If you want to write more persuasive copy, you need better insights from your research. But how do you get them? Sarah Levinger is my guest for the 448th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast and we talked about research insights, trend spotting, how A.I. can distort your research analysis, and how to make your copy more persuasive. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
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Full Transcript:
Rob Marsh: Can psychology help you capture and hold the attention of your readers… then sell more of your products to your customers? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.
On last week’s episode of the podcast, we talked about buyer psychology and how to use it to sell your products and services. It’s a great interview and I recommend you don’t miss it. This week’s episode is a kind of part 2 to that interview.
In addition to specific persuasion techniques, today we’re going to go deep on research and discovering insights that a good copywriter can build a sales argument. If you want to use the techniques we talked about last week, what we talk about in this interview will give you the baseline insights to make them so much more effective.
My guest today is Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether, a research insights platform that helps uncover emotional, behavioral, and identity-driven insights so marketers can connect on a deeper, more human level with their customers. And she uses A.I. to augment the process.
Sarah walks through the process and framework she created for finding the kinds of insights that resonates with customers. She categorizes comments and research data by emotion, which leads to a better set of avatars and marketing ideas based on emotion rather than taglines or words that get a little tired as prospects see them over and over in your ads and other marketing.
Then Sarah goes even deeper than feelings to uncover beliefs—she talks about why in this interview. I think you’re going to like what she has to share about that.
Sarah also mentioned something about A.I. that I hadn’t considered before that kind of shifted the way I’m thinking about using tools like Claude and ChatGPT to analyze data. If you don’t understand this change, if you use A.I. in your research or analysis process, your copy will probably not connect as well you expect.
Before we get to my interview with Sarah, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us.
The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.
And now, my interview with Sarah Levinger…
Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Before we hit record, I told you I’ve been wanting to have you on for quite a while. I’ve been following your stuff online. The way you talk about persuasion psychology, it just rings my bell. So I’m so glad to have you here. But before we get into all of this stuff, how did you get to where you are, where you’re basically, you know, this marketing consultant to DDC companies using psychology to help, you know, increase responses, all of that kind of stuff. How did you get here?
Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, that’s that I don’t even know that the journey that I’ve taken to get there has been a really interesting one, and I really do think I landed here on purpose at this particular time. So I started in marketing when I was 21, really, really young. I went to school to be an equine scientist. I wanted to be a vet for horses. I thought I wanted to be an equine scientist and go be like an equine vet. And then I found out very quickly, I don’t like blood, but I don’t like needles. This is not for me. So during that first, like, college year, I took a course in InDesign. Does anybody remember what InDesign was? I miss that platform so much. Oh my gosh. I really, really enjoyed designing in there. So that was, like an elective that I took, and I just got so hooked. I was like, This is so fun, like, I love the art side of this.
So I moved back home. I was up in Wyoming for a minute, and then I moved back home with my parents. Went back to college for graphic design, and I had a professor in my second semester of college who was like, you know, if you’re good at this and you really enjoy doing design or marketing or art or whatever it is, you don’t have to have a degree. You can just go work. And I was like, what I don’t have to pay for college? Great. I don’t like college anyway. So here we go. So I quit college, and then I basically just, like, freelance for the next 10 years straight. And it was interesting, because this was, like, it, I mean, this was 2010 2011 so it was right at the start of YouTube being a thing. Tutorials online were just barely beginning to like, blow up. So there wasn’t really a whole lot of information on how to market or how to do things online in the digital space. So I had to go to the library of all places and just check out a bunch of books to learn how to do all this stuff. So I would go and check out books on like WordPress websites and Amazon, FBA, how to copyright, how to do all the sorts of stuff. And next to that section was this giant, like, I don’t even know, old textbook section on early childhood development and neuroscience, psychology and consumer behavior, stuff that was like, nobody has touched this book in years. But it was so interesting. So I kept checking those. But that just because they were, like, fascinating to me. And then I did that for like, 10 years straight. I just devoured information on how people work.
Now, I didn’t tell anybody that I had this information or I knew anything about this for decades, until I kind of accidentally fell into paid advertising right before COVID hit in 2019 I had a newborn and a two year old at home, and I was like, I’m gonna die, like I have to talk to somebody. So I got on Twitter, and I just started chatting with people in the industry who were also doing media buying at the time, and then it just kind of exploded, mostly because I think I hit it just at the right time, the right place. This is why I kind of like alluded to that earlier. Sometimes your journey leads you to just the right time, the right place. At the time, when I was on Twitter, I thought I was going to be the last one talking about it, but I ended up being one of the first to talk about how you can apply psychology to add specifically when it comes to messaging, and see amazing drastic results. And I, I guess people just kind of really grabbed onto it and just ran with it because I grew a following. You know, within a year, I had probably about five to 10,000 followers, and I was starting to, like, get good business and drag good leads. And I was like, this is fun. This is a good role for me. So fast forward to now. I’ve kind of created, like, the perfect job for Sarah, where I get to study humans all day long, and I get to focus primarily on marketing and messaging. So, yeah, it’s been a journey.
