Two things.

1. A really great offer.

Most business owners (including marketers and copywriters) don’t have a great offer.

Take a yoga instructor for example. If she’s asking for work you’ll find him saying,

“I’m a yoga instructor with 10 years of teaching experience and I’ve taught over 1000 students how to have a healthy body and mind”

Or

“Learn how to stay younger and healthier longer with yoga.”

These are general pitches. The problem with it is, all the yoga instructors on the planet are pitching a similar thing. And everyone knows that doing yoga can keep you younger and healthier. It doesn’t stop anyone in their tracks and say oh! I must have that. Instead they say, “Yeah I know… so what? Any yoga instructor can teach me what you can. Why should I learn from you?” And there are many yoga instructors who have 10 years or more experience in teaching it.

They need to come up with a better pitch. Something that their customers have never heard. Think of it like packaging. Most businesses are the same, offering the same things. But if you can package it better it gets attention. Now I’m not asking anyone to create over the top promises that they can’t keep. But it has to be put in a better way.

For example, a better pitch for yoga classes could be:

“I’ll teach you 8 breathing exercises (that take no more than 20 minutes a day) to reverse years of smoking damage to your lungs”

Or

“I’ll teach you 3 yoga movements, 15 minutes a day, that’ll reduce IBS issues by 30%”

These are just examples. The point here is that these offers are very specific, tells you what you get, how much time you need to spend in a day, how many exercises are involved and what’s the benefit. That 30% thing could be wrong, but you get the general idea… I hope.

2. Focus on content marketing instead of sales focused marketing

First of all if you don’t have any clients, don’t even bother with marketing. Marketing is nothing but selling to a thousands and millions instead of just one.

But before anyone goes there, they should focus on sales and get clients.

Selling one to one also makes marketing a whole lot easier because now you know what your ideal prospect is thinking, their fears, what risks they want to avoid, what objections they may have, etc. With all that information in hand, you can create better marketing messages and campaigns.

Now with that out of the way, here’s the problem.

I’ve written a lot of content for startups and small businesses. And the constant feedback I got from my clients was “I’m not getting enough sales”.

That’s because I was doing the wrong thing.

See, marketing has an educational (content marketing or brand marketing) and a sales element.

Small businesses and startups end up focusing too much on content, blog, social media posts, etc. They are important. But the entire focus of marketing shouldn’t be on it.

Instead, small businesses should focus more on sales focused marketing. Here’s what a common sales marketing looks like:

a. Put out a free downloadable content and collect email addresses in exchange for giving it

b. Use email marketing to promote your business

If you’re running ads, only use ads for getting people to download your free material.

Or, if you have a decent size marketing budget, put more money on retargetted ads. These are ads that go only to people who have seen a previous ad.

You’ll get more out of your budget this way.

So, how much of your effort should be on sales/sales focused marketing and content focused marketing.

If you’re a small business, then I’d say 80% effort on sales/sales focused marketing. and 20% effort in content marketing.

As you grow and have more spendable money, then you can switch gears and go 60:40, 50:50 or even 30:70 (that would be once you’re a big company and are looking to establish a long lasting brand).

And your final question, what people get wrong with their copy-

They focus too much on themselves, what they can do and what they did. That’s why I insist that every small company should have at least 1-2 years of one on one sales experience before even considering marketing. As I mentioned before, you’ll have a better sense of what to write and how to persuade your prospects to buy from you using your copy. Without one on one sales experience, you’ll most likely write stuff no one cares about except you.

Hope this helps.

1. Storybrand is useful for branding which is a whole different beast. Most small businesses owners need sales. For that, I’d recommend Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins and Adweek by Joe Sugarman. These two are the only books you need to get started. You can also read Gary Halbert’s letters. They are free. Just google it you’ll find them.

2. I get referred by past clients. For the most part I reach out to them. The way I get them to hire me is that I don’t pitch copywriting services. I start with the outcome ie. Sales. I simply say I’ll get you X sales. If I’m working with big companies I charge an upfront fee and commission on gross sales. With small business owners I only charge commission. This lifts any scepticism because they don’t have to pay me if I don’t bring results. It’s as simple as that. And because of that I spend zero time discussing money and haggling over price. It becomes irrelevant. But the important thing is to pitch the outcome not what I do.