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Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty minutes or less. In some respects, copywriting is the unsung hero of digital marketing. It doesn't get as much attention as video and photos, but words matter. On today's show, I'm talking with Eden Badani, a conversion copywriter and acquisition strategist for SaaS, tech, and d to c companies. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Eden.
Eden Badani: Thanks for having me, Mark. It's it's great to be here.
Mark Evans: So what does a conversion copywriter and acquisition strategist do?
Eden Badani: Alright. So conversion copywriting, we're really looking at at the kind of the whole spectrum of copywriting. It's not specifically it's not direct response copy in the way that we're really trying to push towards a sale. It's rather looking at every every kind of customer touch point throughout the funnel or throughout the sales cycle and looking at optimizing the copy at that specific point to help drive conversions, not just not not just to lift conversions at that point in the funnel, but to actually drive greater conversions across the the entire spectrum.
Mark Evans: For whatever reason, copywriting is getting more attention these days. As someone who is a writer by profession, words have always been important to me, and copy has always been at the core of what I do. But it is interesting to see high profile marketers like Dave Gerhardt talk about why copywriting is so important. So why do you think the spotlight is being shone on copywriting these days?
Eden Badani: I think with all the crazy things that are going on in the world right now, I think we're really realizing just how much we actually depend on written communication. More than video, more than other things it's text, it's emails, it's Slack messages, it's SMSs. We're using so much more written communication now more than ever, even though even if we do weave into that as well, video and other forms of media, it's really shining, it's really helped bringing that to the forefront, that if you can't communicate clearly, if you can't get across what you're saying, and if you can't ensure that your message is optimized in a way so that your audience receives it in the way that you intend it to come across, then it's it's just gonna fall flat. That's sort of the the current situation has been brought copyright into the into the spotlight.
Mark Evans: It is interesting that when you look at platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok, video and photographs are seen as a proverbial bell of the ball. Everyone loves video. Everyone likes great photographs. But words are kinda like the workhorses, not terribly glamorous. I'm I'm curious about why people are recognizing the value of words.
Do they suddenly realize that words make a difference As it's harder to differentiate yourself, are words becoming increasingly more valuable?
Eden Badani: I think words have pretty much always been, like you said, the unsung hero. I mean, a picture, they say it falls back to the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, but if you don't have a caption for that picture, if you don't have an explanation or something to support that picture, it lacks context. And so copywriting adds multiple layers of context. You can have a beautiful image. You can have, you know, an an amazing engaging video, but copywriting is such the words have been the messages that are that are, you know, kind of enshrined or encapsulated in the visual, the concepts and the messages and the deeper under the deeper underlying concepts that people want to express through images and through video.
Again, it's really hard to it can be hard to get that message across.
Mark Evans: As a writer, I often think that writing is underrated and undervalued, particularly when it comes to the web. You know, over the last few years, the prices for content marketing as a from a freelance perspective seem to have been dropping, but there's a sense that that is changing. Do you share this sentiment that writing is becoming more valuable and that people are putting more value in people who can write well, or is that just me being biased as a as a professional writer?
Eden Badani: No. I think so. And there I think a lot of it has to do with the trends in in the gig economy over the last few years. There have been for the probably around the last ten years, there was a prevalence of content houses, content farms, or content mills, as we sometimes call them from a writer's perspective. Fits into the wider marketing perspective where you look at things like SEO ten years ago is very, very different to what SEO is today, where it has a much more technical aspect.
Then it was a lot about keyword stuffing, there was a lot of just publishing content for the sake of publishing content just to rank higher in search engine results, to be present online in order to get that attention. But people have realised that it's not just having the content, it actually has to be good content. It actually has to engage people. It has to really speak to people on a deep level. It can't just be something that's just spun up over the course of half an hour.
It really has to connect it really to connect deeply, not just with the audience, but with the topics and express it in just a very highly engaging way.
Mark Evans: What do you see as the fundamentals for good copywriting? Sorry about that, but I had to ask.
