📂 What the best founders know about copywriting

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Whether it's on a landing page, a sales pitch, demo, or even a casual conversation... too often, founders just jump straight into the features, how it works, or listing vague benefits.

"We use machine learning to increase ROI"

"Our next-generation technology blows the competition away!"

"{Insert vague headline that makes your head turn sideways here}"

And it sucks.

Visitors don't turn into leads. Leads don't turn into customers. And customers don't turn into advocates for you.

And that's a huge problem, because:

1. You'll probably only get one shot with someone visiting your website
2. You've only got a lead's attention for so long
3. There are probably a hundred other pieces of software like yours fighting for their attention

You can't afford to waste these opportunities.

When a channel doesn't work, leads aren't converting, and you're having issues with your marketing funnel, the issue isn't with your channel, leads, or funnel — it's with your offer.

Here's what we want to happen with your messaging and positioning:

• People are immediately hooked when they land on your website
• You make internet strangers feel understood, appreciated, and compelled to keep listening to what you have to say
• You stick in their minds, so that even if they get distracted or decide to leave it for another day, you'll be in the back of their mind thinking about your product(s)
• People immediately understand what you do, how you can help, and why your product is the best solution for them

Let's look at a few examples of how your messaging & positioning can influence your growth.

This is ConvertKit’s MRR growth.

They decided early on that, in order to grow, they needed to really focus in on a specific type of customer.

This revenue chart nicely illustrates the point in time when they decided to position themselves as the email marketing software for creators. Instead of generalizing and targeting everyone, they focused in on bloggers, podcasters, video creators, and course creators.

They’re doing $29M+ ARR these days.

Database?

Early in April Dunford's career, she worked at a startup founded by a couple of guys with Ph.D.s in database architecture.

Their product was a special kind of database that could do certain types of queries in a fraction of the time it took a relational database.

They never questioned the way we framed that product — we were database people and we built a database — what else could it be?

The problem of course was that at that time, the world didn’t know it needed another database.

When they did sales calls and started with “Hi, we have a database…”, prospects didn’t even let them get to the part where they explained how they were special and different from the database they already had.

They finally broke out of this mess by changing how they framed the product. It started with a customer telling her that he didn’t believe that they were a database at all.

He went on to explain that in his eyes, they were more of a business intelligence tool. And after re-framing their story they immediately saw the difference in first meetings with prospects.

They could finally make it slide 2!

The re-framing didn’t stop with marketing and sales however, it changed the way they viewed the product roadmap (how should the product reinforce the value they were delivering?), it changed the pricing and packaging, and it changed the partnership strategy.

They'd go on to be acquired for billions.

Drip for marketing automation

Drip, the lead generation tool turned email marketing tool I mentioned early, had another evolution I want to mention.

They reached a point after some time where they started encountering some friction about their price. Even though they were very reasonably priced and could have ignored this feedback, they strategized about what they could do to better position themselves so that price wouldn't be an objection.

Then it struck CEO Rob Walling: What if they positioned themselves as a marketing automation tool, instead?

Marketing automation had a few large players that were exponentially more expensive, yet Drip had all the right ingredients to serve the purpose of a marketing automation tool.

So they went for it. They went all-in on marketing automation. And the price objections disappeared!

That's the power of positioning.

—Corey

p.s. I’m working on a new course, Marketing Like A Media Company. Coming soon 👀

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