Who I am, how I work and how I got here

Who I am

I’ve been a copywriter for more than 10 years - a year on my own, six years in-house for three different employers, then four years (and counting) on my own again.

I work on home pages, landing pages and content strategy (more on that a bit later).

I’ve worked with companies like Xero, Sharesies, Hnry, the Bank of New Zealand and Kiwi Wealth.

I have a BA in History from the University of Otago. I finished in 2007, but didn’t get around to filing the papers to graduate until 2009. So now my Linkedin and CV give the impression that I’m two years younger than I actually am (I’m 35, in case you were wondering).

I live in New Zealand, in a small town called New Plymouth with my partner, my two sons and two cats.

What I do

Here’s the outcome I work on: home pages and landing pages that turn traffic into leads. Content strategy that turns leads into paying customers.

Naturally this involves a lot of copywriting. But my view is that the real work happens before I write a single word. I think that really nailing a landing page or home page is about getting to the bottom of what makes your audience tick, what they care about and how they articulate their problems.

It’s not about some big, lofty, beautiful-sounding Simon Sinek-inspired “start with why” statement. Rather, it’s about clearly and succinctly articulating the problem you solve in a way that connects with your reader.

Simple, but not easy.

How I work

I apply four principles to everything I do for clients:

• There’s tons of untapped potential in the middle of your funnel

• Give your content the energy it deserves - no more, no less

• Your audience, offer and positioning are much more important than your copy (but your copy’s still important)

• Great content is useful

(Ready to work together? Book a call. Or if you want to learn more about me, keep scrolling)

How I got here

Great to see you still scrolling. Now we’re going to get into the details of those four principles by meandering through my career.

#1: There’s tons of untapped potential in the middle of your funnel

I figured this out not long after I went out on my own in late 2017, and saw how heaps of marketing teams prioritise their time and money.

Almost everyone I talk to is focussed on the top of the funnel - getting leads. Everyone wants the traffic to their website, the signups to their lead magnet, the likes and shares on their latest blog. And this stuff is, of course, valuable. You can’t run a business without a steady stream of new leads coming in.

But it’s not the whole picture. Time and time again, I see the exciting top-of-funnel stuff getting prioritised over actually turning those leads into paying customers.

Sending a bunch of traffic to a landing page that doesn’t properly articulate your offer is a waste of time. Spending money on a big PR or above-the-line campaign is setting money on fire if your home page doesn’t tell people who you work with, what you do and why people work with you.

And the same applies once people do become leads. If you just call everyone who signs up to your lead magnet, then never communicate again with the 99.5% who say no, you’re wasting all that money you spent getting their contact details in the first place.

If you pummel people with offers and product details when they barely signed up for your newsletter you are - you guessed it - wasting the money you spent finding them.

#2 Give your content the energy it deserves - no more, no less

Now let’s go to the very beginning.

I got my first writing contract in 2009 while I was teaching English in Vietnam.

The job was writing short articles for eHow.com. If you don't remember that website, its business model was to turn popular Google searches into article titles. Then it paid an army of freelancers to turn those titles into 400-ish word articles. For $15 per article.

In the beginning, I felt privileged just to be paid to write, and I spent ages making sure each one was perfect.

That didn't last. I had rent to pay. Groceries to buy.

I ran the numbers, and figured out that I could spend no more than 30 minutes on each article if I wanted to make a decent hourly rate. More than that, and I would be making below minimum wage once you accounted for time spent working through feedback, articles that never got published and so on.

So that's what I did - and by and large, it worked out okay. Was it the best content in the world? Of course not. But it was exactly $15 worth of content.

I think about this all the time because it’s just as relevant today as it was in 2009.

If you're writing a tweet, you probably don't need to run it through 8 layers of approval (this is an actual thing I have witnessed). Just make sure it's reasonably good, and post away. Conversely, if you're writing a landing page that’s going to get 20,000 sets of eyeballs a week, it’s worth doing research and taking the time to get it right!

Every bit of content you produce should get exactly as much of your energy as it deserves - no more, no less.

#3: Your audience, offer and positioning are much more important than your copy (but your copy’s still important)

In 2011, I got my first in-house copywriting role, at accounting software company Xero. I stayed there for three and a half years, mostly working on email copywriting.

Our team sent marketing emails to all sorts of people. Sometimes we’d email a cold list asking them to come to a webinar. Guess what: nobody came. And other times, we’d email new trialists offering them 50% off their first month if they paid right away. Guess what: it did great!

The reality is, my copy had nothing to do with either of those outcomes.

These emails performed (or didn’t) because of their offer, audience and positioning. A good offer to a bunch of people who know, like and trust you is going to perform really well. A bad offer to people who barely know you is going to perform really poorly.

A piece of content that talks about things its audience cares about is going to perform better than a piece of content that talks about things your audience doesn’t care about.

If you nail these things, your word choice and persuasive argument act as leverage - making your content that much more effective. But if you neglect these things, it doesn’t matter how good your copy is. Your audience still isn’t going to care.

#4: Great content is useful

After a brief stint in PR agency land (it did not work out), I went and worked for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in 2015. This job was all about creating content. Our goal was to better-inform the public about their privacy obligations.

The spanner in the works was that we didn't have the budgets to plaster those messages all over the place.

So we created useful content. We made contact with various organisations, like unions, big public and private sector agencies and industry associations, and asked them what privacy problems they kept seeing again and again.

Then we created content to help them deal with these problems head-on. Videos. Fact sheets. Online training. Case studies. All sorts of stuff. We didn’t spend heaps of money on it, but then we didn’t have to! It was useful, interesting content, and that’s all we needed to reach the people we wanted to reach.

I still apply this thinking with my clients today. One of the easiest ways to get your audience to engage with your content is to make that content useful. So do the work to find out what your audience wants from you - then give it to them. A simple piece of content that is useful to someone is going to be a lot more impactful than an overcooked, high production value piece of content that your audience doesn’t care about.

That’s it. If you made it this far, you’re probably ready to start working with me. So get in touch - let’s have a chat. My email is sam@samgrover.co.nz.