The Copywriter Club Podcast

What does it take to write in the health and wellness niche? I asked copywriter Kristen Driscoll about that on this 457th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. The wellness niche is booming and now is the time for good copywriters to jump in. Want to know why? Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Kristen’s LinkedIn The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Writing for the health and wellness industry takes a special set of skills. And that’s what we talking about today on The Copywriter Club Podcast. One of the questions I get asked the most as a copywriting coach is which niche pays the most. I’m on the record as a big proponent of niching… our own research which you’ll find published on our blog shows that copywriters who write in a single niche make almost two times more than copywriters without a niche. And copywriters who are focused on 2-3 niches make 30% more than writers without a niche. But not all niches are equal. Some niches pay more than others… the financial niche is one of those and we’ve published several episodes in the past talking about that niche… look for our interviews with Clayton Makepeace, Kyle Milligan, Jake Hoffberg and Ridge Abraham. Most of those episode are a few years old. Partly because of its reputation as a profitable niche, it’s hard to break into work with the high-paying financial publishers. Another niche that is generally thought of as high-paying is the health and wellness niche, especially writers who work with supplement makers, fat loss products and medtech. So what do you need to know to break into this lucrative niche? I asked Kristen Driscoll, a health copywriter, to talk a bit about how she broke in and the work that she does. It’s a roadmap for your own path to success with wellness clients if you choose to follow it. We talked about how Kristen found her first client in the niche, why she chose health as the industry she wanted to work in, and why wellness is a such a massive opportunity for writers today. I think you’ll like this discussion that Kristen and I had so stick around. Before we get to my interview with Kristen, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops  to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2. And now, my interview with Kristen Driscoll… Hey, Kristen, welcome to the podcast. I am really excited to talk to you about how you became marketing strategist and a direct response copywriter for health and wellness brands and all of the things. So tell us your story. Kristen Driscoll:  Well, thank you so much for having me on. I think, like many direct cop direct response copywriters and marketing folks… so that was my first career, and then I was a full time yoga teacher for 14 years, and still teach yoga. And also a lot of kind of some similarities there that I could draw upon with copywriting and getting started. So from moving on from copywriting or moving on from full time yoga teaching, is when I discovered copywriting and went full off the deep end and kind of immersed myself in in learning the craft, because it really is a craft, you know, some getting those principles down, I think, is key for a longevity of a career. Rob Marsh: Let’s talk a little bit about what you did in the music industry. I know you got a couple of good stories, but, yeah, what were some of the bands that you helped promote? What were some of the things that you were doing to bring people in, you know, to the audiences, to the venues for all of these bands? Kristen Driscoll:  Well, the very first, my very first job in the music industry was for an entertainment law firm, and that’s where I think I shared with you on one post. You know, there’s that question that goes around like, name one thing you’ve done that you’re sure that none of no other friends of yours has done. And one of the ones I example, I use in that a lot is that I am the witness on Deedee Ramone’s prenup. Rob Marsh: This is awesome. This is such like if, if I, if that was me, that would be like the headline on my website. I would just that would be, probably has nothing to do with anything that I do, but I just think that’s such a cool thing about you. I love that. Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, thanks. And it’s another example of you can really use a whole lot of fodder to get people’s attention, and sometimes the actual story behind it isn’t quite as glamorous as as as it can sound. But… Rob Marsh: Well, let me stop you there, because tell the because I think this is actually a really good copywriting lesson. Tell the story like because you’re right, it’s just something that kind of happened, but then the headline is amazing, right? Kristen Driscoll: So really it was nothing much more than I was in the right place at the right time, my assistant, the assistant to the lawyer, who was Dee. Dee’s lawyer, was out to lunch, and they needed somebody to pull into the conference room and be the signatory. So it really was kind of that, that simple. But then, when you know, know how to take just your, your own individual rich history, and pull out the little nuggets that are true, but will also, you know, get people’s attention and get get, uh, get the get the party started. Rob Marsh: We’ll definitely dive into this a lot more when we’re talking about writing for health and wellness brands. Wellness brands. But to me, this is like one of the things that I really love about writing supplement copy, because you’re always looking for that one detail that you can pull out and build a story around, or that one little thing about it that nobody else is talking about, that you can you know, have be the mechanism, or have be that interest thing that pulls people in, and then it’s not, you know, usually the story is much bigger than that one small detail, but you’re looking like that’s, to me, that’s one of the main skill sets of writing supplement copy. So anyway, that’s, I kind of wanted to draw a line into that. Because I just think this is a key skill, and that story illustrates as well as anything else. Kristen Driscoll: I think that’s a really great point, a really, really great example. And also, on the other end, knowing just how to tell a story that nobody else is telling, you know, you can go back to the Schlitz beer. You know, everybody was making the beer the same exact way, but just taking the time to stop and tell the story and romanticize it and use every possible thing that you have at your disposal. Rob Marsh: So while we’re still talking about music, tell me a couple of your favorite bands that I should probably add to my listening list as I’m sitting down writing copy, what were some of the bands that you really loved promoting or loved listening to? Kristen Driscoll: Sure, well, the one I’ll say, and I’ve never worked with him personally, but I get to see him often here in Austin, and more and more, he’s getting rightful attention as just one of the major lyricists. You know, people like to talk about Stephen King’s book on writing. Well, Stephen King just named James McMurtry as the number one lyricist like ever. So I think it’s like a master class in storytelling in like five minutes or less. And so many different examples you could pull from, you know, starting in the middle of the story, coming on with a lyric that just grabs you right from the beginning. There’s so many different examples of how to do it well, using picture words, you know, just one sentence that just sets this incredibly vivid scene. So I think we could go on for an hour on all the different ways that you could look at really great songwriters as master storytellers and paying attention to how they’re doing it. Rob Marsh: Yeah, there are definitely copywriters who have, you know, come from the music industry or play around in the music industry. And that’s, I think, one of the things that sometimes makes them a little bit different. They’re really good at tempo, at, like you said, picture, words, or, you know, telling a story in a very simple way. So I’m adding James McMurtry to my Spotify list. And we’re done recording here. I’m gonna, I’ll be relaxing, you know, with the Coke Zero. Kristen Driscoll: I think you can’t, you can’t go wrong. There’s just so many great examples there that you can pull from. Rob Marsh: And then, after being in the music industry for a while, you were this Bikram yoga teacher. Talk a little bit about some of the lessons from yoga that apply to copywriting, or at least to the writing that you do. Kristen Driscoll: Absolutely, I think, you know, pulling back to the bigger lens, I think there’s so many similarities. So in Bikram, we talk about the five qualities of mind that you need to practice yoga, and all of them are applicable. So you need a determination. You know from the very beginning, you need to be able to roll up your sleeves and do the work. Be disciplined, get in there and do it self control, which is another one from, again, doing the work, learning the craft, to starting to understand client negotiations and client management. You know, we’ve all been in a difficult client situation where, gosh, if you can just stop and take a deep breath and walk away and come back composed is a big one concentration. You know, there are so many templates and so many tools we have now, but if you’re going to be in the long game and you’re going to learn this craft. It’s not as easy as just slapping something into AI. You have to stick with understanding the really basics and all those just old school things that you can’t really skip over. Patience is one, you know, if you listen to patience and faith, which especially for newer copywriters coming in. You know, there are offers out there that make it sound like you’re going to be making a million dollars in a month, and it’s just doesn’t work that way. So having that patience to know it’s gonna it all good things are there for you, but it’s gonna take, likely, a little longer than you might want it to, a little longer than some people might paint a picture for, and having the faith that if you just do all of the right things and you kind of keep at it, you’re gonna find your way, and you’re gonna find your niche and find your clients. Rob Marsh: So if that is a baseline, then why the turn to copy. And how did you start, you know, with your first client, how did you decide you wanted to be a copywriter? Kristen Driscoll: I stumbled onto copywriting Christy Goldfeder, who is a successful, wonderful copywriter in this space. You probably know her. She and I were went to college together, so I was wrapping up my time as a full time Bikram teacher and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I’ve always been a writer, but I didn’t know kind of the direct response world. And I had, I had dinner with Christy, and I was like, how are you traveling the world? You know that dream of being a digital nomad, like, how are you traveling the world and working? Like, what do you do? And it’s like, I’m a direct response copywriter, you know, I leaned in, you know, tell me, tell me more. And really, just immediately dove off the deep end, bought my first Awai course, and just finally found something that was a perfect blend of my natural creative writing ability, my marketing background and where I could apply my love for health and wellness, um and I was also off to the races. Rob Marsh: So with that learning then, and I’ve seen a lot of aw eyes resources and the things that they do, how did you find your first client? Kristen Driscoll: My very first client, I believe I founded an AWAI conference. Okay, yeah, so I kind of went all in on that conference. Really put my last bit of financial resources into getting myself there and got my first client so that all that all worked out. Rob Marsh: And what did that interaction look like? Because, you know. I imagine there are a lot of people who are thinking, Okay, well, I’ll go to this event where maybe I’m the only copywriter, and I’m talking to potential clients. But it’s one thing to be there, and it’s a whole other thing to strike up a conversation where people are thinking, hey, this person can help me solve this problem that I have. Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, absolutely. And for being a newbie, I think realistically, like you’re not gonna go in with different copy chops that are, you know, you’re not gonna go in with that level of being able to compete on on that. So I think having the underlying interest, it was for health and wellness brands. So I think my natural passion for true health and wellness and coming up with those solutions shown through, shined through. And I think it’s a personality match too, like, don’t be afraid to go out there and show up as yourself and, you know, make those one on one connections, because that, I think, ultimately, is going to be what gets you in the door. And then you just got to roll up your sleeves and be willing to do the work and rinse and repeat, you know. Rob Marsh: So why did you choose health and wellness as your niche? Kristen Driscoll: Because of my yoga background, really is where that that came came through in I’m going back to it now too, in a way that I’ve been coaching a lot of clients recently through some offer changes and maybe some business changes, kind of bigger picture, and over and over again, what it’s coming down for me and for clients. And this goes back to just why health and wellness in general is you have to have that duck in a row before anything else can be built. And so one thing I’m I’m my point with that being like, right now, I’m seeing a lot from copywriters with AI and kind of people pivoting that way, and some business coaching that I’m doing where people are trying to pivot. It comes if you can come back to being your best, healthiest version of you. Like, this is some messaging that is oddly coming into the My ether, and I think is worth talking about here. Now I just was at the Destiny event and in Austin, and Joe Polish was talking about it too, like and any time of transition, at any time of starting something, you can show up in your best possible health and wellness. You know you can get your sleep, you can have good nutrition. You can prioritize managing your nervous system and until those big building blocks are in place, nothing else is really gonna ultimately fall in place easily or for very long. So I think that personal interest and commitment to health and wellness really drove it for me. If that makes sense? Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes sense. It feels to me like health and wellness is a growing industry. It’s one of those places where there are more and more opportunities rather than fewer. And I know there, there are some things going on in all of the markets with AI and and stuff like that. But because of the way that populations are aging, and the baby boomers are kind of in that 60 to 80 year old phase where nutritional supplements matter, where, you know, if you haven’t been taking care of your health, you’ve got to start doing something significant right now. And then millennials, you know, two generations back, are sort of moving into their 40s, where, you know, awareness of this kind of stuff matters as much as ever, and people are really trying to take care of themselves. So as far as, like, a niche to consider writing in, it feels like there’s a ton of opportunity here. Talk a little bit about that. Kristen Driscoll: There’s a ton of opportunity. And not just, I mean, you mentioned, like the supplements, but that is really only one possibility. You know, you could write for yoga studios. You could write for sleep brands. You could it. There’s so many. There’s your mental health. You know, you could start getting into tools for more mental well being. It’s like a limitless… Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, off the top of my head, I can think of like. Medical devices and doctors, even even things like, I mean, this isn’t really wellness necessarily, but even like hospice services and elder care, like, they’re just so many of these industries that are critical for people who need them, and that population right now is growing. Kristen Driscoll: Absolutely, that’s actually the talking about hospice is an area, more and more I’m starting to see really interesting things happening with deaf death doulas and coaches who are not just, you know, wellness coaches, but are death coaches Helping people transition and their families. So there really are so many possibilities and so many brands that need help. Rob Marsh: So when it comes to writing for these kinds of brands, is it just like everybody else, you know, if I’m a SaaS copywriter, can I, can I turn around and just, you know, identify a benefit, or what are some of the differences when we want to be thinking about wellness, as opposed to, say, software or coaching, or, you know, any of the other big industries that copywriters tend to gravitate to? Kristen Driscoll: I think it always goes back to the basics of the problem that you’re solving and the person that you’re solving it for, and especially with with health and wellness, there’s another there’s added layers like so there’s a compliance layer, you know, you’re going to have to have more knowledge about what you legally can and can’t say for compliance. But ultimately, it really comes back to making sure you are understanding how to how to install, instill that, that hope, as well as point out the things that they’re struggling with. And I think sometimes you see a lot of really heavy hit hitting, like fear based copy, and that’s, I think, a misstep a lot of kind of newer copywriters can do is just fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, without immediately offering that hopeful solution. Because, you know, we do need to find a path forward. So I think that’s a really crucial part, is showing people the possibilities of how their lives can be less, you know, more enjoyable, more freedom, longevity. