How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy – Joanna Wiebe

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0:15okay cool thank you for having me it's my third time talking at micro cough which is Wow right a little little louder on the whoop no yes right yes yeah last time I got to I got to follow Patrick Mackenzie which was basically the most evil thing you can do to a speaker at micro cough it was not fun for me to have to follow that act but but now you talk to you about copywriting first thing in the morning but it's 10:00 a.m. right so we're like a little alert there's a pretty good turnout it was hard to tell when I was standing over there but I'm excited um

0:50the countdown timer is not on just so you know so I will just keep going endlessly okay cool so right I talked about copy a pretty good amount I've talked about copy on this stage quite a bit um oh a lot actually to to micro conf into the whole like hacker news kind of community and everything so okay cool so I'm yeah super excited to come back and talk more about copy today and specifically about getting specific with your copy so when I talk about this kind of stuff I'll do like you know webinar get on stage and give all of these like examples of how to get more specific

1:29with your copy and get cool results with it or get more clear or whatever the topic might be but what I'm talking about specificity I'm usually talking about putting more words on the page than you're comfortable with so saying more writing more it makes people very uncomfortable so I'll say you know try just just go for and do it and give all these examples and almost without fail when it comes time for questions we get some person trying to just completely derail things in a webinar who goes like oh that's all fine and good Joanna but don't you know like the average visitor spends 15 seconds on

2:03your website like they only spend 15 seconds on your website so how am I going to use all that long copy and write the average visitor spends 15 seconds on your website is what I hear to which I say like so like since when did we try to convert the average visitor if you're trying to convert the average visitor things are probably not going that well for you there is no such thing as an average person there's no such thing as an average visitor your product is not average there's no such thing as trying to convert the average visitor you can try it's not gonna work now I don't

2:44blame people for thinking this because for years and years 20-ish plus years we've heard very smart people maybe not copywriters and not people in conversion rate optimization people like you know the fine folks at Nielsen Norman group tell us in these like out-of-context sound bytes things like you've got 10 seconds to leave an impression and tell visitors we'll get ten seconds ten incredible seconds to leave an impression and to tell visitors what they're going to get that's all the time you have like oh wow like 10 seconds what am I gonna do with the remaining nine seconds like that's so much time what I can do so much in 10 seconds it's

3:28this crazy thing that we do and I again I don't blame us because we keep hearing again and again these sound bites that people don't read online we just have to get to the point fast keep it short all that kind of stuff we put these rules these like walls around copy which is actually your online sales person and you would in real life never tell your sales person to hurry up and get to the point just hurry up just walk in and just like just tell them what they're gonna get and leave an impression we'll walk the hell out you wouldn't do that right we put these rules on it when the

3:58reality is copy is your online sales person and at either sells or it doesn't it is not about 10 seconds 15 seconds the average visitor word count it's not about any of that and all of those ideas are extremely limiting I've seen it again and again it's been a lot of years of writing copy 5 and a half years of doing copy hackers where it's like focused on startups and the challenges that startups have growing their business while trying to you know do so with their words a small amount of money and their words or their copied stuff on the page so people rush toward this idea

4:35like you should do it all in 10 seconds and if I can just if I can just get to the point really fast I'll have done it right and then I can move on and do something else in my business but so you've tried this ten second copy like how is it actually working out for you how is it working dr. Phil right this famous question how's that working out for you but how is it working out for you how's it going how is that rushed copy those six word headlines how are they doing you'll get about them getting good conversion rate in most cases no getting

5:05generally about a two percent conversion rate is basically the average if we're talking about averages so today I'm going to tell you not that you just have to use more words but that's your empowered you're allowed to use more words you should use more words it's that's the next goal you've done the thing where you try using fewer words doesn't work now try the thing where you start using more words I'm going to show you exactly how now I'm not saying I'm not saying as I'm talking about this I'm not saying you should do you know one of these ugly long-form sales pages with the yellow highlighting and the red I'm

