THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
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Tips on how to write copy that sells from Lukas Resheske
- At the core, [copywriting is] just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
- “Copy is everything,” and “Copy is communication”
- LinkedIn is back on the map
- Big Four Analysis: target market, primals, awareness, and sophistication
- A lot of people view copy as this thing that you buy once and you pay a really expensive copywriter to do it, and then it just works. That’s the myth.
- You’ve got a huge opportunity… for a good copywriter with a good funnel to come in and play with the rules as they are and just make bank… and fill that space.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
At the core, copywriting is just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
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Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back. This is another episode of “Real Marketing, Real Fast.” Today, we’re going to talk about a very interesting topic. We’re gonna talk about copywriting, direct response, and how you can use copy to help move the sales dial.
Today, on our podcast, I’ve got a professional copywriter, Lukas Resheske. Lukas was an officer in the Army. He’s now a top copywriting mentor. He’s an author. He’s a digital marketing expert and he has a deep expertise in creating sales files. So if any of those pique your interest, then make sure that you sit down, tune in, listen in, and take some notes.
There’s a reason why students all over the world, and clients who own eight-figure businesses come to Lukas. He’s become known as the copywriter that millionaires recommend. Lukas is able to take complex marketing problems and turn them into simple, elegant, practical solutions, practically overnight. He’s made millions of dollars for his clients on launches, cold traffic campaigns, and Kickstarter campaigns. His copy still holds the control in several markets, and clients continuously come back to him to launch his new products.
So Lukas has made over seven figures in the last five years from his direct copywriting direct response marketing experience. What’s really impressive was looking at Lukas’ clients that he’s worked with. He’s worked with over 160 clients, but many of you may recognize Ryan Lebeck, the founder of the Ask Method and the best-selling author, Mike Dillard, who is the founder of Magnetic Sponsoring in the Elevation Group.
I was a really bright guy. I really enjoy Harlan Kilstein, who’s the owner of Dogington Post … Yanik Silver, who’s a direct-marketing guy who many of you will know … Tai Lopez, who has become really an online celebrity and superstar in the social space, for sure, and Schelling courses … [Orlon Plaff 00:02:01], and Josh Turner, who I love his material. Josh founded a company called “LinkedSelling,” and he runs a LinkedIn University … or Linked University which helps people to generate revenue through their LinkedIn.
Well, welcome to the show, Lukas. I am so excited to have you here today, and you’re talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart and something that, as I introduced you, I think our listeners really need to sit down, roll up their sleeves, grab a pen and paper and take some notes. So, terms of your bio and your background, is there anything new that you wanted to add?
Lukas Resheske: No. I’m staying pretty consistent and steady with what I do. I try to … Every time I see that little shiny object in the corner of my eye, I tell myself to double-down on what I’m good at and what I need to keep doing. So, it’s pretty accurate, still.
Doug Morneau: Well, good for you. A lot of people … and I think that’s one of the challenges I see, in the business and marketing world, especially … is everybody’s chasing the shiny object or following the new guru. There are some things that just don’t change. There are the basics. If you look at the financial pyramid, they’ll talk about making sure you got life insurance and that you, kind of, stack it all the way up to the nice things. Often, I think, people overlook copy … the importance of copywriting and why they should invest in it. It’s not something you can just have your friend, your neighbor, your kid produce for you. So, do you wanna share with us how you got into this business and how you’ve transitioned from one career into another?
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. It’s kind of a weird route. I assumed for a long time when I was growing up, that I was gonna be career military. My family was military and I got a scholarship to go to school as an army officer. So right up until about 20 old, I thought I was gonna be career military, and this entrepreneur thing wasn’t even on the radar.
In college, two things happened. I met my wife and decided that I didn’t wanna be gone for 50 percent of our marriage. I also discovered “Early to Rise,” which is a newsletter that was written originally by Mark Ford and then taken over by a guy named Craig Ballantyne. That newsletter had a ton of insight on copywriting, marketing, entrepreneurship, business, and all that sort of thing. So, simultaneously realizing that I didn’t want to do what I thought I wanted to do with my life and discovering this newsletter, kind of sent me down the rabbit hole of entrepreneurship. Long story short, I met and then got to work with Mike Dillard. He’s the guy who ran a company called “The Elevation Group,” and several others. Then I got to work with him, and that was a fantastic experience, but he encouraged me to learn the skill of copywriting. After being stubborn for about two years, I followed his advice.
