You actually have to earn the right to be able to write copy – Talk Marketing 047 – Scott Bywater

Scott Bywater has been MD of his copywriting business Copywriting That Sells since 2002. He has the distinction of being recommended by two previous guests, James Yuile and Scott Baker.

Scott Baker describes him as “one to watch, the best copywriter in Australia. He writes copy for the biggest names in the game and is one of the most incredible human beings. He has a skill set in copywriting that cannot be rated highly enough.” Scott is the unseen wordsmith behind dozens of six and seven figure email launches.

If, like me, you know copywriting is perhaps the most valuable skill in sales and marketing and yet hardest skill to master, you are going to absolutely love this episode.

00:00 Introductions

6:36 How are you Scott Bywater qualified to talk to us about writing copy?

12:30 What is your copywriting process?

16:56 How is targeting important in copywriting?

23:19 What sort of copywriting are you most involved with?

28:15 How do you motivate your customers to invest in the way that is required to produce really good copy?

1:12:31 What types of business do you like to produce copy for and have the most success with?

1:28:19 The things that you are posting on your LinkedIn might be considered controversial. How should people be managing what they pit out in these times of polarisation and cancel culture?

1:44:08 What do you recommend people read?

1:46:03 Who can you introduce me to that might enjoy to be part if the Talk Marketing series?

Martin Henley

How are you Scott Bywater qualified to talk to us about writing copy?

Scott Bywater

I think it’s, it’s, I guess, runs on the board and experience. So I’ve been involved in sales and marketing, since I was about 17. So that’s, we’ve been going on about 26 years now. Then I started copywriting as such from the age of 24. So yeah, basically 19 years, I’ve been in the trenches, writing copy everything from, you know, email subject lines, to the long copy sales pages, to webinar scripts, to Facebook ads, to email copy to website, so right across the board. What do they say it takes 1000 hours to get proficient and 10,000 hours to be, you know, to be to be an expert. So, yeah, over that, over that period, by those numbers, I wouldn’t necessarily ever like to call myself an expert, by that sort of data, how, you know, I’ve reached that sort of level of getting a level of expertise. I’ve got some you got to my websites got by we’ve got combinate, you there’s all sorts of I won’t go through them through them now but there’s all sorts of testimonials and that sort of thing on that web page, which on that website, which sort of shows some of the results that are generated over the years.

Martin Henley

Okay, cool. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t, do I have a better idea now of where to start. I was selling advertising at the very beginning of my career and occasionally, we would have to write copy, I’ll tell you, when this was, what we would have to do is we would have to photocopy their logo, really big for the print, and then somebody would colour it in, and then we’d scale it down to go into these little classified ads. So this is the level of sales that we were doing. We would have to write the copy, because they might say to us, oh, yeah, well, we fancy what you’re doing but we don’t have an ad, we don’t have copy and all this sort of stuff. They taught us how to write copy, it was literally classified copy. This was like in 95, or 96 somewhere around then, what’s the thing about that? I can’t do it. That’s the thing about it is ,I really don’t know, it’s much easier to do it for a client. I’m really bad at writing copy. Like definitely, of all the sales and marketing things. I’ve done sales for a long time. I’ve done marketing for a long time. I teach digital marketing so I understand everything about how email works, about how SEO works, all of it, all of it all of it. Copywriting, I don’t know how to do it. So I suppose if there’s a question in all of this, the question is, how on earth do you do it? Where on earth do you start?

Scott Bywater

Yes, yes. So. So I guess I’ll take you through the process in terms of how I go about writing copy. It’s really quite simple. In terms of like, the best place to start out is by understanding something that Mr. Robert Collier was famous for knowing, a great guy.

Martin Henley

That looks like a really old book man.

Scott Bywater

He said, the whole secret to copywriting is being in the conversation that’s going on in your customers mind. Now if it’s your own business, you may have a pretty good indication of that conversation that’s going on in their mind. However, you can deep dive, sending out a survey to your list and asking them questions like, what are your biggest frustrations? If you could ask me any two questions, what would they be? Those sort of questions and that will bring up the, will make it very obvious what the issues are.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?