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I like that, because it does seem natural to gravitate towards the fear. You know, you you’re in your you’re a male in your 50s, you’re going to have a heart attack, you know, by the time you’re, you know, this age, or if you’ve, if you’ve had pizza and burgers, you know, once or twice a week for the last 40 years, your arteries are clogged. And it’s not only your heart health now, it’s also your brain health and and risk for things like Alzheimer’s and dementia. Obviously, there are all kinds of, you know, immuno diseases and and conditions that people struggle with throughout their life. So it’s really easy to gravitate to like, oh, here are all the horrible things. So what’s your trick for turning it to hope and you know, the positive potential futures? Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, you have to. Because the thing is, if you don’t, if you just come on too heavy handed with the fear you’re just gonna shut people down. Nobody wants to, like shy shy away from that. Again, it goes back to just really doing the deep research on your product, on the unique mechanism of your solution, and finding that truthful nugget of how it’s going to to be a positive change. You know, there’s a lot of smaller little things like you can look at speed of results and make sure that you’re highlighting that these changes can happen. And as little as you know, however fast your product can work. So just you gotta really understand what is your prospect is worried about. That’s another thing I see come up a lot is like the faux benefits, you know, like, get off the roller coast, the blood pressure roller coaster. You know, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night being like, oh my god, I really wish I could just get off the blood pressure roller coaster. Rob Marsh: I mean, they think, but, but that that’s a real problem. But they think about like, oh, wow, I’m taking too many pills, or my blood pressure still. High or I’m not living the life that I want to live, right? Kristen Driscoll: Yep, I think the answer really is as simple as you have to keep peeling a bat back, like you may have, you may think you peeled enough layers of the onion, but you’ve got to go like 12 more layers deep. I was just working on a coaching project last week, and we were sitting down, and this woman had a real breakthrough, and we were talking about it in the session the wrap up session afterwards, and they’re like, oh, so she finally got it after like five whys. I was like, No, we skipped five. Whys. It took us like 17. Wise, you know, so if you stop at the like, Okay, I got this exercise that I was taught to do, and I did it. I asked five times, okay, well, maybe in some cases you might have to ask 27 times. You have to just kind of be ruthless in your peeling back what is really underneath it all. Rob Marsh: And exercises like those, sometimes are really difficult to conduct with a client, because ultimately, you know, there are only so many needs that we have. You know, people want to have more money, they want to have more time, they want to have more companionship or sex, or however you want to, you know, characterize that. You know, maybe there’s, there’s some form of self actualization, you know, that, that all this stuff goes to but those kinds of things also are not that appealing, you know, you can’t, you can’t promote, you know, this vitamin supplement saying, well, you’re just going to have better health, right? Like you have to go so deep, and so it’s, I mean, I like how you say, you know you’re peeling back the each layer. But it almost takes an expert to realize that what we’re dealing with at that level five or maybe level even still, level seven or eight is still so general that it doesn’t really address the pain points or the triggers that people are experiencing in their lives. Kristen Driscoll: What I most more often find is when you start peeling back, it’s that people are resistant to say out loud something that they want but maybe shouldn’t want. Interesting, like, are ashamed to want? Rob Marsh: Can you give an example of what sounds shallow? Kristen Driscoll: So I’ll use the example from last week. And this woman, she’s a health and wellness coach, but it was, we were talking about her own marketing, and there was some resistance in her. She was a perfectionist, and there was resistance in her getting this offer out. So I was like, Well, what are you really afraid of? And it took like going she was afraid to kind of admit that. She was afraid of what people were going to think of her once the offer was out there, you know, and it’s something that is so basic and so simple, but it was creating this huge friction that was preventing her from getting the thing done. So, you know, sometimes we’re searching for this magic new answer, and there might not be. It might just be kind of cracking that resistance in the client or, you know, to get to that that point. So that’s an example more of how to interview your clients, and you know, then you have to do the work and how that’s going to all translate to whatever your headline and end lead is for the product. But like we said before, even in these stories, that might seem like nothing. But then you get down to Oh yeah, and I was DDS witness on the prenup, you know, like these things that aren’t that your client or your product might be taking for granted. Yep, you know, you got to kind of keep hammering at, yeah. Rob Marsh: I mean, the way, you know, when I’ve written for supplements, you know, it’s always interesting, because the supplements, the bottle says, you know, ingredients include, you know, vitamin C or potassium or whatever. But as you dig deeper and look at like, okay, where does the supply come from? Or, where does that particular ingredient come from? Yeah, it just happens that this one comes from some rare berry that only grows in, you know, certain fields in the Himalayas or whatever, and, you know, is harvested once, you know, a two week period, once every winter like there, there’s almost always something like that that you’re then. Now I’ve got a really interesting story about, you know, the harvest. Just in the Himalayas, not even related to the fact that maybe it addresses my knee pain, but it’s something that I can get attention with up front before we start talking about all of the things that this thing does. Right? That’s, I think that’s what i and this might be a little bit more difficult, you know, finding something that different about, say, a health coach or, you know, a therapist. But there are stories like that too in their lives. You know, the therapist who, you know, studied at a particular university where, you know, maybe there’s this experimental thing going on or, you know, like, and that’s the kind of digging that most research courses don’t teach. You know, most copywriting courses don’t even talk about they do talk about finding the big idea, but they don’t always talk about how to go so deep that you can actually get the idea. And so when I hear supplement writers, health writers, who talk about, oh yeah, I did research for three weeks. And I think copywriters go three weeks like, What in the world are you looking at for three weeks? Well, this is what they’re doing. They’re looking for that. Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, and it can also be the difference in the brand or the owner, instead of like, if you can’t find something, maybe the formula isn’t so different. But there really is so much truth to the fact that 12 different people could be selling the same exact thing, and it’s going to appeal to 12 different people based on the spokesperson, based on the person creating the product. It really, there really is that room for nuance in attracting our best people. Yeah. So it’s not about creating, you know, again, going back to just timeless marketing principles, it’s not about creating this desire. It’s about fi, you know, unveiling what’s already there and just making sure it aligns with the same the right people. Rob Marsh: So when you stumble on an idea like that, how do you know it’s the one? How do you know, like, Oh, this is something I can build a promotion around, or I can write a sales page around, or a series of emails, or whatever. Kristen Driscoll: The thing is, yeah, it’s usually just kind of a gut hit, you know, like something just sticks at you. You’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. I personally like to print things and use a highlighter and, like, have my hands in different color on things. I think one of the biggest ways I made my life easier is, you know, when you first start a project is just absorb all the information and then set it, set it aside. I don’t know if I’m sure I’m not alone like this, but sometimes you start a project and there’s, like, this initial like, maybe a little procrastination, maybe you don’t crack into it a couple days later than you plan to, but if I can just put all of that aside and like, just get a raw read first and then let it sit. It’s amazing. What will percolate, you know? So there’s that first pass of things that pop out at you, and then doing that early, early, early, like the day you get that or whatever, just don’t let yourself sit on it and then kind of put it on the back burner for a little bit, revisit it. That’s my my process. It just immediately what strikes and very rarely is what struck me first. Not had that same hit. When I go back to it a couple of days, Rob Marsh: It seems like also there can be this opposite problem, where, when you’re so deep in a niche, you sort of know it all. And I know that’s not always true, but, but so a new copy project will come to you, and it’s this familiar problem that you’ve written about maybe a couple of times before. And you think, Well, I know how to deal with this. I’ll just write x right? Like, it’s that approach that I’ve used before. And I think it can be really difficult to take a step back from that and say, Okay, wait a second. I actually need to go deeper here, Kristen Driscoll: 100% and another, like, word of warning that I had to learn the hard way, is sometimes you become so ingrained in those immediate benefits, like, it’s second nature to you. Like, I’ve written for a long term client, like for a blood pressure supply, like product where I caught myself like, oh my god, you didn’t even mention the benefits of the blood pressure because I was so used to saying it over and over again. So I think that’s a word to the whys of something we have to remember, like, just because it’s so ingrained in us, the reason. Readers hearing it for the first time. It’s kind of an opposite point of what you were just asking. Rob Marsh: But in some ways it’s the same, because it’s that curse of knowledge, right? I see this all the time in things that I write, and then I see what other people are writing the same kind of a product, and I think to myself, Man, that is so the way they’re talking about it is so basic, you know, I’m so beyond that, but then it’s selling. And clearly I am not the market, right? And we are not our markets. And so, yeah, that, I think that becomes a really hard thing to get over as a writer, especially maybe in the health dish. Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, that’s another thing where I can tie that to yoga and like that, that beginner’s mind. It’s a real it can be a real gift to approach every new project with that beginner’s mind like kind of pretend you don’t know what you don’t what you know. Come at it with a fresh, fresh eyes. Rob Marsh: As you’ve built your business, Kristen, what are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve dealt with? I mean, obviously there are challenges with writing the copy, but also business challenges finding clients, you know, all that kind of stuff. Where have you struggled and really had to work hard to figure things out? Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, I feel like I’ve probably had all, all the problems that anybody can. You know, you have different levels of problems as as you grow. You know, so first is just getting any, any client. Is that that that first hurdle, and what I still sometimes struggle with is I’m horrible at prospecting. I’m like the cobbler has no shoes. I don’t do my own marketing very often or very I’ve, I luckily have gotten to a point where most of my work is word of mouth and referrals and clients. But, but still, you know, like, I’ll, I’ll be, I’ll get so wrapped up in doing my work, I’ll forget to build my business. And that’s something that I still this long in the game. Have ebbs and flows of because, again, I’ve kind of, for the most part, gotten my lead generation under control. So it’s not a problem until all of a sudden it’s like, oh, wait, this project’s wrapping up. I guess I should reach out to some old clients. At first, there’s just getting your copy chops up enough to be able to to know what you’re looking at and to give good advice. Then, then there comes a level of understanding that there’s only so much you can guide somebody towards, you know, like you can. I work with some clients today. I love working with them. They’ve got, you know, million million dollar brands, and still, sometimes you’ll give a strong recommendation of something, and they’ll do the opposite. And, you know, I’ve had some copywriters and marketers be like, well, you have to fire any client that’s like that. And if they’re not gonna, if they’re gonna change a word of your copy, you shouldn’t work with them. And there’s some you know, like, if you’re doing all for, you know, heavy royalties, or things like that, there’s absolutely a time, you know, to choose your battles. But if you are going to be a person who comes in and collaborates with other brands, it’s not your company. Like, if you’re going to continue to work with those clients, there is going to have to be a a certain amount of being willing to surrender. Like, I know that that subject line is awful for 27 different reasons, but he loves it. He’s gonna run with it. Like Choose, choose your battles a little bit. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing. There are times, obviously, if you’ve got red flags and your clients not respecting you, of course, yeah, fire the client. But the client ultimately owns the product. They own the business, right? And so while you do your best, you have to respect that they know what they’re doing. Kristen Driscoll: And respect that it’s their choice and that, you know? Rob Marsh: It’s their company at the end of the day, exactly, okay, Kristen, if you had to start over, you have none of your experience, but you know, you want to be a supplement copywriter. I mean, maybe you’ve got the music industry, the yoga stuff, but you’re ready to launch your business as a supplement copywriter. Do you wanna do it as fast as possible? You wanna have success as quickly as possible. What would you do starting today to make sure that you were a success three or six months from now? Kristen Driscoll: I would be careful of who I’m writing for. Would be, be one, especially with supplements. There’s some really, really great quality products out there, and there’s some snake oil out there. I firmly believe that the better you position yourself and the like the company you keep you know, like I try to write for brands that I personally am behind, I think that at the end of the day is going to be a huge help. So work with a quality supplement that will actually give you some something to work with, you know, an interesting brand that’s got a story, or just something that you can kind of get get behind our own personal passion really shines through with products. So if you know it’s just a big pile of poop and you’re trying to put lipstick on a pig, I think you’ve got an uphill battle. If you find a product that you’re really excited to get the word out about, you’ve already got that wind underneath your wings, and working with a quality thing is going to give you more quality ideas that you can can work from. Rob Marsh: Is there a trick for identifying the snake oils from the quality products? You know, for somebody who isn’t in the industry, you know, one product may look very much like another? Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, I do your research. We’re copywriters. We should be able to research right? So I think if it’s a brand that’s been around for a little while, you understand the person’s story, you know you can dig into whether it’s a real unique mechanism, or whether it’s just, you can kind of tell the ClickBank really, I don’t want to say everything on Clickbank is one of these offers, but you can tell, like the really far fetched promises. Rob Marsh: I know a lot of this comes with experience as you know, as you work with a client, you realize, Wow, I don’t ever want to, you know, do that again or have that experience, but being able to, you know, research, look up, you know, if anybody’s been reported to, you know, the better business bureau, or their complaints or bad reviews, those kinds of things. But often we’re so excited to get work, you know, if it’s the first project or, you know, whatever, sometimes we skip that step… Kristen Driscoll: And honestly, I think that’s appropriate if you’re just starting out. If you’re just starting out, I would say, don’t be so precious. Keep your morals like don’t work with anything sleazy that you can’t feel okay about working with but all your clients aren’t going to be winners. I mean, they’re just not. You do it’s more important to get your reps in than to get this, you know, pristine, wonderful, Perfect Fit client. There’s very few Perfect Fit clients. So, you know, do what you got to do to stay in your own integrity. But do expect like you’re going to kiss some frogs and you’re just part of the process of doing it. Yeah, and I know that going in. Rob Marsh: Do you use AI tools at all in your in your processes? Kristen Driscoll: I do. I use it to research. I use it to, like, compile reviews that I think, like that, stuff like that, I find it’s really helpful to scan reviews and pull up certain themes. But one thing I you do have to be careful about, it’s becoming so easy just to dump like reviews into the machine, like, keep reading it. Keep actually reading the information you’re you know, don’t use it as a tool, but I wouldn’t hand everything over blindly and take yourself out of the process. I think that’s a little bit of a slippery slope that I think we could get on. Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s actually really interesting, because I do think a lot of copywriters are turning over big chunks of the research process to AI, especially the analysis itself, and while it certainly can help you identify trends and things across large data sets, I just saw, in fact, I think it was this morning, a study about the impact of AI tools on. Of reading and learning, and when we outsource that, we actually don’t, we don’t absorb any of that information. So, you know, if you’re trying to be an expert in wellness, you I suppose you could be an expert in wellness, AI, but that’s a very different thing than, you know, being an expert in the the niche itself. Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, yeah. So that’s my caution, is to don’t get don’t let your own skills get rusty, like read the stuff yourself, and also have ai do it. I think that’s really the sweet spot. Going through the exercises manually, doing your own work, getting that to sink into your skull and also see what AI comes up with that you might have missed. Rob Marsh: Yeah, what are you most excited about moving forward, either with your business, with the wellness industry, something that you’re working on or building? Kristen Driscoll: I’ve been kind of business coaching, a little bit more than just straight up, copy writing, and that’s exciting to me, because I like looking at the bigger, how it all kind of fits in together. Yeah, and helping people get back to really what made them excited about their brands in the first place, so that, so that I’m excited about, um, yeah, I’m excited. I’ve also been really working on, you know what I was saying earlier, like we can be the best in this time of so much change and so much rapidly shifting between AI, between, like, World Politics, like, it just seems like there’s like a lot right now going back to that health and wellness of keeping yourself as well slow, You know, well rested, well exercised, a lot of nutrition, using everything I know from health and wellness and working in health and wellness to stay really grounded. As you know, we’re kind of riding this wave right now. Rob Marsh: Yeah, that feels like great advice for everybody, whether you’re in the wellness industry or not. Kristen Driscoll: I think we could all be reminded to keep ourselves level. Rob Marsh: Exactly. Kristen, if somebody wants to connect with you, you know, follow you find out more about what you do. Where should they go? Kristen Driscoll: Probably, LinkedIn is probably the best place. Or you can email me at describe Inc is my email address. You feel free to shoot me an email or catch me on LinkedIn is probably the two best spots. Rob Marsh: Amazing. Well, this has been fun conversation. I love writing in you know? I mean, I’m particular just like supplements and that kind of stuff. But this industry is, just like I said earlier, there’s a ton of opportunity here. It’s super fun because there’s just so many good stories, whether it’s the founder or brand story, whether it’s ingredient stories, whether it’s customer success stories. It’s just there’s so much good happening in that industry. So yeah, maybe somebody will connect with you, but hopefully we’ll have a bunch of other health and wellness writers that are turned on by this episode. Kristen Driscoll: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today. Rob Marsh: Thanks to Kristen Driscoll for sharing her thoughts about writing in the health and wellness niche. I’ve linked to Kristen’s linkedin in the show notes in case you want to connect with her. Early on we mentioned that changing demographics, the aging of the world’s population, and growing awareness of wellness trends is creating all kinds of new opportunities in the health and wellness industry. It’s a niche that is growing in spite of the up and down economy and will continue to grow for the next decade or two. There are plenty of clients who need copywriters and more entering the industry all the time. I want to mention again that if you want your copy reviewed by someone who can give you expert advice on how to make it better, jump into The Copywriter Underground now and let me see your latest project. You can learn more about the Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Brian McCarthy, a former copywriter turned mindset coach, shares insights on overcoming mental blocks that hinder success. He dives into the pervasive issues of burnout and imposter syndrome, offering strategies to build confidence and consistency. The conversation emphasizes the need to align passion with purpose, encouraging listeners to redefine success. Brian advocates for embracing variety in writing to revitalize creativity and suggests practical approaches to tackle less enjoyable tasks, ultimately fostering a healthier mindset for thriving in the industry.

Divya Agrawal, a seasoned SaaS and Tech copywriter, shares her expert insights on using LinkedIn to attract clients. She discusses the evolution of content strategies, stressing the importance of tailored posts and personal storytelling. Divya emphasizes the significance of understanding buyer personas and competitive positioning to enhance B2B content. She also offers tips for building confidence on LinkedIn, from engaging with others to managing posting frequency, ensuring you stand out in a crowded market.

Join John Bejakovic, a savvy copywriter and author known for his insights on marketing and persuasion, as he unpacks the Ten Commandments of influence. He shares his two-year journey writing his book, revealing the importance of ethical communication. Discover how addressing product flaws can build trust, and learn the art of guiding thoughts through effective questioning. John emphasizes storytelling's role in persuasion and dives into the ethical dilemmas marketers face, providing invaluable lessons for anyone looking to enhance their influence.

Discover 21 creative strategies to connect with clients in the world of copywriting. Learn essential do's and don'ts for client outreach, and why securing initial clients matters more than getting lost in setup tasks. Explore the potential of unpaid projects to generate valuable referrals while understanding the balance of worth. Plus, check out useful resources like the Client Finding Ignition Kit and engaging platforms to enhance your client acquisition journey.

Topaz Hooper, a copywriter and founder of American Copywriter Co, shares her insights on navigating economic downturns. She emphasizes the importance of resilience and adaptability in freelance work. Topics include practical strategies for expense management, fostering client relationships, and diversifying income streams. Topaz also discusses the value of networking and maintaining a positive mindset during challenging times. Her experiences underscore the need for copywriters to evolve and innovate to thrive in a fluctuating market.

Andrea Sager, an attorney and founder of The Legalpreneur, offers invaluable legal insights for small businesses. She shares her journey from big law to helping entrepreneurs establish a solid legal foundation. Topics include the necessity of forming an LLC to protect personal assets and the significance of well-structured contracts to avoid pitfalls. Andrea also discusses navigating the legal complexities of AI-generated content and the importance of trademarks in safeguarding intellectual property. Tune in for essential advice that every copywriter and business owner should know!

Matt Barker, a Copywriter turned LinkedIn Audience Building Strategist, has over 170,000 followers on LinkedIn. In this insightful chat, he shares strategies for engaging potential clients through tailored content and profile optimization. Matt highlights the common pitfalls in audience growth and shares techniques to overcome self-promotion anxiety, especially for introverts. He emphasizes authentic connections over engagement pods and the importance of understanding your audience's emotions to effectively convert followers into clients.

I covered a lot of ideas in this episode with copywriter Grace Baldwin. We talked about product marketing, building an agency, conducting research (including one research technique you’ve never heard before) and the importance of community in growing your copywriting business. This is a good one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Grace’s Newsletter The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Hidden inside this podcast are a couple of ideas that will take your research game to another level… and I promise at least one of these you’ve never heard before.  This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. I’ve interviewed close to 350 different copywriters and close to another hundred or so other experts on this podcast over the past eight years. And you would think that by now, I’ve heard just about everything there is to learn or know about copywriting, research, persuasion, finding clients and the many other topics we talk about every week. Often the topics we cover are good reminders of things I already know but maybe don’t apply to my business the way I should. Other times I hear ideas that I have implemented and what we talk about is a confirmation that what I’m doing in my business is helpful to my clients. And yet, I am constantly surprised by new ideas, new ways to do old things, and new insights that guests share that have never occurred to me before. That happened as I was recording this episode. My guest today is my friend Grace Baldwin. Grace is a copywriter with a background in strategy and product development. She’s in the process of building her own design agency. Grace has constantly leveled up as she’s built her business, working with bigger clients, taking on bigger projects and helping to create more impact for the brands she works on. While we were talking, she shared one way she does brand voice research—something I have never heard other copywriters doing and something that has never occurred to me before… and yet it’s the kind of idea that may help you as you conduct research for your clients, especially if they are in early stages and don’t yet have a lot of customers to intervew or survey.  After hearing that, I shared my favorite research technique for getting a founder to share the features, benefits and other details about a product in a way that helps me capture these for my sales copy. If you want to hear either or both of these ideas, you’re going to have to listen to the rest of the podcast. Before we do that though, since one of the topics we touch on in this podcast is research, I want to share with you all of my research secrets… the 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. I’ve shared them all… more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, plus all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself.  You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery … research mastery is all one word. Check out thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery. I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery And now, my interview with Grace Baldwin. Hey, Grace,  Grace Baldwin: Hi Rob.  Rob Marsh: I am so excited to have you here, so let’s let’s start with your stories. You were in the think tank. We hung out so much together a few years ago, but it’s been a little while. So catch me up and catch up our listeners. How did you get to be marketing consultant, copywriter for B to B, Tech brands, branding specialists, like all these things that you’re doing, and now you’re building an agency. Grace Baldwin: Yeah. So okay, the story starts kind of while I was still in school, so I kind of became a copywriter on accident, like everybody or like, I think most of the people that are on the show, right, never really imagined that this is kind of what life would look like. But when I was in high school, I would always really had fun writing like flyers, and, you know, I threw parties in my basement, and I loved writing the invitations. And then around my senior year of college, I kind of realized, Okay, wait, people will pay me to do this, which was amazing.  And then after school, I moved to Amsterdam and fell into the world of B to B technology. I started working in ed tech. Then I went to e-commerce tech, and then finally ended up in, like, in a space tech company, which was really interesting. And that’s kind of when I came into Think Tank. I was working at a space tech company. I knew I always wanted to be freelance, and so I was really building the foundations through the Think Tank while I was still there, and then, since 2022 I’ve been out on my own, and now I’m building a branding agency. Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about that. Because, yeah, building an agency. I mean, on the one hand, it’s pretty easy to say, Oh yeah, I’m building an agency. On the other hand, there is so much work that goes into it. So yeah. Tell us about that. Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I tried starting to build an agency last year, and I kind of burned myself out on it because I didn’t have any of the processes or anything in place. And to be fair, it’s still a fairly new thing this time around, but this time, I have a co-founder who has some experience with building agencies and managing people, and so that’s making a big difference. And we’re working with, we’re going to be working with a coach to help us avoid some of the big mistakes that I think I started to make last year when I was trying to do it by myself. Yeah, Rob Marsh: That makes a ton of sense. So who are you trying to serve? And like, What is the vision for the agency? What does that look like?  Grace Baldwin: Yeah. So the vision for the agency right now is to be really working with innovative technology companies. So and when I say innovative, I mean kind of like deep innovation. So my background is in space tech and in the energy industry as well. And we want to be working with companies that are supporting we’re calling it planet tech, right? So within agriculture, within space, within Climate Technology, just people that are making really interesting solutions that are kind of what I like about beauty is like, it’s kind of the back doors of the world, and I want to help them tell their stories.  Rob Marsh: I love that, and I love the idea of planet tech, that’s just a really unique way to talk about it. Grace Baldwin: Yeah, we’re kind of kicking around different names and everything right now, but that’s kind of what we keep coming back to. Rob Marsh: Okay, I want to come back to this, but I want to kind of jump back to as you were getting started as a writer. Obviously, you had some in house experiences, but your goal was always to be freelance, and you were freelancing on the side. Tell us just how you launched that side of your business. You know, how you got started, how you found your first clients… Grace Baldwin: So the first clients, so I discovered the copywriter club, actually, when I was still in school, and I joined the free Facebook group then and listen, I binged every episode of this podcast. And maybe, maybe it wasn’t when I was still in school, but was within the first year. And I’ve kind of found my first clients through these Facebook groups, and maybe not necessarily the copywriter club one, but through another writing Facebook group. And that’s kind of how it all got started.  And then for two and a half, three years I was I ended up working in house, but I always had this. I was very tapped into the copywriting club community in the backs, in the back of things, and continued trying to build up a brand while I was doing it, which then helped when I got laid off, for sure.  Rob Marsh: And as far as like reaching out to clients, were you pitching clients individually? Were you posting content and clients were finding you like, how did that all work? Grace Baldwin: In the beginning, it was pitching and just connecting with people on, yeah, in these Facebook groups and just saying, hey, you know, I’m looking for work, anything I can help out with. And then eventually, eventually, when I got more serious about my business, I started posting content on, posting content on LinkedIn, and people were coming to me,  Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of your content on LinkedIn. You seem to be pretty, pretty good at the whole LinkedIn game. I mean, spill your secrets on that as well. Grace Baldwin: I don’t really have any secrets. So whenever I have talked to Chris Collins about this too, but I say that the one of the best things about my business, and one of the worst things is that whenever I have an idea, I can put it on the internet, and that’s kind of how I write content. Rob Marsh: So you’re just like, oh, it’s Tuesday morning. You’re not thinking, I’ve got to get a post up. It’s just whenever an idea occurs to you, you share it,  Grace Baldwin: Yeah, or whenever I see something that one of my clients is struggling with, and if I am able to see kind of a connective thread between what client is struggling with and what client B is struggling with. I’ll post about my thoughts on it, not obviously naming my clients names, but just talking about the larger problem that I’m noticing or the different trends that I’m seeing across whatever is happening the different conversations that I’m having.  