Category: General Marketing

Copywriting Trick: Overcoming Your Blank Page

Liam Atkins

So you think you can dance?

So you’ve decided to invest some time and cash into your next marketing campaign.

You know what you want to do, and you know you need some fancy words to tell your story and pull in new business.

So you open up Microsoft Word, pick your favourite font and…stare…

…at the haunting white page before you.

It’s every marketer’s worse nightmare. The white-hot light of the blank page burning into your retinas as you struggle to get ‘pen to paper’.

So try this trick to help you get started.

Now, be warned, this isn’t for the faint-hearted.

This trick asks some really probing questions. Questions which have made me, as a humble copywriter in East Sussex, stop business leaders and senior execs in their tracks.

For the first time, forcing them to really think, ‘WHY US?’.

My trick to getting over that white page is simple.

Get your journalist’s pad out, and do some digging. Step back and become an investigative journalist.

Pretend you’re researching your product for the first time from all angles… your advantages, who you are, who you serve, the problems, and the pitfalls.

  1. Why is this product made the way it is?
  2. What consumer problems, desires, and needs is it designed for?
  3. What’s special about it—why does it fulfil a consumer’s needs better than the competition?
  4. Who says so besides you?
  5. What are your strongest proof elements to make your case believable?
  6.  What are all the product’s best features and how does each translate into a consumer benefit?
  7. If you had unlimited funds, how would you improve this product?
  8. Who are its heavy users—the 20% who generate 80% of sales?
  9. What irresistible offers might trigger an explosion in sales?
  10. What premiums can be tossed into the mix to press your prospects’ hot buttons?

Cover as many of these points as possible in your research. Take time. Look at your competitors; really dig deep.

You’ll uncover much more than you ever thought possible, and after typing up your findings, you’ll gradually see your new piece of copy come together.

Sound like too much hard work?

I get it; it is. Farm it out to me instead ‘scoop –  [email protected]

Copywriting Tricks: Two Words to Rule Them All

Liam Atkins

The two most powerful words in the advertising world.

Ask any copywriter, marketer or business owner in the land what they believe the most powerful words in the ad world are and you’ll come back with a handful of very similar answers.

#1 FREE – I guarantee that will be up there
#2 YOU – literally writing the word YOU a lot
#3 NEW – goes without saying
#4 SALE – again, go figure
#5 NOW – act NOW etc

They all have their place, but, especially over this side of the pond, these words make your advertising ‘feel’ very ad-like.

And no one wants to admit to opening their wallets to yet another flashy ad.

“So what are these two Oh so Powerful words?” I hear you ask.

They’re dead simple.

And dead persuasive.

Because, unlike the flashy ad words above, they present LOGIC.

*Drum roll*

REASON WHY

You must explain the REASON WHY your product is the best in the land.

And while you‘re at it, don‘t forget that your audience won‘t believe you unless you give the REASON WHY what you claim is true and why they should act today.

So here’s this copywriter’s trick to using reason-why copy in your next ad:

#1 Why YOU
#2 Why TRUE
#3 Why NOW

Which should be really easy…

You’re the best at what you do and have the results to prove it, they should believe you because you have tonnes of social proof, and they need to act now because your diary is half full for the next quarter already.

While you’re here…

#WHY ME: As a copywriter with a focus on lead generation, I have 5+ years of experience helping B2B firms fill their pipeline with fresh leads.

#WHY TRUE: I have tonnes of testimonials to attest to this.

#WHY NOW: But, I only work with a handful of new clients every month so if you’d like to book some work in, I suggest clicking here to schedule a quick call.

Writing Your First Cold Email – What do You Want?

Liam Atkins

Cold emails are the fastest way to reach your ideal decision-makers without a pre-existing relationship.

So we get it, this could be your first foray into the world of cold email marketing, and you want to say it all.

This might be your only chance to tell these decision-makers just how fantastic you are, so you’re bound to want to say it all. Why they should buy from you, why you’re different, why now…

BUT STOP.

Before you dive into the meat and potatoes behind your first message, you need to think long and hard about what you want from this email.

What do you want to achieve, the end goal?

From experience writing literally thousands of cold intro emails, take our advice.

Your emails should be short and have one goal in mind…or two, really.

