The Anatomy of a Perfect SaaS Landing Page - Joanna Wiebe @ Copyhackers

For this episode, we talk to the original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe, the founder of Copyhackers.

Joanna is a rockstar in the world of copywriting and conversion optimisation. Not only is she the brilliant mind behind Copyhackers, a wildly popular copywriting blog, agency, and copy education provider, but she's also the founder of Airstory, an amazing SaaS product that helps people organize their research and writing.

It's no wonder why Joanna is such a big name in the industry. She's spoken at some of the most prestigious conferences around, including Mozcon, INBOUND, SearchLove, and CXL Live. Her passion for helping others improve their writing and increase conversions is truly inspiring. 

Come along as we explore how to build the perfect SaaS-focused conversion landing page, why interviews, demos and thank you pages are the cornerstone for client insights, the best copywriting frameworks, the importance of a value proposition and how to write great CTAs and offers and how to validate the copy on your landing page.

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More about Copyhackers: https://copyhackers.com
Joanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/copyhackers
Joanna’s New Newsletter: https://joannawiebe.substack.com

Upraw Media: https://uprawmedia.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/uprawmedia
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uprawagency
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UprawAgency
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If you are keen to know more about Upraw Media or be a Masters of SaaS guest speaker, visit uprawmedia.com or DM us on LinkedIn. We are also on Youtube if you'd like to put a face to the names and voices of the best in SaaS. Thanks for tuning in!

Transcript

Todd (00:08.437)

Hey, Joanna, welcome to the show.

Joanna Wiebe (00:08.711)

Hello, thanks for having me, Todd.

Todd (00:12.657)

stuff so you are the original conversion copywriter and founder of copy hackers that's quite a big statement the original copywriter og conversion copywriter og what is your backstory?

Joanna Wiebe (00:23.970)

Yeah, so I was calling it conversion-focused copywriting and then I got lazy and just called it conversion copywriting. And then someone I was going to go talk at an event and they were like, we need your bio. And I was like, oh, so I just called myself the original conversion copywriter, Joanna, we blah, blah, blah. Um, so that's where that comes from. But the whole idea of conversion copywriting comes from, you know, me stumbling through what copywriting even is in my first years.

Todd (00:38.917)

Ha ha.

Joanna Wiebe (00:53.990)

as a copywriter, brand new to marketing, brand new to everything. I had just dropped out of law school and was like, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. And I had like creative writing stuff that I did in undergrad. And so, you know, you're like, okay, well, maybe. And so anyway, I would got hired as a creative writer, which really meant copywriter at an agency. And I didn't know what it meant. So it was just like, fiddle with words, make things sound good. And then I got hired to do, to be a senior copywriter.

writer over at a big tech company. And that was like, that was into it. And I've learned that it's a real thing. Copywriting isn't just throwing words down and making stuff sound good because once you start measuring it, then you realize, oh man, which of course every tech company, not every, a lot of tech companies definitely aim to measure things. And the group that I was in at Intuit definitely aimed to measure things. So I went from working

Todd (01:35.401)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:53.970)

agency where I was just like, you know, making a brand sound fun to writing a landing page and the email that drove to it to get people who were on one merchant service provider to switch over to into its merchant service provider. And then having them measured. And like if you perform well, you get a better bonus. So like all of these incentives. And that's when I started to go like, oh, okay.

isn't just wordsmithing, what is it then? So it's supposed to get people to buys, isn't that what sales people do? Am I in sales? And then I was like, that's kind of cool because all the people I know in sales, I'm one like, so I haven't actually met a skeezy car sales person. I know that's like a thing, but I haven't met, I've only actually met really well off nice car sales people. And I was like, I could do that. And then I started to see this other world of direct response copywriting, which everybody's trained

right? It's all letters with highlighting on them. And so I was like, but yeah, but it's kind of doing some cool stuff. Like I think I can learn some things from this, even though I'm not writing mailers. But there was still this conflict. Everybody in the, a lot of people in the organization and people I just like, otherwise who would talk about copywriting would conflate it with writing a blog post or some other like any any writing was copyrighting. And I

Todd (02:57.317)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (03:23.950)

right because if you get hired as a copywriter, if you get hired as a copywriter at a tech company, they're going to expect results. And so that's when I started to say like, no, we're gonna, it's conversion focused copywriting, conversion focused copywriting. And then I said it so many times and I talk really fast too. And I kept stumbling over the focused parts. I was like, effort conversion copywriting. And that's where it came from.

Todd (03:34.564)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (03:51.037)

Amazing. It's so true. Even to this day, I speak to people and say, Oh, we hired a content manager. I'm like, okay, so are they going to be like writing blogs and making videos? Or are they going to be doing conversion focus copy? And it's like, oh, well, both. I'm like, okay, well, these are very, very different things. I mean, it's a whole science, right? I mean, you when you started, I mean, it's just maybe to give some context when you started this. This was 10 plus years ago. 12 years ago. Yeah. And I'm guessing and I'm guessing when you start it like now, if you want to, you know,

Joanna Wiebe (04:05.594)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (04:11.510)

12 years ago when I started copy hackers this year, yeah.

Todd (04:21.117)

Copywriting, you have copy hackers, you have a lot of CXL, you have a bunch of information on this. Back then I'm guessing you didn't have anywhere near as much information, so yeah. Is that why you started copy hackers or...?

Joanna Wiebe (04:23.914)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (04:28.592)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (04:31.070)

Yeah, I actually, I was, so when I was at Intuit, I was really interested, you know, as tech. Intuit was installed software at the time, like QuickBooks was the kind that you bought at Best Buy or Staples in a box and you installed the CD wrong. I'm really dating myself, but that wasn't the way it had to be at the time. There were other cool things like Intuit also had, I guess,

Todd (04:49.502)

Yeah.

Todd (04:51.718)

I remember, I remember.

Joanna Wiebe (05:01.090)

but that was the personal finance software. And then Mint came out and Mint was like all online and we were like, what? It can be all online and suddenly like everybody got excited about building software. Now like we can build it's in the cloud and like you just got so excited. Right, so we were like going with that. Now I'm thinking about all the tools that that I built, but what was the question?

Todd (05:30.517)

I think my original point was around when you started this, there just wasn't much education or information and that's maybe why you started copy hackers I guess. I think I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna go back to the beginning

Joanna Wiebe (05:33.254)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (05:37.770)

Yes. So I was so keen on this like, this world of people starting to build their own things that I started hanging out in hacker news a lot, just like reading. I wasn't engaging. I had a little account, a little profile called blogger girl. And because I was blogging as well. So it's just like what I went with. It wasn't a reference to copywriting at all. Anyway, so I was hanging out there and then I started, uh,

person, Sharif Bache, who put together a tool and he did like a show HN, show Hacker News is like a post you can do. And it went to the top of Hacker News and so I clicked through and he was like just showing this tool that he built and the website for it. And I was like, I read the website and I was like, oh no, this website is not good, Sharif. So I just quickly put together a deck.

That was like, here's what you're doing. Here's what the copy is. Here's why that might not work. Maybe try this instead. And then I just fired it his way. And that's kind of where, like I was just very interested in this stuff. And then he posted to Hacker News, my, this, this deck that I had sent him in this HN post that blew up. That was all about like the Hacker News community is so giving. Look.

Joanna Wiebe (07:07.650)

pull deck together for me. I got inundated, my inbox, I was out for dinner for my birthday, I got home and my inbox was just like, like full, like stupid full. And I was like, what's happening? And I saw all these, all these startup founders had reached out and said like, hey, I love what you did there. Can you help me? Can you help me? And the first ones I was like, sure, sure, sure, sure. Then as I started like replying to all of these, I was like, I do not have time for this. I actually have a full time job. So I can't do this.