5:39not talking about this kind of long copy and this is a long-form sales page it's not what I'm talking about these work sometimes we're not gonna get into when they work the hutt is a different talk entirely but they do work sometimes I'm not saying you should do this so drop that out of your mind right now what I am saying is you should stop doing the things that make your copy fail you should just start pushing more at finding more words so I'm saying you should not do things like this where you're making images do all of the work because for some reason copies ugly or

6:12something like people don't like to see words I don't know what the myth is going around like I don't know what it is I on the other side of the fence I have no idea what's being said but all I know is when I go to a page and I see like make these images doing all the work or all of your important messages crammed in a video that's that's where the problem starts that's a big problem that's a big opportunity at the same time I'm also saying you should avoid cramming all of your copy into this unreadable lump when people say nobody reads online no they don't read this

6:44online and intentionally this is like you can't see the details what you can see is this little blur like five sentences that span the width of the page and they're centered like people if your book if a book a great novel Harry Potter was formatted like that nobody would read Harry Potter right don't cram all of your copy into this unreadable lump and most importantly for today's talk in particular do not summarize everything in as few words as possible we think we should though right like we think when you look at that like those were all random pages that came up when I searched alternatives to base camp those

7:26pages came up those are PPC landing pages people paid to drive traffic to those landing pages and that they were randomly pulled says everything to me that everybody is doing the same thing everybody is taking comfort in saying very little and putting very little on the page and letting images do all the work videos do all the work trying not to say anything at all on the page there's this like push to be average but you're not actually average you're just destroying so hard to be average you're trying so hard not really to be noticed for fear maybe of what might happen if you're noticed and you maybe get it wrong

8:10better to say nothing at all this is still something that confuses me I'm not entirely clear on why there's this pull to be average or appear to be but that is it's the reality if you look at your website and your competitors websites if you looked at them right now everybody is trying to stay in the same safe space follow these same so-called better or best practices and where is it honestly where is it getting us and of course not just going to keep asking that it will show you other things that you can do but what I want to point out here is that the safety in being like the

8:44competition or saying things like the competition does if that's something that enters your mind when you're writing or when you're considering what you're going to put on a landing page or your home page or in your emails or whatever it is that you might be writing we're we're worried that people are going to choose our competitors instead of us we're worried that as long as we're saying at least same things that our competitors are saying then we're in a we're we're safe right we can at least say we're safe we don't have any weird people to answer to only ourselves we can at least say you

9:13know what I'm safe there but the real problem for most of us is not our competition the real problem when it comes to actually converting people is that those people are instead choosing not to decide at all so we're not losing sales necessarily to our competition we're losing our sales to no decision whatsoever people are just not deciding they're not saying I choose the competitor they're saying I don't choose anybody I'm just gonna like keep going on with my life and keep doing what I'm doing which means our copy's job is not to be average but to really interrupt and get in the fort and get in the way

9:54of the force of inertia its to get in there and stop them from doing that thing where they just keep walking right like we're worried about sound bites and quotes the real one we should worry about is our visitors who are like I don't know what you're trying to tell me I don't know what you do I don't know why this matters to me you've got all these summary things I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing I'm not going to make a decision at all kay thanks bye that's it that's like that's the world that were actually trying to convert him so what if what if we just forgot about

10:26ten second copy fifteen second copy word-count long versus short all of that stuff and you just tried to convert one person if you just tried to convert just one person not a persona an actual human being a real person just one I love this idea so much that I have a poem for you about it you will like this poem you might recognize a little of this poem roses are red that's me breathing heavily this is intense roses are red violets are blue donate to a teacher with the same name as you does anybody know this one no if you have donated to donors choose in the

11:17past or before valentine's day of 2014 you might have got this as an email this was actual email body copy this poem went out on valentine's day the whole idea there was that if my name is Joanna Wiebe and I am on DonorsChoose mailing list and they have a teacher in their database who also has the same name I have wiebe then they would send me an email saying donate to this guy he's got the same name you've got that was it we just have the same name he's teaching French I've never donated to language programs at all he's doing junior high school work I don't know I'm all about