  1. To arrange a really short call.
  2. Be referred to the right person.

Secondly, who is receiving this message?

You need to have a clearly defined customer profile, the more specific, the better. Allowing you to tailor your message copy so you can:

  • Address their specific pain points and problems; CEOs have different issues from hiring managers.
  • Ensure your tone and the language you write with ‘match’ your audience; Lawyers speak differently to Marketers.

Niching down like this, hitting them where it hurts, in their language, can drastically improve your lead rates.

If you’d like some help writing these cold emails, we can help.

10 Copywriting Questions for Your Next Landing Page

Liam Atkins

Landing pages are everywhere for a reason.

They’re one of the most effective tools businesses can use to drive conversions and nurture leads.

If your site visitors aren’t taking action as soon as they hit your page, if they’re not clicking or subscribing, it’s because they need more convincing, or your content isn’t meeting their expectations (e.g. the thing they clicked on in the first place) – or it could be a mix of both.

A well-designed landing page, both from an aesthetic and copy perspective, should grab your visitor by the throat and drag them kicking and screaming into your inbox.

Or, at least, it should do enough to give them a shove in the right direction by addressing their primary concerns and offering a call to action that won’t leave them wondering what comes next.

After all, visitors to your website won’t convert unless you give them a compelling reason to do so. The best way to do that is with a strategically-executed landing page that speaks directly to the visitor and addresses their biggest concerns right between the eyes.

As a landing page copywriter of over six years, I thought I’d share the top ten questions even I run my clients’ copy through before I hit send.

Copywriting questions for your landing pages

Take a look and see if you could apply them to your landing pages:

  1. How does this product or service differ from anything their audience has seen before?
  2. What’s *really* in it for their readers?
  3. How do they know this is legit, the real deal?
  4. What’s holding them back or causing them pain right now?
  5. Who or what is to blame for this?
  6. Why should they do anything about this problem now?
  7. Why should they trust my client vs the next guy?
  8. How does their offer work in practice, and how will it solve the issues?
  9. Do they know how to get started?
  10. And finally, what do they have to lose?

If you need help, drop us a message about landing page copywriting

marketing consulting

Step Away from Your Marketing: Advice from a Sussex Copywriter

Liam Atkins

When was the last time you stepped away from your marketing?

When was the last time you tried to look at it from a different angle?

When was the last time you looked at your website without your business owner hat on and thought to yourself...

"What are my actual customers seeing when they read about me? What are my prospective customers seeing? What are those people who are just Googling me, who don't know me from Adam, who don't know why I'm fantastic, what do they think about me when they read my copy or when they look through my marketing or my website?"

Sometimes, it's tricky to see the wood from the trees and see ourselves as others see us exactly.

Helping this client see the wood from the trees

It's something that I've just had to do with an ongoing client of mine. We've been working on several products together, landing pages, pay-per-click stuff, and their website.

Their website's been an ongoing, evolving thing, but we're trying just to nail it, get it done, get it right. And while their website now is 100 times better than the original one they had before I came along, even I'm guilty of getting too engrossed in the nitty-gritty with them.

It took a Zoom call today to realise we were overcomplicating it. So we chose to step back. We decided to assess what we were actually saying, who we're trying to sell to, and why they would buy from us.

We did the exercise, it didn't take long, and it's like a firecracker for both of us. I've got work to do now. I've got to write their copy, but for them, they know exactly what they're doing now.

We know this is going to improve things.

So when was the last time you stepped away from your copy or stepped away from your marketing, with a new set of eyes, with a different hat on, and thought...

What DO other people think about me?

Because it's hard, and sometimes you need someone else's help to do that. If you need someone to help you with that, drop me a message.

blog copywriter

An Easy Guide to Writing a Blog Post for SEO

Liam Atkins

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard it said time and time again from gurus about the importance of publishing a blog post a couple of times a week to boost your websites SEO.

But, while that may be true, should you just write blog posts for search engines?
Yes...and of course...no.

While yes, they should be as optimised for SEO as possible, you have to remember who will be reading them *should* they get found and ranked well by Google. 

Your blog post should be geared towards people who read them; it should help answer a common question, help them address an issue in their lives, etc. In other words, it should add value, and when it does, that will establish you as an expert.

