Episode 490 Copywriting With Todd Jones Whats The Point

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Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Todd Jones aboit Whats The Point.

Show Highlights:

1. 5 questions as part of your value prop.

2. How to make your value prop?

3. You need a write a value prop for your newsletter.

Show Notes

Hey Everyone, Rob here and I am with my friend Todd Jones. Hey Todd.

Hey man, I gotta. A. Cool opening or something? I just haven’t come up with anything I can do the sign off. OK, you know. Come on, Dusty Rhodes by Gordon soli. Know I got all that. I just want to be a good opening. Hey, how’s it going?

Yeah, it’s going. It’s sunny in Toronto as the day is recorded or chilly, but it’s it’s winter. It’s December and.

Yeah, we, we we’ve got cloudy in and cool, but not really cold. And tomorrow supposed. Rain all day. So yesterday at the end of the day my neck was killing me. So it’s fine today, but I’m sure tomorrow will anyway.

Yeah. So today, today we felt we talked about and you kind of coined this as what is the point in the leading to the unique value proposition. Where do you want to start with?

The point I don’t even I’m from Arkansas. Don’t do what? We do. What’s the point?

OK, what?

So what’s the point? So? This is this podcast will come out just preview a little bit before Christmas, but we got happy for Christmas. This is the time of year when we have all these holidays in the year, right? Major religion has a big holiday. And of course. Is the one that a lot of us celebrate at Kwanzaa Hanukkah?

Sonic says. Is actually your Christmas Day this year.

Exactly so. This is what? What we’re doing this time of year is where we do. Lot of traditional. We get together with families and friends and we have holiday parties. And so you’re sitting at the table and crazy Uncle Todd starts telling stories.

Mm.

And he meets a little bit, you know. And everybody’s sitting there going what in the world? And he starts. He’s taking a while to land, right? And at some point during that conversation, someone will say it’s usually the it’s usually the nephew, right? The nephew. Uncle Todd, what’s the point?

Would.

You just get to the point. Please get to the point. We’re. You all know people who tell. Like that in fact. If you pay attention during the campaign season for those American like Likers hate Trump, it doesn’t matter if you listen to him on the campaign trail. He did. Whole lot of that he would meander and people like, oh, well, he’s going off track. Doesn’t go off track. Have to. He does bring it back in, but he. Like. Trail thing and but, but really, when business if we’re not careful, we can be like that and and forget. You know, I saw somebody make a post yesterday and maybe it was based on data that. Yeah, yeah. The the first thing customers care about is like, what is it you do? Clear before they want to know about you. I still say people want to know about you. This is mostly B to B software, but still it’s the case with all of this. People want to know what it is we. They want that clear, objective information about what we do first. At that point, you know you can start building your brand, your trust, your relationship with them, and so the fancy word that marketers use you and I know this very well. Is unique value proposition some will?

You do.

Unique selling proposition and some will just short it by saying value prop. So I’ve been in the world of of conversion. Copywriting even took a train course with my friend Anna who’s from. The area where you’re from, Toronto. Uh, she did a training for how to do unique value proposition. Based on a lot of customer data and information. Kind of stuff. Uh. But it can get complicated. It really can get complicated but but really it’s one of the hardest things to do is to come up with unique value proposition. And so I distilled into one question. Actually 5, we’ll go over those in just a minute. But the overarching big picture is what’s the point? So. Now, if you’re a individual solopreneur kind of like you and me and Ron vendor and Paul and Rhonda, we do multiple things, right? Trying to keep the lights on so. There, you know, but usually a software company, a service company, whatever they do, one major thing is kind of like an umbrella for for what we do. So let’s take a customer of yours as an example. You have the jewelry store.

Are you? Again.

And what would you say the one point is that they do? Have something in mind that you tell me.

We excel at custom work that’s really there for taste so.

I would say the point is they sell jewelry.

Yep they do.

Non not being. Now this is a whole lot of values behind that, like OK. You got a young man who’s proposing to his soon to be wife and he wants to be perfect. Have a 25 year 50 year anniversary. A couple has having. They want. The perfect piece. That you know, you have all that stuff and and that kind of falls. But the main point is they sell jewelry and everything that goes with what it means to buy jewelry. We have a lady. We have a sister’s log cabin in Central Arkansas. And the catch phrase the lady is used for years and I’m not even sure she’s around. They still use it in the commercials. Life’s too. Life’s too precious for ordinary jewelry or something like that. So you know, but if you look at something without complexity. The the point is, we sell jewelry now. There’s all these value points that come under that, but that’s the top point. Sometimes I think it’s best as a business to really define that first. To figure out what that point is, because everything else will fall under that in the next episode of this, we’ll go into having a foundation for. I call it a messaging compass or a messaging copied messaging. Whatever you want to call it, there’s a lot of names for that brand. Some people call it that, but if you look at that, that particular thing that brand strategy, the, the message platform or whatever, and you look at it as an arrow. Or a spear. The very tip of that spear is the value prop.

