How to Create Ad Campaigns That Stand Out (3 Steps)

What Is Interruption Marketing and Why Long-Form Copy Works

Louis: Good. Because if you’re unhappy, it will be a very bad interview. You might be unhappy in the end. No you won’t. I’m sure we’ll have fun. So we talked over email a bit and you said that paid ads like Facebook ads are interruption marketing. You define that as interruption marketing. Can you just define what that means?

Sarah Sal: It means you have Google where people typed airline ticket. They’re looking for an airline ticket right now and you satisfy the demand. Facebook. You’re interrupting them. They’re chatting with their friend, they’re looking at kitten picture and then you just shove a message on their face. And if you’re going to interrupt them, you should make it worth it for them to. And talking about shady marketing it remind me when I was in Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur, you walk there, it’s hot, it’s humid, people are screaming louder and louder. Fake watches for you, fake handbag for you. Do you want belt, ma’? Am? And you have a horrible human traffic jam. And everyone is trying to scream louder and louder. And I see a person wanting to talk to me and I just turned my back because I already have a headache. And he just put his hand on my shoulder. I nearly slapped him on the face. And that’s what people are doing with interruption, marketing. People say, hey, you just need to grab the attention, Stop the click. No, you need to be the person that have the most interesting conversation. Imagine you’re in Starbucks. You would not walk to a stranger and say, buy my product. You want to have conversation that make people head turn. And that’s what I tell people. Forget you’re on Facebook, forget your social media. Maybe 10 years from now Facebook doesn’t exist, or it’s an Instagram or it’s discussion forum or Reddit. But the principle, you’re talking to a human face to face. What do you say if you have somebody in front of you in a coffee shop that you don’t know that you might make the conversation interesting?

The Art of Standing Out Without Being Disruptive

Louis: That’s a very good story. And I was just, I was thinking that you potentially had an example in this busy street of someone who actually grabbed your attention in a nice way, but I guess that wasn’t it, right? There was no one who, in this multitude of chaos and noise that actually grabbed your attention successfully. Right?

Sarah Sal: I could find a good example. It was in London, Camden Town, and I think it used to be where people used to sell drug a few years ago. And everyone is like, you want drag? What do you want? What do you want? They try to sell you something and if it’s not drug, everyone has a banner just to say, this is a restaurant, this is a tattoo, etc, and the exit there was somebody having some brownie that he was giving for free. People say, oh hey, free brownies. And people will take. And after you took a small bite say, hey, if you love those brandy brownies that are handmade, we just open a tea shop, it’s over there. And by the way, those are the type of tea we have. And that’s a really good way to grab people attention as opposed to just screaming, which is what most people do, is give people value first. And I would look at somebody add copies like claim after claim after claim that you have absolutely no reason to believe. And the way you stand out is you teach me something I did not believe. No, that’s how you stand out, how this is how you capture people attention. And I tell people somebody reading your ad, even if they never click on it, they should be able to say, oh, I learned something new I could apply to my business that I didn’t know before reading that copy.

Why Teaching Beats Claiming in Ad Copy

Louis: I thought in the story you were talking about the Brony, I thought it was a drug dealer giving brownie. And I thought they would say, hey, here’s a nice brownie. Oh, by the way, do you want my drugs? But no, it’s actually a tea shop, so it’s a more legal way to do it. But in your example, though, and I don’t want to pick on your stories that are very interesting, by the way, and very good examples, in your example, though, you’re not really teaching anything new. You’re giving a brand new York giving something for free. So would you consider that to be part of the same, like teaching something, or is that a separate way of doing?

Finding Your Unique Positioning Through Client Interrogation

Sarah Sal: I mean, well, this is. You didn’t teach. You teach me that there is a new t place. Now, if I was going to make it more interesting, instead of screaming to say tea, I would say, why my tea is better. I give you an example. A lot of people who try matcha tea, they hate it. I even have friends, they say, I tried matcha. It’s tastes like somebody blended a frog alive. And I say, you know why? Because the quality of the matcha is bad. The other mix it with a lot of sugar syrup. But ceremonial matcha, basically, they shade it, they take young leaves, they take the stems out and it tastes very smooth. And if I taught you the difference between ceremonial matcha and regular matcha, and I said, you know what? We’re not the Starbucks 40% sugar. We’re not the one that is really better. You cannot drink it. We’re more expensive, but we’re better. It’s about disqualifying the competition. I often love to play devil advocate. People will come on a coach and call with me and I say, hey, okay, you’re a financial planner in Boston. There is 500 other financial planners. Why should anyone even listen to you and not the others? And people become defensive and they try to tell me why they are different. I give you an example. I had a coaching call with one in Boston and they focus on helping soldier or veterans. And once he said, we’re one of the few that survived the financial crisis. But let me give you a story. There’s this military family. They travel nonstop, nowhere stable it turned out the governmental default retirement was taxed at 30%. I said, don’t invest under your name, invest under a company. And now the tax you pay get reduced by 20% if you retire after 40 years. That’s a huge difference how much money you make. And I’m like, that’s your ad. They didn’t know I was tricking them to, to poke them like b. But I often do it till they tell me why they are different and they speak at 100 miles per hour. And then I’m like, here is your ad. People not going to figure why you are different. Yes, it’s interruption marketing, but I could go to Google and with one click in two milliseconds I could find 10 competitors. If you don’t tell me what makes you unique, I’m not going to figure it out.