Todd (07:36.058)

Ha ha.

Joanna Wiebe (07:37.650)

And then so I'd say, sorry, I can't. They're like, well, why could you at least write a book or something? Like can you put an ebook together? And that's where I was like, I can probably do that. So I took all of these people that I was doing this free work with and they were like, I'll pay you and I don't want to get paid. As soon as you get paid, it becomes way less interesting. And I loved tech as like just a space where people help each other. I just really loved it. So I was like, no, don't pay me. I'll write this book though. And then the people that I did work with, I turned those into little case studies that

Todd (07:57.738)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (08:07.650)

throughout the book, which turned into this big 250 page book that I then had some beta readers come in and say, like, no, do not do this giant ebook. So I broke it up into ebooks and I launched those ebooks on Hacker News. And then that was really it that like I sold, I think it was $20,000 worth, which for me, I had just left my tech job. And for me, I was like, okay, that's a good signal.

Joanna Wiebe (08:37.710)

from that point on and then take on some consulting gigs and keep kind of sharing everything I learned as I was consulting with people, just bring it back, publish it. And that's where that's why I started writing and sharing online.

Todd (08:53.717)

Super cool. Yeah, maybe you can explain to people what is copy hackers in today's kind of formation

Joanna Wiebe (08:58.350)

Sure, Copy Hackers is, I mean, we call it the home of the world's copywriters. That doesn't mean we exclusively work with copywriters, but over the last 12 years, copywriters have gravitated towards us. Yeah, but it's a space with free resources and then paid training as well. So it's three, almost $4 million a year training company and that's not services.

Todd (09:12.238)

Yes.

Joanna Wiebe (09:28.450)

fully like buy a course, learn how to do this. Yeah. And with a lot of lots of free, there's the paid stuff, right? If you want to get really good at this, or if you have something to write that's like, it's so critical that I get this right, like you're putting together your onboarding emails, and you've done all of this work to acquire these new users, but then they're like

Joanna Wiebe (09:58.550)

on these emails, then you'll probably want to go and take the full email training program. But other than that, if you're like, I know a lot of, we have just 100,000 people on our list, and over the years, over 12 years, I've heard from these people who used to work at small companies, or they were small at the time. So you might have been a VP, or not, sorry, you might have been a marketing coordinator at Unbounce 10 years ago. And now you're a VP of

somewhere else. But along the way you were taking our tutorials like our free they're called Tutorial Tuesdays. You were taking those maybe as a team. This is like anecdotal what we've heard from people. Someone would get our tutorial on Tuesday, book time with the team on Friday to go sit in a room and execute on this tutorial. Totally free, do it yourself, it's fine. And that's kind of what we're there for. I would love for everything to be free so that people

Todd (10:29.117)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (10:58.390)

can just do this and get hopefully good results and we can keep hearing from people and iterating and learning, we do as much free as we can. And then there's the paid upgrade stuff, yeah. Yeah.

Todd (11:11.757)

Amazing, thank you for the context in the back story. So with that in mind, you're probably the perfect person to ask how to build the, well, if there was such a thing as a perfect SAS conversion focused landing page, you're probably the perfect person to ask that, that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna try and get the perfect structure in how you would go about doing that. So yeah, maybe we can just jump straight into that. So you have like your own process

Joanna Wiebe (11:33.150)

I love you. Bye.

Todd (11:42.018)

phases, maybe you can just start by explaining what that overall process is and we can dig in.

Joanna Wiebe (11:44.470)

Yeah, so it's a pretty straightforward thing. Um, begins with research and discovery, which then moves into writing, editing, and then comes validation and experimentation. So we've got in that first phase, I say research and discovery, but it ends up then turning into this like mini phase called planning. So synthesize everything you learned in research and discovery and then plan what you're going to do so that you can write wireframe, edit.

Todd (12:07.340)

Mm-hmm

Joanna Wiebe (12:14.670)

into validating. So is the market actually likely to not even respond well to it, but is there anything in here that could be off-putting for people? A lot of brands are way more terrified of negatively impacting in some way than they are hopeful that they'll get positive results out of it. So oftentimes validation is just like, let's just make sure we're not like breaking our brand somehow here and like our audience will come away not

Todd (12:38.659)

Hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (12:44.350)

liking us or totally confused about what we do. But yeah, that's the basic process in research and discovery. You're doing exactly what it sounds like. This is the part, when I talk about those books that I launched with on Hacker News, the first book was called, Where Stellar Messages Come From, and it's about like stop staring at your screen. And I know I can say this till I'm blue in the face, and I will say it until I'm 190 years old, and people still will not want to do it, but I think chatGBT will help with this.

Joanna Wiebe (13:14.350)

to just like stare at the screen, you want to go listen to what customers prospects your audience look likes, what they're saying. And then you just shut up and take what they said and put it on the page. Um, and I know it's slightly more complicated than that, but it doesn't have to be that much more complicated than that. So you go and listen, you take what you hear, you like, depending on how much you hear, you might be categorizing things.

Todd (13:28.817)

Ha ha!

Joanna Wiebe (13:44.350)

fine, like, oh, here's the categories, like just segments, audience segments, and then what they're saying. So like a basic table or spreadsheet, where you have problems that X market. So VPs of marketing commonly talk about this problem when it comes to a solution like ours or our category, like what it solves, and things like that, right? But we want to go listen, we want to categorize what we're hearing so that we can then write for people

Joanna Wiebe (14:14.390)

sound like we're inside their heads in ways that almost no copy actually does because of so many things we're telling ourselves about what web copy or a perfect SAS landing page is supposed to do or how it's supposed to sound. Your headline should be six words long. It can't be longer than that. It definitely shouldn't be in the first person. Did you just put in quotation marks? You can't do that either, right? Like all of these like crazy ideas.

Todd (14:19.439)

Hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (14:44.470)

Honestly, I got blessed designers, but I think they come more from the design world than they do from persuasion and actually like Conversion copywriting or direct response copywriting. So that's the process though

Todd (14:58.257)

I got it, makes sense. So on the research side, in my experience, this is one, it sounds like for you as well, you said you'll be banging on with the same message for years and years, but research seems to be one of the most overlooked parts. And it's probably, if you were gonna do one thing really, really well, it was probably, make sure you do incredibly good research. So do you feel like the, you kind of said that they're speaking to the customer, I guess, is like the holy grail of research, right? You wanna hear, you wanna feel, you know, the actual, and use the actual words

Joanna Wiebe (15:14.672)

Yeah.

Todd (15:28.877)

But can you put a bit more meat on the bone? Because even just doing interviews, there's a whole science around how you can do interviews, and I'm not expecting you to give me the whole schooling and that. But what would be one or two, three pieces of advice you would give to someone wanting to do interviews?

Joanna Wiebe (15:31.250)

Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe (15:44.110)

Yeah, do the follow jobs to be done. Clicked quickly with Bob from Rewired Group years ago when we were both at Business of Software in Boston. They're just exactly right. Like you don't have to interview a lot of people. We've now followed the jobs to be done methodology when it comes to our interviews because they used to just be like, I would sit down with a founder and basically just for an hour just pick their brain

Todd (15:50.462)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (16:05.280)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (16:14.170)

on why they built this thing in the first place and then like who they built it for and why is that the right group? And that's where, I mean, that alone is good. So if you are a consultant trying to find the right message for some reason, I don't know why, but okay. Then that's a good thing to do. You can also, if you're a founder of a SaaS company, you can just interview yourself. So just like open up your recorder and start like talking through where this came from in the first place.