Yep. Mm.

That’s the way I view it and it’s like the thing that guides thing in the direction you want to go. It’s the North star. So in the past, and you know this very well, ’cause, I have presented this and it’s in the website copy framework. I’ve had four questions to help people determine. A unique value proposition. I’m gonna add a fifth one today because it was left out all this time and I added it because it’s that important. We’ll go over these four questions 1st and then the last one. Is is kind of like something kind of like. Something that supports what you’re saying, but here are the four questions. Who am I? What do I do?

Yeah.

Who do I do it for?

Yes.

Mm.

And how do I do it different?

Yep, and I think and I think the last one is, so key actually and it it comes back for.

Apparently. Very much. That if there’s nothing else, you get the last one is probably. Most important.

It comes back to a book that I tell does counted on this show called the inside advantage by Robert Bloom, written in 2009 and so more relevant today than it’s ever been. And what Robert talks about in his book is. How to make your business different and how not to fight everything on price because of all the same cares? Like. Think about. So I think that one’s a key one. What’s the first one to?

Well, let’s go back and talk about the four before I get to the fifth one, because that’s and you’ll see the correlation with these.

I’ll tip go ahead.

Who am I? Is more for your own sake.

What is?

But sometimes. Will put it in their value prop. I am a web developer. I we are a jewelry store. We are a ecommerce site. Or whatever I. Know I am a solar. I am a copywriter. Whatever it is important for your own sake to differentiate that or just say who you are to find that sometimes you use it in the value props. Sometimes you do not. Just kind of depends. The second one is what? I do. This is this comes back to benefits and features and benefits. What is that ultimate #1 benefit? You know, what is it that you do? You can save live and account it and I help companies keep their books straight. That would be something that you do so that that’s how you would look at the first two. Who do I do it for? Your target audience or the people that you’re most likely? To actually help. So I had this long conversation with Ron and the guard friend of ours from San Antonio yesterday, helping her with some emails and she had gone through branding recently and determined who her target audience was. And a lot of them were. And actually, I felt like, hey, that’s kind of my target audience as well she. She has really kind of found that serial entrepreneurs are people that she works well with and have worked a lot with and I thought. I like that very much so. So for her that target audience, the serial entrepreneurs, people who are not afraid to take a risk and try new business and so forth and they’ve probably done more than one those kinds of things. Target audience, could you? You can I try? I tell people, especially business of business, not to use demographics for that.

Yep, I agree.

Unless you’re Coca-Cola, demographics are probably not so. But let’s take a real estate agent, for example, and I know your mom’s a real estate agent.

Cheers.

What kind of? People, does she? Mostly with in real estate.

I would say her demographic is probably older people at this point in time. Long term clients, people have flipped multiple houses, people that have a good income because in Chrono the reality is you need $1,000,000 to buy a house these days and so on and so.

Yeah. And so maybes people who are entering the final stage in her life. Umm, we have a situation, Conway, where a lot of people that age move here to be near kids. So a lot of my. ‘S friends did. Now, as many of them are. Here been. All their life, but many of them have moved. One lady in her Sunday school class moved here from California and her daughter’s here. My mom and my dad moved here from Batesville, which is about two hours away because my brother lived here. Lived here for 30 years. All his kids are growing up here. And to be near them and at the time I was in Texas. Then moving to Texas was not a good idea. To Conway was a better idea. So and then I’ll tell you another story here. I have a friend actually. He used to work in the office right upstairs, right above me. His name is. He ran a landscape business for a long time. Ran into. Hey, what’s going? What you been doing last year and half him and a friend or him and a partner have been doing a remodeling business? Here is their target audience. This is very specific. They are remoting homes for people who move here from California, Washington and Oregon. That area of the country who sold their home probably almost the same size as the one they bought here and you know, let’s say Toronto, right? Dollars. They probably sold their home for $1,000,000 or whatever they get here. They buy a house the same size 2. They’ve got $800,000 to. I’m just making numbers up, but you get the picture. They sold their home for a lot of money out there. They moved Arkansas. They get something comparable for a whole lot less, so they have money to play with.

