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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:12]:
My guest today is somebody that I've worked with a bunch over the past. We haven't chatted in a while, but Will is an amazing copywriter. He's done a lot working with B2B SaaS brands over the years. We recently reconnected because he wisely joined our Exit Five community. Dan, who has also worked with you a bunch, sent me a note. He's like, you got to get Will on the podcast. And I was like, absolutely right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:38]:
I'm going to get Will on the podcast. So tell people who you are. Just a quick background on your career story.
Will Hoekenga [00:00:43]:
Yeah. Well, thank you for the kind introduction. So my name is Will Hoekenga. I do copywriting and messaging consulting for B2B brands. Really kind of a focus on improving performance of what I think of as, like, high value web pages. So homepages, product pages, Persona pages, things that kind of move the needle, usually in booking a demo or something like that. And it's funny you mentioned Exit Five. I almost.
Will Hoekenga [00:01:05]:
I felt like I was sheepishly entering the party very late on that when I, like, joined, because it had been around for a little while, you know, and I don't know what took me so long, but it's been awesome. Yeah, I mean, I got into this in the early days just by writing about SaaS marketing and, like, breaking down campaigns and stuff like that. I was mostly doing copywriting for more personal brands and stuff, like, ten years ago. And my writing got noticed by the founder of a company called Leadpages. And he reached out and was like, we're hiring copywriters. What do you think? And I was like, sure. And that was kind of my training ground for SaaS, was spending a year there at a company that was growing really fast and just learning all kinds of stuff. Eventually got the itch to return to freelance work and ended up working with a bunch of cool companies.
Will Hoekenga [00:01:52]:
You at drift and later at Privy, a lot of martech companies. And. Yeah. So just been doing that ever since and trying to write about it when I can.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:00]:
Okay, so what. How do you define the role of copywriter? Somebody says, let's talk specifically to our audience. I'm not talking about me bumping into my neighbor down the street saying, oh, what do you do? I have my copywriter. Okay, whatever. In the context of B2B, B2B SaaS specifically, how do you think of the role of copywriter?
Will Hoekenga [00:02:17]:
It is really tough because I find that at a lot of B2B SaaS companies, they don't always necessarily have someone on the marketing team that is a copywriter in the sense of the way that I think about it, especially when it comes to writing web copies specifically. A lot of B2B SaaS brands have amazing content writers. And there's elements of copywriting in all this stuff, right? There's email copywriting, all that kind of stuff to attract eyeballs, tell a compelling story. But when it comes to writing conversion copy for the web, a lot of times it ends up being this kind of collection of people, maybe a pride. And there was a really interesting thread about this on Exit Five recently about who writes the web copy at your company, and the responses were really varied. And it ends up a lot of times being a blend of product marketing. A little bit of someone from content comes in. But to me, the copywriter's job when you're talking about websites, is to know what the goal of the page is, know the context of the visitor who is coming to that page, and give them the information they want to know in a compelling way that gets them to take the desired action of the page.
Will Hoekenga [00:03:30]:
Whether that's booking a demo, whether it's exploring more pages, consuming more content. You have to think about the bigger picture beyond the page that it's sitting in. And to me, that's what the copywriter does, which is interesting because words are a part of that equation, but the structure of the page is a part of that equation. There's all kinds of things going on. And so I think you really need to be involved in every step of the process.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:54]:
Okay, so I'm just taking notes as we do this. If you hear me typing, but why? So, okay, I get it. That's a common thing that comes up, right? Who writes the copy at your company? I've seen this. It's like, oh, sometimes it's product marketing, sometimes it's just this person who works on this team, and they're good at writing copy.
Will Hoekenga [00:04:11]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:11]:
Why do you think, though, a dedicated copywriter is not a more common hire? I think you see it as companies scale. Like, you look at a slack or a stripe, there's like a product copywriter, and they live with product. But within the marketing team, I've kind of always wondered, why is there not a full time copywriter embedded on this marketing team? Do you have a reason for why that might be?
Will Hoekenga [00:04:35]:
I think a lot of times is because they think about the copywriter as someone who's just doing things with words. Right. And so a lot of times that person ends up doing a bunch of content work their website isn't necessarily at the stage where they're kind of constantly iterating and testing, launching new pages. There's not a velocity of stuff going on with the product evolving and needing to put out a bunch of new kind of conversion centric assets. I think they look at that and they think well, we could bring in someone, but they're also going to need to be able to do blog posts, email stuff and all that sort of thing. And so a lot of times that's what the copywriting role ends up being is kind of. When I first got hired by a company, my title was copywriter and I did all of the above. And that's not always the best way to get results out of each of the things you're having the person doing.
Will Hoekenga [00:05:31]:
Right. If youre having them doing content but their skillset is really more actual non content copywriting, then its not the best use of their time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:40]:
So in some cases it might make sense to have a copywriter more on a contract basis for when youre doing something like a homepage revamp that might be a once a quarter, once every six months bigger project where the day to day marketing copy that can be done by the person who does content marketing manager can write the email copy, the product marketing manager can write the landing page copy. Right? Ish, yeah.
