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3 Copywriting Tips To Optimize Your Sales Funnel

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For every 100 people in your sales funnel, 97 won’t buy a darn thing from you. This isn’t an inflated statistic. In fact, 3% is considered a decent conversion rate. But what can you do about those 97 people who ended up in your funnel?

Are you going to just let them sit there without buying anything? 

If 3% of people are buying your offer, I bet you could sell more. 

The key to making more sales is to optimize your sales funnel. Internet marketing isn’t about plugging away at your laptop. It’s about locating bottlenecks in your funnel, testing your copywriting, and understanding conversion optimization. 

You shouldn’t chase new customers until you’ve already optimized everything you can inside your sales funnel. 

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You’ve already done the hard work of attracting these people. Now let’s work on getting them to buy. 

This article will give you 3 steps (plus one BONUS tip) to optimize your sales funnel, increase your conversions, and sell your products. 

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the experience your audience has with your brand. This journey takes them from being a reader or follower to becoming a paying, happy customer, and eventually someone who promotes your product for you. It’s their entire customer journey. 

The goal of conversion optimization is understanding the customer journey and giving your audience what they need to move closer to buying.

Your job is two-fold. First know what your customer expects. Second, deliver. 

If a visitor clicks through to a landing page, you’d expect the landing page copy to match wherever they’ve just clicked from, like a Facebook ad. 

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A typical sales funnel will start with an opt-in (also known as a lead magnet). Then you send emails to nurture your audience before offering them a paid product or service. 

3 Copywriting Tips To Optimize Your Sales Funnel

An example sales funnel inside Funnelytics. Nicola Moors

Now I’ll show you how to optimize your funnels by mixing a little bit of copywriting know-how with data and analytics.

Step 1: Understand your target audience 

Your customer is not a lifeless avatar. They’re a real-life human with beliefs and values. 

In fact, you can highlight a shared value you have to create a deeper connection because you’re showing your prospect that you care about what they care about. As an example, innocent drinks (a UK-based brand) isn’t just selling smoothies. They’re selling a better future. 

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They’re not selling you a drink. In their copy, they highlight that by buying their products, you’re contributing to a better world. 

Your sales copy should sell the promise of how much better your customers’ lives will be once your product is in it. 

That’s because transformation sells. 

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Pioneering neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and fellow researchers at the University of Iowa, discovered in an experiment named the Iowa Gambling Task, that patients with damage to the part of the prefrontal cortex that processes emotions often struggle with decision-making. This tells us that emotion drives decisions. 

So by treating your target audience as a 2D persona, you’re missing out the reasoning behind the decisions they make. 

Take the emotion from your copy and you’re likely missing out on conversions. 

The number one rule of customer research is to never assume. 

Throw out everything you think you know about your audience. Let your research and data do the talking. 


What Does it Take to be the Head of Marketing

How Do You Research Your Target Audience? 

Here are the top ways you can dig into your audiences’ values, beliefs and emotions. 

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Research Option 1: Surveys

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”Surveys are easier and faster for customers to quickly provide feedback,” according to Easy Digital Downloads

In my experience, people love being asked for their opinion. So use this to your advantage by inviting your customers (and even people who haven’t bought from you) for their feedback. 

In fact, implementing this customer feedback loop is the easiest way to retain more customers. 

Create automations and insert touch points that ask for intel at every stage of your customer journey. 

My favorite places to ask for feedback in my funnels are: 

  • Adding a question on your lead magnet’s thank-you page to ask visitors why they downloaded it
  • Asking for feedback before you launch a new product to uncover your audiences’ beliefs and objections to that particular topic (great for creating pre-launch content)
  • Asking new students or buyers to give insights on why they bought from you so you can attract more people like them 
  • Requesting feedback from non-buyers to find out how else they’ll solve their problems uncover the hidden competitors you might not know about 

All of the above can be created and added in so you can collect intel automatically at each stage of the customer journey. 