Rob Marsh: I like that approach because it immediately suggests that you’re the expert working on big problems. And I think when readers see it, they’re like, oh, wait, I have that problem. As opposed to so much of the other content that’s on LinkedIn, it’s like, you know, well, I mean, all the listicle type stuff that’s just, it has been out there and is over, but even a lot of the shared templates that we have for hooks and that kind of stuff. Just, I don’t know, so much of LinkedIn just feels templatized and un-useful. Grace Baldwin: Yeah, and I think that that’s a trend I’m seeing, you know, online in general, in LinkedIn specifically, is that people want to hear your stories and your experience. It’s very easy to for anybody to, especially with chat GPT or with AI to, you know, create a post that’s like three messaging tips, but I think people want to hear more about what you did and what the lessons that you learned and how you applied them moving forward, and that’s kind of what I’ve embodied.  Rob Marsh: And do you take the same approach then, like as you’re thinking about your clients with your agency or for freelance. Are you ever helping them talk about that stuff too? Or are you 100% in on branding? Grace Baldwin: We’re kind of 100% in on branding right now, but that might, you know, might evolve. But as part of the branding, what we’re trying to do is give people, give these companies a perspective on the world, or, like, a point of view on the world. That’s a big pillar of what we do, and then they can use that as a filter for whenever they’re creating content. Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about that process, because that’s really interesting to me. I mean, again, so many of us work with our clients. We touch their brand. Sometimes we even help them develop their brand, voice or, you know, give them input on their the visuals that they’re working on. But I mean, it’s a, it’s a really involved process to get this right. So will you walk us through the process that you go through, and so we can see, kind of, like, how that all comes together?  Grace Baldwin: Yeah, definitely. So it kind of, it’s a it’s evolving now that I’m working with a design partner, but historically, what I have done in, like I when I was working in house, I discovered the world of Product Marketing, and I realized, okay, a lot of the foundations of conversion copywriting overlap with product marketing and, um, so, and that means really starting with, you know, the positioning of the business and understanding where they sit, where this business sits in the product sits in the eyes of the consumer, right? And what is unique about the product, and what is the story about the product that we can tell, rather than the story that we want or that we you know, the client wants to tell. Because sometimes what the product does and what the client wants to tell the world are two different things. And you know, if you want to sell the product, you have to find them the angle that works for that product. So that’s what we start with, that positioning, and from that a message usually kind of develops, and we also create the next step is like personality and perspective. So we try and create a brand archetype and point of view through which they can filter all of their business making decisions through, and then only after all of the positioning messaging, and then kind of messaging concept is done. Do we move into the brand? And that’s where we take the message, take these two couple different messaging ideas, and combine them with the brand so it’s a unified concept. Because what I’ve learned is that it’s very easy for companies to do positioning, do messaging, and they’re these kind of islands, and then brand comes in afterwards and tries to retrofit onto the strategy. But what we’re trying to do is align strategy, or bring brand into the strategy side of things. Rob Marsh: Okay, I want to go deeper on this, if we can.  Grace Baldwin: Yes, I’m rambling a little bit, but yeah,  Rob Marsh: It’s not even rambling. It totally makes sense. But I think we’re covering a lot of really deep ground, really fast? Yes, yes. Can we? So it sounds like we can kind of break down the process into three major steps. One is front end research. And then there’s some some strategy around identifying the archetype and what that strategy looks like moving forward. And then there’s branding beyond that. Is that? Is that correct? Grace Baldwin: Yeah, so that’s a much better way of saying what I was trying to say. But what we call it the brand stack, and we have the three it is exactly three parts. It’s first is like positioning strategy, then it’s personality, and then it’s presentation. So the actual, you know, visuals and how it actually looks out in the world. Rob Marsh: Awesome. I like that. So let’s talk a little bit about your research process then, because this is obviously where all of those ideas come from. What are you doing that helps you surface the unique things to help you identify things like voice archetype, the different things that become part of that brand?  Grace Baldwin: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So a lot of my clients, if I can talk to customers, that’s amazing, or if I can listen in on recordings with customers, recordings with customers, that’s amazing. But I have found with my clients, it’s sometimes more useful to try and find I’m a big fan of using podcasts for voice of customer research, and when I say podcasts, I mean like peer to peer podcasts for their target audience. And I like this because often I find that if you’re interviewing a customer, they’re gonna their natural tendency is to try and be helpful, and that is skewed, or that they’ll provide a skewed perspective. But when you listen to a podcast that says that’s all about you know how to be the best Customer Success Manager of the Year. You find out what their deeper values are and what they really are focused on in their work. And so that’s kind of where I start in terms of desk research. Rob Marsh: That’s a really good idea. I hadn’t actually ever thought of that before, but I mean, that feels like a game changer in some ways. Grace Baldwin: So that really emerged a couple of years ago. I was working with a client on a landing page, and I was doing research, and I didn’t have access to their customers. So I started, it was around the end of the year, so I started listening to a couple of these podcasts, and I realized that what we were trying to put out into the world about this product was wasn’t actually matching what our what in this case, it was like what a customer success managers actual KPIs are, and what they really cared about. And so. We were able to tweak the messaging a bit to be way more powerful, just because we were a fly on the wall, rather than, you know, trying to have direct conversations with the client.  Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, I’m just kind of like thinking through how I could use that same idea on my own, with my own clients as well. Because again, I think it’s kind of a game changer. So when you’re doing that, what are the kinds of things that you’re looking for, or that you’re pulling out? Is it just stuff that feels unfamiliar, or like, how do you, how do you identify the ideas like, oh, wait a second, that’s something that I can build on. Grace Baldwin: That’s a good question. Normally, it’s just kind of intuitive, you know, like just actively listening and trying to see, okay, what is you what is the pattern that’s emerging? What is the thing that they keep bringing up? And it’s nice if I can find, like, two or three podcasts that are in the same realm, and you can hear, okay, this, this idea is echoed across a couple different spaces, and that’s where you’re able to find something. But then from there, you take that research, plus whatever research you have from your internal workshops with the client. And then that’s kind of you start iterating on concepts from that, okay. Rob Marsh: And then as you start to move into step two, how does your process sort of evolve so that you’re turning ideas and insights into strategy? Grace Baldwin: So what we do, we take, we try and approach it from a messaging concept perspective, which is something that I learned from, really, from reading breakthrough advertising Right? Which the whole what we try and do is we look at the market sophistication, the customer stage of awareness. They’re like mass desires, which is what we identified in the first stage, along with the product capabilities. And then we create, we’re trying to create two to three different concepts from there, and each concept will be have a slightly different flavor. And then we, at that point, we also introduce the beginning of a design concept as well, because what we want is that the brand’s visual design matches the overall message and positioning. And then from the client, then kind of picks from there, and whatever concept they go with is how we start building out the personality. Rob Marsh: So I know I’m putting you on the spot here a little bit with this question, but can you give me an example of how that works?  Grace Baldwin: We did this with a client recently where what we did there in the energy industry, and so we kind of worked with them, and we did some research in their early stage. So we didn’t have time for a ton of research. They didn’t have any customers or anything. But we presented a couple different options. And said, Okay, we can go basically in this direction with your brand, or we can go in this direction with your brand, and the messaging is slightly different here, because it might be, for example, you might have, like, more cool, toned, like, precise design, you might have cool, more cool tone, precise designs, and then your tone might also change slightly there. Or you could have something that’s a bit warmer and a bit more of a like a lover brand archetype. But we gave them two options, and then they picked one, and we went with That’s it.  Rob Marsh: And when it comes to the kinds of clients that you’re working with, it seems like there’s some real trade off opportunities for, you know, again, we’re talking planet tech. So, you know, you want people to like you, or to see that you’re doing good things for the planet, but at the same time your tech and so you’ve got a side of the brand that is scientific and functional and delivers results, right? And so there’s, it’d be interesting to balance the two. Grace Baldwin: Exactly. And a lot of clients that we talk to don’t, they don’t want to scream necessarily that they’re eco friendly, right? I mean, that’s not their main purpose. You also want to be able to avoid greenwashing if that’s not the main driver. A lot of times, I’ve worked on products where the main driver and the main value of the product is not about reducing carbon emissions, it’s about helping the team operate more efficiently, which is then a business outcome, rather than, like a climate outcome.  Rob Marsh: And obviously, if you’re showing up and accused of greenwashing, that can hurt your brand. Tell me about the last stage, which is really design and copy. How does that all come together? Grace Baldwin: So from that point, it’s just a matter of refinement. Once we kind of pick a direction, my design partner, he goes and he, you know, works his he’s like the creative genius, and so he works with magic on that. And then I will create the brand voice guide, and we bounce each one of the nice things about having a co founder is that we can bounce the ideas off of each other and make sure that it’s all aligned. And then we put it together in a final presentation. And then from there, we can work with the client on web copy and any other assets.  Rob Marsh: Okay, so I love this process, and right now the agency is just you and your partner, but like, What is the vision as far as team goes? Grace Baldwin: That’s a really good question. You know, we’d like to keep it pretty small, but you. We’re still kind of in the early stages of defining what we want the vision to look like, okay, but we both want it to be something that feels easy and fun.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly the kind of business that I want, too. So what has copywriting taught you about building brands and branding? Grace Baldwin: That’s a really good question. I think the answer is everything. I think that you know, and admittedly, I’m biased, right, like, as you know, I’ve worked for 9, 10 years as a copywriter, and I really think that copy is the foundation. And I think that what it’s taught me is that copy needs to be involved earlier on in the process. I think that often copywriting, and specifically, tone of voice gets kind of added on afterwards. But really, copy is how you shape your messaging. It’s how you shape the presentation to the world. It’s how you shape your you have to come up with slogans and headlines and things like that. And it should be leading. It’s strategy incarnate. And it should be leading kind of the crusade, Rob Marsh: I think a lot of copywriters see it this way. Sometimes designers don’t see it this way. And yeah, it’s interesting. You know, when you’ve got a design partner, really, the real answer is that both design and copy should be in the meeting from the beginning. And that strategy impacts both copy and design, although it tends to show up in the copy more obviously, at least to me. Grace Baldwin: We’re biased that, yeah. I mean, if we had my designer on the phone, he might be like, he might have something different to say, but, but, but no, I agree. I think that, like, I have a massive respect for design, and I think that that’s why we work very well together. He also has a huge respect for copy, and we both think about it strategically, and that’s why we’ve moved towards this kind of concepting, idea of presenting the ideas together and then so that our clients can sort of see how they work together. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I like that. I’ve been and I’ve seen so many situations where design and copy, it’s not that they’re necessarily at cross purposes, but because one, you know, person is advocating for the importance of copy, and the other is advocating for the importance of design, you end up with, you know, a designer saying, well, the copy’s got to fit in this space or or The copywriter demanding that there’s got to be, you know, additional space for storytelling, and it just can create conflict in ways that are detrimental to finishing a project. Grace Baldwin: Totally, yeah, and I’ve just learned that it’s all about compromise. And I’ve been blessed to work with amazing designers when I was in house, and, you know, just throughout my career and the great ones, see you as a teammate. Rob Marsh: So I asked about copywriting, teaching you about brand, but you’ve also got, like, a massive amount of experience on the product side and on product development. So how does that impact what we do with brands? Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I think that kind of I said, what I think product marketing has taught me is that branding really needs to be around the product right? And I think that too often there’s a disconnect between what the brand is saying and what a product actually does. And so it’s the same thing, like your product team also needs to be involved in the branding process because they are understanding, or, you know, they’re shaping what it actually is, and they know the technical details about it, and they’re able to give insights that other people on the team can’t, or, like, a commercial team can’t, Rob Marsh: Have you brought some of that into your process as well? Again, because that’s your brain is in that process. You’ve done it so much. How does that show up in in the process that you do as you develop copy and and design together? Grace Baldwin: So one of the things we really do is we try and always start with a product demo. And for my clients, you know, I’m working with on client, working on projects where with clients who are truly experts in a very specific thing, right? And there’s no way that I can match that. But so what I tell my clients in our process in general, is that it’s very collaborative, and I can help with the strategy and I can help with the words, but I really need their help with all the nuance. Rob Marsh: I like that. One of my secrets for writing sales pages, I like to start with a product demo also, because to me, if you have the person who build the thing try to sell it to you, they’re talking through what they think are the most important points, features, benefits, whatever it is. Now, they’re not always their best their own best customer, but like that as a starting point. So you understand, you know what the founder or the developer or whatever, like this is the thing that I built for the thing that it solves is immensely helpful, absolutely, and it helps with products. You know, if you’re talking to somebody that, or if your audience is very technical, they want to know all the technical details. It’s important to get that insight from, you know, the person developing it. But it’s also important to get the sales pitch from sales and sort of see where there’s overlap. But yeah, having those technical details and the stories behind, behind specific features, that’s where you can those are opportunities for differentiation. Yeah, one of the things that you know, as we’re chatting, I realized, obviously, you’re doing way more than writing copy, your leading strategy. And there may be a lot of people who are listening, thinking, Okay, how do I go from the person who’s asked to develop, you know, a couple of emails or to write a blog post or a sales page to the point where I’m actually advising my clients on what to do? How did you jump from copywriter to strategist? Grace Baldwin: That’s, I think my honest answer is that I mean, working in house for several years was really, really helpful in that, because I got to understand how, how, and I worked in house at startups, right? So, I mean, where I was on a marketing team of maybe three people, I was the only writer, and so I was doing all of the writing. And I think understanding kind of how my clients businesses operate, helps, helps a lot. But then I also think that just time and, like, really digging into the principles of conversion copywriting has helped me be able to leverage strategy so much more. Rob Marsh: So do you think it takes time then, like, does it? Is there a short cut to learning strategy or to being a strategist?  