Eden Badani: No, of course. That's a good one. And I think, actually, the fundamental for copywriting is is actually the research. I kid you not. The re if
Mark Evans: Really?
Eden Badani: Yeah. It's not actually the writing. This copywriting is so far from there's a there's a creative aspect to it, but it's really far removed. At least conversion copywriting, it's so very far removed from branding copywriting, creative copywriting. The research is easily 80% of the work.
If you don't know who you're writing for, if you don't know what purpose of the copy is, what goal it's trying to achieve, where it fits in terms of the overall whether it's the content marketing strategy or the marketing strategy or the funnel strategy, if you hit if you don't know those goals, you don't know who you're writing for and what it's meant to achieve, it's not gonna move the it's not gonna move the needle. So
Mark Evans: So you're saying that there needs to be some strategic thinking before you even put pen to paper, proverbially speaking?
Eden Badani: Absolutely. I get like I said, the research is easily 80% of the work.
Mark Evans: Yeah. That's an interesting perspective because people think that copy flows. I mean, I think we've got this image that artists like Dave David Ogilvy somehow if they were got a a spark of inspiration and out came the copy. But the reality is that good copy takes time and iterations and a lot of lot of hard work and sweat. I think you're right.
I think that good copy emerges because you've just immersed yourself in a topic and almost feels like you're you've kind of given yourself a chance to digest what the key themes are and what the key ideas are. Let's say you're you're writing a piece of copy for a client, and it could be website copy or a blog post or something that requires creativity and thought. How what's your what's your process? How long does it take you to really get to the point where you're happy with what you've done?
Eden Badani: That's a good question. And I think it really depends on it depends a lot on the project and the depth of the project and again, what are the are the 10,000 foot kind of goals for the project? How is it meant to help move the client's business forward or to help them increase more revenue or acquire more customers? It really depends. And it depends on how much customer research that they actually have.
For example, this is not something that can be knocked out in a day. With most projects, start off by interviewing customers that the client actually has and actually speaking with them one on one, recording those, getting the transcripts, going through the transcripts, actually surveying their customers as well, collecting survey results, analyzing them, doing deep audience research. It's it's a process that can be quite it can be a few weeks.
Mark Evans: And why do marketers struggle with copywriting? Because it seems to be one of these things where people think it's really hard, really challenging. Is it because they're not natural writers, or do they not understand the process involved? Can you explain some of the struggles that they have?
Eden Badani: I think market why marketers struggle with copywriting is not because they don't they don't know what to say, it's because they have too much to
Mark Evans: say. Right.
Eden Badani: Marketers know they know the business or they know the product or they know the client so well and there's so many wonderful features. There's so many wonderful benefits they can communicate, but it's wait. If you're gonna dump all this information on your audience, they're just gonna be they're gonna lose focus. Copywriting is about it's about distilling that message down to the kind of one or two core points, like your unique selling proposition, and present that to the audience in a way that's going to encourage them to to make a decision, to decide to move forward, to want to learn more, to decide to purchase. So it's not it's not necessarily about what what what they say or to find ideas.
It's that they have too many ideas and so actually to actually distill the message down and to pinpoint the kind of one or two pieces of information that that the that the audience really needs to hear in order to convert. I think that's the struggle for a lot of marketers because a lot of marketers buy buy trade, they they all write copy. What a marketer writes is copy. A writer or a creative writer might sometimes write copy, but most of the time, it's the general content writing or creative writing.
Mark Evans: You know, it's interesting. I have a client and we were doing website copy for them, and one of their biggest pieces of guidance was we don't want generic copy. They're a fintech company, so they didn't wanna sound like every other fintech company out there. So what we did is we took a step back and created copy that we saw as user friendly and simplistic. And then we got into a bit of a philosophical war because they saw simplistic accessible copy as being generic because it didn't have big words.
It didn't have all the industry acronyms. It wasn't trying to throw out all these inside baseball cliches. To me, that was an interesting struggle because you're as a copywriter, you're trying to be tight and you're trying to be concise, but a lot of entrepreneurs wanna be very verbose, and they wanna set tell everybody everything. And do you find yourself in in struggles with entrepreneurs who just don't understand the the tenants of good copy?
