Catch the Full Episode:
Overview
Your customers usually describe your value better than you do. In this episode, John Jantsch sits down with Joanna Wiebe to talk about getting their words onto your website, into your emails, and in front of the prospects who look just like them.
Wiebe lays out a lean approach to voice of customer research that a small business can set up in an afternoon. She explains how to put your messages in the right order so prospects move from feeling a problem to choosing you. She also shares where AI belongs in the process and where you should keep your own hands on the keyboard.
This one is for small business owners, marketers, and consultants who want copy that sounds like their best customers wrote it.
About the Guest
Wiebe is the founder of Copyhackers, and many copywriters call her the original conversion copywriter. For more than 15 years, she has taught copywriters, marketers, and founders to write copy that sells, with clients ranging from early-stage startups to AWS and Calendly. Her newest book is The Copyselling System: Write to Sell with the Secret Formula for Maximizing Revenue.
Key Takeaways
- Interview about 7 customers, and choose the ones you most want more of. If you only have 2 ideal customers, interview those 2 and skip the rest.
- Add one survey question to every confirmation page in your business: “What was going on in your life that brought you to [action] today?” Use a long answer box and pipe responses into Slack or a spreadsheet so your team sees them.
- Before rewriting anything, find the bottleneck in your growth. Write a 1-page solution design by hand that names the constraint and shows where copy does and doesn’t fit the fix.
- Move prospects through the stages of awareness in order. Start with problems in their life or business, then category challenges, and only then your product.
- Let AI sort voice of customer data from sales call notes and online conversations into a shared message matrix spreadsheet. Your team writes the emails, and 60 words is a good target.
Great Moments
- [05:57] Jantsch points out that people who answer a post-signup survey are making a small commitment that makes them more engaged with the business.
- [14:38] Jantsch describes how marketers have lost control of the customer journey over the last 5 years because the way buyers research and buy has changed so much.
- [13:28] Wiebe explains why prospects can’t tell your AI feature from a competitor’s weaker one, and why your copy should blame the category instead of the buyer.
- [16:20] Jantsch asks whether businesses now need pricing, full reviews, and every case study online to answer the 100-word prompts buyers type into AI tools.
- [22:10] Wiebe describes the “brain dulled” feeling of reading an AI draft and deciding to scrap it and write the thing yourself.
Memorable Quotes
- “All we’re doing with research is trying to learn how to clone our best customers. And the way to clone them is to know what’s going on in their head and throw it on the page so everybody else who’s like them sees it.” – Joanna Wiebe
- “The Copyselling System is intentionally called copyselling, not copywriting. Stop thinking about it as writing, just stop. Now we’re copyselling.” – Joanna Wiebe
- “This is a place where you can start training AI on your message matrix, knowing that it’s more about AI knowing what to say about you than it is about you saying that thing about you on your website anymore.” – Joanna Wiebe
- “AI came to party and I think we should party. But that means it has to come through for us too. We don’t just blindly accept whatever it says.” – Joanna Wiebe
- “Humans make mistakes in their writing. They do run-on sentences, they abbreviate things, they use slang. Good human writing sounds like human talking, and if you read some of the AI copy, you think, I would never speak like that.” – John Jantsch
Resources
AI copywriting, Content Marketing, conversion copywriting, Copyhackers, copyselling, Copywriting, customer interviews, customer research, email marketing, Joanna Wiebe, message matrix, Small Business Marketing, stages of awareness, voice of customer, website copy
