# Improv-Inspired Copywriting Tips for Founders: How to Be Funny (Even If You're Not) – Lianna Patch

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs6ppIBzuRs
Duration: 37 min
Language: English
Words: 6557
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/bs6ppIBzuRs

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[0:00] [Music]

[0:10] gonna shake your hand but we don't have to do that hey guys I feel so famous hum okay so I'm obviously here to talk about humor I see all of you attentively waiting to be for me to be funny that's a lot of pressure but do this improv right improv gets a bad rap because you've probably you have a friend that's dabbled in improv classes and they're like hey come to my show and you're like I'm busy that night no like I didn't tell you when it was but there are so many principles of improv and of humor in general that can help you shape your marketing copy that

[0:54] can help you connect better with your users build loyalty increase retention and so I'm going to show you some of those today why do I care so much about this it's what I do all the time I perform improv probably too much my parents have managed to miss all my shows which is like a feat in its own for them I also do sketch in stand-up comedy and I read a bunch of books about it in case you're interested this is my reading list it's really good I built my whole business on it you know like she's getting a little crazy with this I don't know if we like her so much

[1:26] anymore and I'm actually the first search result for funny copywriter on Google and probably Bing but we don't know because no one's ever used it you're like why is she telling us all this except to prove that she's kind of a douche well my point is if your sass is not using humor you're just not getting the results you deserve you're not making really genuine connections with your users so I'm gonna run you through a few quick examples people that I've worked with y'all know Mike Taber right Co runs this conference yay hi this is his product Rob just mentioned it's called bluetick I worked with Mike

[2:05] on the new website copy and we were trying to get people to stay on the site read through the copy and better understand what bluetick does because it's kind of a complicated tool sometimes and so what's notable about the new copy is that it's actually longer than the old copy but the feedback that might be getting is that it's easier to understand what bluetick does once you get to the site so that was fun to do another client that I've worked with manly bands I rewrote some of their product descriptions for them and they saw between a twenty percent and one hundred and ninety-six percent increase

[2:37] in purchases from just writing funny stuff that their audience wanted to read so there is a connection between humor and money and I just want to make that super clear at the top in case any of you are thinking of getting a second cup of coffee in case some of you're like that's well and good but my software isn't funny there's no room for humor in my brand my last and final client mapa Street I loved them dearly they have them the most boring product I've ever heard of it is stormwater compliance monitoring software literally watching rain fall and I work with them on a bi-monthly email that's just collecting

[3:17] stormwater news and this is the kind of reaction that they're getting from their readers people love it and in fact we surveyed their list and we said do you prefer the old emails that were just sort of straightforward no gifs no jokes and everyone said we like the new emails better we like being entertained so today I'm gonna show you why humor affects us and why it sometimes feels uncomfortable to go for a joke and how humor works in the brain I'm gonna show you where in your marketing funnel that you should use humor to its best effect to capitalize on your effort because it is you know an effort to start doing it

[3:51] and I'm going to show you how to punch up your copy line by line and these are tweaks that anybody can make doesn't matter if you're a copywriter or not I think there's only like four of us here we're a dying breed that's not true we multiply leave us alone in a room come back in there's ten more so why does humor affect us the way that it does specifically why does it feel weird and uncomfortable to make a joke and the simplest reason is that joking makes us feel vulnerable we don't want to put ourselves out there especially if somebody might not laugh and to

[4:28] illustrate this concept I'm going to make myself vulnerable right now I'll tell you a story a few years ago I was at a show I was watching some live music had a few drinks and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a strapping young man who seemed to be facing me I could feel a vibe you know and I was like all right I'm gonna just wait until the end of the show have a few more drinks and finally at the end of the show I got my courage up and I turned to face him start a conversation he was a suit of armor true story I didn't drive home

[5:02] thankfully that was that so that made me feel real vulnerable but hopefully it also endeared me to you in some way that you can't name there are other reasons that we don't feel comfortable using humor in our marketing we remember past times when we've been made fun of we were the butt of the joke that never feels good we always you know everybody here I'm sure remembers the first time that we fell for updog not much dog what's up with you audience participation check and finally work is serious right we're all here because we bootstrapped our products we pay for this ourselves we need to feed our

