At the heart of any successful small business is a creative human being.
And it’s important that we remember to put our very human voice out there to connect with our preferred clients and customers.
And yet, when it comes to writing copy or content, we often stiffen up. Being an authentic human being should be the most natural thing ever — so why does it often feel so unnatural when we try?
Plus, authenticity is determined by the audience, not by whatever pops in your head to say. And that means that communicating in a relatable way takes a lot of listening, and then mirroring back to your audience the language that they prefer.
In this episode, we’re joined by copywriter Nick Usborne, who specializes in “conversational copy. Tune in to hear some of Nick’s favorite methods for creating engaging messages that catch and hold attention, while inching people ever closer to doing business with you.
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Transcript
The Art of Conversational Copywriting
Nick Usborne: Hi, my name is Nick Usborne. I teach the craft of conversational copywriting and I am unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the podcast for freelancers and entrepreneurs who value their freedom, creativity, and income way too much to ever accept a regular old job. For the full Unemployable experience, sign up for our email newsletter for tips, tools, and trends that will take your business and lifestyle to the next level. Simply head over to Unemployable.com to join us. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: At the heart of any successful small business is a creative human being. And it’s important that we remember to put our very human voice out there to connect with our preferred clients and customers.
And yet, when it comes to writing copy or content, we often stiffen up. Being an authentic human being should be the most natural thing ever — so why does it often feel so unnatural when we try?
Plus, authenticity is determined by the audience, not by whatever pops in your head to say. And that means that communicating in a relatable way takes a lot of listening, and then mirroring back to your audience the language that they prefer.
In this episode, we’re joined by copywriter, Nick Usborne, who specializes in “conversational copy. Tune in to hear some of Nick’s favorite methods for creating engaging messages that catch and hold attention, while inching people ever closer to doing business with you.
I am Brian Clark and this is Unemployable.
This episode is brought to you by iThemes hosting for WordPress. That’s our host here at Unemployable, and it keeps the site fast and reliable while not breaking the bank. To save even more, simply visit ithemes.com/BC50 to save $50 off your first year. Or head over to unemployable.com/hosting to read our full review to find out about several unique features that iThemes WordPress hosting includes at no charge, and then click over to your $50 discount from there.
Nick, my friend, welcome to the show.
Nick Usborne: Thank you for having me. It’s great. Looking forward to this. No idea what we’re going to talk about, but I know it’s going to be good.
Brian Clark: Yeah, we run a tight ship around here, so we like to bring the guest on and surprise them to see if they can think on their feet, if you will.
Nick Usborne: Perfect, perfect.
Fighting Back Against the Machine
Brian Clark: Good. No, we knew we were going to talk about “conversational copy and being a human being that resonates with other human beings, even if we use all this fantastic technology to augment ourselves and reach people all over the planet. It’s a wonderful thing, but without a human being there in the middle, people don’t tend to succeed. Would you agree?
Nick Usborne: I would. I think the whole idea of being more human and using everyday language is because we are becoming so utterly immersed in technology. It’s like a fight. It’s like fighting back against the machine. Maybe I’m over dramatizing, but I see so many…
Brian Clark: Yeah, I think literally we’re getting there, because we’ve had conversations recently about artificial intelligence generating spoken word content and all of this type of stuff.
Again, on one side, what we can do as individual creators, or you and a cofounder, whatever the case may be, is truly revolutionary. I mean, I’ve done it in the past a few times, but even now, that feels like I was in the Dark Ages. And we’re just talking about 2007, 2008, 2009.
Since the iPhone was released, it was one of those pivotal moments where technology and society shifted. In some ways, we’re more connected than ever. And yet, surprisingly, perhaps less genuine, sometimes less authentic, putting on an Instagram show for others.
What Is Conversational Copywriting?
Brian Clark: Okay, before we get into the nuts and bolts, it seems weird to have to have a practice to make ourselves more human. But when people start thinking about writing copy, it’s like their human goes right out the window and they start communicating in weird Don Draper-isms or something. I don’t know.
