146: Audience Research: AHA Moments in Copy Creation with Nadine Nethery
Nadine Nethery, an audience-driven copywriter and brand messaging strategist, shares her expertise on creating effective copy that truly connects with an audience.
With the rise of AI tools in copywriting, Nadine emphasizes the importance of human touch and empathy in crafting copy that drives action.
She offers practical tips on audience research and gathering insights, leveraging competitors' experiences, and using AI tools like Chat GPT as a helpful tool, not a replacement for human connection.
Tune in to this podcast to learn how to create copy that hits the mark and resonates with your dream customer.
Summary:
The rise of AI tools in copywriting is changing the game for course creators and marketers alike. But while it's tempting to rely on these tools entirely, it's essential to remember that copy that connects with an audience is based on empathy, emotion, connection, and storytelling—qualities that can't be replicated by machines.
In an episode of the Course Creator's MBA Podcast, audience-driven copywriter and brand messaging strategist Nadine Nethery emphasizes the importance of understanding an audience's mindset, pain points, desires, and objections to create effective copy. One way to gather this information is by sending out a strategic survey to a mailing list or customer base, asking questions to tap into all the juicy intel that can help writers create offers that hit the mark.
But for those just starting out, Nadine suggests leveraging the experience of competitors to see how they differ and tap into their language. And while AI tools like Chat GPT can be helpful for ideation, they're not a replacement for the human touch and empathy needed to truly understand an audience's pain points, desires, and objections.
Chat GPT itself acknowledges its limitations and emphasizes that it is meant to be a tool, not a replacement for human connection and empathy. Still, it's important to adapt AI-generated copy to speak directly to the dream customer. Audience insights and research can help writers prompt Chat GPT with objections, pain points, and desires that resonate with the audience.
Ultimately, audience research and insights are crucial for effective copywriting and content creation. This research should be done at least every six months or whenever there is a shift in the business, such as launching a new offer, changing niche, or adding a new type of audience.
In a world where AI tools are becoming more prevalent, it's crucial to remember that copy that truly connects with an audience is based on empathy, emotion, connection, and storytelling. While AI tools can be helpful, they're not a replacement for human connection and empathy, which are essential for copy that drives action.
Mentioned In This Episode
Where to find Nadine: Website and Instagram
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Transcript:
Destini Copp 0:00:00
You. And my special guest today is Nadine Nethery. Nadine is an audience driven copywriter and brand messaging strategist for female founders who want to intentionally attract, delight, and retain their dream customers. Her strategic take on audience research, copywriting and messaging turns every brand touch point into genuine connections that drive sales, celebrate loyalty, and surround you with keen brand advocates who happily do the word spreading for you. And Nadine, I am super excited to chat with you today and we're going to be talking to copy that truly connects with our audience and customers. But before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?
Nadine Nethery 0:00:57
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Destini. So good to be here. I am Nadine. As you said, I am a Sydney based copywriter and I help female founders with primarily website copy, email copy, self page copy that really speaks to the core of their dream customer. So that copy helps them connect on a deeper level based on empathy rather than a hard sell. And I've been in business a little over seven years and over that time really have found my niche in audience driven copy. I'm obsessed with audience research and having that as the basis to any of the copy and the words that I produce for my customers. And other than just the copy, it really gives them AHA, moments beyond the words that I write for them. It helps them come up with all sorts of topics for their content, for their marketing strategy, and it often even shifts the approach to their positioning as well because it really helps them understand how they support their audience on a deeper level.
Destini Copp 0:02:07
And I like what you said, that you focus on empathy and not hard selling. Because I don't think any of us who are listening here really want to go down that path of being known as somebody who's doing that hard sell all the time.
Nadine Nethery 0:02:21
Yeah, but often I find it's that desperation, we don't really know how to sell in a way that feels comfortable and aligned with our brand. We know we need to sell because we're businesses. But really lacking that insight and understanding about your audience is what often sends us down that rabbit hole of having to sell, sell. So I love to flip the coin and make the audience front and center of the copy, the storytelling and the messaging to really help you step away from that hard sell and that yucky feeling that comes from constantly pushing that hard cell.
Destini Copp 0:03:03
So I'm going to go in and just ask you to spill the beans here. Can you tell us what is the secret to copy that truly connects with our audience and customers?