Doug Morneau: He’s a pretty smart guy. I like him.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, just a down-to-earth man … understatedly brilliant. I don’t know if people who aren’t super connected with him don’t realize just how good he is at putting together an offer and how good he is at his craft. So he encouraged me, specifically, to learn to copywrite. Then, again, long story short, I ended up getting pretty good pretty quick. I found some initial clients. Then the rest is history. I’ve worked with over 160, maybe 165, by now, different clients. I’ve coached thousands of people as a coach in several peoples’ programs. Now I have almost exactly 100 junior copywriters that I’ve personally trained and mentored that have gone out into the world and become freelancers and in-house writers at places like [EGORA 00:05:47] and Mind Valley and things like that.
Doug Morneau: That’s amazing. I love the copy that comes from EGORA. I had a writer working for us in the financial sector for a client that was from experience with EGORA because their people are trained really well and their copy converts really well.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, they are world class. You can’t get much better than a true EGORA-trained financial copywriter if you’re in that space.
Doug Morneau: Yeah. That’s really cool. So [inaudible 00:06:13] share with us … I have a bit of an understanding what you do. So, I love Direct Response. For our listeners in our audience that are thinking, “Oh, well you’re gonna write web copy,” why don’t you, in your own words … why don’t you explain what you do to help clients move the sales dial?
Lukas Resheske: Sure. Like with anything that involves humans and persuasion, it’s complicated when you dig down into it. At the core, it’s just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience. That’s it. Once you dig down beneath that core idea, you start to think, “Okay, who am I talking to? Why am I talking to them? What am I trying to get them to do? How do they know me? What do they want?” So, a lot of real human interaction comes into writing copy and it’s every single time, a person or a prospect or a customer interacts with your company, they have to encounter copy at each juncture, even when they’re dealing with support, even when they are in the raw stages of just discovering you.
So, I really believe that copywriting encompasses all of your company’s messaging and it’s not just a front-end acquisition. It’s not just a Facebook ad. It’s not just an email. That’s how I view it. I view it very holistically. When you start to wrap your mind around, “Copy is everything,” and “Copy is communication,” then you start to treat the communication that you do in your company very differently. It’s an opportunity to communicate and an opportunity to push your products or your brand or your story. That’s, basically, what I would explain to someone who thinks it’s just web copy. It’s just a thing that you have to slap on your site. It’s really not. It’s the actual conversation you’re having with your potential customers and your actual customers.
Doug Morneau: I like the way you describe it because it’s not just a landing page. So often, you’ll see people run an ad, drive you to a landing page. You’ll go through that process and you’ll go to the website and it’s like … there was a show years ago … my kids used to watch Sesame Street. It says, “One of these things is not like the other.” It’s like, “Hey, hang on a sec. I saw your ad. It, kind of, looked like your landing page, and after our landing page, I went to your website and the messaging is totally different.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, that incongruence is just so … It’s crazy how much time we put into that landing page or that we put into that funnel. Then we don’t realize that the prospect is probably only gonna spend about 15 seconds on that. Then they’re gonna bounce to the rest of your stuff and try and figure out more about you … if they have any questions or if they’re interested or whatever. It’s fascinating to see where we focused our attention versus what the actual user experience is.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, and like you said, “And where they are in the user experience.” Are they just shopping? Are they just trying to get … Is it somebody a junior person in the office has been tasked to find me x, and they’re just starting the search? Have they already narrowed down what they want for specific services? Now they’re trying to choose a vendor and they’re way down the road.
Lukas Resheske: Right. I teach all of my students a concept called “The Big Four.” It’s four big pillars on how you construct a specific message to a specific marketplace. When you did into that process, you start to realize “Okay, my stuff over here … my about page … I probably gonna have to be written four, maybe, a founder who wants to work with me if I’m a service provider. They wanna know who I am. Right? [00:09:49]
My contact form might be for the guy who’s just seeking information and wants a quote. When you pass everything through this lens of who you’re communicating with … about your site, everything about what you’re doing, everything about your social just shifts. I think it’s a good shift, but it’s kind of overwhelming at first like, “Oh, crap. All of this matters.”
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
At the core, copywriting is just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
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Doug Morneau: When you think about that mod of discussion you’ll see around branding and making sure your branding’s congruent and then you look at the copy. You’re going, “Okay.” You’ve got the branding right but, as you said, the messaging’s not correct. So can you share with us a major breakthrough or success you’ve had using … someone using your skills. You can name a client or not name a client. It’s totally up to you.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, I mean, so a lot of what I’ve done is under NDA, but one of the things that I’m pretty proud of, that I can talk about, is I worked with a client named Josh Turner. He has a LinkedIn Agency where it generates needs for people using LinkedIn, and he also has a course that teaches people to do the same thing, essentially.
