says to connect with future members of your audience. So really this is, I think of it like the recycle sign, where it's just a cycle that goes around and around and around. When we ask people the right questions, we then get connection. From our people, we increase trust with our audiences. We then also have their language to use in our own marketing that we send out to people in our audience who feel connected to it because you sound and talk like them while staying on brand. So we're gonna go through what to ask your audience, how to ask them, and then how to use that language in the future in specific parts of your copy. Let's go. You have a lot of options when it comes to asking your audience for feedback. If you have not implemented what I'm about to tell you, I encourage you to do so over time, and what I'm about to tell you is that every part of your customer journey should be eliciting some sort of feedback from your audience. You can see an example of this first one when you go to my opt-in copy bot. It will be at the link in the show notes, but you can go to the opt-in copy bot and you will see that before people ever get on my list, I learn something about how they perceive themselves. So when you go to the opt-in copy bot, you're asked for your name and email like usual. But I also ask you to define where you're at in business. This helps me segment the way that I talk to you later. So if you say that you're an established business owner, I might send you something completely different than if you tell me that you are new and figuring it out. So you can start surveying your audience before they ever start working with you. Then when you onboard someone, you can ask them, why did you join my program? And you're getting this in client voice. What are you hoping to see change in client voice? Then a couple weeks in, if somebody's working with you one-on-one, or if they downloaded something of yours a couple weeks ago, you can ask them again. What has changed since we started working together? You're asking them to identify the transformation in their words. And over time you're gonna get all of these forms and hopefully you have a system. I use Google Forms. You can then take those results, and this is where I love using AI tools. You take those results and move them over to say, chat GPT, and you say, this was the question. These are all of the answers. What are the three main pain points that are coming up here? What are the three main reasons that people are working with me? What are the three main types of businesses that people own? When they come to me. So it helps you step away from being too close to the problem to be able to see why are people choosing to work with me? How is my work impactful in their words? Then you also, when you're offboarding, can ask people, what did you get out of this experience? What's different in your business? What's different in your life? So then you have all of these touch points from different parts of the customer journey that you can use later on. How are you gonna use that language? We'll get there. If you don't have these things implemented yet, include them in your brand experience. You can go and start making these forms, including them in your onboarding emails today. If you don't have it and you need some client voice, which again, you want client voice so that you know how to talk to your people and what they need to hear in order to buy. If you don't have that yet, you can do a big push, and I like two specific ways of getting things in client voice. The first is client interviews. You can hire this out to somebody who does voice of customer research or you can do it yourself. Come up with a few questions. Where you can call either past clients or potential future ideal clients, get them on a call and ask them about their customer journey top to bottom. Why did you start working with me? What was the problem that you had? How did you see me fulfilling the solution? And then finally, did you receive that solution? What happened as a result of receiving that? So then you have the story of problem solution, transformation. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go back to my previous episodes. I think it was episode four, we talked about how to find the transformation in your copy. Go back and re-listen to that one. It'll be hugely valuable for you. So that's one thing that you can do is voice of client interviews. The other thing you can do is send out a survey to your full audience. Asking for people's time is difficult, so sometimes a great way to elicit actual feedback and get people more inclined to fill out your survey. Or to take an interview with you, you may want to incentivize that with some sort of small prize or in exchange for a small amount of done for you work or a free strategy session. So ultimately what we wanna do is ask your audience to talk about you in their words. So then the next question is, what do we do with those words? As I mentioned, we have a lot of copy to write as business owners, we have a lot of copy that goes onto sales pages, emails, and more. What do we need to put in each of those? So first of all, when you're talking to your people, they're gonna tell you their problems and you're gonna ideate on the solutions. That's a perfect nurture email. That is the perfect way to say, people tell me this. This is how I solve that problem. That's content right there. You can also take this information and tie it back to what you are currently saying in your copy. And I have a couple of examples here. So I work with a lot of financial professionals and when I ask them what they do, they will tell me their day to day. They tell me the forms that they pull for clients. They tell me about how they hire bookkeepers so that they offer this full service agency. They tell me what it is that they're doing. However, when we interview their clients or when we look at client feedback forms of what are you hoping to get out of hiring an accountant? People will say things like. I need to have my books ready so that I don't spend all of January trying to get caught up before tax season. That's more of a bookkeeping example than a tax example, but they'll also say. I know that I'm growing fast and I don't want to give all of my money to the IRS or worse, I don't wanna get audited by the IRS. So while an accountant knows that what they're doing in the day-to-day is preventing you getting audited, it is preventing you spending a bunch of time at the beginning of the year getting everything together. It is preventing that risk and that uncertainty that you feel as a growing business owner, it is preventing you spending way more time than what it's worth on that task. So they wanna talk to you about all the forms and things that they're pulling to save you time and money. You just wanna know what the outcome is, is that you're not gonna get audited by the IRS because you have somebody who gets your business on your side. So when an accountant listens to their audience. They're going to be able to speak their client's language. So one, that's content, but two, when they go to write their website copy or invite people to a