[5:42] families and avoid taking money from evil venture capitalist sorry to those in the room I love you I'm sorry so we don't we don't feel comfortable bringing jokes into our marketing because this is what we do for a living and finally we don't want to offend our users we don't want them to feel like the butt of the joke like we have so many times in the past so we keep it we play it safe not everybody can be cards against humanity' I love them so much they call their their users horrible friends and consumers and I drink that up I love that that might not be your brand

[6:16] and if you're thinking that I'm gonna tell you to do this I'm not you don't have to go that far it's gonna be okay um but you should be playing on what humor does to people's brains and leveraging that to your best effect how does humor work in the brain it activates parts that make us feel good you laugh at a joke parts of your brain light up and you associate whoever told the joke as long as it's not about you sometimes even if it is with happiness and fulfillment and it also helps us distinguish between two states of mind there's a goal state of mind when we're

[6:51] really focused on getting something done we don't really have time to take a break or laugh or enjoy anything and then there's a play state of mind when we're more receptive to humor and jokes were more willing to have fun and if you are sending out emails and you're using microcopy inside your product and you're helping users get things done but you're never making a joke ever never ever being funny you might inadvertently be making your users feel like your product is a taskmaster so no matter how productive they can be using your sass you they still feel like okay this is work I'm gonna get this done and then

[7:27] one another cool another tool comes along that might help them do it better they have no real connection with you they might just switch right over that sounds terrible right humor is also a really effective way to introduce bad news this is a campaign by Unbounce which is a landing page software I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with they had to change their pricing plans and they had to tell users somehow and so they created this whole chief discount officer campaign that's not a real guy I mean he works at Unbounce but that's not how he dresses he they made him a fake LinkedIn profile

[8:00] they sent out coffee stain flyers and they told people and they told some people their prices were gonna go up and the reaction they got was still really good because people were like I love this campaign so now you're like okay oh great how do I make a joke what is a joke I don't understand teach me no one said that that's there are some Germans here that was my German accent I'm sorry how do you know what to make fun of if you're invested now on the idea of making a joke great how do you know what to make fun of this is where you should

[8:36] go back to your customer research which all of you are doing right you're all doing it everyone's like yep we're asking our users what they love and fear and hate and dread and we're using that and our copy right so take a break from asking them problem and product focus questions on Angel just got it swings take a break from asking those very product specific questions and ask your users what they think is funny ask them about their favorite shows and movies and books and stand-up comedians and cartoons so here's an example of a quiz that I actually ask my clients this is just one page I asked them which meme they find

[9:21] funniest and after they go through this quiz I have a solid understanding of what kind of humor they like highbrow or lowbrow witty intellectual dark and morbid it gives me a really good sense of what to make fun of and what to reference to bring back later in gifs and things like that which I'll get to so when you collect this data from your users look for those patterns maybe you find out that everybody loves Seinfeld but they hate friends I think both of them are garbage for the record maybe you find out that they really like buddy cop movies for some reason so you want

[9:58] to bring that dynamic into your marketing or even reference some of those movies you'll never know until you ask then what you're gonna do is take that data and overlap it with your own sense of humor if it's just you or if you have a team you obviously know what your team thinks is funny you're in slack all day trading jokes see where those things intersect that's the place to make fun of stuff everything in that overlap is going to be appropriate and relevant and perfect for you to tap into those are your perfect topics I'm a thirst monster all right so we talked about how to pick

[10:38] your humor topics let us talk about humor styles it's how you deliver the jokes that you're gonna give to your users there are two failsafe styles that I want to introduce to you today this the safest style is going to be observational humor and then there's self deprecation so observational humor Jerry Seinfeld is really famous for this it involves seeing something in the world that we can both acknowledge and relate to pointing out that it's kind of weird noticing something incongruous about it but it's neutral the user or the listener is not the butt of the joke we're not the butt of the joke this thing out in the world is and we can all