Grace Baldwin: I think just doing it, you know, over and over, you learn every time that you do something new, and I’m continuing to learn, right? But, yeah, this is it. I do think that experience helps. Rob Marsh: That’s probably an obvious question, because I was thinking the same thing as you’re answering that I’m like, I was just working with a copywriter or marketer who’s building her business, and, you know, is talking about the things that she wants to help do. And the her biggest problem is that she hasn’t actually done a lot of this stuff, you know, at this point. And we see this a lot, where people try to step into a role that they haven’t actually had any success in, but they’ve read about it, or they’ve learned how to write a prompt for AI to tell them what to do, and the outcomes are just not the same. Grace Baldwin: And in that case, you know, if you’re freelance too, something that I learned from Annie Bacher actually, is to just subcontract for other copywriters that are where you want to be, right? And that’s something that I subcontracted for Annie I’ve subcontracted for Aaron Pennings. I’ve subcontracted for several people, and I did it because at the, you know, at the time, I didn’t have time to manage my own clients, and I was also just kind of burnt out. But I also learned a ton from their processes as well. Also subcontracting for agencies helps me understand, help me understand and get that experience, because agencies are just doing it so frequently. Rob Marsh: I think a large part of mastering anything, obviously, is the doing. And I love that approach, working with a variety of other copywriters who are a couple steps ahead of you, who can offer coaching. You can see their processes, you can learn from them, and agencies like you said, this makes it’s, it’s almost understating it to say, Oh, that makes sense, yeah, because it’s almost like, No, this is the path. This is actually how you get great. Grace Baldwin: It’s really easy to say, but then, I mean, you have to actually do it, which takes. I mean, I’m in year three, year three of doing my business full time, and I’m only now just kind of getting to the point where I, like, am able to put all the puzzle pieces together. But yeah, it just takes. If I could go back and tell myself, you know, give myself advice, it would be just relax and enjoy the journey.  Rob Marsh: And so when you talk about subcontract for copywriters, one of the things that makes that happen is that you were able to build relationships with copywriters, other copywriters. How did you do that? Grace Baldwin: Think Tank. Think Tank, The Copywriter Club. I mean, I’m in a Slack group now with like seven other people that I met through the copywriter club, and I talked to them daily I commute. I cannot emphasize how important community has been to me over this journey. Rob Marsh: This is one of the things that I’ve come to really late in my career. That is one of those no does, but I tried for so long to be the the solitary copywriter. You know, I can do it. I can find my clients. I can do the work. And when I got into my first mastermind, surrounded by other copywriters as well, I’ve mentioned the story on the podcast in the past. But I just remember in that first meeting, kind of having an aha moment where I was like, Wait a second. I have so much to learn from, from these other people in the room. Like I thought I was good, I was good, but when I could see their advantages, what they were doing differently from what I was it was, I mean, it was like, I turned the dial from, you know, three, where I was playing around, to like, nine or 10. Grace Baldwin: I am just leaving a mastermind right now, actually, where, you know, I joined wanting to be the dumbest person in the room, which is the same thing that happened when I joined Think Tank. I really wanted to be, you know, the youngest person, or like, the least experienced there. But with both of these experiences. I saw where other people were operating at and I knew that there was a path to get there, and it was just eye opening. And then you also, you just meet people and you can who can empathize with your daily struggles. Rob Marsh: Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, it was a total game changer for me as well, yeah. So tell me about some of the things that maybe you do outside of work that actually influence the way you think about business or make you a better writer. Grace Baldwin: Well, I run a lot. I just signed up for my first ultra marathon last night, actually, so that’ll be happening in October. But yeah, running and endurance sports is something that I never did that as a kid. I only got into it. I got into it in like, 2018 and fell in love with it, but it’s just taught me a lot about, like, slowing down and pacing myself and not burning myself out. Rob Marsh: So I also have taken up running the last few years. I used to think of myself as a cyclist, but getting my bike out and, you know, pumping the tires full of air and putting on the kit and road biking has become a lot more dangerous with cars that, you know, don’t seem to be looking for bikes. So I’ve run a lot more. I don’t know that I call myself a runner. I’m more of a plodder, maybe a jogger. I can’t even envision running an ultra marathon like that is so beyond me. Grace Baldwin: Me either Rob That’s nervous about it that seems that’s I back in my biking days like I could knock off 100 miles, you know, in a day, or whatever. That was no big deal.  Rob Marsh: But an ultra marathon is a whole other kind of torture… Grace Baldwin: It’s the same thing that we were talking about, right? Like, when you’re just getting started, or think there’s no way I can. Mean, I remember, I had some friends who ran a half marathon when I was I think we were 19, and I remember thinking, I will never do that. And then, you know, here I am now getting ready to run an ultra marathon. It’s just something that’s slow, and you get better at over time, and you slowly improve, and your endurance grows, and it just gets easier, or it doesn’t get easier, but you get better at it. Rob Marsh: I actually saw somebody mention that yesterday. It’s like, hard things. Hard Things don’t get easier, but your strength increases your ability to do hard things increases. Yeah, totally. So maybe marathons is a good or races, whatever is maybe a good place to start developing some of those discipline skills that we need to succeed as copywriters.  Grace Baldwin: 100%. For me, at least, it has been an amazing way to learn all learn all those lessons in like a safe container, right? And learn to trust myself, and also be able to tell the difference between when something is tough but manageable but or tough but unmanageable. Rob Marsh: Let’s talk a little bit about working out of the states, being a being an expat copywriter. Oh my gosh, yeah. Obviously, there’s some challenges with that. How have you made it work?  Grace Baldwin: Well, challenges is kind of an understatement. There’s a lot, you know, I can tell I moved abroad before my prefrontal cortex developed, because I didn’t, never considered international retirement planning, which is a whole minefield of regulations. But we won’t. We don’t need to get into that. Maybe we should get it. My advice for anybody, if who wants to move abroad, or at least out of the US, is find a good tax attorney to talk to before you do it. But beyond, beyond that, I mean, it’s I just, I moved here for love. I’m still with my boyfriend, and just, yeah, it’s been an amazing adventure. Rob Marsh: I’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past as well, but I am all in on travel. My wife and I, we kind of have a motto, you know, experiences over things. Experiences are better than things. And so every chance we get it’s like, hey, let’s hop on an airplane. You know, who cares about the new car or whatever? You know, let’s do that. And so part of me is jealous that you get to have this full time experience in Amsterdam that you know so many of us, and when we travel for vacations, you know, it’s a totally different experience as well, because you’re trying to hit the three or four highlights. You’re always in a hurry, you’re standing in lines. And when you can actually do it slow, you know, actually experience the culture in the way that you are. I’m, I’m so insanely jealous of of your experience there, Grace Baldwin: Yeah, but then at a certain point, it just becomes kind of normal every day, although, as an, you know, I call myself more of an immigrant than an expat, but I still discover new things about the country on a weekly basis, especially if I like I was at a family reunion for my boyfriend’s family, and I was around a bunch of more Dutch people than I normally am around, and I learned, and there’s just all these like small little things that you never will learn unless you’re actually. Surrounded by that culture, Rob Marsh: When we were living in France, I’m as I’m saying this. I’m like, nobody wants to hear Rob. I want to hear this. I didn’t know this. Yeah, when we were living in France, I realized how different FedEx is in in France than it is in the States. You know, when you would order something from FedEx? Well, here it shows, you know, sometimes, like, place the order by four o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be there by 7am right in France, you know, you had, we at least had to go to the shop to pick it up. And oftentimes the shop was closed because, yeah, they just decided to spray off. Yeah, like, like, the immediacy of American culture is just not a thing. And nobody cares, you know? And so sometimes it would take us two or three visits to the place where our package would be delivered just to get it. So those kinds of culture differences, I mean, they’re kind of funny to talk about, but also when you experience them, it’s in some ways, like when you’re talking about being in a community of copywriters, it opens your minds to just different things, different ways that people do things. And in some ways, it’s like a creative playground that just gets you thinking in different ways, Grace Baldwin: Absolutely, and I think, you know, something that I related when i My first job was, you know, in a Dutch company, and I had a Dutch manager, and my my manager was Dutch, it was me, and then our designer was Canadian, and there we were working on a website project, and my design, my designer, who’s a very dear friend of mine, now, we were stressed out about getting it done on time, because, I mean, we were very deadline driven, and my and it caused, it caused tension in the group. And my manager said to us, guys, like, we can always move a deadline, which was something that she and I were not we’re not. There was a concept we were not familiar with, right? Because we had grown up in these cultures of, okay, there’s a deadline. We have to hit it. And one of the things that I like about Dutch culture, in which I have tried to embrace in my work life, is that Dutch people believe that you have eight hours to work and that’s it, and if you’re working beyond eight hours is a sign that you weren’t efficient with the time that you have, rather than a symbol that you’re going over, above and beyond, which is something I really appreciate, Rob Marsh: Yeah, something I probably should adopt into my life when I’m sitting at my desk, you know, seven o’clock at night trying to finish something up.  Grace Baldwin: I mean, it’s 630 in the afternoon for me, or in the evening right now for me, so I’m totally guilty of overworking as well, but it was nice when I was there were more boundaries when I was in house and like, salaried. Rob Marsh: How much? How much does fun play into that kind of thinking as well? Because oftentimes what I find is, if I am still at my desk at 630 or seven, it’s because I’m actually enjoying the work, and not because it’s a deadline I’ve got to hit tomorrow. Is that like part of the consideration as well, or is it just like, nope, you’ve got your seven and a half eight hours, and then you’re done. Grace Baldwin: I think it’s a consideration of you know? I mean, if you’re having fun with something, nobody’s gonna say no, but, but I have found that managers will reprimand you for working overtime. Even if you are having fun, they’ll say, Okay, well, go, you know, take a half day off, then if you were working on this on Saturday.  Rob Marsh: So for those of us who manage ourselves, then we just need to be better managers. Give ourselves the hardest part, though, right? Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I’m a very bad manager of myself, not a bad, not a very bad one, but I’m always learning to be a bit kinder, yeah. Rob Marsh: So what are the biggest things that you’ve struggled with as you’ve, you know, gone from, you know, moving over, taking that first job, you know, product management, copywriting now, launching your agency. What have been the biggest challenges that you face now, Grace Baldwin: You mean right now, or through the process?  Rob Marsh: Through the process… Grace Baldwin: I think a big I mean moving abroad, you, there’s always a kind of a sense of loneliness that you have to content, you have to contend with because is your you’re very obvious the minute I open even though I speak Dutch, the minute I open my mouth, people know that I’m not Dutch, which is a bit isolating at times. So that’s all about, like, you know, I’ve been, I joined run clubs. I’m trying to build more community here. And so that’s, that’s something that has been a struggle, and that’s also, you know, in terms of business, building those, realizing that’s just a big theme for me, is okay, it’s about finding the right people who can support you. So that’s been a challenge and a learning lesson, but also, yeah, lots of freedom and room to play and explore and try out new things. So the upsides as well.  Rob Marsh: There’s definitely a part of me that’s very jealous of the business that you’ve built. It sounds like a ton of fun. The projects that you get to work on are game changers. So, yeah, just listening to you talk about what you’ve built since the last time we hung out together, which was, you know, five years ago, it’s amazing to see how far you’ve come. Grace Baldwin: Yeah, thanks. Sometimes, sometimes it feels like I haven’t made it that far, but then I’ve had. Look back at where I was five years ago when I first joined Think Tank, it’s a world of difference. Rob Marsh: So as you think about your business now, what’s next for you? What are the big challenges that you have coming up with the things you’re most excited about? Grace Baldwin: I’m definitely excited about building out this agency and building it up and turning it into something recognizable and that, you know, my co-founder and I, we really just want to focus on doing great work and delivering awesome results. And I’m just excited about leaning into that, and, yeah, exploring leveling up in a new way. Rob Marsh: So for those of us who want to watch what you’re doing and hear about, you know, the successes as you move forward, where should we go? Where should we be looking for your latest writings? Grace Baldwin: So LinkedIn is one place. I also have a sub stack where I’m trying to just kind of document what I’m learning. It’s not, I call it a semi regular missive, because I don’t promise to put it out every week, but I’m trying to do every other week, minimum. But those are probably the two places and Rob Marsh: I’ve seen some of what you’ve put on sub stack, documenting, you know, what you’re learning a lot of the process that you’re going through. So I highly recommend hopping on Grace’s newsletter, checking out what she has to say, because I promise you’re going to be inspired. Grace Baldwin: Thank you. Yeah, those are good words, yeah. Rob Marsh: Well, it’s and it’s been awesome catching back up with you grace and seeing what you’re up to in your business. So thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Grace Baldwin: Thank you for having me on Rob. I mean, I was telling my business partner that it’s such an honor to be on this podcast, because I hope you recognize how big of an impact you have had on people’s careers and with the copywriter club. I mean, I’m just one example, and I’m really grateful for the work that you do.  Rob Marsh: You are so kind to say that I really appreciate it. I may just have to take that clip out and play it for me every morning.  Grace Baldwin: Make it your alarm to wake you up to every morning.  Rob Marsh: Well, people have been listening to me prattle on for so many years, so it’s only fair. Grace Baldwin: That’s only you know only fair, I guess then, Rob Marsh: Thanks Grace for sharing the details of your career journey and what you’re building at your agency today. I want to echo what Grace said about finding a community of copywriters who can help you on your own career journey. I’ve told my own story several times, but it bears repeating the lesson, surrounding myself with several other good copywriters who were willing to read my work, share leads and clients, and even just talk about what is working in their busineses right now was a complete gamechanger for me personally, and I’ve seen it have the same effect in hundreds of other copywriter’s businesses too. If you’re missing that, you should check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu where we are focusing on creating more opportunities for copywriters to come together and share these kinds of business changing ideas.  Coming back to our interview, I’ve linked to Grace’s newsletter  in case you want to follow her journey. You should also check out Grace on LinkedIn where she shared other ideas she’s working on with her clients. And finally, I mentioned this at the top of the show, our course, Research Mastery will give you the ideas and insights you need to write better copy, get more impressive results, and increase sales and conversions that will keep clients coming back to you for more. You can learn more about this course at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery … research mastery is all one word.