Nick Usborne: When people ask me what I mean by “conversational copywriting, I remind them. I say, “Hey, you were a kid once and you knew exactly how to do this. As a kid, you knew how to get your dad to buy you that game or your mum to let you stay up late or to sell lemonade at the front yard. You knew how to sell in natural everyday language – you knew how to do it. And you had that, unfortunately, educated out of you. You went to school and they taught you to write properly and they taught you to write so that you passed exams. And then having helped you, you went to university and your writing got even weirder. And if you did a PhD, your writing became incomprehensible to anyone except your peers.
“And then you work for a large company and they have their own jargon and nonsense, and you completely forgot what it’s like. And then, heaven help you, you took some copywriting courses and you learned all this marketing language nonsense, and then we plugged you into all these wonderful services, this automated marketing sequences and funnels and stuff like that.
At that point, like you say, you’ve totally forgotten what it’s like to be a human being, to behave like a human being, to write like a human being, and we get this weird stuff.
Your point about AI, man, if AI already is so much better than we can be, if it comes to that kind of nonsense writing, they can already do that better than we can. I think the only way we can ever compete in the future against AI and automation is to go back to try to remind ourselves: how did we use to do this in everyday conversational language?
Hey, stop me if I’m rambling too much.
But I say to people, “Look, just imagine you’re across… Everyone sits across the kitchen table with a friend or a neighbor or whatever and you’re just enthusiastically telling them about this game you just bought or this watch you just bought or this vacation you just booked. That natural everyday enthusiasm, it is the most persuasive version of yourself. That I think is how you sell. I think the other stuff is all noise and nonsense, honestly.
Brian Clark: It’s true. Here’s a funny story that will relate to your PhD comment earlier. I was an attorney in my past life, so I got the lawyer equivalent of a PhD, which is a Juris Doctorate. But the funny thing is that does have a huge influence on you and it made me very persuasive. It made me know how to present a case, but it also really influenced my natural writing style.
So, get this, our mutual friend Rebecca Matter of AWAI, I owed her a brief on something that I was collaborating with them on, and I didn’t have a lot of time, so I just cranked it out. It was a couple pages, easy. And I mean, I’m known a little bit for copywriting, but it’s very deliberate when I sit there and write in a way that’s actually more human and engaging, it actually takes work. If I’m in a hurry, I write like a lawyer.
She wrote me back and she’s like, “What the hell? And I was like, “Man, I’m just trying to get you the facts. We’re all professionals here, you can read. But she was right. I did not take the time. It’s almost like — this has been attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to whomever — but if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. It’s easy to go on and on and on.
What’s also easy is to somehow write in this very nonhuman way, and we’re trained that way. It’s a system of what we think we’re supposed to do, of our schooling, of our professions, of our peers. And for the most part, it’s wrong. So, I want to get into that.
What Is Your Background?
Brian Clark: But before we do, you’ve had a long and illustrious career. Why don’t you give us a little background on Nick so everyone knows who we’re talking to?
Nick Usborne: Nick, right. Nick, let me see. I finished off school at high school. I had a place at university, I had a place at Cambridge, but had a little rebellious moment and didn’t do that. I did some traveling and behaved badly and generally had a good time. And everything after that was basically a happy accident that I leveraged one accident after another.
That is, my dad generally threw me out of the house, suggesting I get a proper job when I was about 22. So I went and slept on the floor of a friend’s place in North London, and there were five people sharing the house. We were having breakfast one Sunday, and this guy was talking about something called an advertising agency. I had no idea what that was. I thought companies did their own advertising.
And I said, “Well, is that fun? And he said, “Hell, yeah. This was the ‘70s, so this is Mad Men time, the end of the Mad Men period. And he said, “For sure, it’s fun. So, I thought, “Okay. They all went to work Monday morning. I went through the Yellow Pages, I wrote 20 letters on a manual typewriter, obviously. This is the late 1970s. I got three interviews, one job offer, and took it.
I went through various departments of that agency, which is a great background, but then ended up in the creative department. I was this classic kid who left school, no direction, just totally lacking in self-confidence. I landed in the creative department and they said, “Hey, are you a designer or a writer? And I said, “Well, I don’t really know. So they gave me a bit of design and they later said, “You’re not a designer.