Rob Marsh: It’s a cool journey. So, and what you’ve built today is called Tether, and tell me how you’re doing that, like I’ve seen the products that you offer. I’ve seen how you talk about some of the stuff. But in the copywriting world, the content writing world, there’s a lot of research, but, and we’re all talking about like, how do you do research, or whatever, but oftentimes there’s a little bit of a disconnect between getting the research done and actually being able to apply it. And I think you’re bridging this gap a little bit.
Sarah Levinger: I’m trying my hardest. Yes, it’s really interesting, because I think everybody kind of understands what research is, why it’s important. A lot of people understand how to do it. And then there’s then there’s many, many people out there, I think, that do it very, very well. They’re adept at it. Then there’s this, like, very, like you said, big gap between the people who have the information and the people who need to use it. And that, I think, has always kind of existed in business in general. We understand that we need to go after a specific customer type, or a specific person, and then there’s a big gap, and then there’s all the people who talk to that specific person and draw them into the business. So when I started to do paid advertising, I fell in love with it, mostly because I was able to take what I was learning on the psychology side, tactically, put it into an ad, and then see results within maybe four hours, sometimes less. Within 30 minutes, I could tell whether it worked or not. So it was much faster way of testing the messaging that I wanted to test. But that in between, Spot kind of became where, I guess, the sweet spot for Sarah kind of started to kind of morph. I guess so Tether came out of a lot of requests, honestly, from my customers and. Asking me, I would go in and I would run their media, buying their ads for them, and they would always ask, how is it that your ads fit better than everybody else? Like, we have lots of other ads in here, and you seem to be getting consistent good results with your ads. How would that happen? And so out of necessity, I was like, I have to come up with some sort of tactical framework to show them what I’m doing. So at the time, like I said, I didn’t know I was doing any of this. It was just like a part of Sarah’s process for research. I was going through and on the brand Instagram pages for any of these D to C brands that I was working for. I was pulling down all of the comments that was underneath all of their organic pieces of content that talked about the brand or even the product, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do with anything. I just pulled them down and then analyze them one by one. Now this was before AI, so I had to go through by hand and categorize them into the categories that I wanted, which, at the time was emotional categories, because I was like emotion psychology, this kind of all makes sense. Obviously, people buy things for emotional reasons, and then we justify them with logic, so I’ll categorize them into emotional category, and then I’ll just go ahead and, like, run an analysis on that. So this was all done in Excel spreadsheet, and based on frequency numbers, I could tell which emotions were coming out of just the language that customers were using. So I don’t know that I was necessarily a better writer or a better like, you know, Ideator for abs. I think it was more of the fact that I just got much, much closer to the customer, and then I was able to take what I found and basically repurpose it. So I had a framework that just I repeated over and
over and over,
Rob Marsh: Yeah, it seems to me, then, in my experience, you know, working with copywriters, a lot of the time, you know, we’re looking for specific words. Sometimes we’re looking for emotions, but, but you know, when, even when I go through research, knowing that I should be looking at all of it together, every once in a while, something will jump out. I’m like, oh, that’s the idea, right? And then maybe I stop or and so, having gone through and done that work to, like, really figure out, okay, every single comment, it feels to me like that’s almost the putting in the 10,000 hours kind of thing that trains your brain so that, so that it becomes really effective and insightful.