Will Hoekenga [00:06:07]:
Because I think a lot of times the people who end up getting pulled into doing a new webpage or something like that, they're refreshing the homepage. It's almost like that person typically has a bunch of other stuff already on their plate that they're being measured and incentivized to do well at. And it's like now this extra thing gets added to their plate. And I'm not saying that means that that person can't do a good job. A lot of times people have internal team members that step in and do pages and do an outstanding job. But it's just, it's a hard thing to have someone focused on all the time because it's not a need that comes up week after week, month after month for a lot of companies.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:45]:
Yeah, that's the hard part for me because it might not be a need that comes up, but like copy to me is so important. And if you don't have somebody that can do the gap between average copy and great copy, like it makes all the difference in the world. And this is what drives me nuts. I like to think of myself as a decent writer and I think copy is my thing or like it's my strength. I could write an email. I could write great email copy in ten minutes. And then you watch somebody else struggle for three, six, two days to get an email out. And it's like, man, if we just had a proficient copywriter on the team right now, we could just, you could move so much faster.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:20]:
And so I, we didn't end up hiring this role at drift. I ended up writing a bunch of copy, and then we had a couple other people on the team, this guy George, who wrote a lot of the emails. Sarah, we kind of tackled it as a team, but for a while, I ended up being, like, the copywriting bottleneck, because it was like, oh, has Dave looked at this landing page? Has Dave looked at this email? And that can become exhausting. But we just couldn't find the right person to do it. But we really wanted to hire a staff copywriter for that reason and be like, yeah, there might be busy times, then there might be slower times, but I do think there's value of having somebody, like, on the team who, whether it's an email, landing page, website page, whatever it is, a deck, having somebody that has that skill to do it, because I think what happens is companies often lack that consistent tone of voice and the consistent quality. And, like, totally, the landing page might be awesome, but the email was kind of shitty.
Will Hoekenga [00:08:10]:
Yeah. And I really think part of the struggle is just that blend between content and copy. And I think the writer ends up a lot of times just getting pushed into content because they need someone who can write, right, and they're related, but different skill sets.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:24]:
All right. I've already spent too much time on the internal politics of hiring a copywriter. Let's actually use this episode to help people get better at writing copy. You sent me this awesome doc, and I want to tee this up. Just true copywriters filled with examples, perfectly framed outline. And so I'm going to read this problem. You said there's an epidemic of b. Two b websites that sound identical to their competitors.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:48]:
They talk about the same things, use the same language, and fail to differentiate themselves convincingly. So how do you write web copy that makes your brand stand out first, before we get into those, you have four ingredients, and let's cover each one. We'll spend a little bit of time. Each one.
Will Hoekenga [00:09:03]:
Okay. All right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:04]:
Yeah, I see this epidemic, too. And where I struggle with this is, as the writer, I feel like you can only do so much, and I'm wondering if you feel the same way. Do you feel like this lack of the same language, the sounding identical doesn't it come from, like, a lack of vision? Like, if you work with a company and founders, they have, like, they're solving a really unique problem. They're solving a problem in a really unique way. And they have their way of doing things, like, right. Don't you kind of, like, you start licking your chops as a writer, it's when the company doesn't have any. And so I just. I'm saying that because I think this conversation needs to just be elevated a bit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:38]:
It's like copywriters. They're not magicians. Right. Ogilvy has said there are no dull products, only dull writers. And I don't necessarily think that's true, because if you're given a product, if you're giving a me too product, and there's 20 other products like it, it's going to be hard for you to write copy. So I just wanted to riff on that and hear you kind of jump off on that point.
Will Hoekenga [00:09:58]:
Yeah, no, I think it's a really good point. And David Ogilvy didn't live in the era of there being, like, 40,000 different SaaS tools, like, all springing up every year.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:09]:
Right. You're like, hey, will gets a new contract to write copy for, like, a webinar tool. Okay, well, how are we different than every other webinar tool? It's like, well, our design is better. And it's like, no, that's not a differentiator.
Will Hoekenga [00:10:21]:
A lot of times, as the copywriter, you are limited to an extent by what is actually true about the product. And I think that sounds, like, really obvious to say, but there can be a lot of pressure sometimes to really almost invent the thing that makes you different, whether you're a copywriter or you're the founder, and you've made something that is useful. Yes. But you're trying to figure out, okay, what does this actually bring to the table relative to the 15 other similar products that are serving the same type of customer? And if the company doesn't have that figured out, it is a little bit of like a weight holding everything down. And that's why you were speaking to the four things that I listed out. So if we're thinking about a web page, I think of it as having kind of a hierarchy of needs, where there's four things, all of them are important, but if you don't get the ones that are the greater need. Right. It blunts the effectiveness of the other ingredients.
Will Hoekenga [00:11:22]:
And the first one that I put in the hierarchy is clear positioning, which goes back to kind of what you were speaking to because great clear positioning lets people know right away, oh, this is for me. It's designed to solve my problem and I see what's clearly different about it. Right. And so if you don't nail that, it's not like it's impossible for the page to still be good and have good copy on it, but it just makes everything else's job a lot more difficult. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:52]:
Well, the result can be someone reading that page and be like, wow, this is really well written copy. That's very witty and cute and fun.
Will Hoekenga [00:11:58]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:59]:
But I'm going to buy the product.
Will Hoekenga [00:12:00]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:00]:
Like ultimately the copy is to convince and convert someone to take an action. And so if you can clearly do that and show how you're different than alternatives, do you have a preferred method of doing positioning? Like if someone's listening to this and like, okay, how do we go and revisit our positioning? Specifically what you said, how do you convey very quickly and directly, here's what we do and here's how we're different than alternatives.
Will Hoekenga [00:12:27]:
I think actually, I don't know if you're familiar with her content. Emily Kramer has some really great content around positioning and just kind of a general, very simple, stripped down framework for doing it where you're just getting super clear on naming what your product is. Right. What category it belongs to and what you're competing against and what makes it different from that. I think when I look at positioning, there's actually, there's a test. It's an old direct response technique that I don't see come up that much because direct response stuff doesn't always seem like the cleanest fit necessarily, with some of the stuff we do in B2B sas. But it's from a book called Copy Logic and they call it the cub test. Like cub.
Will Hoekenga [00:13:07]:
And cub stands for confusing, unbelievable or boring. And I think this is a really simple, easy framework anyone can use when they're looking at their product positioning because these are the ways that positioning loses people. Right. It's too confusing. It makes claims that people don't actually believe or they're unsubstantiated or it's just boring in the sense that it's not actually targeted at the right problem for the market that you're speaking to. And so I think when you look at it from that lens, it can help you kind of pinpoint the problem with it. And if you're thinking about from a standpoint of confusing, for example, the number one things that I see when I'm looking at positioning that just doesn't seem to make sense is either one. The company is hell bent on trying to create a category and they get super creative with what the name is, but it happens to be something that they're creating it so it doesn't exist yet and it just isn't there for the customer yet.