Todd (16:40.061)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (16:44.170)

your transcript is basically built instantly in any tool you're using now. So then just read over it, print it out if you want to get like really analog about the whole thing, print it out and like circle or highlight things that are interesting, that don't sound like marketing. But so if you're going to get, if you're going to let's say do an initiative where you're like, we are interviewing our customers,

Todd (16:49.901)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (17:14.170)

I say follow jobs to be done if you're like, oh, it's just me. And I just have to like get some messages out there. Still try jobs to be done, but if you can't do that, then at least sit down and interview yourself. Not trying to give polished messages. If you've heard it, if you've written it before, strike it. It's not, it's a no. Has to be like the reason for interviews. Yes. There's the overarching what? Like the message to say.

Todd (17:33.846)

Mm-hmm

Joanna Wiebe (17:44.510)

But there's also the how. There's the actual language that people use to talk about these things that they're going through, what they want, what they've tried, what's failed them, what they're hopeful for. All of these things, they'll tell you. So, but yeah, when it comes to the actual like scientific part of it, I do the thing like I attended Bob's workshop and then I've bought his training online as well, Bob again from Rewired Group.

Joanna Wiebe (18:14.070)

paper, you draw a line diagonally down it, and you start going through the journey. And ideally, there's two of you involved in the interview, but if you can't do that, I've done them alone as well. And then just listen, make sure you're recording and then go back. And I use notes, I use Apple Notes. And I just type out interesting insights that I'm hearing.

Joanna Wiebe (18:44.070)

interesting language, I put it in quotation marks. So I know it's like actual voice of customer. And if it's an insight that I have, I put it in all caps. So I know that was me, it's not from the thing. But this is really like basic, right? It sounds like you can't do that at scale. Well, no, but you're only going to do like seven interviews. So don't worry about it. And if you can't find time to do that work, to get what you're about to get out of it, then you really need to like hire someone else because it's really

Todd (19:02.002)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (19:14.050)

important work to do.

Todd (19:17.617)

Oh, for sure. And can I add one in there? I don't know if you agree with this, but whenever we've done custom interviews and we've helped our clients with custom interviews, we've spoken to the sales team and the sales people always have such great information when it comes to objections and things that so do you think speaking to sales teams is a good idea as well?

Joanna Wiebe (19:32.310)

So I was working with a tech company called Git Prime. They've been acquired since. They had, they were my first introduction to Chorus.ai which is like Gong, a lot of people use Gong as well. But that was when I could really, it's one thing to like listen in on sales, like sure talk to salespeople, great, but they're gonna synthesize it, they're gonna summarize things for you. Here's what people like. And you're like, I don't, no, no, no,

summary, I need like raw data. And so if you can go in and like actually watch the demo happening and especially watch over time, watch with different salespeople, it's eye opening. You can see what people in a demo don't care about when they just like glaze over. Like this is the kind of stuff that you can't read in a transcript. You can't tell when a person

Todd (20:31.761)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (20:32.250)

tell that in watching a demo. So I love, love, love watching demos. And it's definitely part of the cornerstone of the research that we like to do. So the corner, like the core stuff, interview new customers wherever possible. Sometimes it's worthwhile to interview like long-term customers, clients. If you have to narrow it down, talk to the newest customers you have. Their memories are freshest, right? They're not willing to put up with the same level of crap

Todd (20:36.664)

Oh yeah.

Todd (20:54.159)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (20:58.224)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (21:02.290)

somebody who's been around for a long time is. So interviews, do the demo recordings, like go through them like we just talked about, sales call recordings, demo recordings, or you wanna call them, whatever they are, and then thank you page surveys or confirmation page surveys. So any new lead or any new customer, as soon as like, and this is good if you have some sort of checkout, right? Or some place to land people. I know like, that sounds like e-commerce what I'm talking about when you hit

Todd (21:24.617)

Hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (21:32.250)

on a pricing table, and then you move to the credit card screen, then the lander after that, the confirmation page. People love to drop right into app, but I'm like, this is such a seducible moment. They have just said yes to you. They've just said, okay, I'm going to give you my money or I'm going to give you my email address. Those are really big moments for them, and they like you in that moment. They're more likely to like you than not to like you. If they didn't like you, they probably wouldn't be engaging with you. So don't worry about it. These are the times when you can ask.

Todd (21:37.781)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (22:02.250)

One question, I recommend one question and this is one that I worked on and refined when I was at Conversion Rate Experts and it goes, what was going on in your life that brought you to blank? So what was going on in your life that brought you to listen to this podcast today or download this podcast today? What was going on in your life that brought you to recognize that you need to grow your list, whatever that thing is, right? And then leave a big blank space for them to actually fill this in.

Todd (22:06.681)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (22:32.250)

with their own words, not multiple choice. Don't people are like, oh, but my response rates will be low. This is the moment you can ask them to share with you. And you'll be amazed. People do. They write out real insights into like, look, I was struggling with this thing. I'm so tired of it. And they'll get into like real language. And then you get to go through that and make turn it into what to say and how to say it. And it's like,

Todd (22:39.125)

Mm-hmm

Todd (22:56.180)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (23:02.270)

That's it. Those are where I say that where I wouldn't do an engagement. If they don't have a sales team, then I'd have to do an engagement without going through demo call recordings. But otherwise, if you can interviews, demo recording or sales call replays and thank you page surveys, you'll have everything you need. Yeah.

Todd (23:21.917)

Yeah.

Todd (23:25.717)

The last one, the last one's gold. I don't recall anybody in SAS doing that. And even now for my own business, I'm thinking, you know, we should do the same thing after somebody completes a consultation request, or we should do that. So great advice. I'll definitely test that. I'm not sure if you can see it, but I'm not sure. I'm just going to go back to the previous one. I'm going to go back to the previous one. I'm going to go back to the previous one. I'm going to go back to the previous one. I'm going to go back to the previous one. I'm going to go back to the previous one.

Joanna Wiebe (23:37.510)

the insights have, we've been asking for our copy school, we've got now like 5,000 plus responses that we can, and you can see over the years how things change, right? What was important to people five years ago when they were buying this program is still important, but there might be something else that they're saying now or a tone of optimism compared to like a tone of, oh my gosh, I'm so stressed about X. So yeah, it's a very, and it's so easy to set up.

Todd (23:46.901)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (23:54.061)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (24:07.450)

like get a type form embedded in a landing page. And as soon as they complete that, then you can send them into app. But yeah, I love it too.

Todd (24:11.438)

Yeah.

Todd (24:17.497)

Got it. Okay, perfect. So we've done research. We have some amazing insights from our customers. We don't want to stare looking at a page. You said, now we have all this information. We actually start wanting to put pen to paper or creating some kind of wireframe. So kind of what comes next after you've done the research?

Joanna Wiebe (24:30.210)

Then you have to make sense of it. So like I was mentioning, you've got to go through, synthesize it. Now there are so many ways to do it. I do it pretty manually. So I do open up Google Sheet. I have tabs along the bottom for different segments and things I'm going to be going through and trying to make sense of. But I'm looking for what problems are they talking about? What specific moments do they get into? Like, listen for their specific situations

Todd (24:34.183)

Mm.

