The Power of Storytelling and Diagnosis in Marketing

The 368th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is all about what we learned from participating in the Copy Legends Lock-in Event, The Top One Mastermind, TCC IRL in London and our own Think Tank Retreat in London. There's something in this episode for everyone, from copywriting tips to ideas for better supporting your clients and interacting with members of your team to be more effective. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Full Transcript: You’ve heard us talk about the impact that masterminds and events can have on your business. It’s why we talk about The Copywriter Think Tank so often. It’s why we organize retreats and IRL events just about every year. And we don’t just say that because we produce our own events. From the beginning of The Copywriter Club, Kira and I have both belonged to several masterminds from people like Brian Kurtz, Jeresia Hawk, and Todd Brown. And we’ve attended events around the country to add to our own business and copywriting skills. Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my co-founder, Kira Hug, who I just mentioned, talked about the four events we attended over the past two weeks—Copy Legends Lock-in, The Top One Mastermind Retreat, The Copywriter Club In Real Life in London, and our own Think Tank retreat in London. We’re sharing our biggest takeaways and what we learned from these awesome experiences. You’ll want to stick around and listen to this episode. But first, this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. It is truly the best membership for copywriters and content writers… let me just give you an idea of what you get for $87 a month… first there’s a monthly group coaching call with Kira and me where you can get answers to your questions, advice for overcoming any business or client or writing challenge you have. There are weekly copy critiques where we give you feedback on your copy or content. There are regular training sessions on different copy techniques and business practices designed to help you get better. And we’re adding a new monthly AI tool review where we share a new AI tool or a technique or prompt you can do with AI get more done. That’s on top of the massive library of training and templates. And the community is full of copywriters ready to help you with just about anything… including sharing leads from time to time. Find out more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu And with that, let’s go to our discussion for some of what we’ve learned over the past few weeks. Okay, Kira we are. It's just you and me today. But we've been up to a lot of stuff. Lots been going on the last few weeks so let's let's kick it off you know where do you where do you want to start with all the stuff that's been going on. Kira Hug: Ah I think we should just start with our health… I mean I'm seeing you on the screen and you have a heat pad on your shoulder and you're in pain and I think we should talk about this. We have been traveling a lot and I don't know how we physically do it. Travel isn’t necessarily is what triggered your pain, but I think it definitely triggered my cold. I'm a little worn out. I know you're a little worn out. What's going on with your arm and shoulder right now? Rob Marsh:  Yeah, well we were in London for an IRL event and a Think Tank Retreat but I went a few days early just to do a little bit of traveling around England with my wife and some friends that we have there. I woke up Sunday morning in massive pain. It was the most pain I've ever felt. I could barely move… it was hard to dress myself. It was it was awful and I didn't really know what was going on. I felt a little bit better the next day. Although it hurt all week long I didn't want to go to the emergency room, simply because we were on vacation. We had our friends there then we had the retreat and everything was going on with without so once I got home I went to my doctor and he has diagnosed me with a slipped disc which I guess the the medical term for it is a C5 Cervical Radiculopathy. And it's just a slipped disc and it is incredibly painful. I've got some physical therapy that I'm working on trying to fix it. Hopefully we don't need surgery.  It's a really good reminder of when people are feeling pain—how desperate they are for solutions. This is something we talk about in copywriting all the time. You want to you want to start your copy by focusing in on the pain or the problem or the thing that your prospect needs and the the more impactful and deeper felt pains that people have, you know we help them solve that.  We identify what that pain is, we empathize with the pain that they're feeling, then present solutions. You know if a doctor had come along while we were in the retreat with a unique mechanism  and said, “Hey I understand what you're going through. You know it's this diagnosis and my solution does this and you'll be fixed up and healed in you know a week or two” I would have paid any amount of money for that solution and so that's what's going on with me. I’m hoping over the next few weeks that that gets fixed and I'm back to normal. We'll see. I haven't been able to go running for a couple weeks. I'm really feeling that lack of exercise. You know I can't I can't really lift weights with this going on. So I'm just doing the exercises the physical therapist gave me and trying to make it better.  But I'm not the only one that's been suffering. You didn't slip a disc but you spent some time in bed the last couple weeks too. What’s going on with you? Kira Hug: I know. I mean it's real life. It's real life and you know I'm grateful I did not slip a disc that sounds awful. For me, it was just a cold. Rob Marsh:  This is a horrible way to start a podcast by the way. Kira Hug:  Things just caught up with me. My schedule's been very strict with like getting up really early and I think I've been okay for a while, but the travel is what did me in. I think that’s what threw me off so when we were in Orlando I was fine. You and I were running together that was our high moment. Things were great and then after we left Orlando that's when I started to fall apart and came home to Maine for one weekend and to plan a sleepover. And I just couldn't do anything. I felt awful because my husband has been taking care of the kids and I come home and I'm like, “I still can't take care of anyone. I just need to be in bed.” And then you and I went to London after that and so I never fully recovered I think it was just like bursts of energy to just show up. Especially at our events in London. Luckily I could rest enough to feel good to host those with you and enjoy them so I'm glad that I can could be there and enjoy. I had moments where I was like I don't know if I can pull this off. But luckily we did. So the lesson here is recovery is important. Rest is important. I'm never going to schedule back to back trips again. I just it doesn't make sense for me and my life right now. It seemed like a good idea at the time when we planned it. Rob Marsh:  To take nothing away from the events… all of the events were were great, but this is just a reminder of some of the the hassles that we have when we run our own businesses. You don't have the luxury of not showing up. You know whether it's for a client or whether it's for something else that's going on, you still have to make that stuff happen. And obviously there are a lot of positives to running your own business. This is definitely one of the drawbacks and occasionally business is hard. Things aren't going well and you still have to show up. Hopefully—hopefully—we showed up in a way that was meaningful for everybody who was at the event and our mastermind and the various activities that we were doing. Kira Hug:  Yeah I got to the point where I was fantasizing when I was laying in bed in London the first day. I was thinking, “Okay if I can't do this, Rob could do it… before I knew you had a slipped disc… Rob could do it with Linda and they'll be okay, it'll be okay.” But you just got to step up and do it. It's a good reminder that we're human—we’re only human—and that's definitely a struggle I have where I think I'm super woman and then I am brought to my knees and I'm reminded that I'm not super woman. That's definitely been the last few weeks where I was reminded I can't do all the things so I need to just chill out a little bit and scale back. Rob Marsh:  Rest is important. So hopefully we're both able to get enough rest while we are actually working on all of the stuff that's got to happen now because we've been gone for two weeks. There's all this stuff that we're getting ready for. Let’s talk about some of these things in depth. One of the things we've got coming up immediately is a year-end planning program that we have done successfully in The Copywriter Underground a few times that we now want to make available to everybody who listens to the podcast, or anyone who's in the free Facebook group, or anyone who is on our emailing list. Talk a little bit about, Kira. What are we thinking about with that year-end planning and why it's so important for copywriters. Kira Hug:  I've been working on the the sales page for it and I think it's important to do this planning every year. We're gonna take what we've done in the past which has been successful, but in a way kind of basic. And we're going to take that and turn it into an actual program—like more of an incubator for a couple of weeks—where we kick off with a group session where we dive deep into reflection and really thinking about what has happened this past year, then starting to think about what we're going to prioritize in the year ahead. But doing it as a group because this is hard.  It's hard to do and it's not fun to do alone. We need to do it individually,