Will Hoekenga [00:14:04]:
Or theres also the trying to list everything you do all at once route and youre throwing so much at the people that they dont know whats going on. So I think you have to be really honest with yourself in terms of what category your product belongs to and you have to look for what those product differentiators are. And thats to speak to your point earlier. Your product has those or it doesnt. And as good as marketing can be and as powerful as it can be, it's always going to be fighting an uphill battle if your marketing is trying to do the job of differentiating for you when the product has to do that first.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:38]:
Yes, yes, there it is. The product has to do the differentiation. So one example is this company, capsule Natalie Taylor, who runs marketing over there. She's on the podcast and I've become a fan of this product. It's capsule video if you want to look at it. But their homepage headline is finally a video editor made for enterprise. And I think that's good copy because it does all the things that you described without having to like spell those out. It's like very quickly your brain goes to like, it's a video editor, okay, but it's for the enterprise.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:10]:
I'm an enterprise. Oh, there must not be a video editor for the enterprise. And that must mean that it's not secure, it's not collaborative, whatever, right. It implies a bunch of things. If you are that customer. Now, if you're a mom and pop shop looking for a video editing tool, like this headline is going to be like a foreign language to you. And that's great. I think that's the goal of a headline.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:30]:
It's to speak to the person that you're trying to target. And clearly, though Natalie and the marketing team did not make this up, it is because their strategy as a company is we're building a video editor for enterprise.
Will Hoekenga [00:15:43]:
Absolutely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:44]:
As a result of that, the copy becomes easy to write.
Will Hoekenga [00:15:47]:
And I'm glad that you mentioned strategy there because I think that's an under discussed thing in copy. The copy has to be in sync with whatever the overall company strategy is. And a lot of times I think that gets disconnected, especially when you bring in someone from outside the company, you hire someone to write the copy, they really need to have intimate familiarity with not only where the company is now, but where it's going as well. Because sometimes you can double down on whats working now. But if the CEO is thinking were trying to get away from that right, then its going to clash when the point in time comes for someone to approve the copy. So its always this dance between where you are now, where the company is trying to go, and the copy has to shepherd that process, I think. But I like that video example. And I do think thats a clear case where theres so many video products that dont serve enterprise, right.
Will Hoekenga [00:16:45]:
There's so many ones that are targeted at individual creators and things like that. So I think that's a case where literally just stating what the product is and who it's for works really well because it's an underserved type of customer. Right. So it's always nice when you have that and then you can come in as the copywriter and just be like, this is so clear, this is what it should be, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:05]:
Yes. So it's funny because, well, I want to get your opinion on this.
Will Hoekenga [00:17:09]:
Okay.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:10]:
If you look at our website, Exit Five.com, i don't think we explain at all how we're different than anybody else. But I think if you unpack the story a little bit, you can get those ingredients. And it's kind of this weird dance of like, I don't feel like we need a differentiator in some ways because it's a community. It's a community for marketing people. We don't need to explain how we're different than other community. Or maybe there's just not a lot of competition. And this is more of a, a blue ocean and we're trading on my brand and my reputation. We've turned it into this thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:42]:
But what's your perspective on that, mister copywriter?
Will Hoekenga [00:17:46]:
Well, I think that Exit Five is interesting. Well, let me ask you, like, what are the alternatives to Exit Five? Because I see a lot of times in your posts about Exit Five, you compare it to LinkedIn as kind of an alternative, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:57]:
Yeah.
Will Hoekenga [00:17:58]:
It's a better place to network and engage with people doing your work. So besides LinkedIn, do you look at other, are there a lot of these like B2B marketing communities out there?
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:07]:
Well, so part of that. So I don't actually think LinkedIn is a competitor in that sense. That's me kind of playing a little copywriting framing trick. Like that's me trying to proactively handle an objection, right. Which is handling the objection of, well, why should I pay for, like who needs to pay for a community? And so that's me knowing that that's one of the bigger objections. And so I try to write that to be like, you can get lots of great information on LinkedIn for free, but here's why you might consider joining Exit Five. So I think the actual competitors are probably communities that you would pay for to join. The only real one that I know and pay attention to is pavilion.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:47]:
And I wouldn't even say that they're a competitor in the sense of they have basically built a very successful community of go to market executives. And so I think what they're doing is more, and this could just be my bias and how I repositioning them in my head to make the case for Exit Five. Right?
Will Hoekenga [00:19:04]:
Sure, sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:05]:
But I say that their focus on go to market and executives and if you get their newsletter as an example, their newsletter is like, hey, this week Google backed out of a deal to buy this company, whatever they were called. And here's what it means for SaaS. We're like, no, we're focused specifically on B2B marketing. We're not going to tell you about the stock market. We're not going to tell you about equity and options and that stuff. We're going to talk to you about how to write copy landing pages, how to make a internal marketing presentation. We're going to get really tactical about B2B marketing. That's kind of the positioning that I've leaned into.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:39]:
The other competitors would probably be free resources. I think Emily Kramer and them, they have a great substack or something for MkT one. But on the paid side, I think Pavilion is really the big one.
Will Hoekenga [00:19:50]:
Yeah. I think part of it also is what are the outcomes that you're trying to get for your community members? Because then I think certain communities have different outcome goals. When I look at Exit Five, I think a big part of it is helping B2B marketers advance their careers, right. Get a promotion, take the next step, that sort of thing. And so I think first of all, you're narrowing down to a specific role that you're focused on and then the next thing is the outcome. Right. And then I think sometimes it gets tricky with differentiation because like you said, you ask someone why they're different and it's like, well, our UI is easier to use. That's an easy thing to claim.
Will Hoekenga [00:20:29]:
It's a harder thing to show people. Right. But I think with Exit Five, where.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:33]:
The Netflix for ex, it's like, are you though? I'm not sure about that exactly.