[11:18] see it so he's like what's the deal with airplane food and all right I've never seen a Seinfeld stand-up in the show wait let me let me customize it to this audience what's the deal with two-factor authentication yeah it's okay great I won't ever do sign bone impression again so what does observational humor look like when it comes to SAS marketing copy this is a company called digit they help you automate your savings and they take something that we've all experienced the experience of just trying to buy a coffee and accidentally overdraft in your account getting stalked with a $35 fee they notice it they let us know that

[12:03] they've experienced that it's not an outright joke but it is funny and they use it to introduce a new feature that they have that protects you from that so it's super relevant and it endears me to them also their texts are really good you can text them and they text you back I have tried sexting them and it doesn't work anyway moving on appropriately to the second kind of humor self deprecation this is where you make fun of yourself or your product because that's safe you're the butt of the joke no one can get mad at you for making fun of yourself unless they're your therapist

[12:36] or life coach happens to me a lot and that's why I usually make fun of myself when I'm doing my talks like I just did this was me on stage last year at CTA conf and I walked out on stage and the moment that I got there I was like oh no I dress like link from Legend of Zelda by accident and if I could put that out front of 1,200 people like you guys can write a joke into email I promise so what does self deprecation look like in an email I mentioned bluetick earlier this is an email that I worked on with Mike I

[13:08] forgot to put the jiff in there but it's a cat he's going like that's great and so we're making fun of Mike a little bit here saying just look at me now the cat's supposed to be Mike that's the joke find me after the break I'll explain it to you it's a moment where we cast our sense of humor back on ourselves to lighten the mood so quick recap visual joke there do you like I'm just pointing out all my jokes in case you can't that's what everyone should do mm-hmm we have we have now talked about what topics to make fun of how to deliver the jokes

[13:44] that you're going to make let's quickly talk about where in your marketing funnel you can use humor to best effect so there are lots of places that you have copy write virtually everywhere I've never seen a SAS product without copy has anyone hmm and yet we still don't like paying for it mm-hmm I'm so strange hmm just kidding so there are some places that are better suited to humor than others right my general rule of thumb is that you should never be using humor in your value proposition and just a quick reminder the value prop is when users get to your website and you have a quick

[14:26] line or two of text here you need to quickly and clearly explain what it is you do and why your users should care so it's not a great place to crack a joke because you run the risk of muddying up your value proposition and losing that prospect forever so not a great place for humor but if you're sending traffic to landing pages which presumably you're targeting that traffic you know more about those users then you can run then you can crack a joke and the same goes for your website copy the body copy you want to keep people reading through jokes are one way to do

[15:02] that if you surprise them with something as they're reading through your website they're more likely to keep going and finally I always always always use humor in your emails and inside your product itself because this is where you have that opportunity to build a real one-on-one relationship with your users and someone was up here yesterday talking about FOMO and he showed a screenshot from inside the app and it was a date range showing some data and instead of saying like here's the data from this date range it said date range be like I don't know if you all notice that that's the kind of thing that I

[15:37] love and I look for in my SAS products because it shows that someone's paying attention to my experience all right so who here is sending out emails good good who here is like super happy and content with the amount of engagement and response you're getting from your emails I just wanted to make you feel bad I'm sorry that's why for the rest of the talk I'm gonna focus on email specifically because we're all sending them they could all be better right so let's get into how to punch up your copy these are punch ups I must say that we're a million times punch-ups punch ups some of them are

[16:21] just simple some of them are just best writing practice and some of them are simple tweaks that you can use to make copy funnier or more personable on a line level it doesn't matter if you're a copywriter or not like I said we're a dying breed until you turn around so there's three categories of punch-ups show your emotions piss off your grammar teacher and lead the way let's start with show your emotions and why do you want to show your emotions I love this dog by the way I feel like he should be an internet superstar if you know him call me you want to show your emotions because like

[16:57] we said you're super excited about your product you didn't spend all this time and effort building it to just send an email that arrives with the equivalent of a wet fart right you want to share your excitement with your users and you can do that and your copy by using all caps it's kind of like yelling like yelling you should do it sparingly here's an example from a detergent company called rock and green and almost all the rest of my examples are SAS but I like this example because they get into the emotion of doing laundry the laundry you can almost hear it notice it's only one word because if they had

