While ideally you have some sort of proof direct in your headline and ad, your persuasiveness argument relies on how well you prove your point. You see, it’s ultimately about belief and feeling.
As heavy hitter Gary Bencivenga says:
Almost everyone in the world, in every field of human endeavor, is desperately searching for someone to believe in. Be that person and you can write your own ticket. Belief is today’s most overlooked yet most powerful key to boosting response to any ad, in any medium. Harness it and you unleash the core atomic power for exploding response.
Most prospects want to believe the claims you make in a landing page, yet the claims challenge their world-view and the status quo. You need proof, ideally proof that resonates emotionally, in order to get them to take action.
A landing page, or a salesletter, is like a one-to-one conversation between you and the prospect. You put various things on the landing page, designed to instill a particular reaction in the reader’s mind.
A good landing page is written in a conversational tone. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. In fact, you can read it out loud to ensure that the text “flows” well.
Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.
Imagine it as a phone conversation with a friend. They call you. They bring up a problem they’re struggling with. You say something surprising. You empathize with their pain. You talk about an approach you’ve used in the past or a product you can recommend to address it, as you know it will help them out. At the end, you help them buy the product or implement a solution in their lives. Empathize with your reader in the same way you’d empathize with that friend on the other end of the line.
Direct response progenitor Eugene Schwartz puts it well:
It is the facts that the prospect believes in and accepts, and the way that he passes that acceptance along from one fact to another, that determines the ad’s development, the arrangement of your claims and your images and your proofs, so that there is a step-by-step strengthening, not only of your prospect’s desire but of his conviction that the satisfaction of that desire will come true through your product.
You are building up the emotional weight of your argument as much as you can. You want the solution to become real in the prospect’s mind.
When you are making claims about the benefits your product has, your prospect is likely to not believe a claim that you make. It’s that “yeah, right” knee-jerk response. On the phone, you might be able to tell based on voice tone. Some prospects might tell you outright that they don’t believe you.
Proof counters that pushback. It’s your job, as a product creator or founder, to provide strong counter-arguments to this type of objection. In other words, your copy explicitly addresses the prospect’s objections. Show exactly how your solution can solve his problem. Or hers.
Well, the best type of proof is a poignant detail that knocks out a line of questioning or thinking. That’s why direct response copy that sells is clear.
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If you want to know what types of proof you can use, I’ve got your back. In its next update, Launch Tomorrow will include at least 38 different types of proof you can include on your landing page.
One of the TV shows I’ve been catching up on lately is Newsroom. It’s a deep drive into modern media capitalism, with a lovable grump for a news anchor named Will McAvoy.
It’s also a fascinating watch for anyone who has or wants to have an audience. There’s lots of issues raised which are poignant far outside the newsroom. Like Shakira.
For example:
– Intern.
-Yes?
-Come on over.
This is the overnight book.
The night crew puts together every story and every press release from everywhere.
Go through this and separate it into four piles– knew that, didn’t know that, don’t care, and Shakira.
But that one’s just for me, all right?
In this conversation snippet, one of the staff, Neal Sampat, explains a key newsroom process to an intern. The staff filters incoming breaking news notifications. They’re old school. They use printouts of the newswire. Given that she’s handed a stack of paper about a foot high, all she’s likely to read is the headlines. The four piles sort out news stories which are geniunely new and important. Everything else is de-priortized.
Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.
For a newsroom, this is critical. Their audience depends on them to share the most relevant news which impact their lives. After this first cut, the staff meet to plan the order in which the news will air that night.
Your headline needs to have the same effect on a new reader. Would it make it into the “didn’t know that pile”? You know, the pile which also doesn’t include the “don’t care” pile.
Why is specifically the headline so important? According to Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will continue reading. That means your headline is the singlemost important part of your copy. It requires the most effort to get right, say about 80% of your time…especially in persuasive content. Do you see why interviewing your customers and knowing what they want is so critical?
This has always been the case. Direct marketing legend John Caples analyzed high-performing headlines in his classic Scientific Advertising. He found four critical elements to headlines that pull sales:
Self-interest
News
Curiosity
Quick easy way
Self-interest is pretty much a pre-requisite in every case (it’s why features aren’t enough). Without a hint of self-interest, you’ll lose your reader’s attention almost immediately. Beyond that, some combination of the other three will help interest the reader enough to read the next sentence.
And hook in your reader you must.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
brainstorming strategies to raise money in the tech startup world
Concerned you might be not lean if you raise funding? That’s actually a pretty common myth related to the Lean Startup approach.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever received a “recycled” present?