11:56elementary schools none of that mattered all that mattered was that his name was the same name as my name and how did it perform people were three times more likely to give to a project they gave three times as much and it reactivated lapsed donors stop breathing into that that heavily it's intense seriously so what's the point like what's going on that's so why why do people we still respond so dramatically to this this like idea that when they get this they can actually see themselves like that's really them that's me it's me on the patient that does not mean that using someone's name is the Silver Bullet

12:39right that's not what we're talking about when like we're talking about personalization which I won't get into today tragically but I'm really looking forward to Brennan giving a really long talk one day Brennan wherever you are out there I see you you're gonna yeah I'm gonna do that it's not about using someone's name it's about the thing we all know to be true there's an incredible amount of noise there's so much noise out there so much that you can't even make what that says that's by design and that's intentional there's so much noise there's so many things so 30 years ago we saw 2000 ad messages a day okay how many do you

13:18think we see today unless it's already showing no it hasn't gone ahead good how many do you think we're exposed to in a day five not 25,000 ad messages in a day now when I first started copywriting like a hundred thousand years ago or something I gave a talk inside the agency I was working at about how we're overwhelmed by messages and that serious that clearly has not changed in all of this time it just keeps getting worse feels like we all have known this to be true for a really long time but what are we doing about it and even scarier than that which is a little overwhelming this

13:58like holy crap 5,000 in a day like I guess like what am I supposed to do with that number scarier is that we recognize 50 and remember for now is it scary or is it an opportunity to me I feel like there's some real safety in knowing that there are 5,000 ad messages and only four that I really have to compete with I just have to be one of the four I'll have to be worried about being among the 5,000 I'd have to be one of the four that gets remembered that might be a better better goal not to worry about all of the messages and all of the

14:41competition and all of those rules out there but how do you become one of the four it's ten second copy thing I would argue if you're writing for to make Jakob Nielsen happy you're gonna be one of the four thousand nine hundred ninety six are gonna be one of the ones that nobody nobody wants to be but almost everybody is all of those messages that you've been putting out there that have been ignored that makes that's one of them now I'm standing up here and saying wow there's all these messages you should write more how could that be the answer right how could the answer be to

15:16write more copy when there's already so much out there and I would say because the answer is not to keep doing the thing that you have been doing this very popular in the board room and outside of the board room if you've ever worked in house in a marketing department for a tech company or anything you've probably come across this classic message that makes me cry makes most copywriters cry this save time and money it's it's it's so common I keep it as a swipe file I keep a swipe file filled with save time and money messages that I come across and everybody says this but this one I came

15:57across I was shopping for my Nana's 90th birthday party and we're gonna get her candy buffet hey like as part of the party pretty cool so I went on some different sites to see where I could order some bulk candy they're selling candy with save time and money like candy candy is the most possibly the most emotional like impulse sort of purchase you could possibly have it does nothing good for you it's all bad it's all in your head it's all like this super emotional thing and it's saved time and money I'm going to have a giant box of colorful sugar delivered to my house and you're telling me I can save

16:38time and money obviously a huge miss and so common because there's real safety in that message everybody thinks that's the ultimate thing you can say and that's just one example of these really safe messages that we all gravitate toward what I want to recommend you do is zoom in it's go deeper than that no I'm I do believe save my money is the completely wrong message for candy here for candy and bulk but let's pretend same time and money was an okay message to use let's pretend it was the right one how could we actually bring that to life for people what could we actually say so

17:14that it wouldn't just sound like more white noise instead of saved having money you could say something like get the lowest candy prices and low flat rate shipping or six dollar flat rate shipping is what they actually have that's at least zooming in deeper that's going from this like high up here aerial view if you were making like a documentary you're way up high at save time and money we want to go down to the details nobody has time for this up here this is boring this is Dulles is ignore bull this is nothing we want to go down to the details and that means in

17:46doing that it's not about how many words you use it's not about long versus short at all it's not about that that conversation is not it's not the conversation it's about zooming in versus zooming out where we've been zooming out for so long it's time to try zooming in so here are some examples of how we've done that so we worked with a company called sweat block they sell deodorant for people who sweat a lot like hyperhidrosis where it's not like they don't sweat because they're hot or something it's just like a lot of sweating so solving a problem we tested two home pages that were approximately