Louis: Okay, so now I think people are excited enough to learn more about how do you do that? Because when we look, when I look at your examples and your case studies and stuff that has worked, obviously there is maybe a few stuff that didn’t work for you, but it’s easier to put that on the website, to put the nice stuff obviously. But it seems like you have a, you’ve developed some sort of methodology, some sort of ways to say we’re not going to come at it from a one sentence only perspective. We’re going to come at it from like telling a story very much like you just told three stories in the space of like 10 minutes. We’re going to teach them something new and whatnot by painting out the copy before we go into the step by step to teach people how to do this. When you try to convince folks to actually use long form copy on interaction marketing methods like Facebook ads, I’m going to lead you quite a lot on this. But what are the two things that they tend to say as excuses for not to do it? I got that from your website and just asking you, like usually two stuff, they tell you no.

Sarah Sal: Okay, long copy is not for everyone. I’m not going to claim that long copy is going to work for every single business. It’s two in the morning, you partied, you’re hungover, you want a pizza. You couldn’t care less about the Italian family that made the tomato sauce. There are niches like fashion or makeup. You just want something that look beautiful. And if it’s a $20 flip flop, no amount of it’s not the copy that is going to make the difference. But there are niches like software, software as a service Professional services, coaching, health. Why should you take this type of supplement and not the other one that it’s all about conversation and in real life is the conversation that make people read. And people often say nobody read long copy. I have examples where some ad got hundreds of comments. Even somebody leave one comment and they get 60 comments. I’m like, do you think people read or not? It’s just that people don’t read boring copy. And most of the long copy I see that are only claim, claim, claim, claim claim is like, oh my God, I was poor and desperate and I had $5 and then I discovered this magic and now I’m the richest of the richest person I own the on this doesn’t work. If you have something that capture people attention, that educate them, that hey, I interrupted you, I made it worthwhile for you to read that story, then it worked. But an ad that is long copy to work should not look like an ad. It should look more like a conversation between you and a friend. Something educational. Imagine somebody you paid a lot of money, okay. You ask a question in a private email, they reply to that email. It will not look like an ad. It would look like it’s something personal. So that I like that.

Louis: So long copy is the first thing. But just to go back to one thing you said is very interesting. It seems like what you’re saying is long form copy works better for high ticket purchase.

Sarah Sal: So not, not high tickets. Something where the content or educating the prospect make them more likely to buy it.

Louis: Yeah, I would almost, to be honest, I would challenge you on this. I mean you have more experience than me on that. So maybe I’m wrong. But even when you talk about pizza, you talk about specific contexts. Okay, I’m hangover, I want a pizza. Yes, long form copy might not work, but surely it could work if you’re a new pizzeria in town and you want to really stand out against the competition by telling the story like you know. So what you’re saying is really, it’s not linked to the price, it’s more linked to the context. If it’s a commodities that purchase you want to buy straight away, it doesn’t really matter which brand, then maybe it doesn’t work as much. But if you truly need to build the value and make people consider your stuff, then maybe it’s worth trying, right?

Sarah Sal: Yeah, correct. I mean going to the pizza. If I’m the only vegan pizzeria in town, saying I’m vegan, it’s enough. If I live in, I don’t know Utah and I used to live in Italy and I got trained in Italy and I’m the only chef that got trained in Italy and I import all the product from Italy. It matter. It comes down to why you are not the other. And are you able to say those are the reason you should select me? I mean maybe if you’re a pizzeria Utah, you say, hey, dairy in the US is full of antibiotic, full of hormone. This is why I import them from Italy. I’m not sure if Italy is full of hormone or not. But I just made up that example like hey, if you want pizza and you’re not eating pizza with hormone and antibiotics, come to me. But it comes down to do you have something unique either in terms of content or why should somebody choose you and not choose the other person?

Louis: I like it. And then, and then you’re saying that the second thing that people kind of challenge you on when we talk about long form stuff is the it feels like you’re spilling the beans already, right? So you’re not keeping the mystery alive, telling everything and then why would they click? So what do you say to that?

Sarah Sal: I mean here’s the thing. When they say spilling the bean and the mystery, let’s say I’m an expert on copywriting. Is all my expertise of nine plus years in copywriting something I could write in a single long form ad? Is your whole experience about marketing something that you could write in two sentences or 10 sentences? There is always something people could learn more. So often I’m trying to find an example. One example is Strategizer. They used to make 40 cent for each $1 they spent on app. Their ad was the person is very known. I mean they have a business book that sold over 5 million copy but their ad, hey, we have a business model conference in San Francisco. See you there. I also told the story of how Nokia used to spend 20 times more on R and D than Apple. Despite that Apple became the number one and iPhone and Nokia that used to have 80% of the mobile phone market went to nearly 4%. Why R& D cannot save you if you don’t expand into new business model, new type of product. I mean actually no cap and you’re what they call smartphone. They thought nobody wanted them, they are too expensive. And then like hey, do you want to know what methodology people use to innovate the same way Apple did come to our conference and our conference we’re not only going to talk about Nokia or Apple, there is other things. So at the End. The call to action is we learn one thing. But you know what? There is way more from where that come from.