Doug Morneau: Yep. Bought the course.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Doug Morneau: There you go.
Lukas Resheske: Pretty well-known guy in this space. Right? When I came in to help him with one of his launches, he was running into the issue where the marketplace was leaning away from LinkedIn as a tool. It just wasn’t the quote-unquote hot new thing.
Doug Morneau: Sure. Not the shiny object anymore.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, exactly. Also, he had been promoting a similar product for a while like it was his flagship. So there was a little bit of staleness to that offer. Coming into that kind of problem, we were able to reframe, not only his offer but also, the entire idea of LinkedIn using some good target market research and a little bit of overreach into different industries to find congruent ideas.
That sounds, really, like startup-speak, but, basically, what we did was we found a cool concept that was in tech journalism about how people talk about how people talk about technology in relation to how it’s actually progressing. It’s called the Gardner Hype Cycle, and I just found that researching. I’m, kind of, of a nerd and a researcher. So we took that one concept that was well-known in one area and applied it to his marketing funnel. Essentially, the big idea was LinkedIn is currently on a downward hype cycle but on an upward exponential growth cycle, which means it’s the perfect time for an opportunistic entrepreneur to use it as a tool.
Doug Morneau: Sure. That makes sense. Yep.
Lukas Resheske: When people aren’t talking about it … nobody’s talking about it but it’s growing, you know. We had a great way of explaining it as Microsoft had just purchased it. They were pouring tons of resources into it, and now, lo and behold, about a year and a half later, LinkedIn is back on the map and people are starting to talk more about it because of how it actually grew. So not only did we find a cool hook for that product, but also we ended up being right which is cool.
Doug Morneau: I get that. I mean, I’m a huge LinkedIn fan. I bought Josh’s stuff and I gave it to one of my staff. I said, “I want you to go through and learn this ’cause she managed my LinkedIn stuff. Yeah, so the copy was good, sales funnel was good … good enough, obviously that, as you said, Josh got a great reputation in the marketplace.
So when somebody’s thinking about, “I need to look at, re-evaluate my existing copy content,” what are the starting points for them if, … say, if you and I are gonna work together, you’re gonna say, “Okay, fine,” where do we start?”
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. So I’ll go back to that Big Four concept because of a lot of the time … I mean, entrepreneurs are always doing stuff that’s their boon and their curse. So they never start from square one. Right?
Doug Morneau: Yeah.
Lukas Resheske: So I can’t come in and really say that every person who’s listening to this can do the exact, same thing based on where they’re at in their company, but I can say that if they are willing to stop for a second and look at things through a different lens, then they might find a lot of things they can do. That lens would be what I call my Big Four Analysis. It’s your target market, their primal desire … I call ’em the Three Primals which I’ll explain in just a sec, the awareness level of that marketplace, and the sophistication level of that marketplace. So those are the four … target market, primals, awareness, and sophistication.
Doug Morneau: So when you say, “awareness,” what are you referring to … your client’s awareness of the marketplace or the potential customer’s awareness of your client?
Lukas Resheske: So, in this case, I am referring to the potential prospect or buyer that you, as an entrepreneur, are thinking about communicating with. So it’s your customer or your desired customer. When I talk about awareness, I’m specifically talking about their awareness of the problem and/or solution that they’re seeking in the context of your company.
Doug Morneau: Right. Okay.
Lukas Resheske: So, you know, if you’re a lead generation agency, then you’re looking for clients who, obviously, want to end up purchasing your services to generate leads … but where is that client at in their awareness of the problem? Do they have enough leads? Do they not have enough leads? Are their leads bad? That’s awareness.
Now, sophistication is what your competitors are doing, essentially, in that same space … what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, who they’re talking to, what the messages are, what the general zeitgeist of the market is saying because that’s going to affect how your potential prospect views your copy. You can’t get around it ’cause we don’t do anything in a vacuum.
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: So those four things … your target market, their primals, their awareness of their own problem, and the market’s sophistication around what their message is. Those are the four main pillars. Any entrepreneur or any copywriter can take those and put that, as an analysis, on their marketplace. What you’re quickly gonna realize is the more narrow and specific your target market, the easier it is to drill down onto their primal desires, their primal fears, and their core needs. Then, once you’ve got that, the easier it is to understand how aware they are of their problem.
Then, where they are with their problem dictates what kind of messages they’re seeing in the marketplace from their … from your competitors. So everything follows. Once you’ve got that laid out in as much detail as you can, you’re essentially gonna have a copy that writes itself.