Will Hoekenga [00:20:38]:
Yeah. Don't try to be the Netflix for B2B marketers. But.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:41]:
But even in this Exit Five example, like, I feel like it would be overdoing it to be like, we're the only B2B marketing community that blank. It's like, well, I don't know. There's not really that many marketing communities. And we have 4000 members. And the secret flavors, it's created by me, and you may already know me, and that's why you should join. And now that we have scale and we have a reputation, I think we can trade on that. And I think the positioning, like, evolves over time.
Will Hoekenga [00:21:06]:
When I look at Exit Five, because I obviously was familiar with you and was a fan of your content and perspective and everything, but I wasn't really sure what to expect of the actual community. And to me, what stands out is just the quality and usefulness of the discussions. It's something that I didn't really expect to see consistently on almost a daily basis. I see something that is useful to me in some way. And so I think finding a way to showcase that to people who are interested in the community can be a part of it as well. Because saying we have the best quality of conversations, that isn't something that someone is just going to believe right away. It has to be presented to them in a certain way. They need to have faith that because of something about the community, the way it's facilitated the leadership involved, that that's going to be part of what differentiates it.
Will Hoekenga [00:21:56]:
And I do think to an extent, it's led by your personal brand. Right. Like you said. And I think there's a natural inclination, as companies grow, which you guys have been doing, you've been hiring employees. There's a natural inclination sometimes to be like, I don't want to rely just on that. Right. That can't be the only thing that differentiates us. But I will say having a founder who is front and center and getting their perspective, their voice out there is kind of like a cheat code for the marketing team.
Will Hoekenga [00:22:27]:
Because if we're looking back at the four ingredients I mentioned earlier, the last one that I always put on this kind of hierarchy of needs is voice and tone, because that's sort of like the cherry on top, right? You need to get the fundamentals right. You need great positioning. The page needs to have a structure that contains the right information that the prospect wants to see in the correct order. The language needs to be customer driven and differentiated. But if you can also add in a unique perspective, if you can bring that to your copy and your pages, that's worth so much, because on its own, it feels different when people come to it. And I think you guys had this adrift too, by the way, because you were out there all the time, David was out there all the time, and you guys had a perspective on the industry. And b, two, b, marketing that was so pervasive out there that by the time people came to your website, they were aware of that. And now the website can play off of that.
Will Hoekenga [00:23:26]:
They can write from that perspective. And that's kind of the unfair advantage. I see this with 37 signals is another company that's great at this, right? Because you're probably, if you're sort of in the customer segments that they're marketing to, it wouldn't be crazy for you to have come across a lot of their work that they put out there before you even see the product. They have New York Times bestselling books that talk about their philosophies around work and things like that, their founders writing blog posts, putting stuff out there. They have this distinct perspective that when you get to the webpage, when they launched, hey, for example, the email service, when you go to Hey.com comma, the headline is, we finally fixed your email and calendar, which if you're a new company starting out of the blue and you go with that headline, it's like, I don't know, man, you're starting with we. You're just saying you fix something without really backing it up at all. But because they are 37 signals, because they have this distinct perspective of how products should be built and how productivity and work should take place that a lot of their traffic has been exposed to before they get there. When they get there and they see something starting with we, they pay attention to it.
Will Hoekenga [00:24:37]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:37]:
And if you want some great examples for copywriting inspiration, go to 37 signals.com dot. This is kind of just basically this manifesto of type of little quotes and stuff, but just describes their motives and a couple of them that I like. Number two, work is in war. Corporate language is filled with metaphors of war. Companies conquer their market. They capture mind share. They target customers, they employ sales force, they hire headhunters, they destroy competition, they pick battles and make a killing. That's an awful paradigm, and we want nothing to do with it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:06]:
Work isn't war. We come in peace. And then another one is, number four, profit motive. The tech. This is a really good one. The tech industry is especially good at losing money. Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. Like just the play on words there is so good, right? Growth is electric, but profits are elusive.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:22]:
We take an old school economics, one on one approach. Make more than you spend. That's why we've been profitable every year since we've been in business. It's the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long, long haul anyway. That's great. I'm caught up in copyright now. I know we got to go back to this sheet. Number one was clear positioning.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:38]:
I think we've covered that. You got to have that. And I love how you brought that back to the product. And I think this is where, if you're listening to this and you're inside of the company, know that this is not your job in a vacuum. You can, you need to go back to the CEO, the founders, the VP of marketing, whoever it is, your boss, your man. You need to say, hey, hold on. We don't have a strong position here, so I can write copy for this, but I think really, if we do, like, the root cause analysis here, it's because we don't have a strong point of view. And I think that cures all, as you said, with a product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:07]:
The second bullet here is customer driven structure. The page must prioritize and highlight the information that matters most to customers. Tell me about that.
Will Hoekenga [00:26:15]:
So this kind of speaks to you earlier, what we were talking about in terms of the role of the copywriter on the team. And I think that web pages tend to go through some obstacles in their drafting process, one of which is so often design and copy work separately. And there's, like, two ways it typically goes. One is the page is just designed like a design comes from somewhere, and then it's handed off to a copywriter and fill this in. It's got Lorem Ipsum text everywhere, and it's like, put the copy in here. It's got sections already, which the first section highlights this aspect of the product. The second one, this, third one, this. And so the copywriter comes in and fills it in.
Will Hoekenga [00:26:57]:
The second scenario is someone writes all the copy, hands it off to design, and then isn't very involved after that point, unless it's designed, coming back and saying, can you make this headline shorter? Because it's scrunching up, down into four lines across the page. So I think, from my perspective, copy and design need to communicate early and often, and the process needs to be very collaborative, start to finish. Everyone who has input into this page, which is typically going to be whoever is writing it, whoever is designing it, and a lot of times, product marketing. So if it's a product page, the person who is owning that product is going to come in and have insight into the customers and sort of maybe the broader campaigns around it. But you need everyone in the room, and you need everyone saying, this is the objective of the page. And here's where the traffic is going to be coming from. Here's where we want them to go after the page so that everyone who's having a hand in it is on the same page with that. And when you do it that way, then instead of design and copy becoming these disparate processes, they can play off each other so much.