Louis: And what were the results from 40 cents to 18 cents.

Sarah Sal: $18. $18.

Louis: So for every dollar originally they only got 40 cent back. So they were losing money, Correct?

Sarah Sal: Yeah.

Louis: And from the ad you created, they were generating $18 for every year. So 8. Yeah. So that’s that 18x the return, that’s. That’s huge.

Sarah Sal: 700,000 in total they made, when I run the ad for them, nearly three quarters of a million dollar.

Louis: Nice. And again, let me be clear. I mean, this is very impressive and you’ve already shared, I think, five stories in the last 17 minutes, which is really nice and I like this format. But obviously you might have failures, there might have times where it didn’t work, but I’m not going to ask you to name them necessarily. What’s going to be interesting is from the failures, from the wins, from what you’ve learned, let’s try to go through a step by step together of how would you advise a business? Whether it’s maybe a one person independent job or someone who wants to launch a business or someone who wants to contribute to their business, how would they go about going after it? And the first time we got in contact, you mentioned the episode with Joanna Web where we talked about this weird fucking idea of a Simpson museum. And how would you promote it? I’m not going to ask you to promote a Simpson museum, but let’s find something interesting together, something you’re comfortable with as a business model or an industry that we can just take as an example and then go for it. So what would you like to go for?

Step 1: Content Immersion and Angle Discovery

Sarah Sal: I could take the example I wrote for Joanna Wiba on Copyhacker, that most of it for us for a language course.

Louis: The language course.

Sarah Sal: Okay. Yeah. So.

Louis: So let’s say, let’s say you want to learn French, right? Your English. You want to make your life super difficult by learning this awful, awful language that is French with so many peculiarities and I don’t even know how I’m able to speak it. But anyway, you want to teach French, whatever, but. And you want to potentially do some ads, you have some budget, right? Let’s say you have not a crazy budget, but you have some budget. You have a product, you’ve sold it before. It’s not a brand new thing, right? Let’s say that. And you have people in marketing that can help you. You’re not just on your own. Let’s say that as an example so how do you go from that state where you might have tried ads never worked out to a state where you actually make so much out of the ads you have to stop them.

Sarah Sal: Normally what I do, I look at content. I never start from a blank page. And you mentioned French. Actually, the French teacher hated me because I never understood the grammar. It’s like French language. You could pronounce it different. No, you write it differently, but it’s pronounced the same way, which always made me make mistakes. So what I do, I would look at YouTube video, ebook, webinar, interview customer. I would even forget that I’m a marketer. I would take my marketer hat off. And each time I have an aha moment I write note. I say this is ex antwebs good way. I would give you a few ideas. What is a misconception people have about an industry? A misconception. And that’s an app that did really well is that kids learn a language faster. Not really. Even according to university research. Is that a kid never give up. If the kid wants a sandwich, the kid will cry for 60 minutes till he gets a sandwich. He might say sandwich, sandua, some dish and you have no idea and say, what do you want? And after 60 minutes you’re defeated. You said, oh, sandwich. You said okay. And they stop crying. No, imagine you go to Spain and you don’t speak the language. When you say, they say okay, what type of coffee you want? You’re not, you’re not going to repeat I want a coffee and cry for 60 minutes. You’re going to switch to English, right? And that’s why the adult tend to learn the language less faster. Despite that they have they know what’s a language, what’s a structure, what’s a grammar. Is that they give up. It’s not that their brain is less developed than a kid. The other thing what is a question people always would ask is like I would imagine there is the type of question that could people ask you to deposit your sick and tired of answering it. And this is why I wrote the ad for the article for Copy Hacker. Because I’m like, hey, here is 10 way you could write different ad Copy. Go read it. Don’t instead of me explain it to you for the hundredth time. Example about language. People ask should I learn individual words or should I learn sentences? And the person behind it said no, you learn sentences because a word appear in a context, in a structure and that makes you speak like the native people. The other thing would be stories. Interesting story. I mean There was a story of a parrot who used to speak English with a British accent. The applause came back and said, applause families. And we said, hey, what is the moral of the story? We don’t want to tell a story for the moral of telling it if we cannot link it with that learning of the learnings. Like, you know what, the parrot just kept repeating sentences she heard frequently. And that’s how you learn a language. By the way, we have an E book of frequently sentences. And to get your clients, I mean, actually it’s very interesting. I helped write ad for the Copywriter Club. They have a course called the Copywriter Accelerator. And one person that was listening to the interview ended up buying the $2,000 product. Basically, she didn’t have the money. She borrowed the money from her father and she started as an as just somebody who was helping me with the product. And the problem with interview, most people like, oh yeah, that’s a great course. I got good result. No, I want imagine you’re interrogating them like, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to pay the $2,000, but I want to know what made the difference. And one person named Jean Wattage, the really famous copywriter now said, oh, now it’s the crisis. And I got an eight thousand dollar contract. Okay, good, but not interesting because anyone could claim anything. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Copywriter accelerator taught me how to make proposal that the proposal is you need to understand why someone want a product, what they want to achieve. And the first proposal was $5,000. But she learned that they wanted to have a webinar and sell a service via the webinar. And she said, oh, you forgot to ask for a webinar onboarding series to make people sure they attend the webinar and also to make sure people buy after they attended the webinar. And despite that, she was more expensive than anybody else. The company said, hey, when could we hire you? Can we start easier? So just interview customer. I mean, sometimes I just interview customer. I interrogate them and one question lead to the other. And when I think I got into their brain, their language, I just transformed this into an ad.