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, buying their ads for them, and they would always ask, how is it that your ads fit better than everybody else? Like, we have lots of other ads in here, and you seem to be getting consistent good results with your ads. How would that happen? And so out of necessity, I was like, I have to come up with some sort of tactical framework to show them what I’m doing. So at the time, like I said, I didn’t know I was doing any of this. It was just like a part of Sarah’s process for research. I was going through and on the brand Instagram pages for any of these D to C brands that I was working for. I was pulling down all of the comments that was underneath all of their organic pieces of content that talked about the brand or even the product, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do with anything. I just pulled them down and then analyze them one by one. Now this was before AI, so I had to go through by hand and categorize them into the categories that I wanted, which, at the time was emotional categories, because I was like emotion psychology, this kind of all makes sense. Obviously, people buy things for emotional reasons, and then we justify them with logic, so I’ll categorize them into emotional category, and then I’ll just go ahead and, like, run an analysis on that. So this was all done in Excel spreadsheet, and based on frequency numbers, I could tell which emotions were coming out of just the language that customers were using. So I don’t know that I was necessarily a better writer or a better like, you know, Ideator for abs. I think it was more of the fact that I just got much, much closer to the customer, and then I was able to take what I found and basically repurpose it. So I had a framework that just I repeated over and over and over,  Rob Marsh: Yeah, it seems to me, then, in my experience, you know, working with copywriters, a lot of the time, you know, we’re looking for specific words. Sometimes we’re looking for emotions, but, but you know, when, even when I go through research, knowing that I should be looking at all of it together, every once in a while, something will jump out. I’m like, oh, that’s the idea, right? And then maybe I stop or and so, having gone through and done that work to, like, really figure out, okay, every single comment, it feels to me like that’s almost the putting in the 10,000 hours kind of thing that trains your brain so that, so that it becomes really effective and insightful.  Sarah Levinger: Yeah, yeah. Well, and it was interesting, because that was the very first product I ever really had, was what I was calling it NLP at the time. So it was the NLP research panel, and it was called NLP because I didn’t know this was the term, but what I was doing was basically manual natural language processing. So there’s computers that do that. Obviously, Sarah was just doing it by hand. So I’d pull all the data down, categorize it, pull out frequency numbers for the emotions, emotional categories that I was looking for, and then I would write new copies based on the emotion that I felt, not necessarily the keywords and phrases that the customers were using, mostly because the keywords and phrases are important, and they I mean, they still are important. They were important. They are important. But the problem was, in paid advertising, if you use that keyword and phrase too many times. It’s fatigue. People kind of stop paying attention to it, and then it doesn’t work anymore. So fast forward, a couple years later, I had someone ask me, this is great. We love your NLP, it’s really interesting. It’s helping. But do you have any information on getting accurate avatars built, like customer types from all of the data that you’re pulling down. And at the time, I was like, No, but I could probably build that. I constantly look at these things like, I think I could probably make that. Why not? Like, we’ll see if we can ever so the next product that I built was called the CIM. So the CIM is a core identity map, and this particular research panel uses picture based surveys and metaphorical surveys to pull out these emotional like deeper insights out of our customers. So they’re very odd surveys, because about 80% of them are non-functional, I would say. So we ask questions like, if this product was a superhero, which one would it be? And why? Those types of things. Once you’re going to make an association of the brain, you would help pull out some very interesting insights of what people believe about things, not just how they feel about it, that in general, for humans, what you believe affects how you feel, and what you feel affects how you behave. So for consumption, especially since I’m on the paid advertising side, studying just the behavior of clicks or conversion rates and those types of things, not entirely helpful for me, because I have no idea what caused it, right? I just know it happened. So some people take one step back and go, Okay, we need to study the emotion, which is very, very helpful. But again, that’s only one piece of the equation. We can tell how they felt about what caused the conversion, but we can’t tell why they did it. So I go all the way back to the beginning and study behavior with the CI or study belief, sorry, that the CIM, so that way and understand more. Can you give me an example of how that works? Yeah. So, for instance, one of the best you kids into this I’ve ever saw was we had a CIM that was interesting. They had built basically this one. A skincare brand, and they were having a really hard time because the acquisition customer type was too expensive, like that. They were just, like, bleeding money, basically. So we ran a CIM basically just to see what their customers believed about the whole industry, not just their particular product. Because most businesses study themselves, or they study competitive they don’t study the industry, which I find fascinating, because I’m like, Oh, Rob Marsh: That totally rings a bell, too. I do the same thing. Like, of course, you want to look at your three or four closest competitors, so you don’t copy what they’re doing, but you also clue into, you know, the basics, and then, of course, your own product. But yeah, industry wide, that’s a lot, and that’s a lot for one person to handle too, or one small agency.  Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that’s why they usually come to Sarah, because I’m like, don’t go do this yourself. Just hire someone to do it. Blind you. So industry wide, though, this is a very interesting it’s a very interesting ecosystem, if you start to study industry, mostly because a large majority of the time there is one person at the top and then there’s a number two, and they fight with each other constantly, COVID, colon, Pepsi, right? Apple and Microsoft. Then there’s an outlier, usually a third player in here who’s quietly serving an audience that’s like secondary to the larger market that these two are fighting over. Right? That third base. Sometimes they are brand, brand new meaning, like you’ve never seen them before. They just came out of nowhere. Liquid Death is probably a good example of this. Like nobody really saw them come and they just were all of a sudden, there. You also have some of these who have been quietly like practicing their skill for such a long time that they notice a market gap before the two top players do and can like slip in immediately. So I think it’s beneficial to study your competitors and beneficial to study yourself, obviously, but it’s even more beneficial to study the industry as much as you possibly can, because you’ll start to notice consumer shift. That’s what we’re kind of looking for, especially at Tether. Consumer shifts happen all the time for all sorts of different reasons, political reasons for economic reasons for cultural movement. In particular, celebrities have a huge like play on cultural sway, like your customer type is swaying their behavior based on what they believe. And if their beliefs change, then all of their behaviors change too. So back to skincare. When we ran a CIM for them, we found that their customers were a little overwhelmed, not necessarily by like, the industry, like they understood what their problem was. It was usually acne or dry skin or wrinkles or whatever. They were more overwhelmed with the fact that I now have like, 70 bottles that sit on top of my counter, and I’m constantly, like, swapping them out in and every day and like, I just, I’m just overwhelmed with the amount of like ridiculousness that I have in my life now due to these bottles on my counter, it had nothing to do with the skincare, which I found really interesting, but it was such a definitive thread that they the customer types were just like, You know what? I’m just kind of done with the mess and the chaos of what this industry has brought into my life. Now, that’s a very definitive belief and emotion that we can start to message to on the coffee side, to talk about the fact that, like, this is the last time you’ll ever have to switch to another skincare brand.  Rob Marsh: So part of this, what you’re doing is trend spotting, which is maybe a little bit different, again, from what most typical copywriters or even researchers do. So, you know, aside from, you know, running your own panels, are there other tools that you’re using to spot trends and to see what’s coming in order to get ahead of that?  Sarah Levinger: I have tested a ton of stuff recently, and I think this is something you and I were talking about, $4 pocket there. There’s a place for AI. I think in this conversation, I don’t think it’s where people think it is. I typically use AI as a second brain. So I will have it do data analysis for me, because it can spot patterns and things that I just can’t see. If I have spreadsheets or data, I’ll go through and have it analyzed for me and just say, what do you see in here that I just don’t see? So that’s incredibly helpful. When it comes to research. I have a difficult time using AI as a production tool, and this is something that I’ve been slowly starting to learn more and more about. Because when we first started, I think everybody was just like, this is going to cut years off of our production time. It can do analysis, so it can tell us exactly what we should run from what I’m seeing. That’s not at all true. So in general, I typically default to surveys in particular, because it’s voluntary information, and it’s information that’s like, non biased. It’s just, this is just a person out there. It’s anonymous. We don’t collect any sort of email addresses or names or anything. It’s headed we just collect the actual data of people answering the pictorial survey or the metaphorical survey. And that’s on purpose, because I don’t want it to cloud kind of the what we’re trying to actually learn. So ideally, use AI, but it’s, it’s not as a production tool. It’s primarily just to help me think a little bit more, if that makes sense.  Rob Marsh: Since we started talking about AI, let’s, let’s keep going here. Because, like you said before we started recording, you said you have a few thoughts, and I think they probably track pretty closely to what what I think about A.I. But as far as AI goes and writing copy, tell me where you are in your brain and with your experience.  Sarah Levinger: So far, AI has been a very interesting tool to track. When it first came out, this was, like the most amazing thing we had ever seen. Like we just everybody grabbed it, everybody used it. They went from like zero to 5 million users in like 48 hours. It was bonkers, mostly because it is an incredible tool. The interesting part about it is, though, as you start to watch the metamorphosis of AI in particular chat is, well, the one that we use the most often in DTC, you start to notice some like, glaringly obvious issues with this platform. The I think the primary one being this is not really assisting workflow. I find which I think. What do you mean by that? Okay, so most people grabbed onto this because they were like, Oh, I don’t need a copywriter anymore. Save me time. Well, I don’t need any, but I could get rid of my entire team and just use this. That is technically true, but the issue is now you’ve basically replaced a team of experts who can get you a headline within a good 30 minutes to an hour, that will probably work 80% of the time with a system who is making basically an educated guess based upon the data you feed it that’s basically suited to you the user, because the more you use the llms, the more gets trained on you as the person, and it will start to feed you stuff that it knows you like. And this is the most difficult thing about llms. It’s like they’re very, very powerful. I still use it constantly because it’s trained on Sarah’s brain, so it’s almost like talking to myself. But toughest part about this is often the output is terrible, so I have to QA two times as much as I used to. I used to QA inside my own brain before I put it on a piece of paper. I think about it for a long time in the shower, like when I’m driving, or what I’m doing things with my kids, without me having to know that I was thinking about it, because it was all subconscious processing. Now we’ve taken our subconscious and stuck it into a computer and said, you do the subconscious processing for me, but let me help you do it. So we’re spending two to three hours QA one headline instead of just sitting and thinking quietly about it in the background before we sit down to our desk. Rob Marsh: I just kind of had a light bulb go off as you’re mentioning this when you said that llms get trained on our voice, and they get to know us. The biggest problem here is that is that even if we know our customers intimately, we are not our customer, and the knowledge that we bring to the table in order and then to have LLM reflect back what Rob is thinking instead of what Rob’s clients or customers are thinking, or Rob’s clients customers are thinking. Customers are thinking, which is even two steps away, like now. Now we’ve got a really big gap between what’s going to work and what sounds good, because it’s going to sound good based off of, you know, my feedback. I mean, I’m a pretty good writer, yeah, but it’s not necessarily the thing that’s going to work well.  Sarah Levinger: And in paid advertising, we’re using this primarily to produce massive amounts of ads. So our issue used to be that we had teams of like six to 10 to 20 people, all producing ads for us, copywriters and graphic designers and creative strategists, lots of different things, and all of those people, it would probably take us a good week to two weeks to generate a good 10 to 20 ads. Like it’s a process now we can do it in 20 minutes. Now, if you can take that amount of time, squish it down into 20 minutes, and you can take basically 10 ads and like, double or triple your production, that means a massive amount of messages are now being flooded into the systems on paid advertising. So meta, Tiktok, Instagram, right? That means the consumers are also seeing more messages. That means they’re also now becoming desensitized to any messages that are generic or completely boring, right? No offense to AI, but like, it’s a lot of what comes out of there is quite generic, yeah, so I’m watching this, and I’m tracking it as we’re going through just thinking, in the background, wondering, how long is this going to go before we start to see large scale kind of systemic issues in marketing in general, due to the fact that people think this is faster, but it’s not, or think that it’s better, but it’s not because we are the ones that are feeding all the data into The llms and telling them what to think. Now they still have the ability to go and, like, scrape the web, which is helpful. They can go and look to Google. But who produced all that stuff on Google? We did. So again, I am on the fence. I feel so torn about this, mostly because AI has something called projection bias, meaning they kind of just get. Tests at what they think is probably the best course of action based upon the statistical, mathematical patterns in the data. So we can feed it all the customer data we want, but if you’re feeding it on historical customer data, it’s only going to go after people who bought yesterday, not people who are going to buy tomorrow, so you’re dipping the bottom of the bucket constantly, bottom of funnel customers. And it gets even worse when you think about how many 1000s and 1000s of brands are in one industry. It’s intense.  