So they gave me a bit of writing to do. And that first second, that first thing, I just fell in love. That was 40 years ago this year. I just fell in love with the craft of copywriting. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I worked at agencies for five, six years, but mostly, I’ve been unemployable, so I’ve worked for myself.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I don’t think you work with clients now in the traditional sense, but you’ve done that agency, freelance. But you also, like me, took the skill and craft of copywriting and once you have it, you realize you can basically sell anything — well for me, I think it’s true for you too, but if I believe in it, I can sell it.
It kind of goes back to what you said about the kitchen table. If you’re trying to pull something over on someone, all the copywriting techniques in the world, they might work for a little bit, but man, these days you’ll get found out pretty quickly.
But once you understand copywriting, it’s been the most important business skill in general, not just writing. I’m talking about business, big B business, in that it teaches you to always put the other person, whether it’s a business partner, a customer, a client, whomever, you put them first, always.
You’re always thinking about, “What’s the benefit to them? If I give them the benefit they need and if I can figure out what it is, then I get the benefit I want. That’s good business right there. And it’s encapsulated in the art and science of copywriting.
Nick Usborne: I agree. I’ve been incredibly fortunate. Like I say, 40 years, I’ve raised my family, I’ve lived my life. I’ve had a great life. Not that it’s coming to an end, it’s not. I’m just warming up.
The Art of Listening
Nick Usborne: But it’s an amazing skill to have. And I’ll tell you one of the most counterintuitive aspects of that, and it speaks to the point you just made about business, is that I think if you’re a good copywriter, it turns you into a much better listener. Because you have to listen to your clients, you have to listen, actually primarily, to your clients’ customers and prospects is who I listen to the most. I try to listen to the most.
This, again, speaks very much to why I am devoting so much of my time to teaching a conversational approach. Because, again, every good conversation begins with listening.
The worst dates in the world are the dates where the other person won’t shut up and clearly isn’t listening to you. And I think the worst advertising, the worst marketing is where the company or the marketer is not listening to their audience.
So, that is an amazing byproduct. And I think the skill of listening is another thing that is fundamental for good business on so many different levels.
Brian Clark: I’m sorry, what’d you say?
Nick Usborne: And there he is.
Brian Clark: Oh no, I’m kidding. Yeah, everyone should know Nick and I go way back and when we see each other in person, we try to outdo each other by insulting the other guy.
Nick Usborne: I know, and there’s been something slightly flat about the conversation so far.
Brian Clark: I know, we aren’t being conversational, Nick.
Nick Usborne: I know, I haven’t even insulted you even once.
Brian Clark: As the Brits say, until someone takes the piss out of the other guy, then…
Nick Usborne: You’re not really friends. So, it’s a sign of friendship. It’s the English version of intimacy.
Brian Clark: No, it is true. If you can’t hold your own in the UK, you’re not going to have any friends.
Techniques to Listen Well
Brian Clark: Let’s talk about listening, because it is critical and there are different ways to do it. I think for a long time, I’d say from the beginning of Copyblogger in 2006, all the way pretty much, well, at least a decade in, I never did surveys. Everyone was like, “Well, how do you listen to your audience? I’m like, “It’s social media, it’s blogging. It’s interactive if you allow it to be, and if you pay really close attention. That’s the best form of listening, because people are being themselves. They’re not filling out a form or what have you. Nothing against surveys, because I have learned to love them if they’re done well.
What is your primary go-to listening technique, if you will?
Nick Usborne: The web is so amazing for listening compared to old school. Back when I was writing print and direct mail before the web, listening was very, very hard, and audience research was very, very limited. So, we’re spoiled incredibly on the web in terms of listening if you want to do it.
So, I’ll do things. I’ll get the social media streams of that company and their competitors. Or if I go to Amazon, if I read product reviews, if it’s product related, I don’t spend too much attention to the 5-stars or the 1-stars, because you’ll get people with extreme views always wherever you find conversation. It’s the middle area that I listen to.
When I listen, I’m after two things. I want to identify the emotional high points: what are people upset about? What are they excited about? What do they love? What do they hate?