Eden Badani: Sometimes. But then usually once they once they hear the research process, they hear once they hear that it's data based, that it's a data that this specifically conversion copywriting, it's a it's a data based approach to copywriting. So we first confirm the data. We confirm what language the audience is speaking. We confirm the verbal cues and things and the ways that they express themselves, and then we present these to the client and say, this is what your audience is saying.
We need to make sure that the copy is matching their language patterns, matching the way they speak to actually capture their attention effectively and to help bring them to convert. If the audit if in the event the audience is also using jargon and long run on sentences and things, then that doesn't mean that there's not a place for it on the website. That said, if the audience is using simpler language, if the audience in their day to day lives is expressing themselves very differently. Then we present that to the client. We say, this is how we're talking, so this is how we're gonna talk to them.
It like, it makes sense.
Mark Evans: That's an interesting take because I guess one of the things we talk about as marketers, particularly recently, is being very customer centric, writing copy and content that reflects their needs and interest. But it is interesting that you suggest that we should talk like they talk. We should write like they would write. So we're aligning ourselves with their sensibilities, ways that the ways that they like to consume content. That's a very interesting approach.
Eden Badani: Thank you. It's I have I have a degree in anthropology and sociology, so it actually I took that inspiration from there. With anthropology, they the way they learn about different cultures and the way they conduct research projects is they do something called ethnography, which is where they actually immerse themselves completely in the culture, in a culture, in a societal group that is actually foreign to them. And they dress the same, they eat the same food, they speak the same language, they actually do everything that they can to actually understand their audience or who they want to communicate with from the inside out. Then they take a step back and then way you know, look at how they perceive the world and then apply that understanding elsewhere.
Mark Evans: That's a really interesting approach because when I think about doing marketing engagements, one of the things I talk about when I'm approaching entrepreneurs is the ability or the fact that I need to talk to their customers. Sometimes I get pushback because they don't want a consultant talking to their customers. Their customers are sacred. Their customers are theirs. But what I often find when the more customers I talk to, the better feel I get for what customers want, the way they talk.
That engagement with customers is invaluable, and I can see how it can to align with marketing. Any suggestions about blogs or books or podcasts that people should read to learn more about copywriting or people to follow on LinkedIn for that matter?
Eden Badani: Oh, yeah. Definitely. In terms of books oh, there's a ton of books. There's a ton of good books on copywriting. Kind of the two fundamental ones though, I think, be Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, which is not strictly about copywriting, but it contains so much golden information about how it's really about the nuts and bolts of good copywriting, what goes into it, about how to adjust what you're writing for the different stages of awareness, where a prospect is, and how to tailor the copy to make sure, how to tailor your messaging and your copy to meet to meet, like you said, meet their their interests and their desires.
The other my other favorite book, would have to say, is the the Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman. He was a famous advertorial writer and direct marketer from a few decades back. The way he teaches you how to write long form copy, how one sentence weaves into the next sentence to create copy that people want to read every single word. It's really fascinating. After reading this book, you immediately apply it to your own writing and it makes a big difference.
Mark Evans: Well, now I got two more books to read on top of the stack of books I've got on my bedside table. Thanks for that. So, Eton, if people wanna learn more about what you do, where can they find
Eden Badani: you online? Best place would be to find me on LinkedIn. That's the best thing.
Mark Evans: That's where I found you originally. It's Yeah. Tell me a little bit before we go, tell me about your your experience on LinkedIn. How long you've been writing copy and content?
Eden Badani: So LinkedIn, really, I just stepped up the last in over the last year. I've been on LinkedIn for a lot longer than that, but then I really took started taking a more proactive approach to marketing myself. And so not just market not marketing myself in the sense of trying to push myself out there, but just trying to add value to the commune or to the professional community on LinkedIn.
Mark Evans: Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Eden, visit marketing spark dot co slash blog. And if you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or wanna learn more about how I help b to b companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co.
I'll talk to you next time.
