Your copy needs a POV

_{⏩ Forward this email to: someone who’s been running the same ad copy for 8 months}

👋 Hi, I’m Amanda. I’m a fractional head of growth with a decade of experience working with rapidly-growing B2C startups. I work with lean teams in a few ways:

✅ Fractional: You have an expertise gap on your team you need to fill with someone who can flex into both strategy and execution, for an open-ended time frame.

✅ Advisory: You need to validate your existing approach or are just starting out, and need someone with growth expertise to guide you.

✅ Project-based: You need someone experienced to execute quickly and cleanly on a specific scope and deliverable you have in mind.

If you’d like to explore working together, start here to tell me a bit about what you’re looking for. If you’re not quite ready but have growth questions you want to chat about, you can book office hours here.

Good copy, bad copy

One of the quickest ways to torpedo alllll the hard work behind your growth efforts is with bad copy. Bad copy is hard to define, but it’s one of those things where you’ll know it when you see it. Maybe it’s unclear, superfluous, trying too hard, or making a joke that just doesn’t land.

Good performance copy, on the other hand:

• is clear and concise,

• gets you interested while remaining authentic and honest,

• doesn’t try to be clever or punny,

• and follows a logical visual hierarchy that saves the reader any extra work.

The job of performance copy is to drive scroll-interrupting action in seconds, so without the right balance of these four things, the rest of your strategy won’t even have a chance to shine.

If you go audit all your copy right now, chances are you might not even recognize some of it because it’s been running so long. Maybe you even identify some “bad” copy, even though you know what “good” looks like. This is incredibly common, because copy often falls through the cracks in an otherwise tight and cohesive growth strategy.

Where there’s a gap

A lot of early stage brands don’t have dedicated copywriters, which forces growth marketers to be the copywriters. This isn’t a bad thing – it requires you to get even closer to your customer’s mindset.

But oftentimes, this makes copy an afterthought, when it deserves so much better. Without well thought-out copy, you don’t have a way to actually speak to your customer, and the rest of your strategy becomes meaningless.

Some growing brands are lucky enough to have dedicated copywriters, who really understand the customer and what makes them tick. But they may be working across different business functions, and performance marketing copy, sales collateral copy, brand marketing copy, and event marketing copy are four completely different languages.

Messaging and angles may be consistent across customer-facing touchpoints, but specific copy must be tailored to meet the user where they’re at.

The job of some copy may be to tell a story, or provide a paragraph’s worth of useful details, but performance copy has to do more with less. Whether or not growth marketers the ones writing final copy, they’re responsible for making this distinction, to make sure “good copy” for an upcoming conference doesn’t become “bad copy” in a crowded social feed.

How to prioritize copy

Copy efforts tend to be missing from the detailed analyses, roadmaps, and creative strategy growth teams spend lots of time and effort on. Here’s where I’d start to make copy a core part of growth strategy.

Take these 4 exercises back to your team to bring copy to the forefront:

The clarifier

Take existing copy from your ads, your website, any OOH advertising you’ve done, internal brand books, etc. Try to compile 5-10 copy points.

Take each one, and edit it down to make it clearer, punchier, and more performance focused.

Now take each updated line, and do this again. You’ve now started to strengthen your performance copy muscle, and you have 5-10 new performance-focused copy angles ready to use.

The clean test

Take an ad that’s been running for a long time. Come up with two new copy variants for it, then hold all else constant and run your original against your two new versions. No matter which version wins, use results directionally (don’t obsess over stat sig in this case) to come up with 2 more versions. Repeat.

The repository

Build a repository of all your top performing copy. Compiling all these lines together should surface clear insights into what it is that’s working (and what’s not).

The audience split

Try copy angles that are distinctly emotional vs. distinctly feature/benefit focused. The idea isn’t to prove that one works better than the other – different members of your target audience will respond to different things.

All of these exercises together should pretty quickly illuminate how copy is a true growth lever, not just a creative detail. When you focus on copy as much as other components of your strategy, performance improves, because your message has a chance to land.

Was this message forwarded to you? Need a little Growth Therapy? Sign up below 👇

Questions? Comments? Topic requests? Just hit reply ↩