Will Hoekenga [00:28:04]:
Well, because I'll tell you, as a copywriter, a lot of times there's things that need to be communicated on the page. And copy isn't always the best, fastest way to communicate something. Sometimes it's having some words that cue something up and the perfect visual to go along with it to really drive a point home. Sometimes the visual can do what I might have needed six more lines of text to do. So when you're working to, dang it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:29]:
You'Re breaking one of my good social media lines.
Will Hoekenga [00:28:34]:
Oh, no way. What is it?
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:35]:
That you should always write the copy before design. But you're 100% right. You've changed my mind on that. Say, listen to this, people. It's okay.
Will Hoekenga [00:28:45]:
Well, I was always, I was always a copy before design guy, too, so don't feel bad.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:49]:
No, but I. What you're saying is the answer is both and, like, meeting in the middle. Because if I know what the design element is, that's going to change what I'm going to need to write. We're showing people.
Will Hoekenga [00:29:00]:
Yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:00]:
The pizza. I don't have to describe the pizza. Right. It makes a ton of sense. So how do you, how do you work together then? Because somebody's got to get started first, right?
Will Hoekenga [00:29:10]:
Yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:10]:
And I like to move fast. Design, to me, often takes longer. I could sit down and write landing page copy right now in 30 minutes. Design might take a little bit longer. So how do you do it?
Will Hoekenga [00:29:19]:
So I do think there needs to be one person who's kind of shepherding the process. And as a copywriter, I'm going to say that should be copywriters. So I do think the copywriter should start. And to me, whoever's writing the copy should be doing the bulk of the customer research. And, yes, you can lean on existing research that's already been done by other people in the company, the copywriter should be talking to, to the people who have already talked to the customers, in addition to talking to the customers. But I think you need the person who's doing the writing, doing all this research, and coming away with a hypothesis. Right. This is what I think the page needs to cover.
Will Hoekenga [00:29:54]:
These are the things that are important to people, and here's the priority of information that's important. So I'm going to kind of outline this a little bit, communicate to you, the designer, you, whoever I'm reporting to, that's kind of behind the strategy of the initiative. I'm going to talk you through my conclusions that I've arrived at, and I'd love to hear how you think, designer, what we can do with this page to communicate these things from a visual standpoint. Here's what I'm thinking. The structure should be if you have ideas for visuals, because a lot of times designers have worked on other pages where something has been created in a really cool, successful way, and you can either do something that is that same style, or you can bring in a visual that's worked really well on another page. So it's being collaborative and wanting to set people up to contribute in a helpful way. And I also think that approaching it from this collaborative standpoint is really important for getting buy in, too, because I think that's something that you need to do consistently as a copywriter. Don't let the first time people have any inkling of what you're doing with this page be when you're presenting the draft.
Will Hoekenga [00:31:03]:
I think along the way, you need to be sharing. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's what I'm learning. Here's why I think the page should be structured this way. Here's why I think we should do it like this. So getting that buy in, not only from whoever you're reporting to, but also from the people who are going to be working on the page with you, because if you get them bought into what you're seeing, I think that's going to help. I can't design at all. I have no artistic sensibilities.
Will Hoekenga [00:31:27]:
But I think if I can explain what I think the page should be going for and why to the designer, I think that's going to help them do their job better and more effectively. Right. And I think it makes it more exciting for them, too.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:38]:
So you might start writing, have some rough ideas for copy, meet with the designer, suggest some structure they might get you, like a figma mock up. And then you're like, oh, this is nice. Now I can, I don't need this. This is going to be a headline. I'm going to write this copy for the subsection.
Will Hoekenga [00:31:55]:
Absolutely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:56]:
Okay.
Will Hoekenga [00:31:57]:
And so few companies, I think, do it like this, but it works really well when I've done it. I just think it's a far better process. And the whole reason this is important, by the way, the reason why I list this before the copy itself, knowing the structure is just because you can nail the copy. But if you have the thing that's fourth most important to the customer underneath the hero section, then again, that's just going to blunt the effectiveness of it. Right. Because they're looking for the other thing that you buried down here underneath some social proof at the bottom of the page. Or it's also a lot of times getting social proof in the right places. Oh, we made this big claim in our supporting copy underneath the headline, but we don't really have any third party signals that back it up until, like, the very bottom of the page because our template has the social proof down there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:47]:
Yeah.
Will Hoekenga [00:32:47]:
So that's why to me, the structure is kind of the second thing that you really need to get involved.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:52]:
What do you think about design in, let's talk mostly about B2B SaaS, right. It's like you pull off Ogilvy on advertising for my shelf over there, and it's like you're writing copy for liquor, for cars, for cigarettes, for whatever.
Will Hoekenga [00:33:07]:
Consumer products.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:08]:
Consumer products, right. I think one thing that contributes to what we talked about earlier, the sameness, is it's very hard often to show the product that you're selling. And so it's like a screenshot of a dashboard. Doesn't always do it justice. How do you think about what design elements should work with your copy?
Will Hoekenga [00:33:27]:
Yeah, I think it all depends on what the customer wants to see, but I think there's increasingly more interesting ways to try to get people into experiencing digital products, whether it's kind of like an on site demo or something like that, where they can kind of see how stuff moves around.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:45]:
Yeah. People in Exit Five, we've done a lot with novotic and another company called Storylane. They do, like, product walkthroughs. And so I think that's a great example of, like.
Will Hoekenga [00:33:53]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:53]:
You can basically make a product demo without having it to be a video or having anybody walk you through it, and then you can just focus that on, it's like, that's the core of your web page. And you can have someone flip through that and then write good copy around it.
