How Does Copywriting Define Your Brand?

Ben: Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Andrew. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Rhodes: Hey, thanks so much, Ben. Glad to be here.

Ben: Andrew, well, I'm really excited for the conversation and we're going to take a little bit different spin. And I think that your background is really relevant to the conversation today. So maybe if you have just two seconds, feel free to share with us who you are, what you love about content, a little bit about your career and let us get to know you.

Andrew Rhodes: Great, yeah, in two seconds. So...

Ben: That's a little short. You can take a lot longer than two seconds. It's fine. ha ha

Andrew Rhodes: You know, I got my start in content in early 2016, late 2015, writing articles for a customer success consulting firm. And at the time I thought, I have all these transferable skills. I want to move into customer success. And I think there's a lot here. I can provide a lot of knowledge and I can provide a lot of value by writing about it and sharing. And the response totally blew me away.

I had imposter syndrome every single day. I thought people would call me out, saying, "You don't have 20 years in customer success. Why are you writing about this?" But it taught me a lot about just being consistent and showing up. Everyone has value to add if you present it in the right way. But also, who's to say what the right way is? I took a chance. I put myself out there. And I was really fortunate that people liked what I was writing and that helped me bootstrap my way into my first job in tech, which was in customer success. And then ironically, the CEO took me aside and said, "You're not very good at customer success. Would you like to work in marketing because you're a much better writer?" So I thought, well, let's do this. And that was in 2018. And I've been working in marketing since then, getting progressively more specific with the work that I do in copywriting.

Ben: I love it. I love it. What a CEO. I think that's tremendous for them to see someone and say, you're the right person. Let's find a different seat for you at the table. And hats off to them. That's really cool.

Andrew Rhodes: Probably, yeah, I think about that at least three times a week. So I'm just so grateful for that and just like every place that I've been, no place is perfect, but every place that I've been has given me the opportunity to kind of find out what I want to work on and to grow my autonomy within that marketing role and within a content role and a copywriting role specifically.

Ben: OK, wow, that's quite a bit. That made an impact.

Andrew Rhodes: And gotten a lot of great encouragement along the way. And it's been really great for my creativity and my career.

How does Copywriting Impact your Brand?

Ben: I love it. I love it. So for today's conversation, we are focusing on the copywriting side of things and really what copywriting means to your brand and to your business and what it looks and feels like, how it should operate. Just a lot of different things, a good conversation about copywriting. Andrew, one thing that you're really passionate about is that your copywriting and all your content is really your brand, but especially demand generation is something you're calling out.

Andrew Rhodes: So Ben, you and I are just having a conversation right now. And really, any time you interact with the brand, I think for best results, it should feel like a conversation. If the brand tries to intrude upon your stream of thought, or it tries to be really blatant about the messages trying to deliver, or if it tries to make itself the center of your world in that moment, then it's like someone interrupting a conversation you're already having at a party. It's like, wow, now I want to talk to you less because you're not reading the room. You're not respecting my space. We were talking a little bit before you press record about best practices and how some of the best practices are to ignore best practices. Being really aggressive and interrupting people works for some brands. It works for some types of products. And some people, they latch onto that and they say, OK, this is their thing. They're being flashy. They're being in your face. That works for some type of brands. But for other brands, people don't want to see that everywhere they look. So a lot of times, your copywriting is your brand's voice. And depending on what kind of voice you want to express in the marketplace, it can't sound like everyone else. It has to sound unique. But you also can act like you're the center of the world. Your customer is the center of their world. Their world revolves around them. And if you step into that and you try to take that away from them and you try to take that attention away from them, then you won't get a very good response. So I know there's a lot of talk about demand gen versus lead gen. A lot of my career has been working in B2B, especially in B2B SaaS. And they're not the same. Demand has to come before you have leads. The purpose of copywriting is to drive new business, but creating new leads is a lagging indicator of success. You need to really build a community. You need to create conversations that people see and that they want to join in. "Hey, this brand is doing something interesting. This brand is fun. This brand is attentive. This brand is personable. This brand is relatable. This brand sounds like someone that I'd want to have a conversation with at a party." Now, at the same time, realizing that your brand is not a real person, and it's never going to be a real person. And so to recognize that and not to be like the, "How are you doing fellow kids?" meme. I mean, I want to avoid that at all costs. So, I feel like I've kind of rambled a little bit about what it means and how it fits in, but I've always seen copywriting as the first taste that your audience gets of your brand.

Ben: Yeah.

Andrew Rhodes: It could be a billboard. It could be something that they see on LinkedIn. It could be something their friend tells them, their friend sends them a post on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And at a certain point, you can't control what people think of your copy. I think it's a matter of just being consistent with that voice and with that tone of voice. So no matter what piece of copy your audience sees, they know what to expect, they know what to look forward to. And even if they're seeing it for the first time, it's still engaging and it still draws them in. That's how you build demand over time. It's this very gradual process. I'm going to get some flack for that. Gradual can happen overnight sometimes.

Ben: Yeah.

Andrew Rhodes: But if you treat copy like I have to hit a hole in one every time, that's a really high bar. It's hard for any copywriter, it's hard for any team to hit it out of the park every single time that they show up in front of customers. What's more important is to have a consistent tone of voice and to be relatable every time your audience sees you, whatever that message is in that moment.

How to Build a Brand Persona?