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: So, for example, a bad target market is sane business people. There’s two hundred million of those, maybe more, but a great target market would be cosmetic dentists who live in major metropolitan areas in the United States. That’s a pretty good target market.
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: Right?
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: So if I take that pretty good target market and then I dig down into their primal desires and their fears and their core needs, then I realize that those dentists’ primal fears might be having to close down their practice or be seen as a failure in the eyes of their peers. Okay? That’s a fear.
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: That’s big.
Doug Morneau: Yep, that’s a big fear. Yep.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
At the core, copywriting is just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
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Lukas Resheske: Yeah. Their desire might be to work less or to open another practice or to golf more or to … maybe they’re mission-driven and they, generally, wanna help more people look better with their smile or whatever their desire is. Then, their core needs are actually a concept Tony Robbins teaches … which, you have your four core needs that every human being fulfills. It’s consistency, variety, significance, and love and connection. So those are always fulfilled by a person and how is that dentist currently fulfilling those? If you’re gonna sell something to them, does it violate those or does it threaten those? Once you know that, then you can, kind of, dig into awareness. You can dig into the sophistication and the copy just writes itself because, now, your webinar, your book, your seminar, your free dinner, or whatever, is super easy to communicate to that specific person. That make sense?
Doug Morneau: Yeah, it totally makes sense. With the exception of the “copy writes itself” part because …
Lukas Resheske: Well, let me carry that thought through, then.
Doug Morneau: Okay.
Lukas Resheske: So you’ve gotten your dentist. Right?
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: You understand what his primal desires and core needs are. Right?
Doug Morneau: Sure.
Lukas Resheske: You now know that he is aware enough of his own problem that he … So, he’s aware that he’s not seeing enough patients come through the door. Right? He’s not getting enough phone calls. That’s what he’s aware of. So he’s aware of a problem.
Doug Morneau: Yep. That’s right.
Lukas Resheske: He probably thinks that, maybe, he needs to do more flyers, maybe he needs to post on some social media or something, but he’s not really aware of a real solution. The sophistication being, “You have competitors who are also dental marketing agencies, but they are trying to target a bunch of different people, and they’re not really speaking in very well, so he’s not a sophisticated prospect in terms of the marketing that’s around. Right?
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Lukas Resheske: So, knowing all that, a Facebook ad that says, “If you’re a dentist with more than five chairs and you’re not constantly getting 20 calls a day from prospects, then something is wrong in your marketing, and I’d like to help you.” Boom … just writes itself.
Doug Morneau: There ya go. Yep.
Lukas Resheske: You know … you know who he was. He knew what his problem was, and you could speak to him in his language … copywrites itself.
Doug Morneau: Okay. Now I get it. That totally makes sense. I think a lot of the issues are we’re running so fast, often, we don’t take the time to actually sit down and work through that process. Then complain that we’re not getting the results we want.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly.
Doug Morneau: Not putting in the work. It’s like saying, “Hey, I walk by the gym every day, or I drive by the gym every day, but I’m not getting in shape.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s ’cause you gotta stop, get out of your car, put in an hour a day. That’s how it works.”
Lukas Resheske: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Doug Morneau: That’s really cool. So what’s the biggest myth that you hear? I love direct mail copy and direct response. I collect stuff. I go through the problem [inaudible 00:20:09] solve. I love to watch the odds and go, “Man, I can’t believe someone paid someone to produce that. It was so bad. It didn’t speak to my need.” But, I mean, that’s usually in traditional media. So when people are thinking about, “Hey, what you really need to do is get your copy in line with your prospects or hire someone to do that,” what’s the biggest myth that you hear in your industry?
Lukas Resheske: Oh man. So it goes back to awareness levels. Right? So, if someone is like you and they’re aware of direct response, and they’ve been in the game for a while, they’re gonna have a totally different perspective on what copy is capable of doing, but they also might not know the modern landscape … if that makes sense.
Doug Morneau: Yep. That does make sense. Yeah.
Lukas Resheske: So one of the myths right now is that, if you are familiar with copywriting and you’ve heard of the legends … the Halberts, the Carltons, the Bencivengas … you know, those guys, a lot of people view copy as this thing that you buy once and you pay a really expensive copywriter to do it, and then it just works. That’s the myth.
In reality, today, the best possible use of your time is to invest in a really good copywriter, but allow that copywriter the ability to manage their copy through the process … through the writing, through the testing, through the editing and optimization because, right now, we a better ability to test faster with more accuracy than anybody has ever had in direct response.