Joanna Wiebe (25:00.250)

real words when they say them, when they're written there on the screen, you can actually visualize what was going on in their life. You can see it. It's real. Not just like, oh, I really wanted my job to get better. What are you going to do with that? You probably would have guessed some of the common stuff. You're like, it's okay. I don't need that. You can still categorize it. So you've got a frequency of message, so you actually do walk where you could hand the data off. Anyway, there's all sorts of stuff that we can say about it. But we have to take what we've learned there, make sense of it, or what we've heard there,

Todd (25:02.343)

Mm-hmm

Todd (25:19.401)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (25:30.390)

make sense of it so that we can start saying, okay, we have this website to write, or we have this landing page, or we're doing this campaign in May, and we're gonna send all of this paid traffic to a variety of landing pages for this. Now we have to be able to write those, and that's where you'll take what you've heard, and start organizing the messages so that you can then start copying

Joanna Wiebe (26:00.390)

those messages directly into like a landing page builder or your own page, whatever you might end up doing. Yeah.

Todd (26:10.097)

Having done this personally and then also adding in like message mining from external sources and have this big spreadsheet full of You know like 200, you know rows and then we would go through and we would categorize them. Is this like a Job is this a motivation is this a like and we would like cataclype I actually forget all the different ways we categorize them now But would there be like I don't know How would you think about categorizing the things that you've heard like three or four five that the main ones?

Joanna Wiebe (26:29.050)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (26:36.470)

Yeah, I would recommend that you do it in the way that's most useful for you. Like what is your end goal? So I can say, I know that for me, I'm quickly imagining how this is like, because I've been doing this for 20 years, I'm likely to start thinking through what that page is going to look like. And I'm aware that I'll need to know what their problems are, how to agitate those problems, what solutions they've tried, what solutions,

Todd (26:42.843)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (27:02.922)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (27:06.350)

They wish those solutions would do like, so I'm starting to think through that and I can put then columns that are like problem and that would be like the high level version of the problem. And then agitation would be like a column right next to it that like digs into it. Then solutions they've tried, etc, etc. So I'm going through frameworks. I also know that I might do desire and obstacles. So those will be in other columns that I have. However, that's because that's how I write. I'm going to be architecting the message in that way.

Joanna Wiebe (27:36.390)

if you're somebody who's like, okay, well, I really believe in jobs. So I'm gonna take the jobs map that exists and I'm gonna have those, the four different, all of these forces, I'm going to put everything in columns, give them the labels associated with it. And then from there, I can start categorizing into these the forces diagram that jobs has, right? So that's perfectly valid. That's great. All I would say is,

Todd (28:03.422)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (28:06.350)

you're trying to make sense of the data, what that really means with voice of customer is you're trying to figure out the story, right? That's how I see it at least. So if you're trying to figure out the story, the story of your customers as they were, as they want to be, this whole journey that they're going to go on, tell the story to yourself in a way that you can later tell the story again. So if problem agitation solution doesn't mean anything to you, then me saying categorize into problem agitation solution won't actually work for you.

So I'd say if you love jobs, organize information in a way that fits with that methodology. If you are really keen on the value proposition framework that was like such a massive thing for a while there and you want to categorize things that way, cool, go for that. Whatever you do, just make sure that in the end, you don't have a document or a spreadsheet that's nice to put in an archive. You need it to be something you actively reference when you're

Todd (29:04.461)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (29:06.576)

copy.

Todd (29:09.697)

Yeah, maybe you kind of touched on it there with the, there are different copywriting frameworks, right? So, is it you call it PASS or is it P-A-S? Pain, P-A-S, yeah, P-A-S. So pain, agitation, solution would be alright. So, yeah, what is that you speak about? You know, the pain that the customer is experiencing, then you agitate it and then you provide the solution. So, is that how people, once they've done the research, they've categorized it, that's how they should be thinking about the wireframe and kind of the layer of the page by using a copywriting framework?

Joanna Wiebe (29:17.350)

TAS ya, abang.

Joanna Wiebe (29:37.710)

Yeah, I'd recommend a copywriting framework as a starting point. Um, and the reason, I mean, the key reason is because for me, once I was introduced to frameworks, it was like the, you know, cliched light bulb moment. I was like, oh, now I don't have to guess. No, I don't have to like imagine what to do first. I can just, just state what their problem is. Interesting. And then I can agitate it so I can put a bunch of examples in of how that

Todd (29:43.517)

Thank you. Thank you.

Todd (29:58.119)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (30:07.710)

life for them? Okay, I can do that. Right? And so for me, when I'm teaching this, I mean, and once you're 20, 30 years down the road writing copy, you can do it differently if you want to, right? But this is what I find to be an easy way to kind of like break into that page, right? You've got this blank white page staring at you. Even if you use AI to help you with that blank page, you still, there's still a lot of tension and friction there. And you've got to like figure out what to do with AI for that too. It's a very

which is another talk entirely. But you've got this blank page. You gotta find some way into it. I find if you can just start putting words on there, that's a start, right? That's at least, okay, it's not just staring at me. So the words I put on are the framework words. Whatever framework makes sense, now we can talk about how to choose a framework and there are a lot of them in the world. And I say a lot, there's not like a thousand. There's like maybe a hundred

Todd (31:03.122)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (31:07.930)

copywriting frameworks. You do not need to know all of them, trust me. A lot of them will confuse, like they confuse me and I've been attempting to use them for years and it's kind of my job to not be confused by them, but I still am. So I like, yeah.

Todd (31:22.717)

Can I, sorry to interrupt, could I ask just quickly then, so is PAS your preferred and then what would be like two and three if there are two and three?

Joanna Wiebe (31:28.791)

Yeah. DOS, which is Desire Obstacle Solution. That's my other one. So what's the most desirable thing that they want? And then what's getting in their way is kind of like, I really, I love, I love, love, love it. Especially today when problem education solution leads with a problem and people have been so burdened with problems like it's been such a hard couple of years that often it can

Todd (31:34.859)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (31:55.139)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (31:56.790)

feel not very empathetic to start there. So it's nice to start with this desirable outcome that they're looking for. And then the obstacle that's getting in their way. This is all stuff that's going to get them nodding along with you. Right? Like this is the kind of thing where they're like, it's like you're in my head. Um, because you stole it from them. You stole those messages from your prospects, right? Uh, so you are, that's how you got there. And then solution, um, is just like problem that chasing solution. And why I like these two. So those are the only.

Todd (32:01.317)

Yeah.

Todd (32:19.157)

Yeah, we did.

Joanna Wiebe (32:26.910)

real too that I rely on. I find myself inadvertently using other frameworks, like when I go back and look over it, I'm like, oh, that's the four Ps. But if I started with four Ps, I would be like, I don't even, which comes first, is it picture or promise? I don't know which one comes first, and I'm confused now and annoyed. So I just do a problem that changes solution, desire, obstacle, a solution. And the thing about those that makes them powerful, that I think makes them

Joanna Wiebe (32:56.890)

problem same diff, right? You know what agitation is mostly, like, are you agitating it? Are you poking at the wound, right? Like, you know, if you're, you know what agit, you know when you're agitated, you know, I'm agitated. Um, so you can tell that. And then solution is wide open. So I can make, I can hook people, which is the hardest part, I can keep them breeding, which is the second

Todd (33:10.859)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (33:26.750)

problem agitation or desire obstacle, then they're there and now I can start getting into solution and I can move quickly through solution or I can move slowly through solution depends on a lot of things, but it does. So solution is so wide open that I can jump quickly into my solution if P and A got them ready for that or I can explore problematic solutions that they've tried and now we're trying to switch them, right? Where the switch is such an important

Todd (33:41.938)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (33:56.750)

part of getting people to convert. So I can move them through, oh, that solution, what didn't work for it, then you're kind of having like mini PASs throughout there, like the problem with that solution is, and it looked like this, and then another problem, and another one right for those different solutions. And then I can finally start saying, what if you had a solution that did, and then you like go back against all of those things that they just said were getting in their way, they've agreed with you to this point, and now I can introduce my solution.