[17:34] this whole paragraph in caps it would be like your grandmother learning to type and we don't want that we don't want to be old people yelling on the internet with our copy another way to show your emotion in your marketing copy is to use comic book words like bang boom crash these are actually when when people read these you hear them it triggers a different part of the brain you can hear the noise in your head so it activates more more parts of the brain than just reading words here's an example from customer IO there's actually two examples here one above one below those are two different emails and they say

[18:09] tada and the next email they say whoosh the sound of a new user leaving forever the sound that we hate so much I feel like we should hear that ding again like the angel losing his wings no he said because you're not using onomatopoeia another way to show your emotions is by making asides in your copy almost as if you're whispering a secret into your users ear and you can do this using italics you can put your asides in parenthesis pick your poison here however you like to format your copy so here's a great example from Warby Parker it's a simple transactional email password reset starting here your passwords gone

[18:48] missing it happens to the best of us it's kind of like okay someone wrote this a human being wrote this not a machine makes me more likely to buy from Warby Parker and my favorite category using gifs and emoji we can argue later about whether it's Jif or gif it's jeff though so along with being a super fun way to show readers what you're getting at instead of telling them this is an effective way to visually break up your copy you don't want a wall of text no matter what you're writing you don't want a wall of text because people can't read it so by using a jiff you'll have a line break

[19:26] you'll have a visual break and you'll have some interest so here's a simple email from err story I'm gonna mention Joanna Wiebe just to check that box on my micro contraband go card I think you have to mention or if you're up here at least once this is her product err story and she just uses a simple rocket emoji to express excitement with the user so I love that here's another example from soapbox a video making tool from Wistia and I couldn't get the jiff to load so just imagine that all those people are doing this they're really excited thought y'all were gonna laugh at that

[20:02] that's okay that's fine and a quick word of caution it is possible to use gifs badly and I've blanked out who this is here so the reason this jiff is bad there's multiple reasons it's too small it's too long it goes too fast and I have no idea what it is and it's not relevant to needing to add my think for the day fail sale hall around so when you're choosing gifs make sure that they're short relevant you already know what shows to reference because you've asked your users and that they don't distract from what you're trying to get your users to actually do so let's move on to the second category

[20:41] of punch-ups piss off your grammar teacher this is a really easy to remember acronym so definitely write that down point so I like to think it's said the first way to piss off your grammar teacher is to make mistakes you can make an intentional typo you can punctuate incorrectly or my favorite you can use strikethrough to make a joke that doesn't distract from your actual points so this is sumo and they're saying I want to go fast Ricky Bobby it's a reference I think it's Talladega Nights and like john c reilly yeah just in case people don't get that it doesn't matter because they still get the point of the email but the

[21:22] people who do get the joke will be secretly pleased and then they'll probably go watch a Will Ferrell movie another way to do that like I said is including a typo there are some studies that have shown including a typo in your email subject line gets higher open rates so here's Mark littell would some of you may know him from bos and he says more new speakers to show that he's like up on the internet lingo I love it great guy another way to piss off your grammar teacher contract and abbreviate words because we don't speak in full uncontracted we do not speak in this way

[22:00] right we need to our copy needs to mimic how we speak in real life so here's a bad example I won't tell you who it's from hi Liana how is it going hmm how do you do fellow kids that's what that made me feel like it's like who wrote this here's a better way to do it this is just a simple contraction simple abbrevs I want to know it's how we text each other it's how we talk to each other in real life why don't we write that way here are some simple briefs that you can use bonus points if you put them in your emails from your CEO especially totes

[22:45] jelly like CEO of sass product here I'm totes jelly of your user account I don't know what it no one's writing this email but definitely take advantage of using some of these and it's a simple way to go through your existing emails contract words and immediately come across as more friendly and approachable another best copywriting practice is to chop up your sentences we get so excited about our stuff that we're like here is everything it can do all of it at once and no one wants to read a sentence like that we have been told not to use sentence fragments every sentence should have like a noun and a verb make your

[23:24] proposition no one remembers what those are but in fact it's true that your sentences should only be doing one job so give each sentence one job that job can be to get it to the next to get the reader to the next sentence so here's type form they say we just hired a professional photographer thousands of them actually that's not a whole sentence with our new unsplash integration it's never been easier to stand out from the crowd oh and did we mention it's free they're making four points and four sentences here they could have smashed all of those points into one sentence but instead they're saying new pro photographer thousands of