In this article, we’ll examine exactly how you can go about creating an SEO-friendly, highly readable, and hopefully authoritative blog post for your business website. 

Start with Topic and Keyword Research 

Keyword research should be tied to topic research. Your topic research should answer what you’re going to write about based on trends and information that’s not readily available. Ideally, you’ll want to write about something you have insight into within your industry so that the blog post adds value - making it worth reading by someone other than the big G. 

During the keyword research phase, you’ll want to find what keywords potential readers will use to find your article, naturally pepper them throughout the post.

Draft the Structure of the Post 

The structure of your blog post needs to be easy to understand and read. The best design, IMHO, is what already works, so stop trying to reinvent the wheel here. 

Here is how a typical blog post is structured: 

  • A short introduction to the topic 
  • A body for the main message 
  • A conclusion which should summarise everything 

Add Headlines

Headlines make it very easy for readers to scan through the text to determine if it’s something they want to read. Using appropriately placed headlines can instantly tell anyone who arrives on your page if the blog post will satisfy their query. 

Add Links To Supporting Existing Content 

If your website has other blog posts on a similar topic or ties into this one, make sure to link to them. It will help strengthen your new blog post; plus, it’s good for SEO and internal structuring. Or, if you find content online related to what you’ve written about, and you think it will add value to readers, don’t be afraid to link out to other websites and their posts. 

The idea is to ensure that your blog readers have an excellent experience, which answers their questions. Once you do that, getting ranked isn’t all that difficult. 

Use Transition Words

This is where a copywriter can often step in…while many of us can ‘build’ a blog post, e.g. collate the content into a logical order, it takes a writer to write the post. To take it from a bucket of information into a post that’s easy to read, flowing from one sentence to the next. 

But here’s a quick tip for you to ‘DIY’...

Use transition words. These words help your text flow and show readers the relationship between phrases and paragraphs. Turning your bucket into an easy to read article - just as you’d find in a newspaper or magazine. 

Finally, Don’t Forget a Call to Action

Most people assume that a call to action is only for landing pages, not true. Your blog post can also serve as a somewhat passive sales page.

A gentle nudge at the end, or in between the blog post to subscribe to your newsletter, or perhaps a link to where they can buy the products you’re talking about, can help drive up conversions without being intrusive. 

..plus, without a call to action, it’s a completely wasted opportunity. 

Hire a Freelance Blog Copywriter

And on that point, fancy some help writing your next blog post?

Drop me a message. 

email copy

Stop Saying Sorry in Your Emails

Liam Atkins

Stop saying, "Sorry" all the time. 

This is coming from someone like me and I'm pretty introverted. I'd happily send emails all day long instead of picking up the phone or chatting to someone in real life. I could never walk into a supermarket and talk to a stranger.

But yet, when I send an email to someone or do a LinkedIn request, pick up a cold call - whatever. I never just launch into the same phrase that you hear so often, "I'm sorry for disturbing you".

A couple of years back, I was involved in local politics. You'd hear exactly the same thing. You'd have someone knocking on someone's door, going out of their way to knock on someone's door. And the first thing they said was, "I'm sorry for disturbing you".

Now there's several things wrong with this. You're not sorry because you're repeatedly knocking on someone else's door. You're repeatedly sending emails out or picking up the phone. So you're not sorry because if you're sorry, you don't do it again.

Believing in what you do

You might be sorry for disturbing them, but you're doing it for a reason. You're doing it because you genuinely believe that what you have will improve their life. 

So in local politics, these people genuinely believe that their local candidate whoever it was, would make their lives better, would improve things in the local area.

And it's for this very reason why, when I send stuff out, I'm not apologizing. I'm not putting myself on the back foot immediately, because I genuinely believe that the things that I can do for you will make you money, or will save you on your ad spend, or it will make things easier for you because it's one less thing to worry about.

If you know that your offer will do this, you don't need to apologize. You just need to justify it. And then you'll have me, or the next person down the road, or the CEO of your dream company, happy to listen to you.

You don't need to apologize. You just need to know what you do works and that you have a good enough angle.  It needs to be able to hook them in. 

Need help writing sales emails or email marketing pieces that unapologetically do the selling for you? Drop me an email: [email protected].