I love the openness of solution and the specific yes or no you got this or you didn't get it of problem agitation or desire and obstacle.

Todd (34:40.137)

Maybe it's a really obvious thing to say, but I guess the beauty of using something when pain is because it invokes like an emotional response, right? Is that kind of ultimately the goal you're trying to emotionally hook somebody in?

Joanna Wiebe (34:49.470)

And that's the part that most marketers get anxious about. And I think that's where a lot of, if you're a startup, and this is probably why I love startups so much, you're more willing to take on these riskier things because you have to break in somehow. And I don't mean you have to use anything harsh, but a lot of marketers are, I love marketers, I am a marketer. A lot of marketers are scared though. There's great fear in saying something

Todd (34:54.901)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (35:20.030)

stand out and it might make people feel something. As soon as you make someone feel something, you send an email that makes people feel something. They're gonna be replying and your customer service team is gonna be like, don't send that email anymore. People are replying and you get like worked up and scared right? But that's the point. They're supposed to be replying and sometimes they'll be like, you made me feel something and people won't like

end user won't like it, but that's because they felt something for the first time in a while. And as long as you're on brand, as you're thinking through what you're trying to make them feel, as long as you're doing it with empathy, if I say what your problem is and I make it feel like I'm on board with you, like I get it, this is a problem that people have. It's not like, hey, you dummy, didn't you know? And then like you're saying like mean things, like it's not that. It's like for a sweat block.

Todd (36:16.538)

Thank you. Bye.

Joanna Wiebe (36:19.910)

the headline that we had that was for problem agitation solution. It's not SaaS, it's e-commerce, but it's a good really clear example. The headline was in the first person, so sweat block is this solution for hyperhydrosis, so if you sweat a lot and not just because it's hot out, you're sweating behind your knees, your face is drenched when you're in front of an audience, right? And it's like debilitating. You can't actually go out, you can't high-five people, you're afraid to shake hands, you don't want to wear certain colors, like it's a really tough thing.

Joanna Wiebe (36:49.450)

it solves that problem. And so the headline that we tested was it doesn't even have to be hot out, my armpits are always wet. And that was in the quotation marks, and it's like, it's a problem. It's a problem that if I land there and I actually have experienced anything like that, even if it's not, well, it's not my armpits. For me, it's my face or it's the back of my knees or whatever, I'm still like nodding with you, like you get me. And it wasn't us being mean, we're not saying anything, there's nothing,

bad about it, it's here's your actual problem. We can solve that for you and just make people feel that instead of saying like, sweat block is the number one way to stay dry. Like, okay, that's fine, but it's not really going to do anything for people.

Todd (37:37.837)

Yeah, totally. I feel like in SaaS as well, like we, you know, we get like any business, we get low quality leads, we got high quality leads that come into our agency. And usually I can always tell when I read the copy on the site in the first like 30 seconds, I can really tell the quality of the marketing in the company. You can really tell when a company gets copywriting and they do all the things that you just said versus like, we are this, and then they just taught you superlatives, they use the trying sound fancy, you don't understand what the hell the thing does.

Joanna Wiebe (37:50.050)

Thank you. Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe (37:55.271)

Mm.

Joanna Wiebe (38:05.710)

Yeah. Yeah. It's, all right. It's probably written by committee too, right? There was probably a group of people sitting around in a Google doc. It gives me a heart palpitations. Just relax because you've seen them do it in a Google doc and some person, you have to have more respect for your customer than to have any rando from across your organization come in and say, I don't like how this sounds.

Todd (38:08.969)

It's... it's bad.

Todd (38:12.943)

Yeah.

Todd (38:22.184)

Let's sub!

Joanna Wiebe (38:35.770)

it. Like if customers get to react to your copy, maybe that's one thing. But you got to be, you got to have some, I don't know what the word is.

Todd (38:37.202)

Yeah.

Todd (38:43.802)

Yeah.

Todd (38:50.637)

I know, the way I always describe, and I say this, and this leads on nicely to your other point, because you spoke about the first, and there's some saying in copywriting, you'll probably know, or you will know it, which is like the first job of a copywriter is to hook their attention, and then you have to keep their attention, right? And I always think the most important area, and correct me if you see this differently, is above the fold. It's the very first thing that people see, it's the value proposition. That's where you should really, really focus your energy. And I always say, open strong.

Joanna Wiebe (39:10.476)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (39:17.544)

Okay.

Todd (39:19.557)

Open strong. This is where you need to grab people's attention. So I don't know. Do you have I mean You've already given us like a lot of great advice But when you think about a value proposition the most important thing about the fold like how do you think about crafting something? That's great

Joanna Wiebe (39:21.192)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (39:32.050)

Yeah. Um, like a value proposition. So it's, you know, obviously we know that there are value props at brand level, product level, et cetera. So basically when you look at your web page, you might be like, I think every crosshead is a value problem. You're probably right. Like there's a lot there. Um, I agree completely above the fold is such prime real estate. People will scroll, but not everybody will scroll. So you've got to do your best with that space.

Now, when we say put a value prop in your headline, I think that's like people then begin to undertake this massive exercise in developing their value prop. Sorry, I guess I might just quickly, there's got so many pets, there's always fur flying around in here. Anyway, great. So you've got your, you know, this question of what's, what is a value proposition? I think that's a whole giant conversation.

Todd (40:22.797)

You're not crying because of me, so it's good.

Joanna Wiebe (40:31.950)

And I first found the most helpful way I have found to look at what your value proposition is. Marketing experiments talked about a formula a while back, but it really boils down to it's unique to you. I'm going to put that in quotation marks because it's almost never actually unique to you. Desirable to your prospect said in a succinct, be careful with that word, but memorable, listen to that word, way.

Joanna Wiebe (41:02.590)

Okay, so what is it? As soon as I say, oh, it should be unique. People are like, I don't have anything unique about me. And I'm like, I get it, I get it. It doesn't have to be a unique feature. It might be a unique take on something. And it could be that you are uniquely qualified to be an advocate for your audience. For like, like Wistia was an advocate for videographers early on, right? Like Wistia was the champion. Wistia made it cool

Todd (41:10.917)

Thank you. Bye.

Joanna Wiebe (41:32.130)

video like earlier on like 10 years ago. Envision was an advocate for designers, right? That was unique to them even though it wasn't, but they were actually standing up and putting it on the page and saying we're here for designers. So is it desirable to your audience too? Great, that's really important. And then can you state it? And this is where the words happen. Can you state it in a way that is memorable? But also succinct?

Todd (41:36.041)

I remember.

Joanna Wiebe (42:02.210)

and my only pause there is if you don't find that you're a generally wordy person, then throw out succinct. Don't worry about it because it's there for wordy people. But I don't meet a lot of people writing headlines who are going on for 20 words. More often, they're trying to squeeze it into four words, six words max, and that can be the death of a good value prop, right?

Joanna Wiebe (42:31.950)

with what they're really going through or with like this great desire they have. If all you're giving yourself is like 24 characters with spaces. That's a big challenge. That's going to be hard for anybody. And then you have to also make sure that your message matching, that you're solving for SEO, like all of the things that go into what's above the fold or in your hero section, you're putting so much pressure on this H1.