Of course.

They want to remodel their home and create a dream space. This is a specific target. These are the people that they help. Who knows how long you’ll be able to do that, but they are. Killing it right now. They do. Great job and they refer their friends to them.

I’m sure.

Ben, you got to use these guys. And so that is a specific target audience that is. Who they do it for now? The last one. And I did not we we may come back and do a podcast episode about this down the road because it it really deserves its own podcast episode. How do I do it different? Now it’s what’s important here is are you a product business or a service business? A product business. You’re gonna your differentiation is largely going to be with the product you sell. For instance, I get targeted on on Instagram all the. And one of the things I get actually two things I get targeted with have to do with helping CPAP or sleep apnea. You have sleep apnea.

Yep. I don’t. My mom does.

OK. I have sleep apnea. Have the machine.

My mom does.

One is a mouth guard and one of their clients, celebrity clients, is Shaq.

Yep.

I believe the other one is Joe Rogan. It’s somebody like that. Maybe Dana White. Don’t. It’s one of those. I I get those two guys. But anyway, one of the target celebrity customers is Shaq, and he tells about using his mouth guard and helps him sleep better.

Yeah, I knew.

All this kind of stuff, I see that I am their target audience. Figure that out somehow. So that is a product. Is it? Well, you’re you’re you’re trying to help CPAP or sleep apnea, but you’re doing it with a mouth guard. There are a lot of mouth guard products out there, by the way, but just the fact that Shaq is advertising for him makes me pay attention. If you are a service company like you Rob Cairns, you offer services, web security. You offer other stuff too, but that’s your like main thing. So there are different ways and how you those two things matter about when you try to decide your differentiation. I’ve got a whole list of stuff. That a service businesses can look at for differentiation and I don’t have them pulled up right now. I don’t want to go into it.

I think I I think we should address that in another show ’cause, I think.

Another episode, but one of them is price, and you, you brought that up and so you can compete on lowest price. If you choose to. The most famous example of that is one of the most famous example of that is tied to Arkansas. Walmart. Old Sam’s. Walton. He started that thing and he competed on price. Another thing he did also that we gets lost in 2024 is ’cause. I can remember this. A kid. Everything in the store was made in America.

Yep, they’re not.

It’s. Way anymore? No, but I can remember the signs made in America as a kid. You can compete on. You can be the cheapest. You can be the most expensive. Uh, and a lot of people have. A. Job of creating an advantage on being the most expensive.

The dollar store chain is a good example of a chain that Dollar General in the States Dollar Tree in the US and Canada. A company in Canada to. That’s the most successful dollar chain in this. It’s put pretty well by a business called Dollarama. If you haven’t heard of them and the reason they heat up price, it’s interesting, will go in and some of the product they carry, not all of it, some of it. What I call cheap crap out of China. And let’s be fair, but some of it, like if you’re going in and buying a gift bag. And I always say the dollar stores are the gift bag party place. You don’t need a gift bag. The last two weeks you need the last to get the gifted. And I picked up some nice gift bags every day for Christmas. I was paying a buck and 1/2 for two of them. Yep, I go when they even. Even Pat Walton’s Walmart and buy those and I’m paying 5 bucks for the same gift bag.

Yep. So.

And it’s very likely you can recycle those, even though you don’t. Right, they don’t need the last 1-2 weeks. We do.

Yeah, we do. So the point of making though is generally his rule. Not based.

If we had a gift in a bag, a really nice bag, my mom will just store it. If there’s no, there’s nothing to. And so like, we’re using next. So but anyway, that is a huge factor. And like you said, that may be the fulcrum point of that spear of that arrow. And and you’re right, we should do a whole episode about. I’m not an expert at it, but I have figured some things out for myself. I’m happy to pass. So long you have books like the one you always talk about the inside advantage. Get that on my shelf over there. You got obviously awesome by April Dunford and she has a sub stack as well. But those that one is particularly geared toward product businesses. That’s why I make the differentiation between product and services. So anyway, those are the four questions I have always said and you if you just answer those four questions, you would.

Of course they’re different.

Do well what I would tell you is there are tons of formulas for creating a value prop by people smarter than. Me. And the reason you want to. You want to create a value problem and you want to use that to create your headlines on your main pages on your website. But these days you can take all that information and plop it into Gemini ChatGPT, perplexity, and and ask it for variations. And I would do. I would get 10 variations to put in your copy message copy platform, which we’ll talk about in the next episode. Now #5 you. For that, this is the one I left off all this time. And actually when I went through an S training, I was reminded of that day because I somebody I saw somebody else say it and I was like, that’s right, it’s true.