Because you remember when you were a kid, if you wanted your parents to let you stay up late, you made eye contact. You flattered your little eyelashes at your dad or your mom. We knew as kids that the way to sell anything was through emotion, not fact. Little kids don’t argue as to why they should stay up late. They just give you that cute look, because they know that the way to win is through emotion.
So, that’s what I’m looking for when I’m listening — what are the emotions that the prospective audience, the prospects, feel around this? What are the negatives? What are the positives?
The next thing I do with listening, and I listen through social media; I listen through comments streams; I’ll listen through Amazon reviews; I’ll listen through Yelp reviews, wherever people are conversing about the product or service of the company, YouTube reviews. But mind you, some of those just descend into nonsense anyway.
The Art of Mirroring
Nick Usborne: But, as I’m looking for the emotions, I’m also looking very specifically for the language. This speaks very much to what I teach with conversational copywriting.
I think one of the biggest differences I find in this approach to copywriting is the old way I used to copywrite there was a lot of ego. I wanted to write a wonderful headline, a wonderful first paragraph. It was a craft, I wanted to excel at my craft. And I still love the craft.
But I think as a conversational copywriter, really, any good online copywriter, you have to let a little of that ego go and listen to the language of your audience, and then mirror with that language. “Mirroring — anyone out there with a psychology degree immediately knows what I’m talking about.
Brian Clark: Raises hand over here. My mom said I would never get a job with my psychology degree.
Nick Usborne: There you go. Mirroring is incredibly powerful. I finally did the research. It was in a restaurant, where you go to a restaurant and the waiters come up and they take your order. One group of waiters would say something like, “Oh, great choice, wonderful choice. We’ve heard that a thousand times. They always compliment you on the choice and then maybe they’re going to get a nice tip at the end.
The other group of waiters simply repeat it. You’d say, “I want to have an eggs, they’d say, “Okay, having eggs. They just mirror back the language you just used.
It turned out that the tips received, you think intuitively that the complimentary group saying, “Hey, good choice, would get the higher tip, they didn’t. The group that always got the higher tip were the group of waiters that mirrored the language back directly at the person.
The therapists know this. “Oh, I hear what you’re saying is… This whole thing. When you listen, you are able to mirror.
I will very often now, when I’m writing a headline, let go of the ego. I let go the craft of the copywriter. I find the language that my audience is using, I find the questions they keep asking or the statements they keep making, and I take that language and I use it in my headlines. I use their language in my headlines, in my text.
What happens there is you then have this amazing moment of engagement where the reader thinks, “Oh my God, this company, they get me. This is written to me, this is me that they’re talking to. That’s a very, very powerful moment. And it’s like I say, it’s very much not the Draper days of advertising, of the broad…
Brian Clark: No, it was some creative inspiration that Draper got from his fourth whiskey while staring out the window.
But in reality, my favorite technique is one that you just mentioned, which is mirroring language, using the language of the audience, the prospect, what have you. This is why I have always advocated things like keyword research and not because of SEO, although the end result is SEO, at least one component of it. Because you’re mirroring back the way the audience is thinking about this topic.
They’re using this word instead of perhaps this synonym, which means the same thing. Unless you know better, you could be using that when they prefer this and you’re not connecting as well and maybe not at all. And that is so important.
Nick Usborne: It is. You may know, I’ve a bit of a coffee fetish and so I do a lot of research on the language that coffee lovers and coffee buyers use. I come across companies that insist on calling their machines “coffee brewers which is fine, because we know what a coffee brewer is. But, actually, what most people look for when they go to Google, when they search, when they talk about these things is “coffee makers. That’s what consumers use, but the companies don’t use that.
Again, it’s a mismatch. They’re misunderstanding, and it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it can be for SEO purposes. But, more importantly, it can be in terms of connecting with that audience, because they feel a slight, “Well, hang on, is that quite what I asked? We’re not quite speaking the same language here.
Brian Clark: Here’s another example of how powerful that can be. I think we’re finally moving into the age of personalization even for little guys like us. Not just Netflix or Amazon or what have you, but you can see the differences in conversion rates when you have a headline, for example, that refers to let’s say “Freelancers, learn how to charge more for your services. And then a designer is a freelancer, but comes to the page and looks at it and says, “Is this right for me?