Sarah Levinger: Yeah, yeah. Well, and it was interesting, because that was the very first product I ever really had, was what I was calling it NLP at the time. So it was the NLP research panel, and it was called NLP because I didn’t know this was the term, but what I was doing was basically manual natural language processing. So there’s computers that do that. Obviously, Sarah was just doing it by hand. So I’d pull all the data down, categorize it, pull out frequency numbers for the emotions, emotional categories that I was looking for, and then I would write new copies based on the emotion that I felt, not necessarily the keywords and phrases that the customers were using, mostly because the keywords and phrases are important, and they I mean, they still are important. They were important. They are important. But the problem was, in paid advertising, if you use that keyword and phrase too many times. It’s fatigue. People kind of stop paying attention to it, and then it doesn’t work anymore. So fast forward, a couple years later, I had someone ask me, this is great. We love your NLP, it’s really interesting. It’s helping. But do you have any information on getting accurate avatars built, like customer types from all of the data that you’re pulling down. And at the time, I was like, No, but I could probably build that. I constantly look at these things like, I think I could probably make that. Why not? Like, we’ll see if we can ever so the next product that I built was called the CIM. So the CIM is a core identity map, and this particular research panel uses picture based surveys and metaphorical surveys to pull out these emotional like deeper insights out of our customers. So they’re very odd surveys, because about 80% of them are non-functional, I would say. So we ask questions like, if this product was a superhero, which one would it be? And why? Those types of things. Once you’re going to make an association of the brain, you would help pull out some very interesting insights of what people believe about things, not just how they feel about it, that in general, for humans, what you believe affects how you feel, and what you feel affects how you behave. So for consumption, especially since I’m on the paid advertising side, studying just the behavior of clicks or conversion rates and those types of things, not entirely helpful for me, because I have no idea what caused it, right? I just know it happened. So some people take one step back and go, Okay, we need to study the emotion, which is very, very helpful. But again, that’s only one piece of the equation. We can tell how they felt about what caused the conversion, but we can’t tell why they did it. So I go all the way back to the beginning and study behavior with the CI or study belief, sorry, that the CIM, so that way and understand more. Can you give me an example of how that works? Yeah. So, for instance, one of the best you kids into this I’ve ever saw was we had a CIM that was interesting. They had built basically this one. A skincare brand, and they were having a really hard time because the acquisition customer type was too expensive, like that. They were just, like, bleeding money, basically. So we ran a CIM basically just to see what their customers believed about the whole industry, not just their particular product. Because most businesses study themselves, or they study competitive they don’t study the industry, which I find fascinating, because I’m like, Oh,
Rob Marsh: That totally rings a bell, too. I do the same thing. Like, of course, you want to look at your three or four closest competitors, so you don’t copy what they’re doing, but you also clue into, you know, the basics, and then, of course, your own product. But yeah, industry wide, that’s a lot, and that’s a lot for one person to handle too, or one small agency.
Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that’s why they usually come to Sarah, because I’m like, don’t go do this yourself. Just hire someone to do it. Blind you. So industry wide, though, this is a very interesting it’s a very interesting ecosystem, if you start to study industry, mostly because a large majority of the time there is one person at the top and then there’s a number two, and they fight with each other constantly, COVID, colon, Pepsi, right? Apple and Microsoft. Then there’s an outlier, usually a third player in here who’s quietly serving an audience that’s like secondary to the larger market that these two are fighting over. Right? That third base. Sometimes they are brand, brand new meaning, like you’ve never seen them before. They just came out of nowhere. Liquid Death is probably a good example of this. Like nobody really saw them come and they just were all of a sudden, there. You also have some of these who have been quietly like practicing their skill for such a long time that they notice a market gap before the two top players do and can like slip in immediately. So I think it’s beneficial to study your competitors and beneficial to study yourself, obviously, but it’s even more beneficial to study the industry as much as you possibly can, because you’ll start to notice consumer shift. That’s what we’re kind of looking for, especially at Tether. Consumer shifts happen all the time for all sorts of different reasons, political reasons for economic reasons for cultural movement. In particular, celebrities have a huge like play on cultural sway, like your customer type is swaying their behavior based on what they believe. And if their beliefs change, then all of their behaviors change too. So back to skincare. When we ran a CIM for them, we found that their customers were a little overwhelmed, not necessarily by like, the industry, like they understood what their problem was. It was usually acne or dry skin or wrinkles or whatever. They were more overwhelmed with the fact that I now have like, 70 bottles that sit on top of my counter, and I’m constantly, like, swapping them out in and every day and like, I just, I’m just overwhelmed with the amount of like ridiculousness that I have in my life now due to these bottles on my counter, it had nothing to do with the skincare, which I found really interesting, but it was such a definitive thread that they the customer types were just like, You know what? I’m just kind of done with the mess and the chaos of what this industry has brought into my life. Now, that’s a very definitive belief and emotion that we can start to message to on the coffee side, to talk about the fact that, like, this is the last time you’ll ever have to switch to another skincare brand.
Rob Marsh: So part of this, what you’re doing is trend spotting, which is maybe a little bit different, again, from what most typical copywriters or even researchers do. So, you know, aside from, you know, running your own panels, are there other tools that you’re using to spot trends and to see what’s coming in order to get ahead of that?