Doug Morneau: Absolutely. That’s so right on. Yep.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. It’s insane. It’s true… you were back in the direct mail days, so you know that it costs five, 10, 15, 20, maybe more, thousands of dollars just to send the first mailer and seed to a portion of the list. Then you had to wait a couple weeks to see what happened. Now, you drop a hundred dollars on Facebook ads and you’ve got results by the next day. It’s just absolutely incredible, but people are still holding through that myth of, “I’m gonna pay this guy ten grand and then it’s gonna be a miracle and I’m gonna make a million dollars.”
Doug Morneau: Yeah. A lot of people think the same thing about the web … say, “Hey I built my website.” I’m dying to say, “No, now you’re just starting. You started. Now you need to see how people interact and respond.”
When we were testing ads or headlines for direct mail, we were running classified ads in the newspaper, running them to a phone number and to seeing which line go the most calls. We weren’t answering them or responding. It was simply, “Can this classified ad generate a hundred calls a day? Well, then, maybe it’s a good headline to use for our mailer.”
Lukas Resheske: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and that kind of stuff is so much faster and easier to do nowadays, but people are still waiting for that. Home run and I guess the people who haven’t really played in the game too long.
Doug Morneau: Well, I’ve seen … If I look at your style and just reading your own copy on your website, I’ve seen, at least in the financial space, that if we had somebody that had more of a contrarian view, that we got a higher conversion rate. So we’d use the same media. We’d buy, maybe, 500,000 names of email to go out with one writer, 500,000 with the other writer and one writer would just, kind of, crush it ’cause one guy wrote and people are indifferent to him. He was a newsletter writer. They didn’t really like him. They didn’t really hate him. The other guy was either you loved him or you hated him and his copy just crushed it.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah and that’s a huge part, especially in a saturated market like finance because people are so exposed to so many offers and so much good copy that you gotta, kind of, shake ’em by the collar sometimes to get their attention.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, I mean, you could always go into a less competitive space like health and wellness. I’m sure there’s not much copy in there.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly.
Doug Morneau: Or golf, or, you know, something like that.
Lukas Resheske: Right. Yeah, just tiny [inaudible 00:24:08] inches.
Doug Morneau: Yeah. Absolutely. So what are you most excited about in the next six to 12 months?
Lukas Resheske: Six to 12 months … You know what’s really exciting right now is actually the opportunity created by some of the backlashes that these big media platforms are experiencing because of content. So you might have seen in the news … I don’t know if you follow the news. I try not to follow it too closely, but the Cambridge Analytical scandal in Facebook, the takedown of Alex Jones’ channel by YouTube, the general push towards more content and more rich stuff on Google … So all of these major online platforms are policing the types of ads and types of content that come up on their sites.
Doug Morneau: Sure, more than they ever have, for sure.
Lukas Resheske: More than they ever have, and they’ve always been a little anti-direct response, but now they’re becoming extremely focused on user experience and the type of content that’s being pushed out on their sites. So I personally believe, as a copywriter, that’s a massive opportunity because you’re gonna get these people who’ve been skirting the edges of what’s acceptable on those platforms and making decent money but really having to play that balance. They’re gonna get wiped out. They’re gonna leave. They’re gonna get pissed and then they’re not gonna start back up. So now you’ve got a huge opportunity of a lack of who used to be savvy or sophisticated advertisers and all that remains is for a good copywriter with a good funnel to come in and play with the rules as they are and just make bank and, kind of, fill that space.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
At the core, copywriting is just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
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Doug Morneau: Yeah, I agree. I’ve definitely seen a huge shift. When we were working the financial spaces, we ended up spending time on the phone with Google’s Legal Team. I said, “Look, we wanna be compliant. So we don’t want to run ads that get disapproved. So just tell us, in a perfect world, how could we work with you?” That made a huge difference. You’ll go, “How can you run those ads?” It’s like, “Well, we just got really close to what their exact requirement was and we just stayed within the lines. We colored in the lines and … Guess what? They’re happy.”
Lukas Resheske: Exactly. Yep, and that’s so underrated. The communication with a real person, the relationship that you have, is super important.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, and I’m seeing a lot more copy go towards more … almost like, editorial copy as well, where it’s not as direct-response. I like more, “ask for the money” part of it. Like you said, so the copy, the content’s changing and I’m seeing a lot of changes to support what you’re saying in the content area. In addition to what’s happened in Cambridge, what’s happened close to my home because I’m in Vancouver and some of the team was in Victoria which is about a half-hour away from me. You’re seeing things like Google and Facebook and Twitter banning industries now. They’re banning cryptocurrency. They’re banning CBD. Even though CBD is a legal product, they’re banning it. I recently saw this. So I follow the news as it relates to my industry, and they just recently started banning recovery and addiction counselors and houses and treatment centers until they can go through a certification process. Yeah, so it’s getting tougher for advertisers, like you said, who has been doing … kind of schlepping crappy stuff out there.