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An example survey question I love to ask buyers. Nicola Moors

Research Option 2: Interviews 

Remember we want to uncover our target audience’s emotions. And while surveys are great for quantitative data, it’s really difficult to go deep. So I use customer interviews to ask follow-up questions and really dig into the heart of what’s really going on inside your customer’s head. 

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We want to uncover the insights that they might not even tell their friends about. 

So if I was to interview the person who responded to my survey question above, I would want to know the following: 

  • Explain what you mean by “nebulous idea”?
  • How had you gotten your information on brand voice previously? 
  • What type of things were you Googling? 
  • What information were you specifically looking for? 
  • It feels like the idea of brand voice was confusing to you and your clients. Is that accurate? 
  • Now you’ve used this product, how do you feel about brand voice? 

Other things you might want to know: 

  1. What problems does your target audience have?
  2. What are their goals? 
  3. What do they want to achieve by solving this problem or hitting this goal?
  4. What is driving their decision making?
  5. What’s holding them back from buying? 
  6. How else are they solving this problem? 
  7. Who else do they look to for support with this problem?

Research Option 3: Review Mining 

Mining through online reviews is an incredibly insightful way to get even more intel on your audience. In fact, it’s my favorite way. 

Look for the places your audience hangs out. 

That could be: 

  • Social media – for example Facebook groups 
  • Reddit 
  • Quora 
  • Amazon reviews
  • Social proof – review your testimonials and see what language is being used

And look at what they’re saying about your topic or product. 

Search for keywords that will help you find out their problems, hesitations, and desires. 

All of the above will help you get closer to understanding your audience and getting your message right.

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Step 2: Optimize Your Product

Once you understand your target audience, you can use the intel to craft the perfect offer for them. 

In marketing, the key to creating high-converting funnels and selling your products isn’t to find an audience for your offer. You design the offer for your audience. 

The audience always comes first.

Never create a product just because you want to. Make sure there is a need in the market for it. (What we like to call proof of concept.) Your audience will crave your optimized offer because it solves a need for them. 

How Do You Design the Perfect Offer and Optimize It?

Or how do you optimize what you’ve already got?

Even if your offer is already selling, go back to your research and look at the following: 

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Problems

What problems does your audience actually want to solve? How can your offer solve that?

Goals

How does your product help your customer achieve their goals? Remember your job is to show how their life will be easier with your product in it. 

Hesitations

What could be holding your audience back from buying? If the cost is holding them back, could you offer payment plans or free delivery? I’m sure I don’t need to go into the enormous success of Amazon Prime.

If time is their hesitation, could you make the content in bite-sized videos or offer transcripts so they quickly read the content instead of watching a long video. If they’re unsure the product will work for them, could you offer a video demo or a money-back guarantee?

Competitors

Compare yourself with the competition before your visitors do, according to CXL. What makes your product different? How can you position this? If your product is more expensive then you can explain why and how the benefits are worth the extra cost. 

Questions

What’s your audience asking about your topic? For example, when building my digital product helping copywriters nail their brand voice, I saw they were asking what went into a brand voice guide. So I added a template and real-life example of a brand voice guide so they could see it in action. This made the product a no-brainer for them because they were already seeking this information. 

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Urgency or Scarcity

Why does your audience need your product right now? 

Will the price increase? 

Does the bonus run out after a time? 

Social Proof

Social proof comes in many forms. If this is the first time you’ve launched this offer, you might not have testimonials from happy customers. That’s okay! Try adding logos of your customers to the page. You could also add stats, like Justin Welsh did here when he added, “Join 26k+ subscribers.”

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Risk-reversal

Your audience needs to believe your offer is the next best step in their journey for them. Common objections might be:

  • “Is this right for me?”
  • “Is this worth the cost?” 

Things like social proof, sales calls, providing your mobile number (if applicable) and behind-the-scenes demos can all help to increase your conversion rate.

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A brilliant example of how to use social proof to build credibility with your prospect from Content Bistro.