Louis: Okay, so that sounds like this is. To be honest, this is interesting, but it still sounds like a black box. But we’re going to deconstruct it together because you said a few interesting stuff. So first you not. It seems like you naturally think this way, so it might be difficult for you to extract that. But I’m pretty sure we’ll get there. You Think in terms of finding those misconceptions, finding those interesting stories. You have a way to tell stories, you have a way to remember them. You like, off the bat, you remember three stories relating to language, even though we’ve never told you that we’ll talk about language necessarily. So it seems like the first step you take is you immerse yourself in the world of the company you’re going to work for. Right? So in the context of language course, in the context of a pizzeria, you basically absorb as much as you can. Do you have a specific source that you go first, second, third, or is it a bit messier?

Sarah Sal: No, it’s a client. Because if I work for a specific client, it’s the client content. The client might have email series, they might have a book, they might have a YouTube Siri, they might have webinars, because that’s what makes the client unique. Because if I work for three companies that sell language courses, what make them unique is different. Their story is different.

Louis: Basically, you basically ask them for all the materials they have, every blog.

Sarah Sal: If they allow me to speak to their client, that’s very important.

Louis: Okay, but let’s, let’s. We’ll talk about that in a few minutes in terms of talking to clients, because I understand, but this first step is not something we talk about that much. So you basically have, where do you store this? Like, do you put that in a trailer board where you have everything? Like, how do you do it?

Sarah Sal: I put it on a Google Doc. Not the most organized thing.

Louis: Fine.

Sarah Sal: But basically we have id. Aha moment, you see?

Louis: And we’re getting somewhere.

Sarah Sal: Number one. Aha moment number two. Aha moment number three. And I call them angles. So I’m very disorganized. I’m like, angle number one, kid don’t learn better than the adult. Angle number two, forget about grammar because you’ll get demotivated. Start by learning a language by using the power of the story. Angle number three, this is how the brain work. Don’t feel guilty about forgetting. But if you set yourself ambitious goal, you will never do it because it’s more like a marathon and not a sprint. And then I’m like, can add angle. And then I could transfer them into longer copy.

How to Recognize Compelling Angles That Hook Readers

Louis: How do you recognize angles? Like, what are the things that makes you say and think, shit, this, this is interesting. Now it might come from your gut, it might be from experience, but as best as you can, trying to teach someone. Like let’s say if you had to teach someone to actually do this for you, because you don’t have time. What would you tell them? How do you recognize angles that are potentially interesting?

Sarah Sal: Okay, let’s say you have a user, they’re going to read the ad. The aim is I taught you something you didn’t know before reading that ad. So when I look at the content, I look at everything I learned I didn’t know beforehand. So if some copies say, imagine being in Argentina and being able to order food in perfect Spanish. I didn’t learn anything new. Now I read the content. Oh, this is how the brain work according to brain research. I’m like, oh, I learned something new. I give an example. I helped a woman with a depression webinar. Her story was interesting because I didn’t know her story before reading it. But most interesting, I found the problem doctor like, open your mouth, swallow the pills. And according to Harvard, as they’ve been prescribing each year, 30% more antidepressant. Now we have 400 people who are more depressed. Before I read, I learned something new. I have a new knowledge that five minutes before reading this, I didn’t know. Another one is Nigeria, poor country. There are less depressed people. Nothing to do with money, success, infrastructure. In Western world, we eat a lot of processed food. There they eat fresh food. And it has to do with the gut bacteria. Oh, I learned something I didn’t know. And the same way it had that punch on me. Oh, really? What you eat really depend on being depressed or not because how your digestive tract works. Okay, that’s a good angle. Because I didn’t know it. And probably a lot of people who are going to read the ad are not going to know it.

Louis: So it seems like, yeah, teaching something new, but also it seems like so something completely new that you didn’t know, you didn’t know. Like, that’s fine. But also it seems like there’s another type which is the things you thought you knew that are actually wrong. Like the misconception. So to me, it seems like you have two types that you like to come back to. Is that right?