Rob Marsh: It’s crazy. So while we’re still talking about this, I know you’re using AI. I use AI. How are you using AI to maximize its effectiveness and not let it get in the way of actually, like, relating to the customer. Sarah Levinger: So I primarily use it as a data analysis tool, because I’m not a data analyst, and, like, I have people on my team that are helping me with research, but in general, it can see a lot more than I can. I don’t want it to produce and I don’t want it to think for me, because I’m the one that has the real world experience. We all have to remember that AI lives inside a computer. It’s never seen a comb or a shoe or a house, right? It’s never experienced love. It’s also never really experienced rejection or embarrassment. It understands which emotions and words are connected to that word, but it will never be able to understand what it feels like to like be around that. Yet, I don’t know if they’re gonna make that someday. Maybe that would be terrifying, but it’s possible that will happen to them. So because of this, though, I really wanted to pull out things that I am unable to see. So I typically run these metaphorical and pictorial surveys to understand underlying belief systems. And so when I run that data through, we typically have basically qualitative answers that come with the pictures. So we’ll ask one picture of what do you think about this question. Here’s your picture answers. You choose one. They’ll pick an image for us. And then that very next question is going to be, why did you choose that image? Those qualitative answers for why did you pick that are very, very interesting, because they show a whole lot about what people think about themselves. You’ll choose based on emotion, but then you’ll try and justify it with something else, so you can compare them pretty easily. Now, the toughest part about this is I have to describe the image to chat pretty intensely and then tell it. Here’s the image they chose. Here’s what they answered as to why they chose that image. You do this analysis for me and tell me what you see, not necessarily what you think. I don’t try and use that word too much with chat, just because it’s trained on me. So it’s going to think like me. I want to just see what do you see in here that I use all the time, because I want to understand what patterns are in here that I just can’t see right now. Rob Marsh: So it’s helping you uncover patterns, emotions, ideas, and then you’re taking that, and either you’re writing it yourself or you’re working with a copywriter to put that into action. Sarah Levinger: Yep, exactly, exactly. So like the skincare thing, that was a pattern that I didn’t recognize. Like, when I looked at the data, I was like, oh, confidence. A lot of these women are really into feeling COVID. Into feeling confident. They want to boost their skin, they want to look good, those type of things, but those are normal, everyday things that I would think are a part of skincare. That’s normal, makes sense, yeah? And I said, it’s logical sense. So then I ran it back through the system and said, Okay, go find me some stuff that’s weird in here. Go, go get me some keywords or phrases that are like, I don’t know why anybody would say this about skincare, and one of the ones that came up was, I’m overwhelmed with the amount of bottles on my sink, which I’m like, that has nothing to do with skincare. So it was fascinating, but very, very cool thread that they found, and they’re able to use it now a whole lot better just because it spotted something that was weird. It’s an outlier, Rob Marsh: So where this stuff seems to be going is, again, moving into the psychology side of this. And this is something that we talk about. We say it a lot, but it’s hard to make actionable. And that is the idea that people don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them, right? So they’re buying an identity, or they’re signaling something about them. So as an example,I love Jeep. I don’t currently own a jeep, but I have had Jeeps in the past, and I love them, and even though they’re kind of bumpy and clunky in some ways. There’s probably something—I might need to go to a therapist to talk about this—but there’s something about Jeeps that I like that it says about me as a jeep driver, right? So, yeah. So how do we get more of this into the copy and content that we’re creating? Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, yes. So this is really interesting, because this goes down into what how many different associations have you built with Jeep in your head, and what are they attached to? So normally, when you build a memory or some sort of an association as a human, it has to do with how heightened your emotional state was during that particular time period in your life. So it’s possible somebody in your family owned a jeep, or you knew somebody who wasn’t in your family, but was aspirational, somebody sort of like, I want to be that person that owned a jeep. Or it’s very possible that you just had you saw it a lot, right? But same thing happens for like, my kids are. Watching Sponge Bob right now, and like, it’s the funniest thing ever, because I watch it and I can, I can verbatim, just like, go every single line I know, everything that that guy said, because I watched it so much as a kid. So now the just seeing that experience on the TV elicits an emotional response for me, because I saw it so much as the chat. So it just kind of depends. And again, emotional states don’t have to be traumatic. They sometimes they can just be it was there and that was gone. I was excited, and then it was gone, that type of thing. So to get more of this, this is the reason why I’m testing these picture based surveys, metaphorical surveys, because I want to see how close can we get to eliciting that response from somebody without them having to basically, what’s the word without them having to answer in a logical way, if that makes sense. So it’s difficult to get this out, and this is reason why not a lot of people are in this type of research, because hard, it’s very difficult to get this out and to do it without leading an answer, because that’s what most surveys do, especially on like post purchase side, is we just kind of give them a general frame of reference, of like, where did you come from, or what did you like most about it today? What do you wish we had? These are very logical questions, and they’re also well suited to people who read most post purchases are just questions and answers in text based form. If you don’t read well, or if you’re the type person that just doesn’t care, you just button mash your way out of there, and then have gone right? So in general, when it comes to pulling out more of these things, there’s a lot of really good research around picture based surveys that help kind of pull out those emotions. To apply it, though, I think is probably where, like, the bulk of the benefit is. So the nice part is, once you start to find these weird trends, like the bottles on the counter type of thing, you’ll start to be able to understand a little bit more about what these consumers are experiencing in their everyday life. And you guys, copywriters have been very, very close to the psychology of customers more than almost any other role, I would say, in marketing, because you guys had to think so deeply about it to be able to draft good messaging. So finding these tiny little trends and being able to speak to the relatable experience of that customer is probably where this is going to go eventually. And when I say relatable experience, I’m not talking about the problem at all. Almost everybody wants to default to your problem is dry skin. Here’s a solution, very Aida framework. My pushback on that is, I think I’d rather you talk about her experience around her dry skin, because dry skin actually causes all kinds of problems, not just like it’s uncomfortable, but also, if I go skiing this weekend, I’m gonna have to put chapstick on my face, and that’s sticky and uncomfortable, and I don’t like that. It’s a secondary problem that I now have to deal with again. Or if my face is dry and, like, cracked and I flake everywhere, like, that’s uncomfortable because I have a date tonight, and I don’t want him to think that that’s weird, right? There’s like, connected experiences all over the place that stem from one problem, but there’s like, 15 problems that are around it we can talk to as well.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, that becomes really interesting. You know, copywriters know the PAs formula, problem, agitate, solve. And oftentimes we’re, we’re really focused on all of the good things around the solution. You know, we will quickly we’re taught, and I don’t know that it’s always correct, but it’s like, Oh, you don’t want to be negative too long, right? Like, mention the problem, but don’t make people feel bad or whatever, but then, so we were really good at if you take this, it solves this problem, and it shows up in your life in these ways. Now you can do all these things you couldn’t do before, but I think like focusing in on the secondary issues is a really interesting idea to me. Sarah Levinger: Well, I think it’s interesting because if you watch, and this is why I get I get freaked out. There are things too deep. I get freaked out sometimes because I’m like, everything’s attached to everything. Over the course of the last probably 20 to 25 years, we have started to shift as a culture, especially in the US, towards this notion of, Do not offend anyone, right? Do not offend anyone. And it’s happened mostly due to kind of how the millennial generation was parented. But the millennials in particular were very, very sensitive to this idea of everybody included. We’re all in a community. We all want everybody to feel safe. Safety was kind of high priority for this customer type. Now, the interesting part about that generation is they taught it to their Gen Z kids, who are now kind of ramping it up, like there’s even more of this notion of like, don’t offend, no bad feelings. Everything’s fine. That seeped its way into everyone’s mindset because we heard it so much like he talks about the copywriters in the 80s had no problem being me. Like, if you look at some of the long form content from the 80s, copywriters got really harsh about the problem, like they would try and trigger the crap out of people, and all of their content was very, very intense, like they would talk very specifically about this is your problem. This is how you feel about it, and it’s not good. You need to change this, right? They spent a little bit of time on the solution, but they would constantly wrap back into what we call naked. To focused, right? Not so much anymore. Copywriters nowadays, as you said, are so conscious of this idea of like, I need to be careful not to trigger people. But that has caused a little bit of a negative shift in marketing, because now we refuse to talk about the problem. We almost get too soft with ourselves, which means nobody’s selling, which means all of the consumers are kind of bored and just kind of turned out, so it all kind of melds into each other. And so I think about this sometimes, in this respect of psychology applies to everything, first of all, and it’s also interesting to watch, because the herd, the whole group of humans on the planet, we all follow each other a little bit. And I’m not saying that, like, safety is incredibly important, especially mental safety, psychological safety, feeling safe in your body, safe who who you are. I think feeling accepted. These are all good things that came out of like that generation and that movement. But there are always side effects to random things like this, and in marketing, it’s just going to get worse and worse, because the Gen Zers are really intense about it, so it’s gonna be fascinating. What happens the next couple years?  Rob Marsh: Well, as you talk about this, you mentioned Liquid Death. Liquid Death seems to be like perfectly fit into a reaction to that, right? I remember when I first saw Liquid Death, or within a few months of its launch, I saw a marketer who I really respected talking about how this was an awful brand, toxic masculinity, all of this stuff. And I remember thinking, Wait a second, there’s actually something really smart happening here. Now, obviously there, you know, the heavy metal branding and the name Liquid Death or whatever like, they’re obviously going for a reaction, but it’s, but it’s the fact that all of soda pop branding has been happy, family, pop music, whatever, it opens up this opportunity for literally water to be the bad guy, right? And by bad guy, I don’t mean the evil person. It’s that bad boy image, the James Dean riding in on its motorcycle type image, right?  Sarah Levinger: Yeah,yeah. Well, this hits on some trends culturally that are really interesting, because Liquid Death probably would not have been able to do what they did in the 80s, right? Because the 80s group did not care literally at all about anarchy or becoming some sort of a misfit or rebelliousness, because they already were, like, there was a whole bunch of people who did not feel stifled in that mostly because a lot of the boomer generation in the 80s already had, like, a good handle on we’re different. We’re already different from our parents. We’re going to start to push our voices out into the world. They became kind of their own group of movement makers in the 80s. That’s what the Boomers were. Now you fast forward to today’s day and age. A lot of millennials and Gen Xers in particular, feel very stifled, like, again, because they’re starting to hear these cultural messages of, like, be careful, don’t hurt anybody. Like, just like, all the time. If you feel that, if you feel stifled in yourself, you’re going to resonate with products that are like, No, we’re going to get loud and we’re going to be weird and it’s going to be whatever we feel it needs to be. So the interesting part is, again, global emotion is really interesting, because you have a group of people that feel this, you bring a product in that solves that need to feel okay with being rebellious, and people will grab it immediately. And you could spot these patterns, but it takes a minute.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, clearly, it takes a lot of work and a lot of research. So, you know, beyond like going into the spreadsheet and, you know, coding everything for emotions, or having a tool like ChatGPT do it. What else are you doing in your business at Tether to spot what’s coming or where the opportunities are? How are you helping clients see that? How do you see that the rest of the industry or the other competitors are here, and that’s why there’s this really good opening for you over here? Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I run something called the Tether BPE. Everything I have is an acronym, which is not on purpose. That’s just kind of how it happened. The Tether BPE is a brand personality engine. And this was a giant prompt that I read through chat. It starts with doing that kind of, like, deep research about the whole industry, whatever industry we’re studying at the time, all the way back to, I’ll take it back to the 60s, if I have to, like, what was happening in, like beverages in the 60s, so I can understand the history of where we came from. This entire prompt is basically built to help me understand historically what happened throughout the generations and throughout the decades. Where do we sit currently, and what’s the market gap, and predictively, what’s probably going to happen next, mostly so that I can kind of identify, can we see, is there a trend that’s similar to what happened to liquid death? Now they didn’t know that they identified a trend. They just went with what they were going with, mostly because, like, they’re genius, but also because that was part of him, and he noticed a giant people, giant group of people, that were being underserved. That’s what I’m trying to spot with the BP is what’s being on. Deserve that people are craving heavily. So the bbe was kind of born on its own, like off to the side, and then I added to it after reading the Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’ve read that book.  