webinar, they know not to say, these are all the forms that I'm gonna pull. They know to speak to the transformation that says, this is how we are going to get you tax season ready in two hours or less. Join this workshop because what people want is to be tax season ready. They don't care about all the forms. You know that you're gonna show'em the forms. They don't need to know that right now. Another example here is I have an ops coordinator who works on my team, and rather than her telling me every single task that she accomplishes throughout the week or throughout the month, I leave it to her to tell me each week what needs my attention and I know that everything is handled without me thinking about it. Because as a business owner, my biggest problem is that there are a million moving pieces. So if I can hand those off to her and trust her. To do them. That's what matters. So rather than her on her website or on my proposal, I did wanna know all of the things that she would do, but rather than saying that she was going to schedule my blog posts and do some inbox management and scheduling emails and pulling data from emails and doing some financial tracking, rather than telling me all of those things, these dashboards just appear. And she tells me if there's anything that she needs from me to do her job. Otherwise, her goal is to just stay outta my business. Well stay in my business so that everything is handled. So if she were writing her website, her content would be about how she saves me time and that I get to not think about things and not worry that I'm not thinking about things versus in her head, she wants to tell me all the things that she is doing. But I don't need to know about that. So she could use this on her website. Either of these examples could use these on their website in headlines. They could use this in nurture emails and sales emails. They can, when they're launching, take the problem language that I'm using rather than the problem language that they're using and make that part of their email content and their sales content. There's so much that you can do with client voice, but ultimately people trust people who are like them. So when you speak like your client, you're building trust and they think that you understand them. They assume that you are the best person for the job because they understand what you're saying. They don't think that you're trying to pull the wool over their eyes because you're trying to act smarter than them. So what do you write when you don't know how to write? You write exactly what your clients need. Now when writing a sales page, I mentioned this at the beginning, you're gonna get a template. You're gonna get advice from Google or Claude or Chat g pt. How do you know what goes on a sales page? You only need to tell people what they need to hear to buy. If people are telling you why they purchased, you need to put those primary reasons at the top of the page so that other people just like them see why other people purchased. You include that in their testimonials. However, what we often see is that people have several lengths of problem sections on their sales pages. You don't need this. You need to only address the problems that your people have identified that they are problem aware of. Now, if we remember, there's a thing they called a marketing funnel. And a marketing funnel takes people from problem unaware to problem aware, to solution aware to purchasers. So when they are problem aware, we don't need to remind them of problems that they have not yet identified. We simply need to solve the problems that they're aware of and make you the best solution. And when you do that quickly and concisely, you're automatically sending signals that say that you are an efficient, effective person to work with. So if you have a bunch of sections on your sales page that are redundant. I see this a lot, I will see people put the same exact what's included section like same design, same word, same everything. Copy paste multiple places. On a sales page, you're signaling that you're inefficient. You're signaling that you don't feel organized enough that this sales page is gonna flow, and yet that you don't trust them to have already read the first section in which you said that. So when you signal that you are an efficient, effective person to work with, your sales pages, become more efficient and effective, and say what you need to say in as few words as possible to help people understand that you're the solution to their problem. Now there's always a lot of moving parts in your copy and if you show something to a hundred different copywriters, you're probably gonna get a hundred different responses. However, the best person to write your copy, I would argue is you. You are close to your people. You are the one that they trust. You are the one running your business. But it's okay to ask for help with this, and that's where Copy on Demand comes into play. Copy on Demand is a copywriter me in your back pocket all year long. You get four copy reviews per month, and you can choose any of your copy. I've looked at everything this week from Instagram bios to sales pages, to nurture emails. Somebody even had me look at one of their Facebook ads and we look at them and I tell you what to improve and why. I give you examples in the context of your business. This is not a course, it's not a community. This is just me one-on-one with you once a week. As I look at your copy, it's called On Demand because it's asynchronous. The way that it works is anytime throughout the week you submit your copy to me versus via an Airtable form. Takes two minutes to fill out. You just gimme some context. Then every Tuesday I go in, I give you feedback, and I send it back again. It's four times a month. You also get a quarterly one-on-one with me where we get to sit down, talk through your copy. You can give me that additional context. There's also bonuses. We've got webinars. I throw additional trainings into the portal if people are asking me a lot of the same questions. If you have the question, somebody else probably does. So when I get the same question a couple times, I'll record a training that's 10 minutes or less and pop it in there for you. You also get discounts undone for you copy. So if we ever run into an issue where you don't wanna write your copy, you get a huge discount on me just doing it for you. It's only$2,000 a year or$200 a month. The price is going up in January. So if it's something that you're interested in, reach out to me now and we can see what we can make work for you. This has been another episode of Copy and the Marketing podcast where you learn how to write copy that sounds like you, but converts better. Of course, if you wanna get even better at writing your own copy and get my brain on yours with context in your business. Copy on demand is opening on December 17th through 19th, and then again in January. Slightly higher price each month. So if you have questions, reach out. You know, you can always find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. I'm basically everywhere. So leave a comment, be sure to like and subscribe, and I will talk to you soon.