Sarah Sal: Actually, it’s much more than that. But they just picked those examples. And I think you want something that capture people attention. Let me think of an example. I mean, I wrote some ads for a conference where Malala spoke. It’s like the one that stood to the Taliban. If I said Malala, everyone know her story. So I would look, what is something about her story that I didn’t know? So I look for a hook, something that shock me. And one of the example was For a conference. I have the example in front of me is somebody who escaped from Hungary during the revolution and arrived in Canada. He was homeless and he was sleeping on the train station bench. And he only survived because train station worker will give him one apple every day. And I think emotionally the emotion you must. I’m different to that. There is like kind of a punch like wow, okay, I cannot stop reading that. The story is not blank. So it’s a combination between teach me something I didn’t know, but you’re still interrupt me. So is there some hook that will make me stop looking at cat picture or video and want to read the rest of the ad? Because the hook is really strong. So it’s basically what you call a framework. Like ada. ADA would be an example. It’s like you capture people attention, you teach them something they don’t know. You tell them how this could solve a problem or make their lives better. And then you end up by the call to actions like oh, it’s my product or service that will give you that result.

Louis: Okay, I love this. Thanks for going through these steps. I would say this first step, it feels like this something that folks need experience with. You can’t just put them like obviously you can be your own customer in a sense. Like you come from a, from a fresh mind. You’ve never heard of a topic like I don’t know depression in detail, so you don’t know anything. So you’re surprised by almost every single thing or many things. But I wonder then how you deal with it when you know the industry inside out. Let’s say there’s a lot of SaaS, copywriters, software as a service copywriters out there for example. And like once you know everything there is to know about SaaS, do you feel like sometimes you get stuck where you can’t find anything interesting or do you feel like there’s always something interesting?

Sarah Sal: I mean your podcast start, shady marketer who are pushy. I would, I would turn the frustration into ad copy. I give you an example for Facebook ad people used to say, oh, you could target people who have money on Facebook and because they have money they’re going to buy. And I say number one, no targeting is perfect. Number two, if I have a one star hostel just because I show the actual rich person they’re not going to buy. And I’m like, what make people go to the ritz carton at 400 per night is saying if it’s 2 in the morning and you’re hungry and you’re Jet lag. And you’re vegan. The chef will make sure you have a meal you could order via room service. It’s not the fact that you are rich and you have money and you’re burning money. It’s how you communicate your value. And 90% of people who see an ad for a Rolex watch or Risk Cariton can neither afford other. But it’s how they communicate the value. So it’s this frustration where people say, Facebook marketing, there is this magical pill. You push two button and at the end of the two button you’re going to make money. And I say, I really disagree. What you’re teaching people is wrong. It’s just wrong. How dare you say. It’s basically. How dare you say that. You’re basically taking advantage of people in your end. So there is always some frustration in industry.

Louis: No, no, I get you. So I want to break. I think there’s two other steps that you mentioned that I want to talk to. So one is, and I’m not sure if I understood correctly, so please correct me if I’m wrong. You said, I like to talk to the clients as well. So are we talking about talking to the customer’s customer or are you talking about this? Okay, so let’s talk about that briefly because I mean the podcast, we talk about that a lot, talking to customers. I’m glad you mentioned that as well.

Sarah Sal: Yeah.

Step 2: Customer Interrogation Techniques

Louis: What type of questions do you like to ask actual customers? Like what are the things that you like to ask them? And let’s talk about the example again of the language course we’re trying to sell here. What would you like to ask them?

Sarah Sal: I never interviewed the customer of the language course, but I give you an example of marketing because that’s your audience. I had a marketer named Dennis Yu who did run ad for Nike, Adidas was a so on. Etc. I said, I have that conference. I read your case study about Strategizer. I said, who can I interview? He said, go interview Gavin first thing. Gavin said, oh, Deniseu is great. I got good result. I said, I don’t care. Tell me something that you’re doing differently as a result of working with Denise. You. What was the before? What was a mistake or action you took as a result of working with him and what was the outcome? And he said, oh, I had no guest blog article on authority website. He helped me get published on social media Examiner. I put the logo on my website. Now everyone think I’m an expert. My rate went from 49 to 150 or something like that. The second thing, everyone who used to want to talk to work with me or said yes, jump on a phone call now. I said no, no, no, you need to first book a consulting session where you pay for it. And then we decided for a good fit. So basically I ask about the actionable step and how it transformed their business over life.

Louis: But that sounds like that’s interesting somewhat to know the result and whatever. But isn’t it a bit boring compared to the stories you told before? Or like do you find a hook inside that? I’m challenging you a bit here because

Sarah Sal: I want to see you could find a hook. So for that example, I was telling the story of a sandwich shop that used to say, hey, we’re making those sandwiches when use fresh bread, when it run out of fresh bread, we close. Because the bakery they sell us only that many bread and if we get up until 9pm Then we use a lower quality bread and people are standing in line. And I use it to say as a parent, it’s the same thing with marketing. If you’re able to communicate what make you unique, people are going to stand in line. But the other thing, if you’re in that niche, it’s not going to sound boring. I mean I write ads for the most boring niches. For the wide public would say hey, this is boring. But for somebody who’s in that niche who suffer from a certain problem could achieve a certain outcome result, it’s not boring.

Louis: Okay, so step one, we, you collect everything you have to know about the business and you go at it from a beginner’s mind and you take notes, you just take Google Doc and you just take note. This is potential angle. This is a potential angle. Then you interview customers, your clients, customer. How many do you like to interviews briefly? Like what’s usually a good number?