Lukas Resheske: Right.
Doug Morneau: Those days are coming to an end.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, they are, and they have been for a while, but people have been able to, kind of, play with it or look for hacks, and I understand that mentality because if you can figure it out, you make good money for a little while, but it’s never how I’ve chosen to play. I don’t like that, “Look over your shoulder” type of mentality. It’s super interesting because the opportunity is now there due to the vacuum. If someone leaves the platform or tries to market somewhere else, then you get to fill it and there’s still such a massive amount of volume at a much cheaper price than you could’ve gotten, pretty much, anywhere else. As a copywriter, that’s really exciting because I can put the right message in front of more people for less cost and that’s just fun to play with.
I think, to your point … You also said copy’s moving in a little bit more of an advertorial or, kind of like, content-based direction, I guess. What I’ve found is that a lot of people discount the kind of … so my wife used to volunteer at the zoo and one of her jobs was to watch the animals in their pens and see what they do and watch their behavior.
There’s something called stereotypical behavior in animals, especially when they’re penned up, and humans also have stereotypical behavior. You can, kind of, gauge what your message is going to do or elicit … or what kind of action it’s going to elicit in a person based on their stereotypical behavior and use that to your advantage in marketing. It’s not as direct as saying, “Hey, if you want more information on this thing, click here,” and then they click there.
For instance, you could write something on Facebook and it was shared a million times, but what happens after you wrote that and it’s shared that million times is that almost every single time, a person will click to the page, look and see what else is available there, look for more information on the page … and if you understand that one step of stereotypical behavior, you can write things to get attention that is going to lead to that. Those are all trackable, especially if you have wing tracking and all that kind of stuff.
So the traditional view of a person doing direct response and saying, “This is my mailer. This is my action. Anything outside of that is unwanted or we’re trying to mitigate.” I think that we’re gonna start seeing, with better tracking and with better analytics, that stuff that is designed to capture attention and elicit a mood and drive some sort of stereotypical behavior afterward, is going to get more and more attractive in how effective it is. Basically, that’s a really scientific way of saying that branding and content are becoming a very, very viable direct response mechanism.
Doug Morneau: Well, I think one of the things that you’ve mentioned, that I want to bring up, is it’s about patience. This is a long game. So the idea, like you said, “Hey, let’s hire a direct response copywriter and we’re going to pound out some ads and we’re gonna drive people through a landing page into a credit card page and take their money and move on,” … opposed to, like you said, “How do we get right to copy and content that gets shared to a million people and takes them to the next step?” So the bit of the dating before we get married and helping to pre-qualify people … Like you say, “You can measure each of those steps along the way and make tweaks and see your ROI.” So what if we get a million two hundred thousand share it? What if we get a half percent higher click-through rate? Then turn the dials a little bit instead of looking for the fire hose response.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, absolutely. I also feel like, though, … They talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the podcast which was that entrepreneurs are never really starting from square one. They’re always doing something. What I’ve noticed is that most ambitious business owners tend to have these … call ’em “dams” or “blockages,” that they’re just not really seeing in their business.
When someone can come in and use a piece of copy on a particular asset or resource that you have in a good way, that is the fire hose, but when you’re designing a marketing strategy, it’s better to have that long-term view. So if someone can come in and help you like, “Oh, you haven’t emailed your list in 30 days? You never offered a high-ticket offer? You’ve never offered a cross-sell? You’ve never offered an upsell?”
Those types of blockages can come in and cause major change really fast, but when you’re designing the strategy, that wrong view … the branding what people view about you, how they move through the experience of being in business with you, that’s where … People, kind of, get obsessed with the tactics in trying to do something brand new right now that can make a fire hose that’s out of scratch and they ignore the stuff they have, but they also ignore the long term on their strategy. So it’s kinda funny.
