Art of Growth, Show Notes
The more you learn about copywriting (or sales and marketing in general) the more you realize that half of your job is using other people’s ideas.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating for copying other people’s work.
Is that clear?
Okay… what I mean is that…
Business is always a process of identifying what works and creating from that knowledge.
Copywriters do this by paying attention to what really grabs their attention, turning that into a formula, and then creating completely original content on top of that formula.
Now, copywriting is a particular passion of mine. I love learning about how it works and I love the way it trains me to think differently.
And when I think copywriting, I think Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers.
I had the chance to talk to Joanna about her approach to marketing a brand new project that Copy Hackers has been working on, Airstory.
When I asked her how she was approaching the marketing for Airstory–which Joanna describes as what would happen if Google Docs & Evernote had a baby and let Trello raise it–she said she was really inspired by a marketing campaign that Blue Bottle Coffee had come up with.
They decided they wanted to use the idea too.
Blue Bottle had created a beautiful video “course” on Skillshare that explained the process of brewing exceptional coffee from start to finish. As Joanna told me, the result of watching it was that you couldn’t think about coffee the same way again.
In order for her to use the idea…
Joanna needed to reverse engineer it.
Her goal is to get people to rethink the way they’ve always done a frequent task: content marketing specifically and writing generally.
After all, that’s what Blue Bottle did. It’s not really about the videos, it’s not really about putting it on Skillshare. The really important part is to understand the mechanism that made that campaign go viral: rethinking the way you do a daily task.
Further, Joanna told me, the real idea is teaching people to be a better consumer of your product so that they’ll only want to choose your product in the future. It’ll be the only one that now meets their standards.
Once she knew that, she could approach marketing Airstory with the “how and what” of the Blue Bottle campaign but with her core goal being to create better writers instead of better coffee brewers.
The videos and distribution channel for the marketing campaign became what I call the “building blocks” of her marketing. But her own product, brand, and customer perspective become what the building blocks are made out of.
You can do the same thing with any successful marketing or sales assets.
What’s more: you should.
I teach our Quiet Power Strategy clients to start looking at every sales page that catches their eye or every email that moves them to click as an opportunity to create a template.
That template is inevitably made up of building blocks that you can use if you only sub in what’s particular to your product, brand, and customer perspective.
Take this blog post, for instance!
- The first building block (at the beginning) is a shocking or counterintuitive statement that seems to go against cultural norms.
- The second building block (the bulk of the email) is an explanation of this idea referencing a conversation, in this case, one I had with a successful business owner.
- The third building block (what you’re reading right now) is a call to action around how to apply this to work for you.
- The fourth building block (it’s coming, read on!) is a final call to action to check out the whole conversation.
So what are you waiting for?
Listen to Joanna explain this whole process–plus how she interviews prospects to come up with product ideas and how she’s built out two teams to support both the training side of the business and the software side of the business.
[smart_track_player url=”http://media.blubrry.com/creativelive/content.blubrry.com/creativelive/PPP-JOANNA-WIEBE-2017.mp3″ title=”Turning Customer Research Into New Product Ideas with Copy Hackers & Airstory Founder Joanna Wiebe” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_pinterest=”true” social_email=”true” ]
Art of Growth, Show Notes
[smart_track_player url=”http://media.blubrry.com/creativelive/content.blubrry.com/creativelive/PPP-EMILYMCDOWELL-2017.mp3″ title=”Behind the Scenes of Explosive Growth with Emily McDowell” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_pinterest=”true” ]
It’s tempting to think that “lucking” into explosive growth is all that’s standing between you and the lifestyle you dream of as a small business owner.
All you need is a tap on the shoulder from a big influencer, or a blog post that goes viral, or a product you create to appear on Oprah. But explosive growth is often uglier than it is exciting or lucrative.
On this episode of Profit. Power. Pursuit., my guest is Emily McDowell the founder of Emily McDowell Studio and the creator of the wildly popular greeting card collection Empathy Cards.
When Emily realized that the Valentine’s Day cards that were on the market didn’t really reflect the relationships many people found themselves in (ya know, dating–sorta–but only if that’s okay with you), she decided to try her hand at producing an alternative.
It said, “I know we’re not, like, together or anything but it just felt weird to just not say anything so I got you this card. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t really mean anything. There isn’t even a heart on it. So basically it’s a card saying hi. Forget it.”
Etsy–kingmaker for independent designers and makers–put it on their Facebook page and Emily was inundated with orders. She received a whopping 1700 orders in 1 week and had to refuse to sell more.
What would YOU do if you received 1700 orders for your product overnight? Could you fulfill them? Do you have the customer support to keep everyone happy and informed?
It would be easy to say that Emily’s success was a fluke, a stroke of luck.
But Emily tapped into a key strategy for product design.
She says:
“I was really focusing on what I didn’t see versus what I was seeing and what I was seeing done successfully.”
Whenever you’re trying to “get creative” about what you’re going to bring to market, when you’re trying to innovate on something as ubiquitous as a greeting card (or an online course, a coaching package, a wedding photography package, or a t-shirt), you might think the best plan is to shut off the internet, go into a cave, and wait until lightening strikes.
Emily had the opposite approach.
As a former creative director, she knew the best way to create something new and remarkable was to really look at the market. By examining what else was available, she started to see the hole–the opportunity–where there was great need.
It wasn’t luck.
It was a process.
And because Emily had a process for tapping into the market with her products, explosive growth didn’t stop with that one card. Emily created a line of 40 cards she presented at the National Stationery Show and received an order from Urban Outfitters.
Each time she’s experienced that kind of explosive growth, she’s had to figure out how to make things work… even as what she knows might feel like it’s crumbling around her.
Now, her company’s mission is to identify universal emotional truths and observations on being human and turn them into products that help people feel understood.
Emily and I talk about the other side of explosive business growth. We talk about what went on behind the scenes when her very first greeting card design went viral and sold 1700 units in one week. We also discuss how things have evolved from landing a big order for Urban Outfitters at her first trade show to licensing the production of her gift line to another company.
Click here to listen on iTunes and, while you’re there, be sure to subscribe & leave us a 5-star review.
And, find Emily’s new book, There is No Good Card for This, on Amazon.