Cold email copywriting

Cold Email Marketing: Pros and Cons

,
Liam Atkins
Cold email has been an appropriate outreach tool for B2B companies since the beginning of the Internet. 

Alongside channels such as direct mail it fell out of fashion with the rise of social media and other shiny marketing tools. 

Thankfully it’s now back in vogue as an undervalued marketing tool and hotter than ever. 

(Can cold email ever be hot?!) 

But before we delve into the benefits of using cold email marketing as an outreach tool, you need to understand the basics, so let’s get back to the brass tacks.

What is cold email marketing?

Open rates, bounce rates, conversion rates, segmentation…

These are all buzzwords you’ll come across when looking at email marketing.

But what is cold email marketing at its core?

Cold email marketing is an approach where emails are sent to prospects without any initial contact.

Cold email marketing for b2b companies

Cold email marketing can be a great way to generate more sales for your B2B business.

But that’s only if you do it right.

Aside from the increased sales that this approach can bring, what other benefits does it have?

How cold email marketing is useful for a B2B business

Cold email marketing is cheap and time-efficient

We all want to lower costs while maximizing profits, it’s why we’re in business. And that’s why cold emailing is a welcome approach for B2B businesses.

It is less expensive than cold calls and other forms of marketing, like paid advertising.

Practically, the time spent making a single call is enough to send a thousand emails. Ultimately, it’s more time-effective.

Cold emails are less frustrating 

One of the things that most people dislike about marketing is how frustrating it can get. They produce a piece of content, send it out into the ether and hope for the best. 

But that’s not the case when it comes to cold email marketing - at least not in equal measure with approaches like cold calling.

First, you can send the email whenever you like, and the recipient is allowed to open the email when they find it convenient for them. On their phone, on the toilet - whatever. This makes it less disruptive, which is a good thing for busy people. 

Secondly, even though cold emails often get a low response rate compared to say - cold calling, you can easily turn the ‘tap’ on and off with a cold email campaign. You’re only relying on you and your ability to send emails as and when you need them. 

Cold emails are easily trackable.

Unlike other marketing approaches, it is easy to track cold emails. Some of the metrics you can track include;

  • Open rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Bounce rate
  • Response rate

...all these are of value in customizing and improving your email marketing campaign.

Cold emails land where people spent most of their time

According to a Fortune report, people spend an average of 2.5 hours checking their email every day. For a B2B business that wants to get its message seen, cold email marketing is the way to go.

The cons of cold email marketing

While cold email marketing may seem like a near-perfect approach, it has its downsides, even for people like me who sell cold email copywriting as a service. 

Responses are not guaranteed

Cold emails are not as dynamic as making cold calls. With emails, the recipient can choose to reply immediately...or never. At least with a cold call you’ll get an immediate response. 

Cold emails may never get to your prospects

No matter how hard you try to get the right addresses for the right member of staff, some companies do have strict spam filter measures to ensure that they only receive emails from pre-approved or internal addresses. As a result, there is a high chance that your email will not get to their inbox. 

The competition is enormous for cold email marketing

According to Campaignmonitor, people sent more than 294 billion emails in 2019 per day! And since then, the numbers have continued to increase.

The numbers alone show how competitive this space can be.

As a B2B business that wants to stand out from the rest and be heard amidst the noise, getting your email strategy in line is crucial.

Final take…

Even with the downsides, it is evident that cold email marketing is a highly effective approach.

There is nothing that should stop your B2B business from going heavy on this marketing approach. 

Want to learn more about how your business can use cold email marketing as a tool in 2021? 

Speak to me about cold email copywriting and campaign management. 

How to Explain What You Do

Liam Atkins

Whether you call them sales hooks or elevator pitches, they’re a pretty useful way to explain who you are and what you do.

Here’s a quick formula that might help you improve yours…

(With a rough draft of mine to show how easy-ish it is).

1. Identity: Hi, I’m Liam.

2. Struggle: I’ve been helping businesses with their marketing for the last ten years. But, no matter how good it got, there was always one thing that would dramatically move the needle.

3. Discovery: The copy. Picking the right words, that spoke to the right audience, in their language, while addressing their deep-rooted pain points.

4. Results: This improved copy meant better response rates, higher conversion rates and ultimately, more sales.

Put it all together and voila!

Would love to hear yours, or if you need help – gimme a shout