Doug Morneau: Well, it’s funny because I’ve worked with enough businesses and, after going through, kind of, an evaluation, a qualification of their business, and I’d say, “Well, let’s look at the low-hanging fruit first. So let’s talk about what your customers who are the most profitable, the most fun to work with, who pay you the quickest and let’s start mailing your existing list.” They’re going, “Well, I want you to find new people.” It’s like, “Well, we can find new people, but you’ve got money sitting in the bank already. All we need to do is ask them.” They often were so interested in attracting new people into their list they were forgetting that there are people there they have a relationship with that bought them and trusted them at some point, and all they need to do is go back and serve them and ask them, and they’ll pay.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. It’s incredible. I think the statistic I saw recently was 70 to 80 percent of your revenue is usually from existing customers to the extent that you can rely on a certain predictable amount of revenue from people who’ve already worked with you. People just don’t focus on that. They focus on the front end, and it’s insane to me because the whole point is to make money in business, not to acquire brand new customers and then leave them.
Doug Morneau: Yeah. That may answer the question I ask when I speak to business audiences often. “Has anyone heard the old statistic that it cost ten times more to attract a customer than keep an old one?” So everybody puts up their hand. So, “Okay, out of your marketing budget, what percentage are you spending on retention versus new acquisition?” Then, there to really sure. So [inaudible 00:34:14], “So okay, how many of you are spending any money keeping your existing customers happy and asking them to buy more?” Oh, no hands or very few hands. It’s like, “Well, you just agreed that it cost more to find somebody than to keep somebody,” but, you know, you’re right. We’re creatures of, “I want it now and want it fast,” and, “There must be an easier way. Let’s look at what somebody else over there is doing,” which I think is one of your quotes on your website that … What do you say, “A wannabe copywriter imitates, but a true professional understands.”
Lukas Resheske: Yeah.
Doug Morneau: Yeah.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, that brings up a whole new can of worms. I’m a very anti-template in how I train people to write copy because I personally believe that templates can be helpful if you know the underlying principles that you should be adhering to because templates can speed things up for you.
Doug Morneau: Sure, ’cause might give you a framework like you’re saying, or if you’re running an autoresponder series, whether it’s the things that you want to do to move people.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly. Yeah, and that helps, but you need to understand the underlying stuff first. You know, a lot of the current communication around marketing … you know, you hear about funnel-hacking and scripts and all this kind of stuff. The underlying principles of a lot of this stuff make a lot of sense … to model success, to see what the flow of your successful competitors and competition is doing … all of that, like, the underlying principle makes sense, but in practice, the way people actually do it, is rip-off, go as fast as possible, barely change whatever template or boilerplate they’ve gotten and then wonder why they’re not getting results.
I’m a student of what people really do rather than what you tell them to do. That case right now, that’s why I’m, kind of, anti-template when it comes to copywriting. I would much rather have a person who’s never trained in copywriting genuinely communicate with a customer in a clear way and have it be completely wrong, technically, when it comes to copy because most of the time, in my experience, technically incorrect copy, where you forgot to call the action at the three quarters mark, you forgot to add a guarantee, your lead was a little long and, maybe, you might’ve lost someone who wasn’t that interested, or whatever. Right?
But if you’re genuinely communicating with your prospect, that’s gonna be so much more effective than going, “Yep. Got the headline, got the sub-head, got the story lead. All right, now I’m going in now and I’m answering this objection. Now, I’m offering this and putting a guarantee in there. Now, click here. Buy now. Why is nobody buying?
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At the core, copywriting is just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
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Doug Morneau: That makes sense. I mean, it’s really cool. I’ve done the funnel hacking side where I’ve said, “Okay, we’re going into a new industry as a client.” I said, “Well, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go to your competitor and we’re gonna through their whole sales process and buy what they’re doing.” So I’ll see what they’re doing. Lots of times, it’s an eye-opener because, as you said, they’re leaving money on the table. They’re going, “Oh, I never thought of a high-ticket item.” I said, “You notice after you bought, this, this, this, and this, and this, and now they’re going for the big ask like two weeks later? So we don’t wanna copy that.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly, and I think that’s what’s getting mixed up, at least for a lot of the entrepreneurs that I see. They’re either pissed off that someone’s ripping them off or they’re confused as to why their complete rip-off isn’t working.
Doug Morneau: I’m just asking you. This is for your feedback. So just be blunt. When you’re writing copy for somebody, doesn’t the copy have to represent the brand or the person? So if you’re writing for a person who’s a celebrity or a spokesperson, if you look at the Josh Turners of the world or those guys, doesn’t it have to match their persona if the people are gonna see them out in public on the stage and read their books?