Todd (42:54.038)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (43:02.210)

one that, you know, God bless you for trying. Like it's just, it's gonna be hard. So I say, yes, to a value prop, everything, once you look over the copy on your site, it's very likely that you actually have quite a lot of value propositions at each new level of what you're talking about as you're going through features, et cetera. So start there, but make sure that you're doing it in a way again, like as you said, above the fold is critical. Don't, don't spend your

time, focusing on that succinct part of this four part formula. What's unique is that desirable to your prospect? How can you say it in a memorable way that doesn't have to mean clever? It doesn't mean like, Oh Joe, I heard that when things rhyme, they work better. Like, okay, fine. If you like it, okay, cool. It'll make you happy. Fine. Um, but what's a real, like what's going to be memorable to me is when I land on the page. And you say something that matches.

Todd (43:51.001)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (44:02.070)

is where I'm at right now, which is why that thank you page survey is so important because they tell you this is exactly where I was at when I landed on your page. So you can then go like, oh damn, you were going through exactly this thing and that now becomes your headline. Test it as a headline, keep it in the first person, put it in quotation marks, do all of these things that make people feel like you're actually inside their head.

Todd (44:27.237)

Amazing advice, thank you. I could dig in so many questions there, but because of time, there's a big meaty last part that I really wanna make sure we cover, which is CTAs and kind of offers, I guess, combined, because these things are not in silo, right? And I feel like in the SaaS space, a lot of SaaS companies do a really shitty job of call to action and offers, I mean, in particular. They usually have more of like a product led or where you have like a free trial or then you have sales led, which is like a demo, right?

Joanna Wiebe (44:36.950)

Thank you. Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe (44:46.314)

Yeah.

Todd (44:57.537)

demos I think yeah a lot of companies do this with like request demo get free demo and then like you go to this page and there's just like a form and maybe some social proof but like who do I speak to how long is the demo what's the agenda for this is it like a live presentation is it like who am I speaking to like all these questions they just do a shitty job of so what is your advice

Joanna Wiebe (45:12.990)

Yeah. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (45:17.810)

Yeah. Preach everything you just said. That's my advice. Right? Like, we get like, I, I, I know why you put request demo as your button copy. Like we know, right? We know that people want to make sure they're not getting crappy leads in. So they're like, well, I don't want to waste sales got mad when we sent them bad leads. So we changed our button to a high friction button and we put a bunch of form fields up there. So that, we would

do so likelihood of a crappy lead coming through. I can't, I mean, I think there's lots of other ways to qualify a lead rather than just putting a high friction copy on a page. But yeah, when it comes down to it, whether you have product lead growth, sales lead growth, whatever, customer, all of the different kinds of leads of growth that you might have, it's all good. People are still signing up on a page, right? This perfect SaaS landing page we're talking about. You've worked on your headlong.

Todd (45:58.083)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (46:10.357)

Yes.

Joanna Wiebe (46:18.090)

You probably even have your form to become a lead above the fold so you're focusing a lot of attention above the fold But how much are you actually working on the offer like you were saying right offer is Not a confusing word in the direct response world. It's like the starting point like we know we bought this list It's got these kind of people on it. What offer can we say to those people that's going to blow them away?

Todd (46:32.317)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (46:48.530)

That's where you start. You don't start with the headline. You don't sit down and go like, oh, everybody shut up. I have this thing that I want to put on the page as the headline. At all, they'd be like, but you don't even know what the offer is. What are you talking about? Now you have to stop talking and we're going to take over. So there's a world of people who work hard to make money, to generate revenue. I mean, who start with the offer. And that's what I have seen huge lift.

when you optimize your offer. Now optimizing an offer does not mean throwing a discount. You don't have to. That's one way, but there are like 50 different levers you can pull to optimize your offer. It does not have to be anything else. And people often stop at like, well, it's free. So that's good enough. What more could they care about? It's a free trial. Why aren't they signing up? They get it free for 14 days. I'm like, oh, let's unpack that, right? Let's unpack

Todd (47:38.181)

Hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (47:47.890)

I have to give you my email address. I haven't really seen how this product even works yet. So it's one more and we're how many years along in the world of SaaS? Like at least I'm going to say 15 years people will be like, no 30, there was the 90s. Okay, fine. But like for like where it was actually something that a lot of people were using, right? So let's say we're 15-ish years in, five years in, you can say it's a free trial and people are like, oh good. But by now, every single

Todd (48:09.197)

mainstream. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (48:17.810)

the workforce who might be thinking of choosing your solution has tried 15 different things that are like it before. They've got a council over the place, they're annoyed by them. All these other SAS trials have said they're a trial, but they take your credit card, then you have to call to cancel. Like they've made it hard to cancel, so you have all of this legacy baggage that your user is carrying around what it is to start a free trial. And if all you do is act like, oh, start

Joanna Wiebe (48:48.790)

then you're probably gonna have a very high conversion rate. You could have just put anything on that button because people who click through on a start my free trial, we're probably gonna start it even if you put on there, blue is my favorite color. Like you could have put anything on there. So we don't just want to write copy that will move people through who we're already gonna move through anyway. We can do better than that. Our offer can be better than that if you have empathy

prospect. If you really sit there in their shoes and this doesn't take long, that's actually kind of a fun exercise to sit and think about what your prospect landing on the page. So think about who that person is, your one reader, some people talk about personas, whoever that person is, what they're going through, what like tools they were using, what led them here, was their team

Joanna Wiebe (49:48.390)

complaining about the tool you're currently using and that's why they're over here now and they've got like this angst that's driving them here like sit there and really work through who that person is and suddenly you'll realize that a free trial is only one part of what they're actually trying to solve right now in this moment. They need more and you can tell them more. You can

Joanna Wiebe (50:17.750)

You can get them excited with an offer optimization. And there's a lot you can do with offer optimization, but for starters, just Google offer optimization. Go over to chat, GBT, and ask it all about optimizing offers. Like, tell me more and like really dig into it. And you can see all sorts of ways that you can come up with new offers and then how you message those on your landing page.

Todd (50:45.597)

What about like, so I mean, what about in the case of a demo, like in specifically, I don't know, do you have any advice in how you should frame a demo? For example, I don't know, any advice you can give someone, what has their offer and their main CTA is a demo? What would you advise that they do?

Joanna Wiebe (50:53.192)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (50:57.990)

Yeah. Yeah. I've worked with lots. Most of our clients are enterprise, um, or targeting enterprise. So definitely, um, it's, it's, it's the same old thing, right? Like, so they don't, nobody wants a demo. They might want to see the product. They might want to have their questions answered. They might want to say, Hey, my team is wondering about this exact thing. Show me how you do that in your tool. How will we do that in your tool? I'm,

Todd (51:07.561)

Hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (51:28.130)

My CFO is annoyed with how difficult invoicing is with these, like, we can never get an invoice out of our software. Show me that. So we know going in, okay, people come to a demo, not for a demo, they want to see certain things. Why don't you give them a list of the things that they'll see, and then the things that they're worried about, right? So I'm worried you're just going to spend all your time selling, or I'm worried this is the first of 15 sales calls when I'm basically

Joanna Wiebe (51:58.010)

Times are wasting and I've got pressure from all sides or I'm aware that I'm going to have to involve four different people from my senior leadership team over time. Getting them all on a call at the same time is impossible. What can you tell me about this demo that will make me feel like I have more control. So when it comes down to it, it's often like a very simple question of. How do you prove that you're going to make their lives easier.