For I am God.

I thought. Got to add this to it so. It’s kind of called. Bonus or a 5th 5th question. Can I prove it? You’re basically asking for the expertise, and so it’s like, how do I prove? And one of the things that Anna suggested to me when I was doing that is like you can always say author of the website copy framework because she knew about the website copy framework. For Rob Karens, you can say host of this STM show. There’s certainly a whole lot more to that to your expertise than that, but usually you get expertise from. Usually you get expertise or not so much, you get the promotion from other people about your expertise and. What you want? Because akin to what we call social proof from digital and digital media digital marketing, it’s like, you know, testimonials, reviews. If you have certifications, if you have 20 years of the business. If you have. Have if you have authored a book, something like that. Those things are kind of proofs of what you can do.

And social proof as well. If you get any tweets, for example reviews, I got A and I posted in our private slack the other day of a review I got and you made some wisecrack. But that’s OK, you know. But the point was. And and he’d say it refused to agree with what? Hard to get. And you got to you got. Ask for. But even then, people are lazy. I know. Amazon asked me for. All the time and stuff I buy and I might do one out of every five out of every six. So reviews are hard to get.

Yeah, when you’re when you’re adding it to a value prop, you’ve got to make it succeed. Really. I mean, you can put a review in there, but what you want to do is like for, for your instance, you know. For for rob. A host of the SDM show. Which has, you know, 500,000 downloads with over 50 episodes, that kind of thing.

Yep.

So you’re you’re creating a very short succinct.

Quantifiable thing.

Quantifiable, very short, because you’re probably going to use it, a headline or something like that, but it is a reminder of the proof that that you have as a as a solpreneur, but even as a company, you know, data points can be very helpful. Data points, but it doesn’t always tell a story. But but reviews and testimonials can help tell that story. There’s a that’s why when it comes to social proof, I use a guy. Got a list of like 8 things that you can use. Another. We should do about social proof, but that right there, those five questions make up the unique value proposition. Like I said, once you have those. Articulated. You can create. You can create variations of it using your favorite genre of AI. It’ll spit them out in mere seconds. Now, in the old days we would have probably just wrote them out about 10 different ways about 10 different times. You know, and maybe we’re a little more lazy with generative. Now but. It’s it’s like one time when I was on a call with Joanna Weed from. Copy actors and she said you need to write 50. 50 different variations your headlines like.

I would now go to Gemini and say hey Gemini give me $50, I guarantee you.

Yeah, exactly. Know I. Even blog post, she said. Every headline is like, oh, if she hit me in the gut with that man. Anyway, maybe it was 25. Anyway, 25 to 50. The ideal and she in her point was not a bad point, and this is certainly before we were using generic AI. So heavily, the point was you get it out of you. Even the bad to find the good ’cause. You know you put out 25 or 50 different variations of a title. There’s going to be some terrible ones in there, but. There will be some gems and usually what I will do with ChatGPT or whatever I’ll say Gimme 10. Headline ideas for this, and then they’ll put them out and they’ll say any these strike, you know, whatever else they like. Two, let’s do a variation of. So sometimes I’ll take one or two of them and say let’s do more variations of that. And sometimes I don’t even use it, but it’s spare it for me. It sparks. The juice to kind of create a better headline so, but you’re you’re creating variations because like I said. On most of your. Main webpages you should have a value prop, but also it is your North star, your messaging North Star, right? This reminds you of and then one thing she taught. Joanna taught in her the e-mail course. I took e-mail marketing course. Copywriting course that took was to have a value prop for each e-mail, and I’m not sure I would go that far, but I would definitely say if you are doing e-mail newsletters. Better consider writing a value prop for the newsletter that will help you know what you’re trying to do with that newsletter.

Yes.

Don’t vary too far off, but value props ’cause you’re going to use these with your products and services as well. But but this would be how you do it. And it’s very important to create that and the the top of value prop we’re talking about here is the one for your business as a whole, so. That’s why I kind of titled this. The point? You know what is the point of your business?

So so.

And and the value prop will help. You put that into place, so there you have it.

Hey.

Hey, Todd, thanks for sharing above value props. Happy. In your case, Merry Christmas to our Jewish friends, happy Hanukkah, Hanukkah starts on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, if I recall, right. Are. And happy New Year. We’ll be back with you in the new year.

See you next year.