18:25the same length tested them against each other but variation B did this thing where we kind of zoomed in to replace summaries with real detail so what does that look like so the control would have a high-level summary like this I'm gonna read really close their control sweat stop embarrassment okay high level control sweat stop embarrassment what does embarrassment look like what is embarrassment I don't know what am what is that right so easy to kind of gloss over that and move on to the next so tiny here smallest screen on the planet nobody can read that I have a close-up of you in my pocket for the other ones

19:07but I think it's control swept up to seven days with a single use okay fine so up to seven days that sounds like we're getting specific right what more can we say so in the new variation we zoomed in on that we said control your sweat and we're what you want and then stay dry for up to seven days with just the dab of a towelette so getting more specific right like what does this actually look like in my life stop embarrassment doesn't mean quite the same as wearing what I want if I suffer from whatever it is that makes me come to this landing page of I'm actually a

19:44prospect not an average visitor I'm a real person looking for a real problem to be solved I come here I see more of myself on the page another high-level summary let's go that up to seven days of sweat relief okay up to seven days that's still I mean this sounds specific doesn't it like it sounds like we're getting into the details but what is sweat relief if you were to visualize sweat really you'd have to come up with a bunch of different things where you'd of course as your prospects come up with nothing at all because it's not their job they're too busy they have other things

20:19to do so we zoomed in on that and we said get up to seven days of dry high-fives hugs and hooray is just for some alliteration because so zoomed in on that that I know what that is a dry high-five I get it I can raise my hand it's a dry high-five I can hug I get what that is I know what that looks like hooray is at least a sound I know what that sounds like it's a real thing it's not like changing the world kind of stuff this is obvious stuff that you're probably already thinking as you're writing but then you're going through this like editing process in your head

20:54based on all this crap you've heard over time about how nobody reads online we want to just kind of get past that what happened when we did that when we went through this page we did this variation be doubled paid conversions the majority of what changed on the page was just getting more specific with things where we were otherwise otherwise summarizing so okay so then we're like cool when now we get to do more because when you have a win you get to do more so we ran a second test against the new control and here's the one it's basically the same length but you'll notice the one on the

21:31right you can't see the detail we're gonna do a close-up right away but the one on the right has this little part tacked on up top this is it kind of close up and this is the part that we really added on there the whole idea was to kind of zoom in on the pain people are feeling so the real the real the real pain that we're trying to kill with this product and if you think of your product and how you are killing pain this should be an interesting thing for you so our control had this pain-free hero right where the product is the hero we

22:08tell ourselves the prospect or the visitor is the hero but this is all about the product it's completely all about the product variation B was filled with pain it was our prospect what they're feeling where they when they arrive are the hero of the page now you'll notice that there is no sweat block product shot in the one on the right there's nothing there there's a little sweat block logo of course do you have to have and there's still the same button up top in the sticky Neve but other than that there was no there's no product shot we didn't show the product you had to scroll twice before even got

22:46near the product this is uncomfortable for every business on the planet like nobody this was not easy to pitch it's never like people don't like it people like it the business doesn't like it so here's what we did here's what actually happened we use this it's called problem agitation solution pas framework this let us kind of get into those details and get inside of our prospects head so here's how it really breaks down so you can see just how much space was spent on setting up the problem on agitating the problem with examples with real things that bring that to life then getting into the solution and then below that

23:24even like once we've set up that there is a solution then getting into the product so we want to zoom in on the problem and how it actually presents itself in real life everything here in case you're wondering like where messages come from if you've ever got the copy hackers ebooks which I think a few people in the room have you might have got book one which is called where stellar messages come from everything that's showing in here was pulled from Amazon reviews so sweat block also sells on Amazon there are thousands of reviews for sweat block on Amazon to find out what to say in the