Step 3: Craft the Perfect Message

Now your task is to craft the right message. 

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Getting deep on the right message is the fastest way I’ve increased conversions. But you don’t need to be a copywriter to write high-converting copy. 

Luckily you’ve already done the hard work. 

Effective copywriting is based on understanding your audience and re-using their language. You’re going to use the feedback you’ve gathered from your audience to write sales copy that converts. 

Based on the problems and goals of your audience, what is the transformation you promise your customers?

The promise has to be accurate. Don’t inflate your promise or you risk losing customers—because you can’t follow through on the deliverables. 

Use your target audience’s exact language so the copy resonates with them. Highlight the benefits of the offer in your copywriting so your audience can see how it will help them. 

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There are so many copywriting formulas out there and I think following Eugene Schwartz’ five stages of awareness is effective. 

  • Unaware: Has no idea they’ve got a problem. Push marketing drives awareness.
  • Problem aware: Copy should talk about the problem your audience has and how it affects them.
  • Solution aware: Show them the transformation they can expect. What would life look like if their problem was solved? 
  • Product aware: Introduce your offer and the benefits.
  • Most aware: Use social proof and any risk reversals—like a guarantee or time-limited bonus—and give them an option to buy.

Following this outline will guide your copywriting so that you give your audience all the information they need. If done properly, you’ll have built enough rapport with them so that the logical decision is to buy from you. 


What Does it Take to be the Head of Marketing

Bonus Step: Map Out Your Lead Strategy 

The number one mistake business owners make after creating a sales funnel is forgetting to create a strategy to generate leads. 

You have a crave-worthy, optimized offer, with a killer message. But if no-one is reading your sales copywriting, then no-one will buy. 

It’s that simple. 

After you create the funnel, you have to create a plan to generate leads—AKA your lead strategy.

Here’s an example from one of my recent clients. This client hired me to write the sales page copy and email marketing sequence for a course launch. Mid-launch, my client was concerned that they weren’t hitting their goals. After analyzing the data, I spotted that the sales page was converting at 7.12%. 

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The real problem? They weren’t getting enough leads through the funnel. 

The best copy in the world won’t sell if people aren’t seeing it. You need to invest in a lead generation strategy. 

Now this doesn’t mean you need to get as many eyeballs on your funnel as possible. That won’t necessarily translate into higher revenue. 

There should be a balance between generating quality leads and generating a quantity of leads. 

Quality leads are people who are likely to buy your product. This is why customer research is key. When you understand your audience, you’re more likely to attract the right people into your sales funnel. 

The next step in generating quality leads is to look at which channels your target audience is spending time on. 

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Examples of channels might be: 

  • Social media such as Instagram, LinkedIn, or Pinterest
  • Blog posts 
  • Paid advertising like Google or Facebook 
  • Direct traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) 
  • Email marketing 

You can use a mixture of paid and organic marketing to get in front of customers. 

Organic marketing—search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, etc.—is a long-term strategy, but one you need to use for sustainable business growth. 

Content marketing is pull marketing where you create valuable content that pulls your audience away from the search engine results page and onto your website.

And content marketing is an easy way to inform your target audience and funnel them towards being ready to buy. You can even embed opt-ins inside your blog post to move them into your email marketing campaign. 

You can also use paid marketing, like running a Facebook ad to your newest blog post. This is push marketing. You push your content onto the platforms your audience is most likely to hang out on to interrupt their scroll and get them thinking and hopefully clicking.

As long as the blog post is written to meet your audience’s expectations, then it will funnel them closer to clicking the buy button. 

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So consider writing blog posts optimized with SEO copywriting, which will inform and nurture your prospect. 

Conversion optimization and copywriting is so much more than just writing copy. Effective marketers test and tweak their copy to make sure it’s always converting as best it can.

Hopefully you feel confident in optimizing your marketing funnel, writing more effective copy, and increasing your revenue.


What Does it Take to be the Head of Marketing

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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