Sarah Levinger: I have tested a ton of stuff recently, and I think this is something you and I were talking about, $4 pocket there. There’s a place for AI. I think in this conversation, I don’t think it’s where people think it is. I typically use AI as a second brain. So I will have it do data analysis for me, because it can spot patterns and things that I just can’t see. If I have spreadsheets or data, I’ll go through and have it analyzed for me and just say, what do you see in here that I just don’t see? So that’s incredibly helpful. When it comes to research. I have a difficult time using AI as a production tool, and this is something that I’ve been slowly starting to learn more and more about. Because when we first started, I think everybody was just like, this is going to cut years off of our production time. It can do analysis, so it can tell us exactly what we should run from what I’m seeing. That’s not at all true. So in general, I typically default to surveys in particular, because it’s voluntary information, and it’s information that’s like, non biased. It’s just, this is just a person out there. It’s anonymous. We don’t collect any sort of email addresses or names or anything. It’s headed we just collect the actual data of people answering the pictorial survey or the metaphorical survey. And that’s on purpose, because I don’t want it to cloud kind of the what we’re trying to actually learn. So ideally, use AI, but it’s, it’s not as a production tool. It’s primarily just to help me think a little bit more, if that makes sense.
Rob Marsh: Since we started talking about AI, let’s, let’s keep going here. Because, like you said before we started recording, you said you have a few thoughts, and I think they probably track pretty closely to what what I think about A.I. But as far as AI goes and writing copy, tell me where you are in your brain and with your experience.
Sarah Levinger: So far, AI has been a very interesting tool to track. When it first came out, this was, like the most amazing thing we had ever seen. Like we just everybody grabbed it, everybody used it. They went from like zero to 5 million users in like 48 hours. It was bonkers, mostly because it is an incredible tool. The interesting part about it is, though, as you start to watch the metamorphosis of AI in particular chat is, well, the one that we use the most often in DTC, you start to notice some like, glaringly obvious issues with this platform. The I think the primary one being this is not really assisting workflow. I find which I think. What do you mean by that? Okay, so most people grabbed onto this because they were like, Oh, I don’t need a copywriter anymore. Save me time. Well, I don’t need any, but I could get rid of my entire team and just use this. That is technically true, but the issue is now you’ve basically replaced a team of experts who can get you a headline within a good 30 minutes to an hour, that will probably work 80% of the time with a system who is making basically an educated guess based upon the data you feed it that’s basically suited to you the user, because the more you use the llms, the more gets trained on you as the person, and it will start to feed you stuff that it knows you like. And this is the most difficult thing about llms. It’s like they’re very, very powerful. I still use it constantly because it’s trained on Sarah’s brain, so it’s almost like talking to myself. But toughest part about this is often the output is terrible, so I have to QA two times as much as I used to. I used to QA inside my own brain before I put it on a piece of paper. I think about it for a long time in the shower, like when I’m driving, or what I’m doing things with my kids, without me having to know that I was thinking about it, because it was all subconscious processing. Now we’ve taken our subconscious and stuck it into a computer and said, you do the subconscious processing for me, but let me help you do it. So we’re spending two to three hours QA one headline instead of just sitting and thinking quietly about it in the background before we sit down to our desk.
Rob Marsh: I just kind of had a light bulb go off as you’re mentioning this when you said that llms get trained on our voice, and they get to know us. The biggest problem here is that is that even if we know our customers intimately, we are not our customer, and the knowledge that we bring to the table in order and then to have LLM reflect back what Rob is thinking instead of what Rob’s clients or customers are thinking, or Rob’s clients customers are thinking. Customers are thinking, which is even two steps away, like now. Now we’ve got a really big gap between what’s going to work and what sounds good, because it’s going to sound good based off of, you know, my feedback. I mean, I’m a pretty good writer, yeah, but it’s not necessarily the thing that’s going to work well.
Sarah Levinger: And in paid advertising, we’re using this primarily to produce massive amounts of ads. So our issue used to be that we had teams of like six to 10 to 20 people, all producing ads for us, copywriters and graphic designers and creative strategists, lots of different things, and all of those people, it would probably take us a good week to two weeks to generate a good 10 to 20 ads. Like it’s a process now we can do it in 20 minutes. Now, if you can take that amount of time, squish it down into 20 minutes, and you can take basically 10 ads and like, double or triple your production, that means a massive amount of messages are now being flooded into the systems on paid advertising. So meta, Tiktok, Instagram, right? That means the consumers are also seeing more messages. That means they’re also now becoming desensitized to any messages that are generic or completely boring, right? No offense to AI, but like, it’s a lot of what comes out of there is quite generic, yeah, so I’m watching this, and I’m tracking it as we’re going through just thinking, in the background, wondering, how long is this going to go before we start to see large scale kind of systemic issues in marketing in general, due to the fact that people think this is faster, but it’s not, or think that it’s better, but it’s not because we are the ones that are feeding all the data into The llms and telling them what to think. Now they still have the ability to go and, like, scrape the web, which is helpful. They can go and look to Google. But who produced all that stuff on Google? We did. So again, I am on the fence. I feel so torn about this, mostly because AI has something called projection bias, meaning they kind of just get. Tests at what they think is probably the best course of action based upon the statistical, mathematical patterns in the data. So we can feed it all the customer data we want, but if you’re feeding it on historical customer data, it’s only going to go after people who bought yesterday, not people who are going to buy tomorrow, so you’re dipping the bottom of the bucket constantly, bottom of funnel customers. And it gets even worse when you think about how many 1000s and 1000s of brands are in one industry. It’s intense.
