- " A million dollars a year more for your business." You write that copy post on Facebook, it gets that disapprove. - You know that rarely are people are gonna remember what you said, they're gonna remember how they, you made them feel. - You look at the biggest companies in the world, Apple, Nike, they all have brand equity. These, that's what the direct response guys don't get.
- You know and the thing about social media is that people don't understand the importance of copy in that because you have a limited amount of space and people are scrolling through a feed and there's so much content.
So it's even more important because if you don't hook them and you don't get them to click or to spend 15 seconds on your content, it's a lost opportunity. I mean, you can spend a lot of time and energy and resources and money obviously, trying to build a social media following, but if you don't understand the fundamentals of copywriting, you're, you're gonna struggle. So I'm not surprised that that, that old expert from the, probably from the '80s who didn't evolve is, you know is kind of going the way of the buggy web salesman.
He's, he's probably starving these days.
- They need to look at a financial statement. Warren Buffett talks about that's, that's you being able to read financial statements. Understand currency. Financial fluency. I would go as far as saying that words that we use, that's the true currency of business.
- Obama. - Because of the words that we use, it could be in person or in print or in your marketing message, that actually converts people into a buyer. If that's the case, you think about looking at the profit and loss statement, that's, that's an effect. That's not the cost. What causes those numbers is your copywriting, your copy, your sales copy and copy is everywhere.
- Everywhere! - Think about everything that we wanna buy. Think about everything that we have, in your home, in your office, the car that you buy, I could bet some copywriters, were sitting in a room, thinking about the brand, thinking about the tagline, thinking about the color, thinking about the message, that compels us to take action to buy.
Maybe we saw an ad on TV, maybe saw an infomercial, you know, it's like one of those late night infomercial. - So Colton, I'm getting right now is the year 2000.
And we gotta go. Geez, that's the second time I've done that. - We were like we couldn't sleep, we're flipping through the channel back in the days, we're like, " Now, you know what is this thing? This thing is stupid." 10 minutes later, okay, let me, let me order this, you know, whatever exercise equipment that would, I would never use, it's too big for my house.
Doesn't matter. But someone I copyrighted crafted that's video script, planted that infomercial, everything that we wanna buy today, that we didn't even know that exists but now we wanted to buy it because of a copywriter.
It goes that far, as far as I'm concerned. - I want you to do this for us. I think that was a great intro, right?
Understanding what copywriting is and kind of where it was and where it's going. I think that's an important first step. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the difference in how you approach it today in this scalable copywriting formula format that you've perfected. - So if we can not make claims 'cause you may be asking, " Well Dan, if I cannot make promises and claims, well, how can I sell?" When I say you cannot make claims it's this, you cannot, back in the days you could, but now if you go on Facebook and say, let's say you sell a business improvement product, okay?
You got, you've got a program, you've got a service.
You can not say, " Hey, how to generate a million dollars a year more for your business." You write that copy post on Facebook, it gets that disapprove. That's a good case scenario, worst, they might shut down your account. - Just say yes, say yes.
- That hasn't gone that well. - Even you have proof that you could do it, even you have client that has, you have done it for, you can't do that. You just can't say those promises, then what are you gonna do.
Oh, how about, how they get clients? Oh, you could.
But then it's not as compelling. So the first thing now, anything that you wanna sell, I always suggest to all business owners, you need to come up with what I call a unique mechanism. A hook, in other words. What makes your thing, your offer different from everything else that's out there? What's, what's that unique message, because you could position the unique mechanism as that solution without making claims.
Because you're not saying that you're guaranteed to get these results, I'm saying that this unique mechanism could do these results for these people, it's very, very different. I'll give you a perfect example. Think about copywriting. Let's take that as an example. There are many copywriting books out there.
There are many copywriting courses out there. So Dennis, if I was to market my own copywriting course, called High-Income Copywriter course, how do I differentiate myself from everybody else? Its very simple.
Instead of teaching all copywriting, I just focus, just focus on one thing and what I call that, scalable copy. How to write compliant copy, that's it.
- That's all you had to say. - From that, that's my unique mechanism. Now then, what qualifies me to teach, to talk about it, because of my social media credibility. I use what I teach. I preach what I teach to grow my social media.
So you cannot make crazy promises. You've gotta first come up with a hook, a unique mechanism. And a lot of this has to do, instead of back in the days, you know in sales, feature benefit, feature benefit, feature benefit. This requires a deeper level of thinking which is called storytelling. How could you tell a story, that people could resonate with, that without making claims, that people want your products?
See it's very different. It's not just, " Hey, buy this you get that!" No, you can't do that. It's more, it's a story, it's, it could be client story, it could be your own story, it could be a metaphor, but how could you use story to make a statement to make a promise without making a promise and then get people to click and go to your funnel go to a landing page and things like that.
So that's, that's, it's the thinking ahead of time, before you even like, write a single quote.
- I love that because there's, there's that old saying that I heard years ago, " Facts tell- - But stories sell." - Right? Everybody's heard that. And I think when you think about copywriting that way, it kind of changes the dynamics a little bit, right? Now all of a sudden you don't necessarily need to make those claims, the story is going to do the selling for you.
The story is going to leave that imprint. People are going to remember the story, right? - Yes. - You know, the rarely are people are gonna remember what you said, they're gonna remember how they, you made them feel right? And if that story hits home and they can resonate, if you're telling the right story to the right audience, that's the secret, right?
- I'll give you one more example, one more example. So let's say you're in a marketplace where let's say you're selling weight loss, right? So first in the beginning, before any weight loss products you could say, "How to lose weight." And people saw the ad on, in the newspaper, " Great.Let's buy this product, buy this, this bottle pills, I lose weight.