Ben: I love that. So when you're looking at those elements of your brand, right, and how it translates into copywriting and all of your content and bringing that consistency and that personality, do you have like a brand persona that you typically operate with saying, if my brand were a person, this is what they would sound like, this is what they would look like, this is what they'd be interested in? Because you also said you don't want to like act like you're a person at the same time. So how do you mentally kind of measure and balance the consistency in finding that brand all at the same time through your content?

Andrew Rhodes: I mean, I think it really depends on the client that I'm working with. I have a personal brand for when I share content on LinkedIn and that looks a little different for what my personal brand is on Instagram. That's just being me. It feels weird to call that a brand because in this case, it is me. These are just stories from my life. When you're working with different clients, each of them has a different voice and each of them has a different perspective. They have a different audience who expects different things from them. They have different products and services. B2C e-commerce brand probably not going to look the same as B2B company offering data infrastructure services or product analytics or voiceover IP or anything like that. I think it really depends upon doing your homework about what does this brand stand for, what have they accomplished in the past, what do they want to achieve in the future? This is really high-level stuff, but as a copywriter, it's my responsibility to not be too technical because if I get too technical, that is not really generating demand. That can fill in later. When people really buy into the value based upon the copywriting, then you can show them support documents. Then you can lift up the hood and say, here's how it works. Whatever questions you have about, does tool A connect to tool B? Or can I use this with my existing system? Copywriting is secondary. I want to show people what your life looks like with this product or service. Can you imagine what it would look like without this product or service? How do you feel when you go through your day and use this? It's really about painting a picture in people's minds and having them live out that life in their mind as they think about your brand.

How to Write for Your Audience

Ben: So sometimes we're lucky enough and we're the target audience for the product that we are writing for, right? You know, I'm in a unique position where I'm a marketer who built a company that sells a marketing product, you know, and a go-to-market product. Often we're not, as marketers, the target audience. We're not the ideal buyer and we have to learn from the audience to feel the pain, to understand what life would be like with or without the product or service. How do you really put yourself in their shoes so that you can write content from their perspective? How do you actually get those insights?

Andrew Rhodes: You know, there's a lot of ways you can do that. You can do one-on-one interviews with members of the team. You can go through all of their public-facing content. A lot of brands, they have a distinct look and feel, but they might not have the most recognizable voice. If you read the blog content of 100 different SaaS companies, would you be able to tell which one was which if I didn't show you logos or typefaces or anything like that? Public-facing content, if it's a publicly traded company, you have earnings calls and things like that where people talk about what their goals are and what they're hoping to achieve. You can look at what people are saying about them online. You can look at what their employees are saying about them online. There are a lot of different ways to get a sense of where the company is headed.

Ben: Yeah.

Andrew Rhodes: You know, it's funny, we're talking about best practices and all companies want to grow. If you do your research into a company and they say, we want to grow the XYZ market, I'm like, OK, let's get a little deeper then, because that doesn't tell me anything new. If you want to grow the XYZ market, what does that look like? How would I approach you? How would I have a conversation with you as a consumer and what is the brand's tone of voice in that conversation and how does the copywriting come across as a result of that?

How to Maintain Brand Consistency with Many Writers

Ben: One final question, because we're coming up on time here. When you're looking at it, as in they go by quick, it's pretty crazy. When you're looking at consistency and having a brand, if it's just one person doing the copywriting, it's somewhat easy for them to remain consistent in how they bring that forward.

Andrew Rhodes: Incredibly.

Ben: How do you maintain that across an entire team and agencies and freelancers or any number of different individuals writing on behalf of a brand? How do you get that to really come across the same way across the board?

Andrew Rhodes: We should do a whole other episode just on that. I think the copywriter's greatest challenge and also their greatest skill is to blend their own unique voice into the brand's tone of voice. If I, Andrew, tried to make my writing for a certain client about me, and I tried to be clever for me, that does not serve the needs of the client. That won't be what their audience expects. It won't fit into what they've written before. If I'm working for the client, they hire me for my unique skills as a copywriter. They didn't hire me just to press a button on AI and say, Andrew, we need you to create AI content. I wouldn't want to write that kind of copy anyway. The best copywriters are great team players. They know how to collaborate with different departments, with different teams, both within an agency or in-house, within those teams and also with getting the voice of the client, getting the voice of the audience, of their customers. You have to learn to adapt your voice. Especially for copywriters that work with many different types of clients. You can't bring the same approach to every single type of client. You might be writing for B2C one day and B2B the next.

Ben: I love that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, very cool, Andrew. I love this. I love your take on how the content all adds up to the brand to really keep that in mind and to really focus in on that and really be mindful of how you're writing, producing, sharing content to make sure it's consistent with the brand that you want. I've loved this. Andrew, if anyone wants to reach out and continue the conversation online, how can they find you and connect with you?

Andrew Rhodes: You can find me on LinkedIn and I'll send you the link to my profile and you can put it in the description for this episode. I call LinkedIn my second home. I'm there all the time. It's the easiest way to get a hold of me. LinkedIn gets a lot of flack, but I have found some really great friends on there in the copywriting community and beyond. It is a great way to build community. Please reach out to me there, happy to talk more.

Ben: Love it. Love it. Well, Andrew, again, thank you so much for the time and the conversation today.

Andrew Rhodes: Thank you, Ben. It's been a pleasure. Really appreciate it.

‍