[23:58] them it's unsplash and it's free super easy to understand quick recap so we have established now that effectively using humor helps you build your relationships with your users right now you know how to do it in some line levels there's one more category that we're gonna get to and just in case this is feeling weird everything that we are learning here oh wait my slides are different that's good there's an updated version last category last category of punch-ups lead the way people are sheep you got to tell them what to do the first way to do that and your copy is by asking and answering questions so

[24:40] if you know that your user is gonna have an objection and you need to answer that right away meet them where they are this is text expander saying hey what if you don't want immediate snippet expansion use the limiters and another email to the lower right want us to show you not tell you watch our video they get right to what their user is thinking and they address those objections right away leading them to what to do next another way to lead the way is to trail off with ellipses this is like the copy equivalent of a drum roll not great but it's what we have dot dot dot

[25:21] here's brain dot FM trailing off building suspense also giving us a nice line break so that there's it's easy to parse this whole email we have some good news to share with you dot dot dot announcing latest updates they also have an emoji I love it although don't ever tell people that it's been a while since they've heard from you they don't remember in the last and most important way to lead the way include a call to action please please tell them what to do um you have to have a button or a link in your email tell them what to do next here's a great one from tunnel they're

[25:55] they're a private VPN service that I recently discovered I love their website there's anyone here from there let's talk and they say upgrade my bear it's super personal it's written in the users voice my bear it's on brand because it's talking about bears and not like upgrade my service and it's excited because there's an exclamation point at the end by contrast here's how not to write a call to action take a peek into our musings momentum and March updates why though why would I do that there's nothing in that for me it's somebody who really likes alliteration and they were like what can i litter eight with March its March

[26:37] right no one even know what is here from this team I think so I mean you can send an email without a call-to-action but it's like sending a pregnancy announcement featuring guns you just shouldn't you can't but you shouldn't like there are more than one of those on the internet if you search pregnancy gun announcement I'm just saying no why alright so to quickly recap everything that we've gone through it's been a lot you need to use humor its science its psychology it can help you generate trust and love and increase retention you should do it inside your app with your micro copy and definitely in your

[27:25] emails make fun of what's around you or make fun of yourself to avoid offending your users and use those tricks I just showed you to go through your existing emails and punch them up line by line so congratulations you just took part in an improv show against your own will you don't have to worry about being a weirdo because I will do that for you and thank you so much [Applause] questions we do a ton of advertising and which has said so many different headlines and we types of memes too and they work pretty well what I didn't see you mentioned and which we haven't actually tested is using jokes in at

[28:10] copy headline body of the copy and etc have you tried well what kind of feedback have you seen in using at at the top of the funnel so I've tested that with a couple clients and I think it just comes back to whether the joke is going to attract attention because of the top of the funnel that's what you have to be doing so if it's a joke that you know is relevant to your readers or it's something that catches their eye or it's a callback to something else they've seen from you if you're retargeting that would be effective if it's just a joke for the sake of a joke

[28:43] it's probably not gonna work as well that make sense cool someone else hey okay I am in the funeral niche and I'm wondering

[29:01] you're killing me what were you wondering or we just trying to make me feel bad does doesn't actually work across all industries you know on my website it says like if you're in the funeral niche like probably not for you so your results may vary but I did just see an ad another copywriter saw this ad in the UK and it's for a mortuary service trying to remember the exact line but it was light hearted and it was referencing the fact that like hey we're all just gonna be dirt eventually so why not save some money basically obviously you know your target client like if your

[29:49] target client is cool with death then that could work if they're terrified and going screaming into the grave then no thank you yeah yeah so I have two types of claims they're either fresh out of college or they're a bit retired just the way it is and I've tried humor in different ways and it always backfires me in some kind of way do you know a type of humor that can work across both of those demographics for example when I do gifts you know half of the group doesn't understand it if I do you know misspellings the retired folks who are usually 70 to 80 they always like send