Nadine Nethery 0:03:15
Yeah, absolutely. So I alluded to it before. So rather than working with assumptions that we have about our audience and our offers and how we support them. It's taking a step back and really finding out the mindset and what keeps our audience up at night and then joining the conversation that is already happening in their mind. So as consumers we don't need to be sold to what we need from brands is understanding and empathy and how we can achieve that is by showing up with messaging and copy that really taps into that current mindset. And with mindset, I mean objections, desires, pain points without agitating them too much, but really speaking to what's currently keeping them up at night where they want to be, ideally that better future they're trying to get to and also addressing those objections that are potentially holding them back from taking action. And if we help our audience connect those dots and work out that it's achievable and that we are perfectly positioned to support them on that journey, then we don't have to push that hard sell. We can help them connect the dots and move them one step closer to being ready to take action with every email, every landing page, every freebie, even every social media post. So it's about supporting them on that journey and giving them the confidence that we are what they need to reach and get to that better future.
Destini Copp 0:04:49
So you mentioned that we need to really get in there, understand their pain points, understand their objections and their mindset. But how do we go about getting to that? I mean we might think we know what that is, but how do we truly go about discovering that?
Nadine Nethery 0:05:07
Yeah, it's actually easier than we think. So often when you talk about audience research, people go oh my God, I don't have time, I'm busy enough as it is, I don't need more on my plate. But the beauty of all these tech tools out there nowadays is that we can often automate that process and integrate it into our onboarding and offboarding processes. So obviously, if you've never surveyed your audience before, I would absolutely start with a very strategic survey that you send out to your mailing list, your customer base to really tap into their first hand experience with you and your brand. Beyond that, as I said, I would incorporate very strategic questions into the onboarding survey just to capture that current mindset, that's front of mind as people book you to support them with their business or in their lives. So what made them reach out? What is keeping them up at night? What's the transformation that they're hoping to achieve? And then also, once you hand over, let's say you're a web designer, the fresh new website to them, I would again incorporate some very strategic open ended questions in the offboarding survey to really tap into that excitement, that fresh website feeling. So how do you feel now that you've got a new website? How did that experience align with your expectations? And then this one is often forgotten probably around three months after handing over your deliverables. I would absolutely check in again, which you should do anyway as a service provider. But again, just ask them a few strategic questions to get tangible results that only happen a little while after you've handed over your deliverables. So, tangible numbers when it comes to click through rates, conversions on their website, sales on their website, to really tap into that tangible transformation that came with your service and working for them.
Nadine Nethery 0:07:10
And the beauty of that is you can pick up the language that they're using to describe that transformation and that whole journey with your brand and using that language in your copy, in your messaging, makes it a lot more tangible, relatable and real and gets your reader to nod along. So rather than you pulling statements and taglines out of thin air, it means that your audience is doing the hard work for you. So your audience is telling what they're experiencing and how you can help them. And the transformation that you delivered and piecing all that together in your messaging takes the guesswork out of your copp, out of your marketing and it means that you're using words and language that really resonate with your perfect customer. And the beauty is, as I said, you just set aside time every few months to strategically sift through those survey responses that come in on autopilot with every new customer project and then take note of the objections, the pain points, all the things that I mentioned before and keep adding to it. So you can then tweak your messaging or even if you're trying to launch new offers, integrate that into the copy for that. And I love it super simple.
Destini Copp 0:08:28
It is simple. I love the process that you just described about going and asking them questions once they're coming on board and then after you've done the website surveying them, then and then three months later going back and doing some more surveys and getting some more feedback from them. What if somebody's just starting out and they might not have a lot of customers to gather this from? Maybe they just have a home, a handful. What would you suggest to them? Just get started? Or are there other places they can go to gather this information?
Nadine Nethery 0:09:03
There absolutely are. So apart from making sure that you are setting yourself up to capture intel with every new customer that you work with, I would absolutely snoop around in a non creepy way in online communities. I'm sure you're part of Facebook communities where your ideal customer hangs out and you can absolutely post a link to a particular survey in that group to capture people that haven't necessarily worked with you, but who absolutely match your perfect customer and then leverage their experience even with your competitors. So you can see how you are different, how you stand out and tap into the language there. And you can absolutely, if you don't want to go down the survey rabbit hole, even just listen into the conversation. So take note of the questions that keep popping up, the answers, the solutions that people are offering, and again, make note of the way they phrase that mindset and the expressions. And then you can start from there and build up your audience intel once you have more customers to your name and then really tap into your point of difference and what makes you stand out from everyone else out there in your niche.
Destini Copp 0:10:24
So, good, that's good news for all of us, for people out there who might just be starting. I'm going to switch gears just a little bit. Nadine and I want to talk about Chat GPT as it relates to copy and just AI in general, because I know a lot of us have an AI writer or Chat GPT on our computer all day long and we're using it. Can you talk about how we should use it? And why is it still important to know our audience when we have tools like that available to us?