Now, if you use on-page personalization, which a tech exists, then it’s like right message and then you just tweak it for that segment and you say, “Designers, here’s how to charge … Boom. Conversion rate goes through the roof. It shouldn’t matter, because the designer knows they’re a freelancer. And yet, any little bit of doubt, hesitation, incongruence, it matters. It’s the way people are.
Be Heard Above the Noise
Nick Usborne: Again, the other huge change in my lifetime, first of all, I was writing for print, for traditional advertising, and that’s a very different game. But also, another huge difference is the level of noise. The noise out there, the distraction out there, the noise through social media.
We could go on forever going down the rabbit hole of AI and stuff like that and automation. Ask me what I think about marketing automation in a minute. But when you have that much noise, when you hear a voice that is speaking, that it feels like it’s speaking directly to you, that really catches your attention.
When you’re surrounded by marketing noise and nonsense, when you feel that mirroring, that, “Oh my goodness, this company gets me. Oh, they’re talking not to freelancers in general, but to designers – that’s me. Then sure. Within a noisy environment, that makes a difference, a huge difference, I think.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I think that’s the gist of it. That’s a good point.
I hadn’t really considered it that way, but you have a split second really. It’s at the headline usually when they will make not a logical choice, but an emotional decision whether they’re going to continue reading. And that’s the whole slippery slide aspect of copywriting. The headline is there to get them to read the opening, and the opening’s there to get them to keep going. Yeah, that’s fascinating.
So, whatever you can do to get that connection quicker, or at all, really depends on how many people you’re going to get on board, whether it be as clients, customers, whatever.
Nick Usborne: I think the other part of that is you’ve just got to accept that you’re never speaking to everyone. I think marketers get tied up in it. We don’t want to exclude anyone. We don’t want to offend anyone, to which I think…
Brian Clark: And everyone knows, “Oh, you’ve got to have a niche and you’ve got to specialize and you can’t talk to everyone, even though you’re right, people still try.
But I think it goes even more than that. I think what personalization technology is allowing us to do is to maybe talk to freelancers and still segment smartly where we’re talking to them as individuals with a specific vocation. This is one aspect of technology that can be liberating.
Instead of niching down, as the British say, so small so that you can talk to one, and really ignoring a big part of a viable market, find a way to understand the different ways the different segments of your audience think and speak. And then you can speak to them.
We’ve got to admit that personalization isn’t this widespread yet at this level. It needs to become this way because people are beginning to expect it, I think, from the Netflixes and from the Amazons.
A Danger of Automation
Nick Usborne: I agree. Hey, I use marketing automation and I use personalization. I’ve used RightMessage before. I get that and I like that and I agree completely with that. I think we’ve got to be mindful of a danger with automation.
My wife is not in this business. In fact, she really doesn’t like the marketing business much, because she’s on the receiving end of it. She’s an avid watercolor artist and she takes online courses. The other day I heard her, she was sitting at the desk, and she literally groaned. I said, “What is it? And she said, “Dammit, I’m caught up in one of those things. And I said, “What?
We talked a bit, and I realized what she’d realized, what she’d recognized as a consumer is that she’d fallen into a marketing funnel. She thought she was going to engage with a teacher for this course, and then she realized she was falling into this sequence of emails and she was like, “Oh, man. I thought that was really interesting. I call it “funnel fatigue, where if a regular consumer – it’s like realizing how a magician is doing a trick. As soon as you see how the magician is doing it, it’s like it’s no longer interesting.
She thought she was in conversation and it was kind of working because they’d used, I think, some of the systems you’re talking about in terms of a very personalized message to her. But she caught onto the fact that she was in a funnel and was part of a process, an upselling process. And as soon as she felt that, she was gone. She just unsubscribed. She was gone. It was like, “No, thank you. I’m disappointed.
The Human Element
Brian Clark: It doesn’t surprise me at all, because that’s the thing. But I don’t blame the technology, I blame the people who think they can substitute.
Nick Usborne: You know what I do when I’m doing something like that? I’ll have a sequence that is like for a while, at least an evergreen sequence, “Here’s the sequence. I will throw in random timely emails like, “Oh wow, did you see the news today when they said blah, blah, blah? So that even if there is a sequence happening in the background, I’m breaking that rhythm. I’m throwing in something that is timely, that is clearly from me.