[30:29] me a very lengthy email explaining how I did everything wrong sweet old folks I love them I have many questions for you including whether you started with research into what your people thought was funny no not at all that's what I thought was funny now yeah well that would be a good place to start and then now that you know misspellings don't work on the older people and gifs might work better and the younger people go that direction and I think there's also you bring up a good point that sometimes especially with different email clients gifs might not render correctly for some people and so they will completely miss

[31:04] the joke and that just looks like you messed up your email so that's the thing to consider deliverability

[31:13] do you see a difference in how we need to be writing jokes for like the b2c market versus the b2b market where you know you're aiming at companies maybe you like reliability or strength or like part of your your key points and does humor attract there or does it work equally well because it's still a person who's making the purchase decision so I will say that b2c has gone whole hog with humor we see it so much more and especially retail emails but think of it this way would you rather have a president who can crack a joke about themselves and does that make him seem stronger and

[31:45] more powerful in your eyes or one that can't take a joke that's kind of how I feel about that yeah yeah but in the back hi hi so I run a b2b business how are you Freight how do you the tactics of doing the research and interviewing your customers to say what do you think it's funny how do you frame that because it seems like a totally random sort of question to ask someone what do you think is funny and some of our survey or something like that yeah it is random and it will surprise people and that's kind of part of the fun I like to sandwich those

[32:25] questions in with the existing research so generally if we're doing research by email we're sending a survey we're trying to keep it to like three questions or fewer so you can ask the first two questions with the data that you really need to know and then reward them with the third question like hey just so we know who's your favorite stand-up comedian or like what show of these three is your favorite like parks and brag the office or whatever I don't think again I don't think that people will be upset about it they'll just be a little surprised and that makes you more memorable hey lianna hey that was a great talk

[33:00] very actionable thank you so on are like aren't our email confirmation page and someone who has signed up we used to have a gif of Arnold's lifting weights and it's a pun because it makes it introduces our our branding and our company name but instead of two weights he was lifting two cats and I just thought that was like just a funny gif and most people thought it was funny but I had someone make you know send us a super lengthy email about how we were like animal abusers and that way so for the majority of people I think they found it funny but for some people they

[33:31] definitely did not so I just wanted if you had any experience with those kind of reactions and how you should deal with that kind of thank you yeah I think I think even when you do everything the right way you still there's still a tiny risk that some people will get offended or take it the wrong way and you saw with that that mapa street data when we asked the email us what they preferred their work there were like five to seven people who still said I liked the old emails and at that point you have to ask who's my ideal user and like who do I

[34:02] really want to work with who's the most valuable for me what's the lifetime value of somebody who likes the jiff versus doesn't and focus on the people that are worth it to you yeah nope I think we have time for one or two more if there are any additional questions so a question about poking fun at your competitors advisable any tips or tricks or guidelines generally not a good look it's a it's offensive to them and it can be libelous depending on like what you say and where you say it and it just doesn't make you look good either because instead of pushing other people down there's this idea in comedy that

[34:52] you should always be punching up so if it seems like you're punching down at your competitors then it's kind of like not fun for anyone and feels gross and bad so I say stay away from it I was just talking to someone in the audience I don't know who that was okay so we have been trying to bring humor into a very serious field so we're public safety so we look up a lot of cops yeah and I'm kind of getting nervous about where to how to push the line right because we have so many cop donut jokes that we can kind of you know integrate like how do we test to where

[35:31] we we don't I mean do we have to just throw it out there and then just maybe offend people and then be like oh let's reel it back in or like how do you baby step into that with this really sensitive serious industry that you want to try to make have fun or is your audience cops or are you working with cops for another audience yeah it's fall Public Safety so mostly cops and then like a 9-1-1 dispatch and ems and things like that yeah like like when i have a relationship with them on the support side like we're friends right so I need oak but when we're not to that point yet

[36:02] how do we integrate that humor yeah slowly and and cautiously I would say like don't go whole hog with writing an email series that has tons of jokes and gifs like test version of a joke in one of those emails if you're sending them and I know I keep talking about emails but like anywhere in your marketing copy let them get to know you let them get to trust you getting to know you getting to like you that kind of stuff and then you can start to crack those jokes that you crack with people that you know better thank you very much Lana thanks guys [Applause]

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