Sarah Sal: As much as, as, as much as they have some clients say hey, there is only one or two clients that is ready to interview. And some if I could interview 10, I would interview 10, given that they have time.

Step 3: Extracting Uniqueness From Business Owners

Louis: Okay, so you interview them and you just let them tell, tell their story. Right. And you dig in.

Sarah Sal: Yeah, it’s interrogation.

Louis: It’s interrogation like I’m doing right now.

Sarah Sal: Yeah.

Louis: And then step three, you said something else. You said that you would talk to the client itself. Right. Because you said at the start, you said you would like to challenge them to think about what is unique. And I’m going to like, I’ll be honest here. I think this is one of the toughest things for people to do because there’s so much inside the jar, they can’t see the label. Right. It’s almost an impossible task to find out what is unique about a marketing consultant or a copywriter when there are literally hundreds of thousands of copywriters, hundreds of thousands of marketing consultants, or at least people who claim to be. But it’s the same thing. I mean, on the Internet, everyone is. Can be an expert or can be perceived as one. So how do you. How do you get this uniqueness out of them?

Sarah Sal: I mean, by play, rolling that I’m a client. It’s like, hey, I’m a client. I could give you money right now. But if I give you money, you need to tell me why you. Because you’re charging me $1,000 and somebody else is charging 200. Why are you worth it? And people often will get some. Might have nothing unique. If they have nothing unique, I cannot beat them and have them give me something unique. Then they need maybe to think about what makes them unique. And some of them, they have a lot of things that make them unique. They never thought about communicating it. It’s like they think, this is a Facebook ad. I’m going to write a short sentence, and that’s all. I give you another example. I know I’m heavy on examples. It was a tax consultant, and people say, you’re $10,000. There’s somebody who make it for 500. And I said, yes, But I never play safe. I look for every single deductible. And even if the IRS disagree, I would go to them and argue with them, tell you, when the other for $500 said, oh, the IRS asked you to give them $5,000, too bad I cannot help you. And often it’s just people never think about writing it in an ad. But if you intergate them, they would tell you. And if somebody’s a McDonald and there is 200 McDonald’s in the same city, there’s nothing unique about that McDonald’s. Why would I drive 20 minutes, 20 minutes to that McDonald’s if there is a McDonald’s next to my home? I hate, by the way. But sometimes not everyone have something unique and you cannot do anything about it.

Louis: So do you choose to work with them if there’s something. If there’s nothing unique, you know, you

Sarah Sal: say, no, no, I give it. I mean, sometimes people contact me, say, hey, I want to start an online business. I look at their blog post. They have maybe 20, 30 blog posts like, is this generating any traffic or client for you? They say, no, I just paid somebody $50 per blog post and that’s it. I’m like, Facebook cannot amplify what’s not working already. Fix your content, then come back. Because if people have a content problem, I could have the best targeting, the best Facebook ad strategy, the best Facebook ad copy. Then Facebook doesn’t work alone without interacting with the rest of the content of the business. Have. It’s not, it’s not a magical solution that could sell everything and nothing.

Louis: So you can’t polish a turd.

Sarah Sal: Exactly, exactly.

Louis: So, okay, so we’ve gone through step one, which is basically trying to like beginner’s mind, collect everything about the business. Then talking to the customer’s customer, talking to the customer himself or herself or themselves. Then what do you do once you have this wealth of information?

From Angles to Final Copy: The Writing Process

Sarah Sal: I organize it into angles that I might present to the client. I say I have angle 1, angle 2, angle 3, angle 4. Choose a few ads. Okay. It’s basically high level. So I don’t tell somebody, I’m going to make you a cake with egg and milk. And the person said, I am vegan. Then, okay, they say, I like this ad angle. Expand on it. And then you make an interesting. For example, using framework like eg data, you want to capture people’s attention. Like the first sentence is what make people decide do they want to continue reading or do they want to scroll further? Okay, I captured your attention. Now what? Give me some value or a promise or teach me something that I didn’t know where the outcome, it might make my life or my business easier or avoid a certain problem. And then the call to action is like, why is that client solution the answer? So if I go to the language one, yes, the parrot learns Spanish, but we’re not telling you go to Dilingual because we’re the one that have an ebook with common Spanish sentences that you could download right now. So it’s basically how to organize that in a structure like capture the attention, give some content, present the solution and then why is your solution the answer?

Louis: Okay, this still feels like there’s a lot of steps into one, but that’s normal, that’s the way. So you have a few angles and you pitch that to the client. Then they pick 1 or 2, 3, and they say, yeah, any of them would sign. Okay, so then how do you tell me more about the way you turn this angle into an actual copy that is ready to go on whatever channel? Like it could be Facebook, whatever. Do you start working straight away? Just write the copy like, you know, fully Then you revise it the next day, do you write an outline for the copy, then write it, then edit it, then edit it again. Like, what’s your typical process?