Nadine Nethery 0:10:57
Yeah, absolutely. So Chat GPT and all the other tools are absolutely coming, so there's no denying that it's going to impact the way we are creating content and writing copy in the future, even for us. Copywriters. What I want to highlight though, is that Chat GPT is meant to be a tool to support you on that journey. It is not capable yet, who knows what happens in the future, but at the moment, it is not capable to replace human interactions and your input and your unique take on your audience. So how I would use it is to help you with that dirty first draft you like to call it even for ideation when it comes to headlines, taglines where you might be stuck, where you want, just a little push to get you started, and then make sure you are tapping into your audience intel. So if what Chat GPT is giving you simply is not connecting on a deeper level, it just doesn't hit the mark. Absolutely. Have a look at your audience insights and make sure you tweak the output and use the language that your audience is giving you. Or alternatively, you can absolutely use that research that you've done to better prompt Chat GPT as well. So tell Chat GPT firsthand what you've uncovered. So include the objections, the pain points, the desires in your prompt to make sure that Chat GPT is speaking directly to your dream customer. And I actually asked Chat GPT the other day around its limitations because I thought, what better way to get a direct response than go to the source. And Chat GPT told me straight up that it is meant to be a tool, it can't replace human interaction, human connection, because it simply can't feel empathy or emotions. And that is a huge deal breaker for copy.
Nadine Nethery 0:12:52
We all know copy that really connects with our audience and gets them to act, is based on empathy, emotion, connection, storytelling and Chat GPT simply can't produce that for us. Our opinions, our story, our lived experiences are uniquely ours. So yeah, it takes prompting the right way, but then also tweaking and infusing your personality to stand out from all the content, the middle of the road, mediocre content that is going to be hitting the market soon simply because it's so easy to get output from Chat GPT. So if you really want to stand out, if you want to connect on a deeper level and really push empathy, emotions, connections, I would absolutely do that. Groundwork get to know your audience and make sure everything that Chat GPT gives you is actually tweaked and adapted to speak to your Perfect Fit audience.
Destini Copp 0:13:49
And I love the tip that you gave about putting the objections, the pain points and all of that audience survey or audience insights into the prompt to help to help kind of guide Chat GPT and also the comment that you made about the fact that it's an AI writing tool. It doesn't have that empathy, it doesn't have that storytelling that you need to infuse in your copy. So thank you for bringing that up. Now, Nadine, any last minute tips for the audience before we wrap it up here?
Nadine Nethery 0:14:21
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you got the point, but I'm obsessed with audience research and it is not complex. You would have seen that. Please do me the favor and take a look at audience insights and conversations that you've already had with your existing customers to get started or make a conscious effort to add sending out a survey to your perfect Fit customer to your immediate to do list. Because it's going to blow your mind, it is going to shift the way you market and it is absolutely going to speed up how you create content, how you write copy and how you approach marketing in your business.
Destini Copp 0:15:04
I was going to say, Nadine, this conversation has definitely inspired me. I've done audience research in the past and obviously I have a lot of knowledge of my audience, but I'm thinking I need to go back and do it again. How often do you suggest that we go back and do that research?
Nadine Nethery 0:15:23
Yeah, I would definitely look at it at least every six months, like a general survey, if nothing has shifted in your business. But as a general rule, whenever you are considering launching a new offer, changing niche, adding a new type of audience into your business, it's always worth asking the right questions before you go down the rabbit hole and launch all your products. Launch a course because your audience can tell you what they want. They are more than willing to come forward with the goods because they want you to succeed ultimately. So tap into all their intel to create offers with ease and make sure they actually hit the mark. So, yeah, just make it a habit. So anytime anything shifts in your business, anytime you have a big idea, tap in to your audience and validate it before you spent hours wasted on creating something that is not actually what your audience needs.
Destini Copp 0:16:25
And I think I'm due for it. So you've definitely inspired me to do it. Nadine, can you tell people where they can find you if they want to do some audience driven copp? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.
Nadine Nethery 0:16:40
Yeah, I certainly do. So best spot to connect with me is via my website, Candocontent.com. You can also track me down on Instagram Cando content and I have ten free strategic survey questions for your listeners that you can grab via the link in the show notes. And they are my actual questions that I use in a lot of my one on one client surveys. So they are very strategic, they're open ended and they get you all the juicy intel to tap into all the things that I mentioned before.
Destini Copp 0:17:12
Now, are those survey questions ones that we can use to survey our audience?
Nadine Nethery 0:17:17
Yes, absolutely. So they're for your existing customers and I've also thrown in nine bonus prompts for social media. So question stickers to tap into your online order ends in case you are just getting started and you want to quickly send check the mood around the room.
Destini Copp 0:17:36
Well, they definitely need to check that out and I know I will too. So Nadine, thank you so much for joining us today and just really reiterating how important audience Insights is in our copy.
Nadine Nethery 0:17:50
Thanks so much for having me, Destini.