TCC Podcast #61: Creating customer personas with Alaura Weaver

Welcome to episode 61 of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Today Kira Hug and Rob Marsh talk with freelance copywriter Alaura Weaver about how she’s grown her business, often working at night to get things done. During our discussion, we covered: •  how she went from acting to sales to copywriting •  how theater and acting has made her a better copywriter •  what she did early on to get her first clients and her advice to new copywriters •  how she saw herself as a business owner, not a freelancer •  her thoughts about seeing customers as humans, not consumers and living your message •  how copywriters can live their own message and values •  how to develop buyer personas and why you should use them •  how she gets to know the customers she is profiling •  the trap of writing for everybody and reaching nobody •  how she sells her clients on creating Avatars as part of her projects Plus we also asked Alaura about how often you should create new customer profile, what she’s doing to share how you can define your own customer personas and how she juggles family, course creation, and business and makes it all work. Want this one in your ear buds? Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Textbroker Neil Patel Joanna Wiebe The storytelling post on CH Hillary’s coaching post Xtensio Alaura’s website @wordweaverfree Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you can hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits. Then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work. That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 61 as we chat with freelance copywriter and storyteller, Alaura Weaver, about how she became a copywriter, creating customer personas, and her course about them, juggling work and family, and various other products, and making business personal. Welcome Alaura. Rob: Welcome Alaura! Alaura: Hi! Thank you! Kira: Great to have you here, so I think a great place to start is with your story. As a storyteller, can you tell us your story? Alaura: So, it’s really ironic is that my verbal, like, speaking storytelling skills are a little bit off, which is why I like writing. But, I’ll tell you how I started. I’ve actually started in the theater. I was a child actress and, that’s what I thought I was going to do my entire life. I was on the stage, I literally grew up on the stage. Kira: Wow. Alaura: And I went to the Baltimore School for the Arts for high school. I majored in theater in undergrad and got my graduate degree in acting. So, it was kind of like, that was my path; I was going to be a professional actress. I focused on the creation of original works, so I did have that writing element in there. But, life is a lot harder—laugh—than your dreams, right? You know, the reality is most actors are unemployed for the majority of their careers, and I had to find a way to pay back those student loans and pay bills and be an adult. And so I got into sales. I got into business-to-business sales. One of my first jobs was actually on inside sales for a start-up, and I liked that environment a lot, of that small team, that kind of feisty, scrappy team, building and growing that business, and it felt like a good place to be. But then I got an offer to start selling, advertising for the Yellow Book.—Laughs—If you remember...do you remember the Yellow Book? Rob: Let your fingers do the walking, absolutely. Alaura: So you can guess how, um—clears throat—old I am....but yeah, unfortunately I got into Yellow Page sales, advertising sales, just as smart phones were starting to take off. And it was also right as the economic crisis happened. So, there was like a—this, terrible, perfect storm of economic downturn for small business owners who were the majority of my clients. And then of course, on how people find information about doing business with people, Google—you know, Google was king, but actually Google, on a local level, hadn’t really taken off, until right as, like, 2008. You know, just as Facebook was happening and more people were talking about things on a local level, and so I got a lot of pushback and I had to kind of fight through and learn how to sell. And then, I fortunately got a better job as everything was falling down, and then, I got married and got pregnant, and had to kind of had to re-evaluate everything. So, I decided I wanted to stay home with my child. I was actually given the opportunity by the company that I worked with to stay home and work from home, but, that was a pilot program, they’d never offered that before, and realistically, trying to sell on the phone is...kind of impossible around children, as you probably both know. Trying to have any kind of phone conversation is impossible around children. Kira: Right? Alaura: So, I also had a really bad case of postpartum depression, and it kind of forced me to dig deep and take a look at what I really wanted from life, and, what I didn’t want from life. And what I didn’t want from life was having to be beholden to someone else’s dreams. And honestly, I wanted to make an impact and a difference in this world. After having a child, it put into perspective that I want to, in some way, help improve lives for people who need a hand up. And so, I kind of was taking a look at what I could do, and what I didn’t want to do, and at the same time I was trying to out-mom every mom that had ever “mommed”. Kira: Oh, wow. That’s hard to do! Alaura: It’s a lot of pressure, when you’re dealing with depression especially, so I was turning to, you know, those Facebook groups and the moms’ groups, and everybody’s talking, and subtly competing with one another with how great of a mom they are. And then finally somebody had this discussion of “look, I’m finding it impossible to find work that I want to do other than, you know, selling gadgets or romance...supplies?....or, kitchen gadgets” through MLM. You know, that’s like the classic stay-at-home-mom-job, right... Kira: Right! Alaura:  ...is to be the Mary Kay supplier. And, she said, that’s not what I want to do, I hate doing it. What do you do, that isn’t that, and earn money?” And, one of them mentioned “I do content writing on the side”. And so I looked into that, and I had discovered Text Broker. I got signed up at Text Broker, just to kind of take a peek, dip my toes in, and I started doing just little blog posts with 24-hour turnarounds and getting really good at it. And in fact, it was paying like two cents per word, and I wasn’t making much, but it was still a space of my own that wasn’t being a mom, that was just doing the things that I love like researching and figuring out who those readers are, and also sprinkling my own point of view when it comes to how information can be given to people without overloading them, without selling them too much. And my clients responded really positively to me, and one of them actually said, “You’re better than this place. You need to get out and do your own thing.” She says, “I hate telling you this because we’re not supposed to even contact, you know, the writers outside of this platform. But, girl, get out!” Laughs—And so, I did. I started my own website, and I started looking, you know, learning just how a lot of your listeners do, it’s just learning the ropes: listening to podcasts, looking at blogs....some of the blogs that I really attached myself to were Neil Patel’s blog and Copy Hackers, and I started learning what was really involved in content marketing and copywriting. And I started developing a even more-focused point of view when it comes to how I think business can be done in a really positive way, and I think that storytelling is at the center of that. And we can talk about that a little bit more, but, eventually, I started kind of developing that brand, that point of view, and reaching out, and creating, like, a social media presence. Nothing huge, just letting people know on Twitter, you know, this is what I’m about. And, people started coming to me. And eventually, I decided I was going to take the leap and offer to guest post for Johanna Wiebe at CopyHackers, because I had noticed that she—and most blogs had done this—they touch on storytelling, and I’m using air quotes right now, on like, oh I’ll have a middle, beginning, and end, but they didn’t really talk about the mechanics of storytelling, and how to do it, and how to apply it in a copywriting and content writing framework. So, that’s what I did, and I ended up writing this massive seven-thousand-word post for.... Kira: Oh wow. Alaura: It was like my manifesto, you know? It was like everything that I cared about, why I cared about storytelling, why it was so powerful. Just poured my heart into it, and it was a huge hit. It’s like, it still gets shared, I still get fan mail over it. You know and I think that people think I’m a little more influential than I think that I am—laughs—because of this one article that ended up kind of, just, “this is me, this is what I stand for, this is what I’m picking a fight with”. And the clients followed, you know, by putting myself out there and defining what I wanted to do in this industry and the type of clients I wanted to work with, I very rarely have to go after clients now, they come to me. Kira: Wow. Alaura: That’s why I’m here now, I’m talking to you. Rob: So much to unpack from that answer.