Joanna Wiebe (52:29.010)

That's it. If you can look over your copy and go, oh, this is how they're going to see that their lives are getting easier and they're going to look better, better to their team, particularly for like where there's a sales call that usually means you're selling into a large organization, lots of decision makers, crazy different, everything's different for every different group, right? Even though there's like similarities. So yeah, I would say just go back to what they really want and then don't be bashful

Todd (52:33.217)

Thank you. Bye.

Todd (52:52.017)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (52:58.030)

about putting it on the page. You're allowed to say, hey, if you have a question about, and then you fill in the blank, you don't make them think, if you have a question about something, we'll show you. I don't know what something is. But if you have a question about how your, what our algorithm is that drives the dashboard, we'll show you exactly the behind the scenes stuff. Because, but you would know that that's their question. If you listen to customers in the first place and do those thank you page surveys, et cetera, you can take what they're telling you and put it on the page.

Joanna Wiebe (53:27.990)

them the benefit of the favor of being specific. The worst thing that we often do as marketers is leave it up to our prospect to connect the dots. And when you're in like a sales experience, a salesperson doesn't leave it up to you to connect any dots. Like they're there one to one back and forth talking to you. We don't have that luxury with copy because we don't get to have an actual dialogue. But we do get to learn from how those dialogue

Todd (53:42.243)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (53:57.990)

logs work. And one of the things is just just do the work for me, just connect the dots. I don't have to imagine things because that's making my life harder. So that's, that's one way to start thinking about those demo landing pages.

Todd (54:10.838)

Yeah.

Todd (54:14.117)

I kind of feel like you need to scrap the marketers in SaaS Enterprise. They need to scrap the idea that all demos are created equal. Like the prospect assumes that a demo is just, oh, it's just a demo. I know exactly what a demo is. Imagine they have no clue what a demo is, be as specific and clear as possible, connect the dots for them. I love the idea about personalizing it as well. Like you give them a few different options, questions they can ask. So yeah, if you were can SaaS do that.

Joanna Wiebe (54:21.350)

Thank you. Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe (54:39.650)

Yeah, I mean, once you've listened to, yeah, exactly. And it really just takes, if you're writing copy for your website, for these landing pages that are going to drive leads over to the sales team, just go listen to the sales calls, just go watch them. You'll see just how different every group that they're talking to actually is and how they do show up bored at the beginning when like the salesperson is going through that preamble stuff where they're like, you know, the whole time they're selling.

Todd (54:44.319)

That's it.

Joanna Wiebe (55:09.550)

staring going like, can we just get to my question? Like I just want to see this thing. And so once you see that, you can start to have better empathy for those people and write a better demo sign up page. Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick demo.

Todd (55:23.097)

Love it. Thank you. Cool, so we've done our research. We've got our rifle, we've got our different frameworks, we've written copy, there are now words on page, we have a good offer, CTA. Next we need to go about some kind of validation. What would you kind of recommend people do here? I think we're gonna have to go back to the beginning and then we're gonna have to go back to the beginning and then we're gonna have to go back to the beginning and then we're gonna have to go back to the beginning and then we're gonna have to go back to the beginning and then we're gonna have to go back to the beginning

Joanna Wiebe (55:27.538)

Rr.

Joanna Wiebe (55:29.750)

Thank you. Bye.

Joanna Wiebe (55:37.110)

Yeah, so validation is really just, I think about when Pepsi, God bless them, had that Kylie Jenner debacle with that ad. So many, and that's just one example, right? Like, so it was off tone. It was problematic. But they didn't know. They didn't know that. They were just kind of like trusting like, oh, Kylie Jenner, or was it Kylie or Kendall, whatever, it was one of them. People like her. Let's put her in an ad. And she's...

Pepsi's gonna save the day and somehow be the hero, which should have probably tipped them off that that's a problem. But those kinds of things we want to prevent, right? So validation is where you're basically doing a gut check. So you've written your copy using voice of customer data. You've organized it in a copywriting framework like PAS. You've done all that you can do. You've optimized the offer. The CTA is like desirable.

I want to click it. Great, but it's been still just you and your team working on this. Now, you can just launch it to the world and see what happens, right? And it could, you know, maybe nothing happens. And maybe that's something that you should have been aware of going into it, like, huh, we're not really saying anything real here. So yeah, nothing happened. But what we want

Todd (56:50.717)

which is what most people do. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (57:07.050)

We use usability hub. We use five second test to check for the headline in particular. So is the headline clear? Is the headline memorable? So that's really a matter of putting the headline isolated up on the page and then they see it for five seconds and then you ask them a question afterwards. It has to do with what you're trying to answer. So if you look at your copy or if internally your team is like torn on this headline, one half is like, oh, we're not really saying anything.

Joanna Wiebe (57:37.550)

Oh, we're really getting emotional. Then you could at least ask a question that has to do with at least resolving that issue with your team, right? Or whatever other thing you might be wondering, oftentimes just clarity is the best thing to answer, right? So do you do people on reading this, can they parrot it back to you? Or can they interpret it for you? What did that headline say? And then you can. The person.

Todd (57:57.000)

Mm-hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (58:07.550)

And this is on usability hub. You can just like get a panel of people or you can supply your own panel But I just typically use a panel and you can like get really granular with who they are Again, we're not looking for a stamp of approval. We're not looking for new copy ideas We're not looking for anything other than might this blow up somehow in a bad way Or are we so unclear with this that we're going to be driving traffic to this page and they'll bounce because We went way off in some tangents

that we shouldn't have, right? So you're just really looking in for that five second test. Preference tests are also good on clarity, clarity, sorry, on usability have none, they can have clarity. These preference tests, and that's like, if you have maybe internally, you have like three headlines and you're not sure which to go out with. And we could all say, oh, just test it. The reality is as great as testing is, and yes, we still want to go with the best possible test wherever possible, right? So

Todd (58:48.917)

Please be the help.

Joanna Wiebe (59:07.210)

If you've got three headlines, you're not sure which one to go with. You can do a preference test and then maybe 200 people in your panel will help you rank which two to go out with. And then you can do an A, B test, 50-50, or you can still make a call that's different from that. You can still say, well, people prefer this one, but honestly, we just don't like it. And that's your marketers, your whatever you might. It's valid enough.

say we just don't like that. I don't love talking about like and don't like, but I'd be a fool to pretend that all we do is make decisions based on data in marketing. It's gonna come down to like, but at least this way you can say, look, half of the people we polled said they like this one the most. Here's why we're not gonna go forward with it. We're gonna test these two against each other. We're gonna see how they perform. If one beats the other, then we'll throw that other one into the mix and just see if the market likes it more.

That's all we're really talking about with validation. Just make sure you're covering your butt, that you've got a clear message, that you're not saying anything that could be potentially offensive or just like taking the wrong way. Or just like confusing that leads to frustration that leads people like bailing on you and not liking your brand somehow. But then you do of course want to split test wherever possible. And there's a big asterisk there because split testing is problematic in many ways too. Yeah.

Todd (01:00:29.602)

Yeah.

Todd (01:00:36.317)

Oh yeah, for sure, we could talk about that at length. But usability hub is really inexpensive as well. I mean, the one thing about usability hub is the quality of the panels. So yeah, ideally you would wanna ask people that are in your ideal customer profile that are your persona, but nonetheless, I still see the validity in it. We had, and like I said, it's inexpensive. We had a customer, we were doing a landing page project for them and I didn't understand what the hell this company did, or I mean, I did,

Joanna Wiebe (01:00:37.050)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:00:54.172)

Yeah.

