One of the first, and most important, lessons I’ve picked up about copywriting is “You have to understand your market.”
It all starts with that. If you need to know how to do anything, the answer is in the market.
Many many high profile copywriters preach this mantra.
And it applies to this challenge too.
My first copy challenge task for the day is working on coming up with a big idea. In many ways that’s a fancy way of saying “research”.
But it’s specific research for a specific market.
In this challenge, I decided to focus on financial. Not because it pays best… but because it’s one of the most challenging to write for. It’s highly research based. The customers tend to be educated and sophisticated.
And it’s competitive.
I believe if you want to get good at something, you have to go up against the best. Doing that will push you further (whether you succeed or not) than going up against an average Joe.
So it comes back to the market.
How can you learn your market inside and out, better than anyone else? One of the easiest ways is to be in your market. But I’m not a 60 year old conservative white male (yet).
The next best step is going to be to talk to people in that market.
You should literally make a list of people you know and seek to increase it every day. And then talk to them. Get to know them. Make sure you like them.
This is after all what you’re signing up for as a copywriter. You’re supposed to want to help these people be better off in some way.
The products you’re going to be selling in any market are supposed to make them healthier, wealthier, or wiser.
If you don’t like this group and are just in it for the money, you’re going to have a hard time being successful in the long run.
That’s all pretty much just common sense though.
Here’s another tip I’ve come across even as I’m just getting my feet wet in this project. Specialize more than you think you need to.
I suspect this is the same with any field you want to get into. But in financial, there are so many different ways to make money that as a new copywriter, if you dip your toe in all of them you might get good exposure, but you won’t get good.
To get good, you need to go deeper. So do you want to write about stock investing (or even specific types of stocks)? Or do you want to talk about options and option strategies? Maybe you want to talk FinTech, Real Estate, or Forex?
My point here is that the market itself is going to be slightly different for each of these areas. Risk tolerances and perspectives are going to differ.
If you try to go research your market but you’re too broad, you may miss the mark in a lot of ways. You also may not be able to dive as deep as you want to because as you to something like risk, the market starts to splinter based on what they want to do.
Alright, I’m pretty long winded today and my time is up for writing this morning. Time to get to work.
If you want more information on the challenge and some resources I’m using to get to know my market of choice, subscribe to my email list.
Until tomorrow.
P.S. I’m going to drop the “Copywriting Challenge” from these post headers starting tomorrow because it’s starting to feel really redundant.
I’ll still categorize the posts that talk specifically about my activity with this challenge.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, this isn’t as much about some 30 day challenge to me as building the proper habits to become a good great copywriter.
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