Will Hoekenga [00:34:04]:
Right. And I think that goes back to, like, bringing the designer in on what you're trying to achieve. Right. I've done some work with the restaurant point of sale company, toast, and they've done some cool things with design in terms of just getting a screen mock up on the page and people being able to, like, toggle between different setups on the screen for different types of restaurants and things like that. So there's some elements of interactivity to it. It's not this small, like 400 by 500, just naked screenshot of a UI. It brings it to life a little bit more. So, yeah, it's tough with digital products, for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:41]:
All right, let's talk about differentiated language. On top of speaking in benefits and pain points, rather than just features, your copy needs to feature customer centric language that your competitors are not using.
Will Hoekenga [00:34:51]:
Yeah. So when you start doing customer research and interviewing customers and looking at the words they're using and things like that, I actually think it's kind of easy to arrive at a lot of the same high level conclusions that your competitors have arrived at already by talking to similar people. And that's why you see five companies in the same industry all having headlines that are some tiny variation of basically, like, will increase your revenue. Right. They end up saying the same things. So what I try to get at is we know what the benefit is. How can we go deeper and different on expressing that with our copy? And it's hard to find actual shortcuts or formulas for doing this. I found that what it comes down to is really talking to a lot of different people, kind of like I was speaking to earlier.
Will Hoekenga [00:35:42]:
Don't just talk to customers. Don't just talk to whoever your contact at the company is. If you're a copywriter who's been brought in, talk to sales, talk to product marketers, talk to customer support, get all these different data points on customers, what they need. Talk to the customers, of course, as well. And a lot of it comes from asking good questions when you are talking to customers. This was actually a great Exit Five thread the other day. There was one about customer interview questions, and I picked up five that I hadn't used before and started sprinkling in. But I think it's easy when you're doing a customer interview to end up getting all the same information that your competitors are getting.
Will Hoekenga [00:36:23]:
And a lot of that comes from the tendency I feel this. I don't know if everyone else feels it, but I'm kind of an introverted person. I get a little nervous before I do customer interview calls, even though I've done hundreds of them at this point. And I think there's a tendency a lot of times to just trying to get to your next question or if theres a silence or something that comes off, like if they have a short answer and they pause to want to jump in and fill that silence. But something that I have to consciously do is tell myself, okay, when theres a silence, just wait. Just wait for like three to 4 seconds. And so often the customer will pick back up and go deeper on what they just told you. I also think, again, the tendency to go to the next question when youre talking to customers.
Will Hoekenga [00:37:06]:
Its a balance between that and listening to what theyre actually saying in real time and jumping in with the whys the can you clarify what you meant when you said or going a level deeper? Okay, youre interested in increasing revenue. What does that allow you to do? Or youre interested in getting a higher conversion rate? Why? What does that allow you to accomplish? And I think a lot of times we hesitate to ask these questions because they seem like they have obvious answers. But I was talking to a customer the other day for a client I'm working with, and it's like a martech company and has to do with conversion rates of email opt ins. And they were talking about how important that is to them. And I said, well, why is getting a higher conversion rate on your email opt ins important? And what they ended up saying was, when someone is on our email list, their LTV is way higher. And so we're really focused on increasing LTV right now. That got me going in a completely different direction than if I had just stopped at higher conversion rates. It's that so you can anytime you write a benefit, and this is an old copywriting thing, this is not revolutionary.
Will Hoekenga [00:38:14]:
But doing the so you can exercise and the so you cannot exercise I think is really helpful to kind of get to those different things. And then a lot of it is literally just comes down to using a different language than what competitors are using. Right. So I mentioned toast earlier. I did a page for them for cafes and bakeries a little while back. And when you look at the other point of sale systems out there, you see a lot of things like intuitive, easy to use design, speeds up your throughput and things like that. And what I ended up doing on this page, I wanted to speak to the ease of use instead of just saying, great UI, whatever makes it easier to use the headline for the section was trade in workarounds for a POS that just works. And workarounds was one of those things that came out of talking to customers, of hearing that a lot.
Will Hoekenga [00:39:13]:
That was a pain point for them, instead of just saying, it's easier getting a very specific word that I wasn't seeing in other places and getting that in the headline. There was another one, and you see this across, not just restaurant point of sale, but anything that's designed to get people to buy more than once. And you see this in Martech, it's like, keep people coming back, repeat purchases, stuff like that. And what ended up being important to these cafe owners I was talking to was, we want people to come back, but like we really love being part of our communities lives and like seeing people come in again and again and developing that relationship. So I had a section that was become your community's daily ritual. And the supporting copy under there was focused on some of those revenue generating benefits and stuff. But again, it's trying to approach the same thing other people are trying to approach, but from a different angle. That gets to something your customers are expressing, but maybe won't tell you the first time you ask the question, well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:11]:
This is a perfect example of how, like, copy can be a key ingredient in the decision making process. It's like, oh, your copy spoke to me and felt much more relatable and connected with me. You get me and therefore you get me. And that is ultimately the goal of copy. It's like, I think it's in Dan Kennedy's ultimate sales letter. But he talks about how one of his copywriting rules is to understand if the customer or that industry has a particular language. If you can speak their language, you're like, oh, okay, these people, clearly they're not bullshitting me.
Will Hoekenga [00:40:48]:
They get this, they get me 100%.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:50]:
And I'm not going to go feature shopping now because of that. And your headline on this page is great, which is the morning rush. Doesn't have to feel so rushed. One follow up to this is on this page you have a bunch of features. How do you decide? I feel like if it's up to the marketer or the company or whoever, they're like, here's a, here's the 50 features we have. And I absolutely hate feature comparison charts because number one, I think we all know that we can skew them all to our favor. I can show, if I was going to make a feature comparison chart, Exit Five and pavilion, I would show all the things we do that are good. And I'd put checks next to them.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:25]:
And on the other side you have like, we're not going to list 50 things on this landing page. You kind of listed three. Do you have a guardrail for like, let's pick, how many features and benefits should we talk about on a typical landing page? Is it two or three? Is it whatever the marketer wants? How do you navigate that?
Will Hoekenga [00:41:40]:
I don't necessarily have a hard and fast number for it. I do think if you get beyond four or so, I just thought I don't have a hard and fast number and then I listed one, so maybe I do three. Three.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:50]:
The rule of three is all of three?
