The Writers Room

By Nate LagosBusiness Education How To Marketing Careers

The Writers Room episodes

May 21 Country Music Meets Creative Strategy
The most valuable copywriting inspiration I've ever gotten is from songwriters.
They're the best at writing in a way that makes people feel something. They're excellent at making the aspirational feel within reach. They're better than any marketer at making people feel at home, and comfortable in their lyrics.
Great advertising should aspire to do those things too.
So, in this episode, I share 3 songs that taught me how to speak to our customers with more familiarity, how to hype up our customers without being too cheesy or on the nose, and how to bring an aspirational lifestyle to appear within reach to our customers if they use your product.
This episode is brought to you by Intelligems.io so you can test copy, content, prices, and offers all across your shopify site to make more money!
Sign up for my copywriting skool here: https://www.skool.com/bottomsup/about
20 min
May 06 Bottom's Up Copywriting (I want to write copy for you)
Since I'm taking some time off from full time employment, my entire steak & whiskey budget is now dependent on freelance work...

So, I'm going to market my freelance services the way I wish freelancers & agencies marketed to me while I was on the brand side. Which means...

1. I won't make you hop on a call if you don't want to, I'll explain everything in this podcast.

2. I won't gatekeep my process, I'll lay it out in detail. If you have an internal team that are experienced & talented copywriters, & they have the spare time to adopt new processes, you can send them this and you can execute on it without paying me a dime. You're welcome.

3. I won't charge bigger brands bigger retainers just because they can afford it. The price is the price is the price, and I explain in this episode why my flat fee (no percentage of spend bullshit) is a no brainer and you're guaranteed to make a ton of money off my work.

Who's ready to write better copy & make more money?
18 min
May 01 Media buying can be deadly (Connor MacDonald from Ridge speaks)
CMO of Ridge & the Most Valuable Guest of Tactical & Practical, Couuor Mac joins the pod to talk media buying, on-site messaging testing, and hammock-maxxing.
39 min
April 24 Why Split Testing Doesn't Work For Some Of You
Some of you have spent a year split testing on your website and don't have anything to show for it...

and I think I know why.

I ran a headline test on a landing page. The control variant was a very evidence-based, authority / credibility kinda headline. The variant that won the split test, and increased CVR by 48%, was on the other end of the spectrum, it was very emotional & benefit driven.

THAT DOESN'T MEAN I SHOULD JUST SET THAT HEADLINE LIVE AND FORGET IT.

All the results of that split test tells us is that CURRENTLY, our ads are doing a better job of bringing emotional buyers to our website.

It means that we're NOT good at bringing logical buyers into our funnel.

So now, my job is to create two separate funnels for the same product, one that appeals to emotional, benefit driven buyers, and the other that appeals logical buyers.

Split testing should teach you how to grow your TAM, not just increase conversion rate for one specific cohort of your target market.
7 min
April 16 The Difference Between $50mm/yr and $10mm/yr
Brands need to act differently at different stages of growth.
What works for a $50 million/year brand might drown a $10 million/year brand.
Understand where you're at, and act accordingly.
18 min
April 08 How I Build Marketing Teams
How I build marketing teams
When you should hire in-house vs agencies/freelancers
How to keep employees accountable & productive without endless meetings & micro-managing
& more
don't miss this episode.
30 min
April 01 AI: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Side Of Artificial Intelligence
AI is great at some things
It's bad at others
And sometimes, it straight up makes mistakes or lies to me...
I think it's all important that we take a step back, understand its strengths, weaknesses, how it can help us today, and how we should be building it into our brands for the future.
This episode is all about The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly side of Artificial Intelligence:
25 min
March 18 Performance Marketers vs Brand Builders (Not What You Think)
Don't hire a performance marketers to do a brand builder's job.
10 min
March 11 Don't Launch That New Channel... Until You Try This
BEFORE you launch that new advertising channel, try these 5 things to try to spark new growth in a product or brand that's hit a plateau:
1. Test new prices & offers on your hero SKU. Price-Market-Fit is not something you can set and forget, just look at gas prices the last couple weeks. The price consumers are willing to pay for your product changes with inflation, election cycles, and category maturity. If you haven't tested your prices or offers in the last year, they're officially out of date, test them again.
2. Shoot new creative in different formats and with different creators than you've worked with in the past. If you're ad account is full of UGC, maybe try producing some high quality, polished assets. If you've relied super hard on videos, try some statics. Not every person in your target market will resonate with the same content format. When I see UGC as a marketer, I assume it's fake and dismiss it. When my wife sees UGC of someone who has the same pain points as her, she trusts it. Don't leave any part of your target audience out in the cold, make creative that can resonate with every corner of your audience.
3. Take this mentality into your copywriting, too. If you typically lean into negative, fear of loss, risk aversion messaging, then you're only going to acquire customers who resonate with that. Try to frame it positively, or be more optimistic in your messaging. Instead of showing them what they might lose without your product, show them what they'll gain by adding it to their lives.
4. Look for anomalies in your customer reviews to give you new ideas for ad angles. If 80% of your 5-star reviews are about how awesome your product looks, that means you're really good at marketing how good your product looks. Acquisition is self fulfilling prophecy... But if 10% of your 5-star reviews are about how good your products makes someone feel, then you're probably MISSING that benefit in your top spending ads. Go make more ads & landing pages about how they'll FEEL, and you'll acquire more of those customers that your last round of ads wasn't talking to.
5. Make new products that appeal to a wider range or a different segment of your market. Jack Daniel's does this perfectly. I never buy their base bottle, Old No 7 that costs $25. But there's 8 bottles of specialty, limited edition Jack Daniel's bottles that I paid over $500 each for on my shelf right now. They never would've gotten that money from me if they didn't push into a new market. Mercedes does this great, too. They make the G wagon for people who are rich. They make the C class for people who want to look rich. Rolex sells the dayjust and the daytona, to completely different tax brackets. Puma sells some traditional golf shoes, and ones with camo print all over them. I'd never by the traditional ones (or anything from puma usually) but I'm on my second pair of the camo ones... and so on.
Obviously new product dev takes a lot of time, but you can definitely do those first 4 things BEFORE adding the complexity and unknowns of a new advertising channel.
Then, when you do launch that new channel, you'll have more learnings for how to make it work for you.
Happy scaling
20 min
March 04 You're Under Utilizing Your Post Purchase Survey
Did you know that you don't have to just ask "How did you hear about us?" in your post purchase survey?
I think it's way less valuable to use it as a form as attribution, and way MORE valuable to ask them questions that'll shape your marketing strategy in the future.
At Adapt, I'm asking
"When did you first hear about us?"
"Who supports you on your health journey?"
"How do supplements fit into your daily routine?"
"What's your favorite way to stay active?"
Each of those will affect how we measure our marketing efforts, how we position our brand, what kind of organic content we'll create, which influencers we'll partner with, and what IRL events I'll want us to be a part of.
Those insights are way more valuable to me than hearing someone try to remember where they heard about us.
- Then, we have some winning results from a brand who just INCREASED their prices
- Tweet of the week is really tactical Meta advice
- A JUICY Marketer's Anonymous from a guy who's about to quit his job
15 min