Todd (01:01:06.317)

articulated very well and we ran a usability test. We simply asked the mother for what does this company do? And we asked a hundred people and not one could guess what the company did. So I think, yeah, if you're looking for buying or budget, if you don't think you have good landing pages, this is a really like quick fireway to get some more data-driven feedback for your manager or whoever handles the budget. And so, we're gonna go ahead and do some more of the things that we're gonna do. So, we're gonna go ahead and do some more of the things that we're gonna do.

Joanna Wiebe (01:01:09.550)

Hmm.

Joanna Wiebe (01:01:14.992)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:01:26.650)

totally and I wouldn't make like a big decision based on it because right as you just said these aren't necessarily your market. If you are trying to target CTOs, they're not going to be in your panel. I don't think any CTOs are usability hub panelists. So you can't depend on that but you can at least get a sense for... Yeah. Okay.

Todd (01:01:36.602)

Mm-hmm.

Todd (01:01:44.239)

No, no.

Todd (01:01:53.317)

common sense. There's a lot of common sense involved in this right here. You just want to have some people that are relatively intelligent that can give you some common sense advice. But setting that winter, and we spoke about this before, winter from Pepli, that is actually a much more high, it's way more expensive. It's, you know, I don't know, a lot more expensive than usability hub. But if you are investing a lot in landing pages, then you do have CTOs and the like in those panels that get paid considerably more. 

Joanna Wiebe (01:01:58.150)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:02:17.750)

Nice. Yeah. Yeah!

Todd (01:02:23.577)

a ton of value in landing pages. Before you go, can I ask how's copy hackers going? How's business? How's kind of life as an entrepreneur? Because you are a copyrighter of course, but ultimately you're an entrepreneur now. So how is that going for you?

Joanna Wiebe (01:02:35.630)

It's great. I say that, but it's, it's, you know, got its ups and downs. I'm in a few groups. So I get to hear about the ups and downs that everybody's had over the last year. The last year, of course, has been really tricky for every business on the planet. So, and we have not escaped unscathed, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's a whole, like, how long you got.

Todd (01:02:44.221)

Mm-hmm

Todd (01:02:54.201)

Go, yeah.

Todd (01:02:56.519)

Yeah.

Todd (01:03:00.939)

Nor have we. I don't think many have, no. Indeed.

Joanna Wiebe (01:03:06.910)

But no, it's it's go where I'm some of the things that I have learned is Include sorry that I'm I don't think I need a big team We had some people who moved over to the services side of our business from our team This went over to our agency and I didn't backfill them and I'm just doing like they were like copywriters and things like that and so like I've just stepped in to do that copywriting work and

Todd (01:03:25.402)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:03:36.270)

I missed it. And like, so I'm finding that I'm doing a little bit less with fewer team members and the work I'm doing, I'm enjoying more. So that's where I'm kind of at, which is surprising to me because for the longest time it was like, you should be hiring higher, higher, higher, and make sure you're hiring. Why haven't you acquired a company? And we actually tried to acquire a couple different companies and none of those came through. And so, you know, you get a little frustrated with that kind of thing, right? And so now I'm just kind of,

in chill mode? Like if it doesn't make me really happy, I'm not going to do it.

Todd (01:04:11.738)

Yeah.

Todd (01:04:14.137)

You're at that point where you've kind of done well enough now that you could really, really kind of burn yourself out and work incredibly harder, but there's not a huge amount of upside for you probably. So yeah, why stretch yourself out? 

Joanna Wiebe (01:04:21.770)

There's not. No. And I... Yeah, exactly, right? I see other people who are doing cool stuff in copywriting space in this copywriting world. And I'm like, go, enjoy it. Go do it. Take some business away from me. I'm okay. I don't want to like burn myself out anymore on things like I'm unhappy. So I overthink it, you know? I don't know.

Todd (01:04:38.577)

Yeah.

Todd (01:04:51.617)

Yeah, I totally understand. Yeah. Well, thank you, Joanna. That was a lovely way to end the podcast as well. Sure. Sure. Yeah, it's good. So, Uproar Media is six years old. We're 10 people. We went through a phase in the last year. So, roughly 18 months ago, I was running the podcast, things were going really, really well. Lead volumes really, really ramped up. I was kind of a victim of my own success, but I was that typical finder

Joanna Wiebe (01:04:51.832)

Thank you. Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe (01:04:56.450)

I wanna hear about your business though. How's yours going? Yeah.

very different because I love doing this, I love doing marketing so a lot of my time spent on this, we still have a lot of work to do because we got hit by the economy as well so we did lose some clients, the SaaS space got hit really really hard but things are on the up again, we've really got our marketing flywheel going, the podcast we haven't launched an episode in about 18 months so yeah we're kind of on the up and up and we have much better foundations now so it's a very different, my day to day work is very very different now but much more enjoyable.

Joanna Wiebe (01:05:52.710)

Yeah. Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:06:00.512)

Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:06:13.270)

Thanks.

Joanna Wiebe (01:06:17.350)

That's good. Yeah, I keep finding people reminding me not directly, but that it's supposed to be fun. And I know that might sound naive to people who are not in the same headspace I'm in right now. But I do think it's supposed to be fun. I'm supposed to like my job. Otherwise, why did I create this job?

Todd (01:06:20.638)

Yeah.

Todd (01:06:40.297)

100% and it's really strange you go on this tangent, I guess. It's exactly what I've been thinking. When I first started the agency, it was all about, I wanna be 50 people, 100 people. Now I couldn't give a shit. And now I want to, I already do well. I feel blessed. I live in Lisbon. I have a wonderful life. If anything, I just wanna create more space and freedom. So it's, yeah, I'm seeing things in a very different way. And I think the COVID, the whole pandemic, I think really recalibrated people, didn't it?

Joanna Wiebe (01:06:55.804)

Yeah.

Todd (01:07:10.417)

kind of think differently and that's definitely been the case for me so yeah

Joanna Wiebe (01:07:11.930)

Yeah, same. Totally. I'm like, I don't really give a crap. Like, I'm liking what I'm doing. I stop liking it. I'll stop doing it. But yeah, I don't care about a 50 person team or an empire. I just want to walk my dogs and chill.

Todd (01:07:28.597)

No, and just, yeah, totally. Yeah, just for me, one of my favorite things in the whole world is just drinking a coffee and walking in the morning. I'm like, I don't need a lot of money to drink coffee and walk in the morning in the park. So yeah, someone to think about, yeah.

Joanna Wiebe (01:07:42.050)

Exactly. Exactly. Totally. Yeah, I think a lot of us are there. Yep. Yep.

Todd (01:07:48.997)

Yeah. Well, Joanna, this was really lovely and you gave some amazing insights. I definitely learned a lot. So where can people follow you, find you if they so want to?

Joanna Wiebe (01:07:57.950)

Yeah, over at copyhackers.com. I am on Twitter at copyhackers with an S. That's really, oh, I have a newsletter because I've decided I want to write a book but then as soon as I say that, I don't want to go through publishing a book. I just kind of want to nerd out and research some stuff. So I have a new newsletter at Joe and Co over on Substack but you can get to that from my nav on copyhackers.com.

Todd (01:08:29.617)

Yeah, I'm willing to all that in the show notes. So awesome. All right. Thanks, John. Thanks for your time and speak soon.

Joanna Wiebe (01:08:29.870)

Oh, thanks.

Joanna Wiebe (01:08:33.800)

Yes, sounds good. Thanks.

Todd (01:08:37.259)

See ya.

Todd (01:08:40.057)

Yay, that was good and session for all.