The Two-Person Rule and Final Copy Refinement

Sarah Sal: I tend to say copy is the same as food. If you keep it one day in the fridge, the flavor will become stronger. So I would write an outline, like, start, middle, end of the ad, let it on the fridge. Because the next day you take, you

Louis: take your computer and you put it in the fridge, or your paper and you put it in the fridge. Literally.

Sarah Sal: Yeah, it’s a way for speaking. It’s like your first comment and if you revise it the second day. But most importantly, if I work on copy, I always work with somebody else. Okay. So if so I would have people I work that I trained. So if, let’s say I’m the one interviewing, I might give them the angle and the transcript and I tell them to write it. Why? Because I want to make sure I communicated clearly. Did what they write when I read it back was what is in my head? Or would I tell them, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is not what I meant, Please change it. And often when you have four eyes on a copy, it’s better. Because if I read it, if one, they don’t understand me, probably the person reading the ad is not going to understand if I read it back and I don’t understand what I wanted it to say, probably the user on Facebook would be the same. And then of course, I give it to the client. Because you want it to look like a copy that was written by an expert, not a copywriter. Because there would always be domain knowledge that would look like it was written by somebody, not a domain knowledge based on mistake, not knowing the niche of the industry. And if the client is happy, we just create the app, target the audiences, look at the numbers and so on.

Louis: It’s actually the first time I ever heard someone mention that. It’s very, very, very interesting tip. Something I figured out before. It’s very difficult again to get, once you’re, Once you’re inside the jar, to get out of it. Even if you’re a copywriter working for clients, it’s easy to get into this jar and not being able to get out because you take stuff for granted, you absorb knowledge, you think all of that. So to make sure I understand what you’re saying, you ask someone else to write it for you, to make sure that they understand what you’re trying to say. Is that it? Or do you write it and then give it to them to make sure they understood it’s in different steps.

Sarah Sal: So I might write the angles, ask them to write the ads, and then I review it. So it’s nearly like tandem. I do step one, they do step two. I do like step three. And the sense it’s easier to criticize somebody else work than your own. But I would do the high level, the strategy, this, the outline, and then read it to make sure I understood, because it’s easier to criticize what somebody else wrote than what I wrote myself.

Louis: Gotcha. But it’s a very interesting tip. And then the other thing that you mentioned, something I do, I’m not the best copywriter, far from it. But something I’ve noticed is that very much like a good boeuf bourguignon, which is a French dish where you cook with beef and red wine, it’s much, much better once you cook it once and then leave it aside, and then cooking twice and then leave it aside. And I do that with my copy as well. So I would really let my brain on the back in the background work for myself. And I found, like, you can find stuff then, which is like the rule of the shitty first copy, Right? The shitty first draft. So how long did it. Does it typically take you from start to finish? Like from you have the angle to having the copy written?

Sarah Sal: I would say this is approximate because I never measured it, but more or less one week. And I say more or less one week because you cannot force creativity. And there are. I mean, I never believe in saying, right, write 10 pages per day, write 50 ads per day, because some of them are going to be horrible. And sometimes it’s better if you’re not creative not to write. And once you have the creativity, finish writing it and you have a better quality writing. I believe more in the quality than quantity.

Louis: Okay, so is there a particular. Like, we’re talking about Facebook ads, paid ads, and we’re gonna have to talk about some sort of platform here, because even though hopefully Facebook is gone in five years, but I’m sure there’ll be another. Another thing to fill the void. What are the formatting things? What are the principles that you like to apply for that type of platform when writing copy? Like, is it better to have long paragraph or short paragraph, that kind of thing? I know it might be. You might find examples of things that are the opposite of that. But generally speaking, what you see happening,

Sarah Sal: I think as long as you give value, you teach, you entertain, you’re not doing a hard sell. It doesn’t matter. Because 10 people are going to have a different type of writing. And as long as there is aha moment, there is value. You taught me something I didn’t know. It’s basically the content that teaches something. And I often get people who say, Facebook, should I do video or text? I said, it doesn’t matter. Maybe if I made video, I would make people fall asleep. And maybe I’m better at writing text, maybe somebody else. The writing is horrible, but their energy on the video is so good that everybody’s going to watch. It’s just that content is what makes people look like an expert. And it’s content that make people go move from not being a client to potentially a client, and from potentially a client to a client, or even a repeat client for existing clients.

Louis: So it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, right? It’s like the format doesn’t matter. And I like the word energy. It’s something I use a lot as well to explain things. And sometimes I feel it’s not that clear when you explain it, like when you talk about this energy thing. But it’s. Again, I think it takes experience and a bit of gut feeling to follow. But this energy is really about, like, the flow of things. And. And is it boring as fuck when you watch this video? Is it boring when you read this copy? Or instead does it give you some. You know, to be honest, when the. The few stories that you said during the podcast, like the ones about the brownie and I thought it was a drug dealer giving the brownie and all of that, those are the type of stories that actually interested me, genuinely interested me saying, shit, what’s the end of this story? And I think this is a good sign of this kind of energy and this flow of, like, youth are saying about language, saying that actually it’s not true that kids learn languages faster. This is the kind of shit that I will remember. And you did it quite quickly, so I can see that you’re pretty good at what you’re doing. And hopefully during this interview, we’ve been able to deconstruct it enough so that people can use that as well. And then I suppose what you need to do is just ship the ad and see how it works and then tweak it, Right?

