TCC Podcast #448: Finding Better Persuasive Insights with Sarah Levinger

If you want to write more persuasive copy, you need better insights from your research. But how do you get them? Sarah Levinger is my guest for the 448th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast and we talked about research insights, trend spotting, how A.I. can distort your research analysis, and how to make your copy more persuasive. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Sarah's Twitter Sarah's Community Tether Insights The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Can psychology help you capture and hold the attention of your readers… then sell more of your products to your customers? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. On last week’s episode of the podcast, we talked about buyer psychology and how to use it to sell your products and services. It’s a great interview and I recommend you don’t miss it. This week’s episode is a kind of part 2 to that interview. In addition to specific persuasion techniques, today we’re going to go deep on research and discovering insights that a good copywriter can build a sales argument. If you want to use the techniques we talked about last week, what we talk about in this interview will give you the baseline insights to make them so much more effective. My guest today is Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether, a research insights platform that helps uncover emotional, behavioral, and identity-driven insights so marketers can connect on a deeper, more human level with their customers. And she uses A.I. to augment the process. Sarah walks through the process and framework she created for finding the kinds of insights that resonates with customers. She categorizes comments and research data by emotion, which leads to a better set of avatars and marketing ideas based on emotion rather than taglines or words that get a little tired as prospects see them over and over in your ads and other marketing.  Then Sarah goes even deeper than feelings to uncover beliefs—she talks about why in this interview. I think you’re going to like what she has to share about that. Sarah also mentioned something about A.I. that I hadn’t considered before that kind of shifted the way I’m thinking about using tools like Claude and ChatGPT to analyze data. If you don’t understand this change, if you use A.I. in your research or analysis process, your copy will probably not connect as well you expect. Before we get to my interview with Sarah, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.  And now, my interview with Sarah Levinger… Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Before we hit record, I told you I've been wanting to have you on for quite a while. I've been following your stuff online. The way you talk about persuasion psychology, it just rings my bell. So I'm so glad to have you here. But before we get into all of this stuff, how did you get to where you are, where you're basically, you know, this marketing consultant to DDC companies using psychology to help, you know, increase responses, all of that kind of stuff. How did you get here? Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, that's that I don't even know that the journey that I've taken to get there has been a really interesting one, and I really do think I landed here on purpose at this particular time. So I started in marketing when I was 21, really, really young. I went to school to be an equine scientist. I wanted to be a vet for horses. I thought I wanted to be an equine scientist and go be like an equine vet. And then I found out very quickly, I don't like blood, but I don't like needles. This is not for me. So during that first, like, college year, I took a course in InDesign. Does anybody remember what InDesign was? I miss that platform so much. Oh my gosh. I really, really enjoyed designing in there. So that was, like an elective that I took, and I just got so hooked. I was like, This is so fun, like, I love the art side of this.  So I moved back home. I was up in Wyoming for a minute, and then I moved back home with my parents. Went back to college for graphic design, and I had a professor in my second semester of college who was like, you know, if you're good at this and you really enjoy doing design or marketing or art or whatever it is, you don't have to have a degree. You can just go work. And I was like, what I don't have to pay for college? Great. I don't like college anyway. So here we go. So I quit college, and then I basically just, like, freelance for the next 10 years straight. And it was interesting, because this was, like, it, I mean, this was 2010 2011 so it was right at the start of YouTube being a thing. Tutorials online were just barely beginning to like, blow up. So there wasn't really a whole lot of information on how to market or how to do things online in the digital space. So I had to go to the library of all places and just check out a bunch of books to learn how to do all this stuff. So I would go and check out books on like WordPress websites and Amazon, FBA, how to copyright, how to do all the sorts of stuff. And next to that section was this giant, like, I don't even know, old textbook section on early childhood development and neuroscience, psychology and consumer behavior, stuff that was like, nobody has touched this book in years. But it was so interesting. So I kept checking those. But that just because they were, like, fascinating to me. And then I did that for like, 10 years straight. I just devoured information on how people work.  Now, I didn't tell anybody that I had this information or I knew anything about this for decades, until I kind of accidentally fell into paid advertising right before COVID hit in 2019 I had a newborn and a two year old at home, and I was like, I'm gonna die, like I have to talk to somebody. So I got on Twitter, and I just started chatting with people in the industry who were also doing media buying at the time, and then it just kind of exploded, mostly because I think I hit it just at the right time, the right place. This is why I kind of like alluded to that earlier. Sometimes your journey leads you to just the right time, the right place. At the time, when I was on Twitter, I thought I was going to be the last one talking about it, but I ended up being one of the first to talk about how you can apply psychology to add specifically when it comes to messaging, and see amazing drastic results. And I, I guess people just kind of really grabbed onto it and just ran with it because I grew a following. You know, within a year, I had probably about five to 10,000 followers, and I was starting to, like, get good business and drag good leads. And I was like, this is fun. This is a good role for me. So fast forward to now. I've kind of created, like, the perfect job for Sarah, where I get to study humans all day long, and I get to focus primarily on marketing and messaging. So, yeah, it's been a journey.  Rob Marsh: It's a cool journey. So, and what you've built today is called Tether, and tell me how you're doing that, like I've seen the products that you offer. I've seen how you talk about some of the stuff. But in the copywriting world, the content writing world, there's a lot of research, but, and we're all talking about like, how do you do research, or whatever, but oftentimes there's a little bit of a disconnect between getting the research done and actually being able to apply it. And I think you're bridging this gap a little bit.  Sarah Levinger: I'm trying my hardest. Yes, it's really interesting, because I think everybody kind of understands what research is, why it's important. A lot of people understand how to do it. And then there's then there's many, many people out there, I think, that do it very, very well. They're adept at it. Then there's this, like, very, like you said, big gap between the people who have the information and the people who need to use it. And that, I think, has always kind of existed in business in general. We understand that we need to go after a specific customer type, or a specific person, and then there's a big gap, and then there's all the people who talk to that specific person and draw them into the business. So when I started to do paid advertising, I fell in love with it, mostly because I was able to take what I was learning on the psychology side, tactically, put it into an ad, and then see results within maybe four hours, sometimes less. Within 30 minutes, I could tell whether it worked or not. So it was much faster way of testing the messaging that I wanted to test. But that in between, Spot kind of became where, I guess, the sweet spot for Sarah kind of started to kind of morph. I guess so Tether came out of a lot of requests, honestly, from my customers and. Asking me, I would go in and I would run their media,