And I don’t know, I’m just allowing people to feel that I really am still there, and I’ve done the same with friends with their businesses. It’s saying, “Yes, leverage technology and automation, but never allow people to feel that you are not there as a person.
Brian Clark: Yes, that is exactly the theme we’re trying to get across with this 7-Figure Small thing. Yes, technology can allow you to do amazing things as long as people think and know that there’s a real person in there somewhere.
That means there’s no such thing as just set it and forget it automation. It just doesn’t really work that way. And if it does work that way, that means someone else can come along and undersell you or outdo you. You’re replaceable when you stop being human.
Nick Usborne: Absolutely. And just as a research subject of one, like with my Conversational Copywriting course, yes, I’m productizing my skills, I’m selling this course on conversational copywriting. Late last year, I was automating it more and more and turning it into this automated sequence that I could basically back away from.
Two things happened. The biggest thing that happened is I suddenly realized I hated it. I hated the distance it was creating. I wanted to be more closely connected with not only my customers, but my prospects. I wanted to feel that there was something spontaneous and real about my interaction. And I actually stripped out a whole bunch of the automation.
So, obvious things like getting people to sign up for a welcome sequence, stuff like that. It’s been around for years, and I do that. It just makes absolute sense. But in terms of me trying to build any kind of relationship with those people, I do it completely old school. And within the course, I could automate a lab, but I don’t.
There’s the course, but then there’s also the Facebook group and it’s the conversations on Zoom. There are all those elements that make it real and personal and interactive. And then all of a sudden, you have a group of people who just love everything about it and then they tell their friends about it, etc.
Caring for the Audience
Nick Usborne: I think one of the big challenges for particularly people like us, sort of solopreneurs as it were — well, when I say “like us, more like me than you. But I think that’s the way forward — to let everyone else disappoint my wife with the automated sequences. And what we’re going to do is we need to listen more carefully, we are going to mirror the concerns, emotions and language about audience. We’re actually going to deeply care about them.
And that’s the other thing I realized last year when I stripped out the automation from my business, much of the automation. I thought, “You know what? I care about these people too much to just stick them in this system. I actually want to engage with them and give them the ability to spontaneously reach out to me. And yeah, I love, I love what I’m selling, I love the audience and I want to be present for that.
Brian Clark: Love it. I mean, it’s been a recurring theme this season that just emerged.
We kicked off when we came back with Seth Godin and he had this one line that resonated with me and everyone else, which is: who are you going to be responsible for? That’s another way of saying, “Who do you care about? These are the people that you’re going to serve and make a living, because you care. You’re responsible for them, you’re going to bring them value. And you can’t do that with 100% automation.
I love the fact that that keeps coming up, because maybe that’s the essence of it all when we talk about the human aspect. Yes, it’s creativity and collaboration and all these other c-words, but the most important c-word is caring.
Nick Usborne: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s a point that you made 20 minutes ago — the best copywriting you’ll ever do is where you really love the work you’re doing.
Like everyone, I’ve had clients in the past, where great client, big company, big fee. If I didn’t love what I was writing about, I would for sure give it my professional best. But there’s no question that the best copy I’ve ever written has been stuff that I’ve cared deeply about, and I really would like to respect the client as well. So, that kind of respect for whatever it is you’re selling, respect and caring for your audience.
The Power of Plain Language
Nick Usborne: And then, I think there is such power in using regular language. Brian, I’m going to use you as a test subject. I need you to tap into your inner emotions here. If I say to you, “Brian, what is your core competence? In your mind, you’ll have a certain response in your mind to how you feel about that question.
If on the other hand, I said, “Brian, what do you think you’re really, really good at? That’s a whole different thing, isn’t it?
If I say “core competence, it’s this weird business cliché and it creates, I don’t know, some kind of distance or barrier. But if I say, “Hey Brian, what do you think you’re really, really good at? That’s the kind of thing I might ask you over coffee or in a bar or wherever. It’s just natural conversational language. It’s just everyday language.