Sarah Sal: Exactly. Exactly. It’s dipping your toe into the water. Marketing, especially interruption marketing. It’s better to have something not perfect. You free it, you test it. People are voting with their mouths. If it do well, keep it. If it doesn’t do well, you keep going and doing more tests.

Louis: Yep, exactly. Amen to that. Is there anything about your process that I’ve forgotten to ask? Is there a secret sauce, something that you like to tell others that they don’t really know that I’ve forgotten to ask you about?

Sarah Sal: I think it was. No, it was pretty complete, I’m sure. Maybe there’s something in the back of my mind maybe I forgot saying, but I think it’s pretty complete.

Louis: Okay, so I’m going to ask you three questions I always ask at the end of the episode. And thank you by the way, for going through this with me. I know it’s not easy to be interrupted, but we’ve done it. So what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 5, 10, 50 years?

Sarah Sal: Multi channel marketing. You could be an expert on Facebook and you know Facebook really good. But you should know a little bit of Google, a little bit of copywriting, a little bit of email. Because every marketing channel never work in its own. It interacts with anyone. Facebook could drive Google Organic and Google could also drive Facebook. Or a conversion could start on Facebook and finish via email. Especially if it’s a high price item. And understanding what work in niches outside of one own specialty really give you the edge.

Louis: Yeah, amen to that. I think a lot of people think that people are in this silo and they see an ad, they buy straight away. While digital marketing, I mean the practice of doing marketing on digital platforms because I don’t think there is digital marketing per se. But anyway this practice, it’s very easy to think of numbers as this kind of gospel thing and trusting every single number and trusting your Google Analytics. Well in fact journeys from customers and from just normal people are very much different. They’re much more complex. They’re coming back and forth between each step. They, as you said, they switch platform, they switch context. You can’t track every single movement they have. So. So don’t overly obsess over those numbers and instead obsess over those people behind the screen who are actually, you know, trying to learn from you and buy from you. What are the top three resources you recommend?

Sarah Sal: Made to stick but I know other people in your episode said it, so I’m not going to expand on it, but I would say a book by Andy Bowne called Jelly Effect and basically he’s someone who’s blind from one eye. His mother was blind, which mean he needed to be able to explain to things she’s not able to see. Like what is an image, what’s people, what’s movie and he said, you know what, if you make him marketing writing a message, people are blind to your own agenda. He’s not somebody who did an MBA who studied marketing, who worked for big company. But that life disadvantage taught him about how to communicate clearly better than anybody else. And actually he helped Berkeley’s get a 2.6 billion pound deal because of his communication skills. So that would be number one. The Jerry effect by Andy Bound. The third one nothing to do with marketing. It’s called Catch me if you can by Frank Bagnale is basically a very famous scammer. He used to be a scammer. He would make fake checks, would pretend he’s an airline pilot and at some point when he was doing it, he was at GFK and somebody asked him so what machine you’re flying? And he ignored the question the pilot, what machine? And he’s just dressed as a pilot because people trust people who dress as pilot when they give fake check. And he just said something wrongly said general electricity. And then he thought about said oh my God, I look like a stupid who’s flying a washing machine. And then he started learning the terminology. He would read flying magazine, he would go to a bomb where pilot are and just listen to your their conversation, what they say. And even one day he was in Atlanta in a really luxurious gated community and people asked what do you do? He said oh I’m a pediatrician. And okay it went. And once at a party they said oh you should meet that person, he’s also a pediatrician. And he escaped from the party. And just so people doesn’t discover that he’s taken identity that’s not his. He would go to Atlanta library, read book magazine, medical journal, etc. And when he remit the doctor one month later was so impressed he said oh I’m on vacation leave, I’m an absence thief. They really believed he was a doctor and even offered him a job. The moral of the story, okay, don’t do market research to scam people because what he did was bad like using fake shake etc but if you really go deep, know the language people are using to the point where you say I’m one of you, then your marketing gets much, much better than if you just throw things at the wall. So this is why I selected Catch Me.

Louis: Yeah, I think it’s a very, very good learning and story. I love this story. I love the movie as well. DiCaprio. I think if I’m mistaken Sarah, you’ve been. Yeah, you’ve been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your tips and your secret sauce and all of that. Where can listeners connect with you and

Sarah Sal: learn more from you on my website. So Sarah with an H at the END -SIGN S A L.com or on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter. So social media.

Louis: Social media indeed. All right, Sarah, once again, thank you so much.

Sarah Sal: You’re welcome.

Louis: And that’s it for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Out Daily. I stand very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, shocking, entertaining content to help you Stand the Out. It’s ateveryonehates marketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just going to read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna Said, I just realized this morning that my email habit is now to 1. Skim through the list. 2. Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly scheme yours. Amy said, Also loving the new containers coming from you. It feels really lovely. I like your writing a lot. It really resonates. There’s so much bullshit out there. Good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button? Brilliant. I hope you subscribe. You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side.