Will Hoekenga [00:41:52]:
Yeah, I mean, I try to shoot for three, but again, a lot of it comes back to when you're talking to sales, when you're talking to customers. What are the primary things that are coming up? Obviously there are things that we think are important. There are things that we think are unique and different. But what are the non negotiables for them when they are analyzing a product? And this really comes into play if you're getting more specific with the page because the more someone is drilling down into, you know, they've got beyond your homepage now they're on a specific feature page. I think the things they're looking for get more and more specific. And sometimes there are, there are non negotiable features that if you're someone who's comparison shopping, whos buying some SaaS product for your team, you have a list of things that youre looking for. Its always a delicate balance between wanting to be benefit, pain point driven, but not wanting to bury what the thing actually is because as people get more and more close to buying, theyre like, does it have x? Does it have y? And so you need that to be clear to people when they get to the page. Its great to lead with benefits and pain points, but if you only talk in emotions and you dont get down to specific deliverable, this is the thing.
Will Hoekenga [00:43:05]:
This is what it is. Then people are going to look somewhere else. You just have to have a sense of what gets people to buy. What are their most important things. You can talk to people, you can do surveys, you can look at product usage. Theres a lot of different ways to do that. But thats one of the things that you need to determine early on. When youre looking at the structure, what are the jobs this page needs to accomplish?
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:28]:
Okay, voice and tone. I'm going to skip over this one because we kind of talked about it in doses. But basically like how can your voice and tone reinforce your brand's unique point of view? I'm not so sure this is true today now that they've been bought by Salesforce and they're less fun. But Slack used to have a really fun tone of branding and I think that impacted their branding like they would do, right? Kind of like funny little copy and like the release notes when you get the update on your phone or if you tried to upload a photo and it wasn't working. I love when brands do things like that that just sprinkle in little microcopy to like again, build a relationship like we talked about earlier. But I want to wrap up and I want to just hear about you since we're all marketers listening to this, by this, what is your writing process? So do you set the mood? It's five in the morning and you got espresso and you got incense burning and you're like, I got 2 hours to like write this landing page copy. Like take me into the, the creative process here of this master copywriter.
Will Hoekenga [00:44:29]:
So I wish that I could be the cool guy sitting in the corner of the coffee shop with the big headphones on, just like chilling, vibing, listening to great music. I cannot be that guy at all. I cannot be around people. I need complete silence. I love music. I listen to music all the time. I cannot listen to it while I'm doing that kind of work. So my process is very unsexy.
Will Hoekenga [00:44:52]:
It's me sitting in this chair that I'm in right now in my home office sitting down in front of the laptop with a Google Doc open. And typically I always find that if you are struggling to write or get started or whatever, it's because you have not done enough research yet. You don't know enough about the product, you don't know enough about the customers. You might have some ideas and stuff, but if it's nothing flowing to me, that's always a signal. I need to spend more time looking back at these customer interviews, talking to more people, looking at my, I need more data points, right? So I generally, before anything gets, wait.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:29]:
And real quick just to interrupt you on that. When you work with a company, are they providing you with that and that, like that's homework for you to just like digest. Like hey, can you send me some call recordings and stuff? Like how are you doing that?
Will Hoekenga [00:45:40]:
So I'm always as soon as possible with an engagement. I'm trying to get as much internal stuff that they already have that might be useful to me. Right. I tell clients I want to know as much about the customer as you do and you guys have already done a lot of, you've already put a lot of research into that. So anything you have and I'll ask for specific things because a lot of times companies can forget about it. So yes, I'm trying to get internal documentation, sales recordings, whatever might exist that I can go through. I might not end up being able to go through all of it if it's too much. I'd much rather have the problem of having too much information to have than not enough information.
Will Hoekenga [00:46:17]:
So I'm going to ask for stuff. It's very rare that I wouldn't want to talk to customers even if they have some great customer interviews and stuff like that. That's always going to help. So I'm doing that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:27]:
So you're asking to like literally set up questions.
Will Hoekenga [00:46:31]:
Yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:32]:
Set up conversations with customers.
Will Hoekenga [00:46:34]:
Yes. And I make it easier for clients. I can handle the scheduling. Obviously I want to do it in a respectful way that they're comfortable with. They're entrusting a customer, talking to someone who is representing their brand, who isnt an employee. And so in a sense they have less control over in a way. So if they can introduce me, thats always great. But ive done other stuff where its creating an email campaign to ask customers, people who have bought in the last six months to raise their hands to get on the phone for 30 minutes.
Will Hoekenga [00:47:05]:
So theres a lot of different ways to approach it and I try to do whatever the company is going to be most of comfortable with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:11]:
Okay, got it. So if you can't just sit down and get something going, it's usually because you haven't done enough research. But this is just you laptop open in a Google Doc and you're just going to start writing.
Will Hoekenga [00:47:22]:
I'm going to start with the headings of the page. I actually don't always start with the overall headline. Sometimes I'll start with a supporting copy that comes first because I'm a little clearer on what that should be. But generally, yeah, I'm going to start above the fold. I'm going to do it in order. I'm not going to start and hop around from different sections, but I will look at the what the headline should be, kind of get those mapped out on the page and just, I'll have some research docs open that I can refer and look back to. But a lot of it's just, it's not a shortcut. At the end of the day, it's pounding out words, writing stuff, deleting stuff and just trying to get it down there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:00]:
How do you work with deadlines? Do you ever time box yourself on purpose? It's something that I do which I'm like, I'm gonna, I got to get a v one of this. Dan and I were working on something earlier this week and I had kind of been putting it off, putting it off, putting off. And I literally put an hour on my calendar and I said, I am going to ship v one of this deck, this pitch deck to Dan to get feedback on in 1 hour and I have to do it. Do you ever do anything like that? Give yourself forced deadlines to just make things happen?