24:01problems people were going through we went through the Amazon reviews and just picked out the language that was like sticky that made us pay attention this is something you can do easily there's lots of ways to find your message but the most immediate way you can go right now and find your next possibly winning message it's just going through reviews for products that are yours that are similar to yours or that are doing the job that your product should be hired for like a book so things like it doesn't even have to be hot out my armpits are always wet that's that was swiped that it's not mine I didn't write

24:39that everything on here all of these points under agitation around there's something like the color of clothing that you wear dark you have you can't wear light gray or light blue always black something about a sweat Soaker undershirt like you can't make this stuff up you have to go through and look at what people are really saying all of that was pulled so copywriting is a huge opportunity for you and it doesn't have to be hard you just have to listen and pull stuff in so we put that in as our new hero section the new variation beat that oh there's gonna be an overlap beat that

25:13high-performing controlled by you can't really see it but it's 49 percent paid lift so we went from just zooming in and then adding even more detail on the page just to keep growing revenue with that right just keep doing it zooming in going deeper we works the same with email as well so that's an example of a homepage for e-commerce now let's talk about SAS email we worked with Wistia are you familiar with Wistia who loves Wistia right hands oh that's one would shout or something everybody's very polite with the hands um but so he worked with Wistia we love Wistia too we use them all the time um Wistia has a

25:54three-part onboarding sequence well they're three sequences for people who are onboarding trial users to paid users three trigger different sequences so we worked on the third one where they had eight emails the whole goal was once you got triggered and put into this sequence you're gonna be moved towards being a paying customer so we're trying to push you from trial to paid in this sequence that was the whole goal generate revenue get more people to hand over their credit card information become paying users so we tested ours against theirs all we did was change the copy change the copy that was it the same we use HubSpot to do this test of spot has

26:37templates you can't mess around the templates very easily so I we had to keep everything the same except the copy we tested it we got 3.5 times the paid conversions all fully vetted data nope it's all happened in HubSpot the whole Wistia team signed off this is not coincidental this is not insignificant and there were no summaries to be found throughout these emails all of the copy was longer so I'm going to actually have to get this out I took a picture because I knew this is gonna be kind of small and I'm gonna read you some coffee and I have to see up close ok ok so we're gonna read you

27:26one like the control email and then I'll read you the one that we rewrote and we're comment we're like breaking apart and see what went wrong what went wrong and what we did differently so here's one of the new ones up oh sorry I just hit you with the laser hit the wrong button here's the next ok so control email number 2 this is the second one in the sequence I'll read it to you you can decide if you think it's specific enough or not would it make you stop doing what you were doing and pay attention would you get it you're probably already reading it ok

27:59customize your player 18% is a lot that's the improvement in play rate that Wistia customers see by customizing the color of their video player appearance to reflect their company branding on their website it's that easy then there's a video get more plays on your videos by customizing your player colors ok that's the whole email I'm a busy person and I get this email there are 5,000 messages and being attacked by in a day I've become extremely skilled at blocking messages I'm so skilled I can knock through four thousand nine hundred ninety six and a day they can't hit me and I get this email do I stop and pay

28:42attention do I believe it does make me do anything or is it just like no I'm just gonna it's gonna I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing fine and move on with my life like we do so often which copy can stop copy can make that stop so we were like wait good idea Wistia and they're very good marketers but what if we were to kind of zoom in on that on things like the 18 percent improvement when you say 18 percent is a lot nobody believes 18 percent is a lot that has never sounded like a lot in the history of numbers so zoom in on that

29:16what's the video player I don't what what do you mean what does this video player I have to visualize I'm not who are you what and zoom in on my life like you're trying to talk to me right you're trying to get into my head you're trying to connect with me why do I care about your Wistia customers and what they're doing so here is our rewrite you'll remember I think if we go back we can't okay the last one was pretty short this one is good to be a little bit longer okay so this was ours okay variation B we tested against that other one of course as you already

29:51know we saw 18 percent more people click play when we did this first name we customized the color of our video players that's all it took to get nearly 20 percent more views of our videos the Wistia video player defaults to gray which is nice but gray so why stick with gray when you can go with hot pink or dollar bill green or well Wistia blue take a look then we have it side by side image in there then a call to action which is you can change a videos player color in two clicks in wisdom then we continue on getting 18% more views is pretty major videos that used to get a

