There are three super important questions that every copywriter should be asking their clients, but most don’t.

If you have already found my copywriting questionnaire, then you’re already using two of these, but I’ve actually since added a third to the lineup…

And I’m a little embarrassed it’s taken me this long.

In today’s episode of Write Bites, we’re going to cover exactly what these three critical questions are.

This episode of Write Bites is sponsored by Copy.AI – a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers harness the power of GPT-3 to quickly create first draft copy for their businesses and clients. Click here to try Copy.AI free.

Listen To The Recording

Watch The Video

Read The Transcript

Let’s talk about three super important questions that every copywriter should be asking their clients, but most don’t.

If you have already found my copywriting questionnaire, then you’re already using two of these, but I’ve actually since added a third to the lineup and I’m a little embarrassed it’s taken me this long.

This is a super important question that I personally added after publishing that questionnaire and just completely forgot to add to the lineup.

I’m adding it in now, and this video is my way of highlighting to you that it’s there, that it’s super critical and that you need to be asking every single client you work with this question.

So with that said, let’s dive in.

This episode is sponsored byCopy.AI, a toolkit that helps writers, marketers and freelancers skip writer’s block completely and quickly create first draft copy for themselves and their clients.

If you’d like to get a 30-day free trial, head on over to http://copy.ai/jacob and sign up there.

Question #1: What Businesses Do You Like And Want To Emulate In Some Way?

Now, this is a super important question because what people tell you they like and what they actually like are often completely different things.

so you can ask clients all day long, what they want to see in their copy, and they’ll give you all sorts of feedback, but when you actually look at the real examples that they actually like – when they point to a website or a brand or messaging and say “Hey, we like this” – that’s when you know they actually like it.

I can tell you: I’ve had so many clients who will sit there and talk all day about how they want their copy to be bold and aggressive, or interesting, or artistic, or something, something, something that’s outside of the norm…

And then when I asked them “Show me the brands you want to emulate”, they send me to cookie-cutter brands that have very straightforward, industry -average types of messaging.

And I know from experience that the clients who say they want bold, they say they want artistic, but then point to examples that are none of those things?

At the end of the day, when I send them the copy, they’re going to want the example that they pointed to, not the actual adjectives they use to describe their requests.

So:

Always, always, always – regardless of what the client tells you, no matter how effusive they are on the call, no matter how passionate they are about their desire for this, that, or the other in their copy – ask them for the examples.

Make them show you the brands they like.

Make them show you the businesses they want to emulate.

Take that as the baseline.

And then try to incorporate small little bits of what they’ve requested.

But as a general rule you want to use the examples they point to as the core foundation of the copy…