Will Hoekenga [00:48:26]:
Absolutely. A lot of times I'll have a themed day in my schedule. So if I was writing copy for Exit Five, I'm going to have Exit Five day. And the output of this is I'm going to get to a shitty first draft, right? This probably won't be the draft that I share with Dave, but I'm going to get through it so that then some good will come out of it and then I can go back and refine and iterate.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:48]:
Yes. Okay. Listen to what this man just said. This is so, I think this is such an important part of the writing process and the creative process is like, you can't get to the good one until you get the shitty one out on paper. We're trying to name something right now and we are literally, we don't have a name yet, but we're like every day in slack, we're like, here's a list of ten new names. Nope. Hey, Tom, all he has to get that out. And I think most people don't ever share their work until they think it's perfect.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:14]:
But once you realize when you've done this long enough, you actually, all of those bad versions end up getting you to get to the right version. For me, if I'm really, really stuck, I go to sit down and I go pen and paper sometimes if I really need to, if I'm just like not feeling it in the Google Doc, but it's really important to call that out that you said that. That's why I wanted to come back and do this, because I, I think sometimes we just sit around expecting this thing to be perfect and you really just gotta like, if you like running, no matter how much you've run that first mile, that first quarter mile, first half mile, first mile usually always sucks, but then you get in a rhythm and like mile two, mile three, mile four. You're like, oh, this feels really good. I've found the same is true with writing.
Will Hoekenga [00:49:52]:
That's why I've never gotten into running, by the way. I can't get by the first mile guy. Yeah, cycling works for me, but not running, but, yeah, I literally. I label the Google Doc, the first one that I open up as company name, drafting table. And then it's just. It's the drafting table. I'm just getting it all out, but, yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:50:09]:
Nice. I like that. Any other inside the writer's room? People that like to hear how other people work. So any other interesting nuggets about how you create?
Will Hoekenga [00:50:18]:
I'm trying to think there's anything interesting I do. I feel like I'm a fairly boring writer in terms of stuff like that. But, I mean, take a walk, get out, move around. Don't just sit, get up, stand up. Listen to interviews. Do whatever you need to do to kind of shake yourself up. Sometimes I'll change rooms, by the way, I did say I'm in this office. Sometimes I just need to change the scenery.
Will Hoekenga [00:50:38]:
I'll go to the bedroom, to the living room, whatever. You got to shake yourself up.
Dave Gerhardt [00:50:42]:
I agree. Do you read fiction?
Will Hoekenga [00:50:44]:
Yeah, I do. I try to always do a mix. I try to have a little bit of fiction, a little bit of business stuff, and a little bit of nonfiction.
Dave Gerhardt [00:50:52]:
Yeah, I feel like reading fiction, for me, brings more good vocabulary and creative writing into the mix a little bit. And I think if I. I think reading business is really good because it works for me as, like, reading in general when I'm not really creative is because I haven't been reading. And I'm like, reading gets me to, like, I can start sentences quicker. I can tell better stories. I have little nuggets and nuances to use. But I do feel like the more that I've gotten into reading more fiction, like, my way of describing it almost forces you to think completely outside the box. So you might be writing B2B sass copy for toast, but you're reading this great novel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:30]:
That is. The copy is really good. The writing style is really good. That's going to bleed into your writing. Maybe it's music. I do think the other creative outlets feed into your writing 100%.
Will Hoekenga [00:51:40]:
Yeah. Little turns of phrase that will just spark something. Sometimes I think that's such a great point. Have a diverse diet of content that you're consuming, because the more that you're feeding your brain, the more that stuff just kind of, like, bleed into your work. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:54]:
I like to read on my Kindle. And one of the reasons why is because I use this app called Readwise and I like to highlight the things on my Kindle. And I just did this last night, but you can go through, they send you like a daily digest of things you've highlighted on your kindle. And I found this is a really good way for me to get a quick little daily dose of creativity in writing because I'm flipping through, I've read hundreds of books over the years, and every day I'm flipping through ten little passages that I've highlighted and it's like this perfect little dose of creativity that I can bring with me.
Will Hoekenga [00:52:25]:
Readwise is super cool. Shout out to them. Funnily enough, I think their founder was on my email list right when they started. And I had an email that was like, I'd love to give some feedback to people. Just send me your page, I'll give feedback on it. I want to say the first read wise homepage ever they sent to me. So I've been following those guys. What they're doing is really cool.
Will Hoekenga [00:52:42]:
Use their product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:43]:
I just flipped over to one highlight just to give you an example, but I have this highlight from the rise of Theodore Roosevelt biography about Theodore Roosevelt. And here's the line. On the first day of January, 1907, the president had shaken 8150 hands more than any other man in history.
Will Hoekenga [00:52:59]:
That's a great opener.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:00]:
Yeah, it's great. You just get these great little lines of copy, right? It's just those help me. And I'm like, okay, has nothing to do with B2B marketing, but like, I feel primed to ready to write now. All right.
Will Hoekenga [00:53:11]:
Yeah, I was just going to say, so much of B2B marketing, especially when you get beyond the webpage, what's the larger story you're telling? Right. You have to tell a compelling story. Reading stories is a great way to learn about that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:22]:
Absolutely. All right, well, this is a fantastic discussion. I got a bunch of great notes. We're going to a helpful episode on helping you write better copy. Thinking about the role of copywriting on a marketing team, will, it's just great to reconnect. Great to have you back in our life. I'm glad to hear you're inside the Exit Five community. I'm glad to see you doing well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:40]:
We'll link to your LinkedIn. Everybody can go connect with you and follow you there. I'm sure you'll get a bazillion messages after this. And hey, maybe one or two new cool brands want to get your help writing.
Will Hoekenga [00:53:50]:
Yeah. Feel free to reach out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:51]:
Will, thanks for coming on the Exit Five podcast.
Will Hoekenga [00:53:54]:
Thanks so much for having me, Dave. It was great to catch up and love the podcast. Looking forward to continuing to listen.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:59]:
Yeah, go reach out to Will. All right, good job.