I think marketers underestimate the distance they create when they use marketing-speak or business-speak. I think they’re creating this barrier in communication between two human beings when they use that kind of language. I think if you use everyday language, you can immediately get much closer to someone.
And if you get closer to someone, then they’re more available to you emotionally. If they’re available to you emotionally, it becomes much easier for you to sell — in not an adversarial way, but just a naturally enthusiastic, sharing and caring for your audience kind of way. It’s like, “Hey, I bet you could benefit from this. I bet you’d love to find out more about this. I bet this could help you in this way. And, yeah, a lot of it is mindset.
I interviewed Seth for the blog on the Conversational Copywriting website, and he was coming around with similar ideas to what you’re describing in your conversation with Seth. That idea of, “It’s not so much about winning, it’s about serving.
Like I said, I’ve been doing this forever now. And for being the cynical English person that I am, if somebody had said to me, even a few years ago, “The most powerful thing you can feel is to be of service to your prospects, I’d have blown the foam off my beer. I’d have scoffed at the idea.
But honestly, in the last few years, I’ve realized there’s a powerful truth there. And that an incredibly powerful way to sell is if your primary purpose is to be of service to your prospect and your customer. And it makes business so much more enjoyable.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I’ve called an entrepreneur “A highly compensated servant of their customer base basically. For a lot of people that does not comport with the media’s rock star image of what an entrepreneur’s supposed to be. But ultimately, it’s the truth.
The Importance of Inclusion
Brian Clark: Okay, if I’ve been listening carefully, and I think I have, I’ve got listening, mirroring, caring, plain language – that’s four. You’ve got to give us a fifth tip before I let you go today. You can’t have four tips, Nick. You’re a copywriter, you know that. You’ve got to have five.
What would be the final one of a conversational copy approach? Of course, we’re going to send you over to Nick’s site. He’s got so much information for you, so don’t worry about that. But I really want to get one more solid tip from you on this.
Nick Usborne: Related to this is the idea of make your reader, your audience, your viewer, your listener, feel included. So much of traditional marketing advertising has been one way. It’s me pushing a promotional message in your face. It was TV, billboards, there really wasn’t much other way to do it, because it was one-way media. Online, we have a two-way, multi-way media.
Even in the language I use, I can help you feel included. The classic way of doing this is with an open ended question. If I ask you an open ended question, “Hey, Brian, how do you feel about blah, blah, blah? I am including you. Now, this may be just a question. A headline is a question. We may not actually be in a conversation.
But because I’m using conversational language, because I’m asking you an open-ended question, I’m not selling at you, I’m not pushing at you. I’m not saying, “Believe me when I say it. I’m asking, “Hey, what do you think? What do you feel in the headline? That’s just one way that I can write in a way that makes you feel that you are included in this.
I think including the reader is a kind of kissing cousin to mirroring. But again, super, super powerful, because they feel they’re not in an adversarial position, because traditional sales is adversarial by nature. This is not. To be conversational in your copywriting, you need to be open and inclusive and include the reader.
It may sound like a soft skill, but hey, this is a whole other discussion and I think I’ve heard you talk about this as well. We’re approaching a time now in business where the soft skills will become the hard skills, because all the hard skills will be done by AI.
I think these things like empathy and respect and conversational language and mirroring, these will become the skillsets of humans who are prepared to be human. And the people who are not prepared to be human, their jobs are going to be taken over by AI anyway. But that’s a separate discussion.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s a big discussion. I agree with you. Unity, belonging, tribalism (at its worst) — I think I’ve come to believe that it’s the most important thing, more than your skill necessarily with words.
I reflected over my 20 years as an entrepreneur, and I don’t think I realized I was doing it, but I was always trying to participate in what I call “a movement. They can be small, they can be big, they can be trends, they can be fads, but this unifying aspect where the people you’re talking to realize that they’re in it together with you.
We did that with blogging, we did it with WordPress. I’m doing it now with Further, talking to my own Generation X, because everyone else ignores us. But it’s that thing, maybe when you ask, “What am I good at? Maybe that’s one aspect of it — just kind of subconsciously realizing that people want togetherness and belonging. And I’m an introvert, so I don’t do it as well in public, but I do it online, and maybe I just gravitated towards that.