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, I think so. I don’t that you have to write in any specific kind of way. I’m much more of a person who likes to match the tone of whatever guru I’m working with if I’m working with a particular person because I think their brand is part of the sale. I actually teach my students, sometimes, when they come to me and they ask me why Frank Kern did something … Obviously, Frank Kern’s a great marketer. He’s done a lot of awesome stuff. I’m not shooting on Frank Kern, but the point is that he has built such a brand around himself and what he can do that a lot of what he does may not be applicable to a person who doesn’t have that type of brand or doesn’t have that type of following.
Doug Morneau: Okay, yeah.
Lukas Resheske: Without understanding that context, it’s difficult for a new marketer or someone come in to understand that. The way he did it, in particular, might not be effective for them, but the principle behind what he did might be.
Doug Morneau: Okay, I guess that’s what I was getting at. You did a better job at drawing it out ’cause I was thinking of guys like Frank Kern and Ryan Deiss, and all these guys and people want to rip off or copy their stuff. And they go, “It doesn’t work.” It’s like, “Well, you’re not Frank Kern. You’re not Ryan Deiss. You’re whoever you are and that persona doesn’t match you when they look at who you are online.
Lukas Resheske: Right. Yeah, and that’s a huge part of … especially if they’re personality-based. A lot of businesses, right now, are trying to be personality-based. They’re being the expert or the guru, but there’s also something to be said about, “If you don’t have a brand yet. If nobody knows who you are, you can take steps to be positioned in a certain way, and some of those feel and look more authentic than others, but that’s more of, like, talking to a PR person, to a person who’s an expert in creating authority on first glance, but then you have to create something unique from that initial perception. If you sound like a “Me too,” or if you sound like someone who they’ve already heard about or you’re saying things that they’ve already heard, then it’s not going to be interesting.
Doug Morneau: Yep, that makes sense.
Lukas Resheske: Hopefully.
Doug Morneau: So, we’re drawing close to the end. I wanna be respectful of your time. This has been super good. I hope the listeners, you’re getting the message here. I’m a huge support of outsourcing and hiring smart people that have expertise in writing copy, for a couple reasons … first of all, they’re likely to write better than you are … they definitely write better than I write. Secondly, you’re gonna get another fresh set of eyes in your customer and you might be leaving some money on the table and just simply missing an opportunity.
So, Lukas, thanks for your time. Thanks for sharing with us and giving away some of your tips and secrets.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, absolutely. I hope I was helpful for the audience. I know you’ve got a varied audience … some people working in bigger companies, some entrepreneurs, but if anybody has any questions, then, I’m pretty easy to find on the internet. I’m also pretty approachable. I don’t try to be the untouchable sage on the mountaintop.
Doug Morneau: Speaking of that, how can people find you?
Lukas Resheske: My name, Lukas Resheske, on Facebook is pretty easy to find ’cause you spell it with a “k” and Resheke’s kind of odd. So it should be really easy to find on Facebook. That’s where I spend the majority of my time when I’m marketing and teaching. Then my website, www.lukasresheke.com. Either of those.
Doug Morneau: Excellent, and I saw you on Amazon as well.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, I’ve got a couple books up. They’re primarily for copywriters if you wanna be a freelance copywriter if you’re interested in that. It’s some of the stuff that I’ve written for my students and some of the lessons that I’ve had. If you’re just interested, yeah, absolutely. You can go jump over there. Just type in my name as an author and my stuff will come up.
Doug Morneau: Well, awesome. One last question and I’ll let you get back to your day of helping your clients make buckets of money. That’s who’s one guest you think I need to have on my podcast?
Lukas Resheske: So, you’ve had a lot of guests so far, and I was really happy to see some of the names that I saw, but I wasn’t able to get a comprehensive list. So, if you haven’t yet, I would recommend trying to get Justin Brooke. Have you spoken with Justin?
Doug Morneau: I have not. Nope.
Lukas Resheske: So Justin Brooke is a very talented media buyer. He’s also very progressive in the sense that he’ll probably talk a lot more and a lot more intelligently about what we discussed earlier which is the ad networks changing, and what they’re doing, and what they expect.
So Justin Brooke would be a good person to try and get on here.
Doug Morneau: Well, excellent. That’s super cool. So thanks so much. Listeners, as usual, make sure that we transcribe all these notes so you can go back and you can review some of the stuff that Lukas and I talked about. We’ll make sure we put links to his website, his social media sites, Facebook as well, and his book.
So thanks for tuning in. I look forward to serving you on our next episode.
Lukas Resheske: Thank you.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: THE FOUR PILLARS OF WRITING COPY THAT SELLS
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At the core, copywriting is just communication. It’s being able to accurately convey a message to an intended audience.
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