Rob Marsh: I love everything by Clayton Christensen. He was brilliant, and one of my favorite thinkers ever.  Sarah Levinger: Yeah, I can’t get enough of his work, because I’m just like, oh, my God, that one blew my mind. It was such a dry, technical read, but I had to, like, really stick with it. But the underlying tones of what he was studying are so clear that in market, in industries, especially when you’re helping brands businesses grow, and your job as a copywriter or a graphic designer or somebody who’s like, fronting the load of the operational work. Your job is almost always going to be told to you as go get a sale, but that’s not at all what your role is. The people on the on like the ground floor of the business, our job is to spot patterns quicker than they can spot it at the top, because we’re closest to the customers. So in that particular book, they were talking about the standards industry and how it morphed, and all kinds of crazy things that happened. The people that were at the top of the industries had a very difficult time noticing that the customer bases started wanting smaller, faster, quicker, not necessarily more like more capacity. With this, they just wanted smaller, faster, quicker. So there were a couple companies like scandals or, you know, later it was Sandisk was able to come in and undercut some of these massive brands, because it was like, we’re solving a problem for one teeny, tiny customer group. But the customer group is growing. It’s not really that, like demand is really growing. There’s just more of them kind of coming into the circle. So what I do with the BPE is I’m trying to understand historically what has happened, so that I can kind of track the growth of things, but then predictively, I want to see if we can identify some trends that are coming out of the BPE, like the bottles on the table. And then can we track what the whole industry is saying so that we can kind of put our brands right in the right spot to hit at just the right time. Now, that’s difficult, and I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but it’d be interesting to see if we could do it, because it’s happened in every industry across history. Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, as a real simple example of that is the history of soda pop. You see this happening about every five to six years. There’s a new trend, right, like so, you know, in the 60s and 70s, there was the uncola and Mountain Dew, and then you get things like Snapple and the teas that come along. And the interesting thing is, the soda pop industry is always being disrupted this way, but either Coke or Pepsi comes along and they buy up the company in order to preserve their space. And we, I mean we literally, I think two weeks ago, Pepsi just bought Poppi, or one of the nutritional soda pop brands, right? That’s kind of the latest, the latest thing happening in soda pop. And before that, you know, Liquid Death and water and energy drinks and like you sort of see this happening. And I guess my point here is, if you can figure out how to do that for your clients, this is the kind of superpower that I mean it doesn’t just like, it creates literally 100 million dollar industries. So, how do we do more of that? Sarah Levinger: Yes, I think chat is making it a whole lot easier for people who would like to stay at home mom in Colorado to sit in her office and be like, what’s happening with the consumers. Get curious. Get curious if you see something specifically, if you see an outlier, stop tracking things that are normal. I don’t care what the consumers are doing. I also don’t really care what the competitors are doing all that much. If it’s normal, if the consumers are acting normal today, cool. Just keep it going. If somebody comes in that door that says something wild to me, that’s like, that has never been attributed to our product. Why would you think that? Like, what is that? Pay attention to it, get curious about it, because at the end of the day, if you see more people coming in saying that same thing, or even if you see something that’s like, I don’t know, one person said this and the other person said that, and they’re kind of related, keep track of it, because trends change slowly, right? And consumers do things very quietly, but they’re always telling you what they want constantly, because they’re voting with their dollars. So you could see it everywhere. And I tell people, track your sister industries too, like track the ones that you don’t think you’re related to, but you definitely are. For instance, in one of the brands that I was looking for, they sell these really cool little flasks, right? They were just gorgeous, beautiful things. They’re 100% attached to the alcohol industry because of what goes in the plow. However, they’re also attached to body positivity. I can’t talk body positivity is one of the industries they’re attached to, specifically because if the millennials stop drinking, they go under so you have to track, you’ve got to look at the entirety of the ecosystem. And this is why you know the study of economics exists. You got to track the whole thing. And I know it sounds intense, and it’s like, oh my God, how would I start that? The best place that you can start, I think, is with chat. Though. This is where I’m like, it’s a second brain. Just use it as a way to go look for things that you can’t book for on your own. It’s got deep research. Now it’s incredibly well versed. I’m pretty sure one of these, one of these models here, was just passing the training test I was reading.  There’s like, about that a week or so ago, yeah, where it’s like, oh my god, the models are outscoring the humans in the Turing test, and people are identifying the model as the human. So use the tools that you have. I would not use it to produce again. I try really hard to default to I think humans still should be writing and producing for humans. But I would go and look at what what’s connected to you. Take your industry, plug it in. Just say, what do you see? What’s out there? What’s the history of this? Learn, learn, learn. Just act like a historian. But the more that you know, the more that you can kind of see out into the future to tell what’s happening next. Rob Marsh: This feels like a place where you know, we should mention that niching actually becomes part of your superpower, too. So there’s, you know, this conversation in the marketing world, should you niche? Should you not niche? And there are good reasons on both sides to do one or the other. But if you niche, you have a much better ability to spot this kind of thing as it comes up, because you’re familiar with the industry. You’re not just jumping from one project or one client to another.  Sarah Levinger: Oh, 100% I have that issue right now because I’m so solidly connected D to C. There for a minute this year, I was trying to decide, do I want to move to B to B? Do I want to see if I can open up SAS or like service based or consulting. The toughest part about it is I know too much about DTC, so it’s way too easy for me to come over here and just be like, these are my people, and I know a lot about them, and I can help and serve them, but it could be a blind spot for me and for Tether. If we continuously go down the path of our normal customer, we’re going to miss outliers that might be a better customer type. So, and not to say that, I’ll leave you to see I’ll probably be here forever, but in general, this happens in every business. So this is why it pays to look. It pays to pay attention.  Rob Marsh: The flip side of niching is that you’ve missed the exposure that’s happening in those other industries, and you can’t bring new ideas from those industries into it. So maybe the answer here is that you need one person who’s focused and niched, and you need a team member next to you who’s paying attention to everything else.  Sarah Levinger: Yep, yep, yep. That’s why people hire Sarah. Usually they’re like, go out there and find us and stuff, and then we’ll stay close to our customers. So now we have Beth to both room. Yeah, yep. I think that’s probably the best way to do it.  Rob Marsh: So we haven’t really even talked much about, like, specific psychological tactics or things that you know you’re paying attention to, or that you’re doing with ads and advising your clients to do. But do you have like, just a top two or three tactics? You’re like, okay, these are my go tos. I’m gonna start here. I’m gonna try this stuff first, because I know it’s a good place.  Sarah Levinger: This is not copywriting related, but rounded buttons tend to produce better clicks, better conversion than sharp ones do, which I find really interesting. They’ve done a lot of studies around that and that, that one in particular has to do with sharp things feel a little unsafe to the mind. Now, I’ve seen a couple of studies that have gone the opposite direction with this, that talk about the fact that it depends on the product. If you have a tool or something utilitarian, rounded corners don’t do anything at all for conversion rates on button, interesting. So if I’m selling an ax or something dangerous, I might want a square, right? Something with sharp edges? Okay, so second one… I saw it here that was really, really interesting study I read talked about the fact that italics, italics and ads in particular, tend to increase engagement, where people like, like it and share it and do all kinds of stuff. Like, if the text is slanted, now they they specifically said over slanted, but typically italic says, like, I don’t know, it’s like eight to 10 degrees, not that much, right? Yeah, they were talking about like 30 to 33% like, really slanted text, for some reason that does really well. And they said it happens not just on ads, but landing pages and emails everywhere. So without… Rob Marsh: Would you do it in with, like, small blocks, or like, the entire piece of copy, like, in a Facebook ad, you’ve got that introduced the introductory block, or whatever you want, that whole thing slanted.  Sarah Levinger: From what I read, I’m pretty sure it’s just headlines like, don’t do the whole thing. Slanted, yes, but headlines, as long as they’re short, like, I don’t know, and that was probably the third study I read, was sweet spot for headlines on advertising in particular, at least, is four to eight words long, interesting. Tapped at eight, yeah, they seem to lose effectiveness at over eight words. So and again, I. I only know studies that pertain to pay to advertise, because that’s what I’ve been to. But for the slant, it’s interesting. If they’re short headlines, make the whole headline slanted, but then your subhead, your body copy, all the rest of it, just keep it a normal, normal font. So weird stuff. Humans are really sensitive to a longer, strange thing.  Rob Marsh: I think maybe part of this goes back to just standing out, just being different, right? Because every other headline is straight or slightly italicized, right? So something’s different that triggers our innate sense that I need to pay attention to this, because, again, it might be dangerous, it might be food, it might be an opportunity for connection, right?  Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the lesson here is, try lots of stuff. Try lots of different stuff, be different from everyone else. Yes, the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to, awesome. Rob Marsh: This has been fascinating for me. I wish I had another hour, because I think we could just keep going and going. But Sarah, you have a newsletter, if people want to get on your newsletter and follow you, where should they go? Sarah Levinger: You can actually go to tetherinsight.io. That’s probably the only place to get access to it right now. I feel really bad. I should probably update my email. I get so deep in the weeds on my own business, I’m like, I should really work on that this week. But yeah, so sign up for that. I usually do brand breakdowns in particular. So if you’re looking for studies of brands that have used psychology in the past and how they used it to grow or get more customers or cut costs, that’s usually the first half of it. The next section on that newsletter is most interesting to me. They’re Tether signals. So all of the little insights that we pulled out today from all the brands that I work with. I’m providing those inside that newsletter. So if you want to get access to like a random trend that nobody sees yet, they’re going to be inside that. Rob Marsh: And then you also write a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter, and so we’ll link to to your accounts there, so people can follow. And before we start recording, you mentioned you might be launching a community here, or by the time this goes live, have launched a community. Tell me a little bit about that. Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I’ve been asked to do this for years and years, and I just haven’t had time to do it. But I’m finally going to do it this year. I have a community that’s going to be starting up specifically around consumers, consumption, behavior, psychology, identity, and in particular, we’re going to be studying not just d to c, but basically any customer type, anybody that you want to bring into your ecosystems. How do you use psychology to get them in the door faster and cheaper? And primarily, I think this community, it’s going to be good, because I want to start talking to the people who are studying the consumers the most. So I’m hoping to bring in a lot of people from the large scale universities, large scale market research firms, people who know and understand consumers really well. So we can start to talk to them a little bit about what they’re seeing as well. But primarily we’re going to do brand breakdowns basically once a week, so you can submit your brand, or if you want to come in and submit your service, whatever it is, and I’ll take a look at it, and then we’ll talk about here’s all the psychology things you need to put in place. Here’s the way you need to shift emotionally to bring people in. And then I got lots of resources, tons of courses and trainings and things around learning psychology specifically for marketers.  Rob Marsh: So I’ll link to those in the show notes as well. Thanks to Sarah for walking through her research and analysis process, how she uses—and doesn’t use—A.I., and we can all get better at spotting changes in trends before they happen. If you’re not already on Sarah’s newsletter, you definitely should be. She write about her research and shares case studies about how she’s applying the strategies and frameworks we talked about on this episode. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making this stuff work and Sarah is one of the best. I’ve linked to her site in the show notes as well as her brand new community if you’re interested in finding out more about that as well. And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Or, if you don’t know another writer or freelancer who you can share it with—and I find that very hard to believe—visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and leave a review. If you haven’t left a review, now is the time. I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you. Don’t forget to check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. See you next week.