While it’s clearly new, it doesn’t actually match your interests. In fact, you know that the giver received that present from someone else a few months earlier. It’s likely, therefore, that they never opened it, and just gave it to you.
Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.
That’s similar to the day-to-day experience of a tech startup investor. I actually worked at a VC fund in the past. More on that in future emails. Download a free chapter of Launch Tomorrow to get in on the action.
Many times a day, VCs get pitched equity in a tech startup. The founders don’t want the equity. They prefer cash. This immediately reduces the equity’s perceived value, in the VC’s eyes. In some cases, screams desperation. If the founders, who have lots of equity they got somewhere else, are willing to give it away…what does it say about the company’s value? About its prospects? About what the founders believe about the company?
A common question that I get from people first looking at tech startups is why tech startups need so much money. After all, it shouldn’t cost that much to throw a product prototype together. Isn’t it all just self-serving hype?
Not always.
There are five strategic reasons to raise money in the tech startup world:
Funding customer acquisition
Hiring top talent
The “land grab”
The “pre-emptive strike”
The cash flow shortfall
So, starting from the top.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
In all but a handful of businesses, if you can’t buy customers, you don’t have a business. Sometimes an idea takes off and goes viral. For the mere mortals out there, though, you need to figure out how to acquire customers and serve them profitably. Paid advertising, in particular, has a bad name because it’s easy to misuse with other people’s money. It’s easy to fool yourself and others that something is happening, unless if you know what you’re doing.
Admittedly, most investors aren’t keen on providing money just to acquire customers, unless if you have already proven you can do this. Turn $1 into $4. Or $40. A marketing expense can reliably generate profit.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
Investors are keen to put money only if you prove them growth.
Recruiting talent to help you execute also costs money, particularly if you are breaking new ground technically. Figuring out how to scale certain technical problems (like search or constructing social graphs) requires serious technical chops. The number of software engineers capable of doing that is pretty small. And the first guys who scaled Google, for example, were self-taught.
Moreover, to be blunt, the guys in most cheapo emerging markets live in much smaller markets. They’ve never had to solve these problems in their home country. So you need to hire smart people and keep them happy.
Now–we get to the really good reasons why raising money is a good idea. The strategic ones. If you and your competitors are creating a completely new market, there is a land grab going on. Whoever can get the most market share–wins. There’s an old rule of thumb from Davidow who ran Intel’s marketing during their high growth phase. Having at least 30% of market share leads to consistent profitability in most niches. At that point, you can influence what happens.
Until you get to that point, you’re a commodity vendor. So while it can be a bit abstract, getting a strong footing in a niche will help establish you as a player. If you’re in a niche where this is happening, suddenly paying for growth has whole new meaning to investors. You only need to be a little bit better to beat out the competition, after all.
The pre-emptive strike is similar to the land grab, but more defensive. Let’s say you are a cheeky bootstrapper. You enter a market adjacent to niches already inhabited by companies with deep pockets. You’ll be at a loss when they decide to enter.
For example, Google entered the search market, knowing there were a lot of well-funded competitors at the time. Yahoo, Lycos, and Altavista to name a few. Moreover, there were big tech players like Microsoft who had kind of missed the boat, but still had a lot of money. They could catch up quickly if needed.
Think Bing. If Google had tried to bootstrap their way into the market, despite having better technology, they could have lost. Instead, they got funding. They built their technology to be completely scalable, while building up goodwill with users. Then, after 6 years of funded growth, they finally introduced advertising to monetize the growth. In 2004, they launched Adwords.
Last but not least, there’s the cash flow shortfall. This is more common in tech companies that combine hardware with rapid scaling. In essence, though the same financial problem happens across the sector. There’s a long list of well known companies which blew up, despite having a sales growth trend: Osbourne, Spectrum. That’s right. High growth, high sales, high profits, yet low cash inflows.
If there is a long time gap between a sale and getting cash, the company won’t have enough cash to fund operations. Scaling their operations becomes impossible without that. You may need an exponentially growing staff to service your exponentially growing revenues. You need inputs like parts for a hardware company–also at an exponentially growing pace.
Unlike in software, manufacturing at scale is complicated and costly. Should you think this is a throwback issue from the 1970s, what about the Internet of Things? What about hardware startups today?
So there you have it. Five legit reasons to raise money for your startup.
If you want to get on that path, you’re much better off using the Lean Startup approach. Don’t take external money, if you don’t need it. Stop selling yourself (and your business idea) short.
Validate your idea. With Launch Tomorrow, you can be certain that you’ve proven people want to buy what you’re selling. Or thinking of proposing. Or building.
Build the right product. Make sure you can acquire customers profitably.