30:27hundred views in a day now get 118 views a day in a month that's an extra 500 plus views and it only takes something like 11 seconds to make this very simple but very powerful change to your video sounds really easy call to action PS that's the whole email we zoomed in we just said more what is 18% 18% is a number and if you just say 18% is a lot that does not make it true we had to tell them what that really looks like we could go much further than this say how many more views out B in a year well you go further and say if you

31:00convert X number of people or viewers into paying customers that could mean this much more money for your business we could go further but we already had and reply like mmm yeah a little more copy then we're used to Joanna so I pulled back but there's so many more places you could go and so much more you could do to bring that to life for your very very busy readers now I'm gonna finish this part out by asking you all to stand up no I'm kidding I would not I would not ask you to stand up but I do want you to close your eyes okay oh

31:39sorry yeah sorry I'm going to tell you what we're gonna do and then close your eyes sorry okay what we're gonna do is you're gonna close your eyes and all I want you to do is just be you so just like listen to what you're hearing and pay attention if any images form in your brain at all like if anything actually becomes a real image in your mind okay that's your whole job and then I'll tell you when to open your eyes I'll tell you when to close them and I'll tell you when to open them all you have to do is listen okay okay okay

32:20meet Wistia customer Z blue there are a lot of creative ways to grow your business with video collecting email addresses is an easy way to fill your database with sales ready leads we thought you'd enjoy reading how Z blue a digital marketing firm collects leads with video for their client the Santa Barbara chicken ranch and uses coupons to connect with their customers want to collect leads with your videos upgrade to Wistia Pro Plan and use turnstyle in your videos okay open your eyes did you see anything did your mind see anything chicken do you think Wistia was hoping that you would see chickens when you read this that the one thing you

33:08would remember paying attention to is that probably not right so without the picture on the page without that what is your brain left to see when we don't rely on images when we actually put words there and try to engage our reader who is actually literate and capable of reading by and large we the real question is without the picture what would your brain see right we need to stop relying so much on the images and the things around our messages when our messages are actually there to sell they're actually there to get inside people's heads like words are supposed to actually like create pictures in our minds that's what

33:51they're there for they're supposed to engage our imagination if they're not doing that they're not doing their job and they shouldn't be on your page at all we can do all that we want to do with images I'm not saying stop using those I'm just saying stop relying on them because the most amazing things happen when you're actually inside your prospects imagination to quote mr. Don Draper who I wish was not fictional they have no budget the imagination of the consumer has no budget there's no time limit and if you can get into that space your ad can run all day that's how you get to be

34:26one of the four that actually gets remembered not by talking about chicken as the one thing that actually stands out in your email but by using more images by actually trying harder to get more specific with what you're saying it's gonna be uncomfortable but it's exactly what your prospects need from you they're tired of the rest they're telling us that they're ignoring all of the rest and paying attention only to the most relevant specific stuff for them we've seen examples of that and I'm sure you've seen examples of that in your own life so we rewrote that I'm going to because I have a little time I'm going to read

35:03it out to you this is you don't have to close your eyes or welcome to if you want to but video marketing with Wistia turns viewers into leads what if you could double your leads without doubling your PPC spent without doubling your content production without doing anything more than switching on Wistia turnstiles when we stopped using on-page lead generation forms and started using video turnstiles we went from a 6 percent conversion rate to a seven percent conversion rate that's nearly double the leads without any extra effort sounds great you say but what on earth is a turnstile this my friend is a turnstile and there's a gift

35:38for the turnstile because it demonstrates very well in motion it's a really elegant content gate in Wistia here's how to turn your marketing and demo videos into lead collection machines one prospects land on your page two they see your video front and center not squished next to an ugly form three they click play four they watch and then just at the moment when you're about to reveal an incredible data point or the climax of a killer story voila the turnstile appears you can add a turnstile at the beginning of a video at the end or at an exact point on your timeline and anywhere you embed the