Rob Marsh: It’s crazy. So while we’re still talking about this, I know you’re using AI. I use AI. How are you using AI to maximize its effectiveness and not let it get in the way of actually, like, relating to the customer.
Sarah Levinger: So I primarily use it as a data analysis tool, because I’m not a data analyst, and, like, I have people on my team that are helping me with research, but in general, it can see a lot more than I can. I don’t want it to produce and I don’t want it to think for me, because I’m the one that has the real world experience. We all have to remember that AI lives inside a computer. It’s never seen a comb or a shoe or a house, right? It’s never experienced love. It’s also never really experienced rejection or embarrassment. It understands which emotions and words are connected to that word, but it will never be able to understand what it feels like to like be around that. Yet, I don’t know if they’re gonna make that someday. Maybe that would be terrifying, but it’s possible that will happen to them. So because of this, though, I really wanted to pull out things that I am unable to see. So I typically run these metaphorical and pictorial surveys to understand underlying belief systems. And so when I run that data through, we typically have basically qualitative answers that come with the pictures. So we’ll ask one picture of what do you think about this question. Here’s your picture answers. You choose one. They’ll pick an image for us. And then that very next question is going to be, why did you choose that image? Those qualitative answers for why did you pick that are very, very interesting, because they show a whole lot about what people think about themselves. You’ll choose based on emotion, but then you’ll try and justify it with something else, so you can compare them pretty easily. Now, the toughest part about this is I have to describe the image to chat pretty intensely and then tell it. Here’s the image they chose. Here’s what they answered as to why they chose that image. You do this analysis for me and tell me what you see, not necessarily what you think. I don’t try and use that word too much with chat, just because it’s trained on me. So it’s going to think like me. I want to just see what do you see in here that I use all the time, because I want to understand what patterns are in here that I just can’t see right now.
Rob Marsh: So it’s helping you uncover patterns, emotions, ideas, and then you’re taking that, and either you’re writing it yourself or you’re working with a copywriter to put that into action. Sarah Levinger: Yep, exactly, exactly. So like the skincare thing, that was a pattern that I didn’t recognize. Like, when I looked at the data, I was like, oh, confidence. A lot of these women are really into feeling COVID. Into feeling confident. They want to boost their skin, they want to look good, those type of things, but those are normal, everyday things that I would think are a part of skincare. That’s normal, makes sense, yeah? And I said, it’s logical sense. So then I ran it back through the system and said, Okay, go find me some stuff that’s weird in here. Go, go get me some keywords or phrases that are like, I don’t know why anybody would say this about skincare, and one of the ones that came up was, I’m overwhelmed with the amount of bottles on my sink, which I’m like, that has nothing to do with skincare. So it was fascinating, but very, very cool thread that they found, and they’re able to use it now a whole lot better just because it spotted something that was weird. It’s an outlier,
Rob Marsh: So where this stuff seems to be going is, again, moving into the psychology side of this. And this is something that we talk about. We say it a lot, but it’s hard to make actionable. And that is the idea that people don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them, right? So they’re buying an identity, or they’re signaling something about them. So as an example,I love Jeep. I don’t currently own a jeep, but I have had Jeeps in the past, and I love them, and even though they’re kind of bumpy and clunky in some ways. There’s probably something—I might need to go to a therapist to talk about this—but there’s something about Jeeps that I like that it says about me as a jeep driver, right? So, yeah. So how do we get more of this into the copy and content that we’re creating?
Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, yes. So this is really interesting, because this goes down into what how many different associations have you built with Jeep in your head, and what are they attached to? So normally, when you build a memory or some sort of an association as a human, it has to do with how heightened your emotional state was during that particular time period in your life. So it’s possible somebody in your family owned a jeep, or you knew somebody who wasn’t in your family, but was aspirational, somebody sort of like, I want to be that person that owned a jeep. Or it’s very possible that you just had you saw it a lot, right? But same thing happens for like, my kids are. Watching Sponge Bob right now, and like, it’s the funniest thing ever, because I watch it and I can, I can verbatim, just like, go every single line I know, everything that that guy said, because I watched it so much as a kid. So now the just seeing that experience on the TV elicits an emotional response for me, because I saw it so much as the chat. So it just kind of depends. And again, emotional states don’t have to be traumatic. They sometimes they can just be it was there and that was gone. I was excited, and then it was gone, that type of thing. So to get more of this, this is the reason why I’m testing these picture based surveys, metaphorical surveys, because I want to see how close can we get to eliciting that response from somebody without them having to basically, what’s the word without them having to answer in a logical way, if that makes sense. So it’s difficult to get this out, and this is reason why not a lot of people are in this type of research, because hard, it’s very difficult to get this out and to do it without leading an answer, because that’s what most surveys do, especially on like post purchase side, is we just kind of give them a general frame of reference, of like, where did you come from, or what did you like most about it today? What do you wish we had? These are very logical questions, and they’re also well suited to people who read most post purchases are just questions and answers in text based form. If you don’t read well, or if you’re the type person that just doesn’t care, you just button mash your way out of there, and then have gone right? So in general, when it comes to pulling out more of these things, there’s a lot of really good research around picture based surveys that help kind of pull out those emotions. To apply it, though, I think is probably where, like, the bulk of the benefit is. So the nice part is, once you start to find these weird trends, like the bottles on the counter type of thing, you’ll start to be able to understand a little bit more about what these consumers are experiencing in their everyday life. And you guys, copywriters have been very, very close to the psychology of customers more than almost any other role, I would say, in marketing, because you guys had to think so deeply about it to be able to draft good messaging. So finding these tiny little trends and being able to speak to the relatable experience of that customer is probably where this is going to go eventually. And when I say relatable experience, I’m not talking about the problem at all. Almost everybody wants to default to your problem is dry skin. Here’s a solution, very Aida framework. My pushback on that is, I think I’d rather you talk about her experience around her dry skin, because dry skin actually causes all kinds of problems, not just like it’s uncomfortable, but also, if I go skiing this weekend, I’m gonna have to put chapstick on my face, and that’s sticky and uncomfortable, and I don’t like that. It’s a secondary problem that I now have to deal with again. Or if my face is dry and, like, cracked and I flake everywhere, like, that’s uncomfortable because I have a date tonight, and I don’t want him to think that that’s weird, right? There’s like, connected experiences all over the place that stem from one problem, but there’s like, 15 problems that are around it we can talk to as well.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, that becomes really interesting. You know, copywriters know the PAs formula, problem, agitate, solve. And oftentimes we’re, we’re really focused on all of the good things around the solution. You know, we will quickly we’re taught, and I don’t know that it’s always correct, but it’s like, Oh, you don’t want to be negative too long, right? Like, mention the problem, but don’t make people feel bad or whatever, but then, so we were really good at if you take this, it solves this problem, and it shows up in your life in these ways. Now you can do all these things you couldn’t do before, but I think like focusing in on the secondary issues is a really interesting idea to me.
Sarah Levinger: Well, I think it’s interesting because if you watch, and this is why I get I get freaked out. There are things too deep. I get freaked out sometimes because I’m like, everything’s attached to everything. Over the course of the last probably 20 to 25 years, we have started to shift as a culture, especially in the US, towards this notion of, Do not offend anyone, right? Do not offend anyone. And it’s happened mostly due to kind of how the millennial generation was parented. But the millennials in particular were very, very sensitive to this idea of everybody included. We’re all in a community. We all want everybody to feel safe. Safety was kind of high priority for this customer type. Now, the interesting part about that generation is they taught it to their Gen Z kids, who are now kind of ramping it up, like there’s even more of this notion of like, don’t offend, no bad feelings. Everything’s fine. That seeped its way into everyone’s mindset because we heard it so much like he talks about the copywriters in the 80s had no problem being me. Like, if you look at some of the long form content from the 80s, copywriters got really harsh about the problem, like they would try and trigger the crap out of people, and all of their content was very, very intense, like they would talk very specifically about this is your problem. This is how you feel about it, and it’s not good. You need to change this, right? They spent a little bit of time on the solution, but they would constantly wrap back into what we call naked. To focused, right? Not so much anymore. Copywriters nowadays, as you said, are so conscious of this idea of like, I need to be careful not to trigger people. But that has caused a little bit of a negative shift in marketing, because now we refuse to talk about the problem. We almost get too soft with ourselves, which means nobody’s selling, which means all of the consumers are kind of bored and just kind of turned out, so it all kind of melds into each other. And so I think about this sometimes, in this respect of psychology applies to everything, first of all, and it’s also interesting to watch, because the herd, the whole group of humans on the planet, we all follow each other a little bit. And I’m not saying that, like, safety is incredibly important, especially mental safety, psychological safety, feeling safe in your body, safe who who you are. I think feeling accepted. These are all good things that came out of like that generation and that movement. But there are always side effects to random things like this, and in marketing, it’s just going to get worse and worse, because the Gen Zers are really intense about it, so it’s gonna be fascinating. What happens the next couple years?