Awesome." - Shut up and take my money.
- And then suddenly the marketplace gets more crowded, you have more competition. When you say, "How to lose weight." " Nah, I've heard that before, what's so unique about it.
Doesn't work." Then, when you go into that next stage, you gotta come up with something. Okay. I got, I gotta make a better promise. " How to lose 20 pounds in 20 days.
" Ooh, like let's hype it up. Let's make bigger promises. Right? And, " Oh man, 20 pounds in 20 days? Screw that.
30 pounds in seven days." Right? You just go through this crazy period of time that people are just making more outrageous claims one after another. And then suddenly the next phase is okay you're making outrageous claims, but how do I know is true? How do I know I could believe you?
Oh, you know what? Look at, I have all of these case studies, I have all these testimonials. You see this info on this infomercial a lot. Oh wow, this company is making these claims, but they back it up, great.
- Now flap in place, okay?
So really you say... - Oh God. Herod are you okay?
- Actually I didn't have it locked. - And now other people also backing it up, now you've got a problem. You said, you can help me lose weight. You said you could help me lose weight. They all kind of sound the same.
Just like how many consultants out there, I can help you get clients, I can help you do this. I can help you. You know it all kind of sound the same, right? Then someone come up with the idea, you know what, " That's all good, but the way that we teach you, this is, this is a different way of diet. You know, you try different diet programs they don't work.
This is called keto diet." " What is that?" Well, here's what it is. And boom, boom, boom, boom. See the keto diet becomes a unique mechanism versus just diet, right?
And then you, of course you have, I can name 30, 40 other diets. Then you have the unique mechanism and everybody resonates with different message. Someone's like, " Oh, I'm all for keto." Someone's like ," Oh I don't like keto, I try to avoid." I like this diet ,like that diet, like this style, right?
And then we all find our own little thing.
So you can think about it's going from broad, in a way you'll narrow down your message, have a unique mechanism and then you narrow down who you actually serve and then you focus on that. Then you use your copy to communicate that piece of it, right? Does that make sense? So you think- - Yeah, I like how you tie that unique mechanism thing- - Yeah.
- back to niching down, because first you started talking about diet, dieting as a whole, right? - Yeah, so massive. - So we have this whole dieting. It's massive.
It's huge.
- It's massive. - Yeah. But then all of a sudden we broke it down into that mechanism, which was keto, which is a smaller niche. Now you're not worried about, you know, you're not worried about getting the whole dieting space. You don't want to, you'd rather get a larger percentage of that smaller space because your messaging is gonna be more precise.
- Correct. - It's gonna be more appealing, It's gonna, you know what I mean? That's also gonna make your ad dollars convert better. - Lower your ad costs. - Last time, go further lower your costs, your acquisition costs, yeah.
No, I love that. I love the way you tie that in. And it works the same way on the on the organic, you know, as opposed to the same paid as well. - Is exactly the same. So, but when you have a hook, when you have a strong message, everything is easier.
- Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. - Because sometimes a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, they struggle to get the message out there because they haven't come up with this yet.
So they create this message, just kind of a me too message, right? And they, they go on and market, " Oh, how come it's not converting? How come not getting clicks?
How come no one is booking the time with me, on the coming to my store." Whatever it might be, It's the same as everybody else. If people can't tell the difference, they always go back to what they're comfortable with. And that has to do with, like one of the things I think what I bring to the, the entrepreneurial world, when I learned cooperating in my early twenties, like you have this group of copywriters I call them direct response copywriters, two school of thought you, you know that Dennis, right? Direct response, meaning everything you do is, it's designed to get a response, get an order today.
And then you have another school called branding, branding and direct response. They're almost like don't, they don't agree with each other. All the direct response marketers and copywriters talks about, " Oh you don't want forget the image, forget that stuff." Words, ugly sales.
That's what I learned from ugly sales. Playing on white envelope, no graphics, send it out and then you get an order. Then you have all the branding guys like, these guys are like, " They don't know what they're hell they're talking about." - Do you have any idea, how crazy you are? - It's brand, It's all about brand.
It's about image. Oh yeah, but then the direct response guys to say, " Hey if you go with our image, you go broke." Right? It doesn't work. So you have these two QSU school of thought.
But what I have learned is yes you need to combine the two. Branding will be, if done properly, a byproduct when you are doing direct response.
I do direct response. But at the same time I build my brand. They don't contradict if done properly.
Doesn't mean look at my stuff. My stuff is not ugly. It's anything but ugly, because that's part of the brand. But if you go with just words, then it's very transactional. You don't build brand equity.
You look at the biggest companies in the world, Apple, Nike they all have brand equity. These that's what the direct response guys don't get, right? But when you combine the two, when you have a unique mechanism, it kicks ass. - Yeah. I've noticed that with all your messaging, with all of your marketing, with all of your copy, whether that be through your YouTube channel, your Facebook or your blog or wherever, Instagram, wherever you go, that branding, there's always that continuity and brand, right?
- Yes.
- There's that style. There's that look, there's that feel? - You can tell that's a Dan Lok brand. It's a Dan Lok message.
- Yeah. You can tell it's a Dan Lok brand, even though sometimes you're talking about copywriting and sometimes you're talking about high ticket closing and sometimes you're talking about, you know, wealth creation or whatever the case may be. But the brand is the overarching positioning that you're taking, but that individual offer or that individual hook or mechanism can be different. But the overarching brand is still the same. - Correct.
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