36:13video on any page on any site you can collect leads where do all those leads go then we get into those details in almost every sorry in almost every case the winning email copy was two to three times as long as the control and people read it the right people read it the average visitor was not in our minds at all the average person doesn't exist as a thing so people are not afraid to read you just have to make them want to when they actually take the time to open your email that is a major win for you and you have to respect that yes they're

36:51busy but they gave you that moment you have to use that moment to win their business over and you can do that with your words as you've seen 10 second copy is I do not believe the future for any business in this room it was made by UX pros clarity is good getting to the point is good but don't overlook all the important stuff you have to say and your prospects need you to say in order to be convinced to choose you test more words use more words they are free in unlimited quantities that is all thank you [Applause] a simple tactical question when do you

37:36use images in emails when they need to be in there so I've seen over time and some may say I'm biased because I'm a copywriter but when copy leads design things tend to go better from a conversion perspective so I would never start by saying this email needs an image I'll say what's the message what's the goal what is our prospect trying to get out of this what can we actually move them to do and then as you're writing that do you need an image like in the turnstile the whiskey a turnstile case there was only an image in there because it actually called for it like what's a

38:13turnstile we tell you what it is then we show you what it is and then we tell you what it is so that's when I would use it but again like in all those Wistia emails we pulled out almost all the videos and we almost never used images didn't hurt didn't hurt conversion rate at all that helped other questions do these same rules kind of apply in social media when you know you're dealing with the Instagram or Facebook when they're when that that spot is so much smaller Facebook but yeah Facebook ads I mean as most of us know like the image is the biggest deal right you can keep all your

39:00copy the same and just keep testing your images out and do really good things for your conversion rate so today but that's been the case kind of with ads in the past as well right like magazine ads were very visual except in the rare case where they weren't so be specific still in in the language that you do use and then you're perhaps more likely to get people to actually click but we know like at this point in the history of Facebook ads at this point images are king they're the big deal but if someone's going to read that copy once they've seen that image and they're

39:39paying attention you saying something that's going to actually matter to them have you ever had a longer copy perform worse depends on like if we mean this kind of longer copy copy loses for a lot of reasons if your message is right to begin with if your message is already in a good place like you feel like okay it's converting well then digging deeper and getting into the details I haven't seen it loose doesn't mean I've tested constantly everything everywhere but I haven't seen it loose if the message itself is wrong to begin with like the candy store thing if you were to change saves having money

40:24to get low flat rate shipping and the lowest prices online that might still be better than the control but it's not it's it's easy to beat that I would say that would be an easy one to beat with an a simple message about a shorter even message possibly vote get candy at your doorstep right like open sugar on lap or sell freely I don't even know what that would be but you could say things a lot shorter and have a better message outperform the longer message that wasn't right to begin with

41:04this is kind of off topic but how are things going with growing heir story and what's been the hardest part so far you're a plant you want to give a one-sentence summary of what heir story is no no I just wrote to my team was like we need an elevator pitch for heir story badly our story is a little bit it's gonna be a little bit like lead pages for documents that's the ultimate goal is to make it really fast and easy to write mostly fast as their primary value prop to write copy because getting started is hard and finishing it it's hard and then there's the hard part in

41:40the middle so we're gonna make it easier and faster to do that but it's going well two months in do you want to demo I'm happy to show you how it can work for you and we have some pretty cool templating features coming out in about two weeks thank you for asking I think we have time for one more question I

42:07don't want to put you on the spot too much but what is the old adage show don't tell come came to mind a lot when is it good to show and when is it good to tell I had a drunken fight with Amy Hawaii about that exact thing she believes show don't tell I believe Show and Tell both so tell then show then tell people need details nobody cares about anything if you go into every writing exercise knowing nobody cares about anything then you'll know that you can't just show you have to like really tell so if show until Stroh verses tell means like kind of show is the more elegant

42:51solution telling is like here this is what you do we will do it this way and this is exact what you'll get out of it that's the one that I would put my money on actually getting people to make sense of it show is nice so I I would say sandwich it between two tells just to make the whole argument more complex cuz that's how I stay employed I guess I don't know cool thanks again Joe thanks [Applause] you