Nick Usborne: Yeah, people do. They want to feel that they are a part of something, belong.
You did this very, very well with Copyblogger. You had a loyal following, you have a loyal following with Copyblogger. And they identify as Copyblogger readers and fans. That’s a powerful thing, because there are resilient blogs out there that don’t achieve that at all. I think you’re right. I think you’ve had this natural skill of building tribes and groups of people, because it’s super powerful.
I see this a lot with conversational copywriting, because from a purely business point of view, I probably spend way too much time with the community engaging and talking and getting online with them. But the most powerful aspect of that for them and for me is this powerful sense of belonging, of being part of something.
And also it’s being part of something that most people don’t get, that most people are not – it’s who we are. They don’t have this exact same belief system. Again that sense of being a tribe that is somehow separate from other people is a powerful thing, I think.
Brian Clark: Yeah, and this is not some secret super power that you’re born with. Everyone can learn to be more empathetic. Like you said, when the robots come, that’s what’s going to keep us going, because they can’t do it yet.
Nick Usborne: They’re here. Have I got two more minutes?
Brian Clark: You do.
Nick Usborne: There’s a company called OpenAI, they develop artificial intelligence and they’re kind of backed by Elon Musk and others. They had this kind of engine, this text generator they developed earlier this year, late last year. I’ve forgotten the topic of the article. They basically fed this AI, gave it access on the web to, “Hey, check out as many articles as you want on subject x. And then they said, “Okay, here’s the first paragraph of a new article. Please write another 500 words. That’s it, no instruction. “Here are a thousand articles to look at. Knock yourself out. Here’s the first paragraph, please finish the article.
And I read that article. They released the article, I read it. I honestly and truly could not tell it wasn’t written by a human. The structure, the language, the opening, the middle, the end. It was just a really good article. And OpenAI is open source. But they, in fact, as a company, decided not to release that engine, because they suddenly realized how it could be used in very bad ways.
They said, “Hang on, we need to think about all these ethical layers here that we need to… So, in terms of computers writing like people, we’re here. It’s already here. It’s not like we’re waiting for something coming out maybe in five years.
Brian Clark: I know. If you think the last 10 years have been crazy, buckle up, because it’s about to be really weird. It’s time to really up the things that make you uniquely human. No one can compete with you when it comes down to who you are, and that’s what we’ve got to do. Sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s hard. But it’s doable.
Nick, you’re certainly one of the good guys who are helping people when it comes to copy, which really all are. Whether you’re video, audio, written word, the way you communicate as a human is really powered by this notion of conversational, whether you want to call it copy or not.
Nick Usborne: Right. It allows you to be human instead of hiding behind all this marketing-speak or business jargon or gobbledygook or whatever.
Where Can We Find You?
Brian Clark: Let people know where they can get more from you, Nick.
Nick Usborne: You can go to conversationalcopywriting.com and poke around. There’s a blog there. If you go to conversationalcopywriting.com/unemployable, I will entice you to sign up. I’ll offer you goodies, so I’ll get you into my funnel. But I get you into the funnel in a nice way, I think, hopefully. And I communicate with you in a very human conversational way after that.
If you really want to dig in and learn more, conversationalcopywriting.com/unemployable. If you just want to ask me a question, you can always reach me at nick@conversationalcopywriting.com. So, I like to talk to people about this. I like to make myself accessible and available.
Brian Clark: How’s that for human? He even created a special page just for you guys. I can’t even insult you anymore. You’re too good a guy, dammit.
Nick Usborne: Ah, you’re obviously not trying hard enough.
Brian Clark: I’ve lost a step.
Nick Usborne: If we had a couple of beers, we could get better, I think.
Brian Clark: Probably, you’re probably right about that.
All right, Everyone, I hope you got a lot out of this. I have studied copywriting for 20 years and I learned a few things listening to Nick, so go check out his site at conversationalcopy.com, and whatever you are up to…
Nick Usborne: Conversationalcopywriting.com.
Brian Clark: See, that’s how I was going to get you back. I was giving you the wrong URL. Yeah, just head over to Unemployable.com and Nick will be around there somewhere.
All right, Everyone. Have a great rest of your week and keep going as always.
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