Rob Marsh: Well, as you talk about this, you mentioned Liquid Death. Liquid Death seems to be like perfectly fit into a reaction to that, right? I remember when I first saw Liquid Death, or within a few months of its launch, I saw a marketer who I really respected talking about how this was an awful brand, toxic masculinity, all of this stuff. And I remember thinking, Wait a second, there’s actually something really smart happening here. Now, obviously there, you know, the heavy metal branding and the name Liquid Death or whatever like, they’re obviously going for a reaction, but it’s, but it’s the fact that all of soda pop branding has been happy, family, pop music, whatever, it opens up this opportunity for literally water to be the bad guy, right? And by bad guy, I don’t mean the evil person. It’s that bad boy image, the James Dean riding in on its motorcycle type image, right?
Sarah Levinger: Yeah,yeah. Well, this hits on some trends culturally that are really interesting, because Liquid Death probably would not have been able to do what they did in the 80s, right? Because the 80s group did not care literally at all about anarchy or becoming some sort of a misfit or rebelliousness, because they already were, like, there was a whole bunch of people who did not feel stifled in that mostly because a lot of the boomer generation in the 80s already had, like, a good handle on we’re different. We’re already different from our parents. We’re going to start to push our voices out into the world. They became kind of their own group of movement makers in the 80s. That’s what the Boomers were. Now you fast forward to today’s day and age. A lot of millennials and Gen Xers in particular, feel very stifled, like, again, because they’re starting to hear these cultural messages of, like, be careful, don’t hurt anybody. Like, just like, all the time. If you feel that, if you feel stifled in yourself, you’re going to resonate with products that are like, No, we’re going to get loud and we’re going to be weird and it’s going to be whatever we feel it needs to be. So the interesting part is, again, global emotion is really interesting, because you have a group of people that feel this, you bring a product in that solves that need to feel okay with being rebellious, and people will grab it immediately. And you could spot these patterns, but it takes a minute.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, clearly, it takes a lot of work and a lot of research. So, you know, beyond like going into the spreadsheet and, you know, coding everything for emotions, or having a tool like ChatGPT do it. What else are you doing in your business at Tether to spot what’s coming or where the opportunities are? How are you helping clients see that? How do you see that the rest of the industry or the other competitors are here, and that’s why there’s this really good opening for you over here?
Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I run something called the Tether BPE. Everything I have is an acronym, which is not on purpose. That’s just kind of how it happened. The Tether BPE is a brand personality engine. And this was a giant prompt that I read through chat. It starts with doing that kind of, like, deep research about the whole industry, whatever industry we’re studying at the time, all the way back to, I’ll take it back to the 60s, if I have to, like, what was happening in, like beverages in the 60s, so I can understand the history of where we came from. This entire prompt is basically built to help me understand historically what happened throughout the generations and throughout the decades. Where do we sit currently, and what’s the market gap, and predictively, what’s probably going to happen next, mostly so that I can kind of identify, can we see, is there a trend that’s similar to what happened to liquid death? Now they didn’t know that they identified a trend. They just went with what they were going with, mostly because, like, they’re genius, but also because that was part of him, and he noticed a giant people, giant group of people, that were being underserved. That’s what I’m trying to spot with the BP is what’s being on. Deserve that people are craving heavily. So the bbe was kind of born on its own, like off to the side, and then I added to it after reading the Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’ve read that book.
Rob Marsh: I love everything by Clayton Christensen. He was brilliant, and one of my favorite thinkers ever.
Sarah Levinger: Yeah, I can’t get enough of his work, because I’m just like, oh, my God, that one blew my mind. It was such a dry, technical read, but I had to, like, really stick with it. But the underlying tones of what he was studying are so clear that in market, in industries, especially when you’re helping brands businesses grow, and your job as a copywriter or a graphic designer or somebody who’s like, fronting the load of the operational work. Your job is almost always going to be told to you as go get a sale, but that’s not at all what your role is. The people on the on like the ground floor of the business, our job is to spot patterns quicker than they can spot it at the top, because we’re closest to the customers. So in that particular book, they were talking about the standards industry and how it morphed, and all kinds of crazy things that happened. The people that were at the top of the industries had a very difficult time noticing that the customer bases started wanting smaller, faster, quicker, not necessarily more like more capacity. With this, they just wanted smaller, faster, quicker. So there were a couple companies like scandals or, you know, later it was Sandisk was able to come in and undercut some of these massive brands, because it was like, we’re solving a problem for one teeny, tiny customer group. But the customer group is growing. It’s not really that, like demand is really growing. There’s just more of them kind of coming into the circle. So what I do with the BPE is I’m trying to understand historically what has happened, so that I can kind of track the growth of things, but then predictively, I want to see if we can identify some trends that are coming out of the BPE, like the bottles on the table. And then can we track what the whole industry is saying so that we can kind of put our brands right in the right spot to hit at just the right time. Now, that’s difficult, and I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but it’d be interesting to see if we could do it, because it’s happened in every industry across history.
Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, as a real simple example of that is the history of soda pop. You see this happening about every five to six years. There’s a new trend, right, like so, you know, in the 60s and 70s, there was the uncola and Mountain Dew, and then you get things like Snapple and the teas that come along. And the interesting thing is, the soda pop industry is always being disrupted this way, but either Coke or Pepsi comes along and they buy up the company in order to preserve their space. And we, I mean we literally, I think two weeks ago, Pepsi just bought Poppi, or one of the nutritional soda pop brands, right? That’s kind of the latest, the latest thing happening in soda pop. And before that, you know, Liquid Death and water and energy drinks and like you sort of see this happening. And I guess my point here is, if you can figure out how to do that for your clients, this is the kind of superpower that I mean it doesn’t just like, it creates literally 100 million dollar industries. So, how do we do more of that?
Sarah Levinger: Yes, I think chat is making it a whole lot easier for people who would like to stay at home mom in Colorado to sit in her office and be like, what’s happening with the consumers. Get curious. Get curious if you see something specifically, if you see an outlier, stop tracking things that are normal. I don’t care what the consumers are doing. I also don’t really care what the competitors are doing all that much. If it’s normal, if the consumers are acting normal today, cool. Just keep it going. If somebody comes in that door that says something wild to me, that’s like, that has never been attributed to our product. Why would you think that? Like, what is that? Pay attention to it, get curious about it, because at the end of the day, if you see more people coming in saying that same thing, or even if you see something that’s like, I don’t know, one person said this and the other person said that, and they’re kind of related, keep track of it, because trends change slowly, right? And consumers do things very quietly, but they’re always telling you what they want constantly, because they’re voting with their dollars. So you could see it everywhere. And I tell people, track your sister industries too, like track the ones that you don’t think you’re related to, but you definitely are. For instance, in one of the brands that I was looking for, they sell these really cool little flasks, right? They were just gorgeous, beautiful things. They’re 100% attached to the alcohol industry because of what goes in the plow. However, they’re also attached to body positivity. I can’t talk body positivity is one of the industries they’re attached to, specifically because if the millennials stop drinking, they go under so you have to track, you’ve got to look at the entirety of the ecosystem. And this is why you know the study of economics exists. You got to track the whole thing. And I know it sounds intense, and it’s like, oh my God, how would I start that? The best place that you can start, I think, is with chat. Though. This is where I’m like, it’s a second brain. Just use it as a way to go look for things that you can’t book for on your own. It’s got deep research. Now it’s incredibly well versed. I’m pretty sure one of these, one of these models here, was just passing the training test I was reading.
There’s like, about that a week or so ago, yeah, where it’s like, oh my god, the models are outscoring the humans in the Turing test, and people are identifying the model as the human.
So use the tools that you have. I would not use it to produce again. I try really hard to default to I think humans still should be writing and producing for humans. But I would go and look at what what’s connected to you. Take your industry, plug it in. Just say, what do you see? What’s out there? What’s the history of this? Learn, learn, learn. Just act like a historian. But the more that you know, the more that you can kind of see out into the future to tell what’s happening next. Rob Marsh: This feels like a place where you know, we should mention that niching actually becomes part of your superpower, too. So there’s, you know, this conversation in the marketing world, should you niche? Should you not niche? And there are good reasons on both sides to do one or the other. But if you niche, you have a much better ability to spot this kind of thing as it comes up, because you’re familiar with the industry. You’re not just jumping from one project or one client to another.
Sarah Levinger: Oh, 100% I have that issue right now because I’m so solidly connected D to C. There for a minute this year, I was trying to decide, do I want to move to B to B? Do I want to see if I can open up SAS or like service based or consulting. The toughest part about it is I know too much about DTC, so it’s way too easy for me to come over here and just be like, these are my people, and I know a lot about them, and I can help and serve them, but it could be a blind spot for me and for Tether. If we continuously go down the path of our normal customer, we’re going to miss outliers that might be a better customer type. So, and not to say that, I’ll leave you to see I’ll probably be here forever, but in general, this happens in every business. So this is why it pays to look. It pays to pay attention.
Rob Marsh: The flip side of niching is that you’ve missed the exposure that’s happening in those other industries, and you can’t bring new ideas from those industries into it. So maybe the answer here is that you need one person who’s focused and niched, and you need a team member next to you who’s paying attention to everything else.
Sarah Levinger: Yep, yep, yep. That’s why people hire Sarah. Usually they’re like, go out there and find us and stuff, and then we’ll stay close to our customers. So now we have Beth to both room. Yeah, yep. I think that’s probably the best way to do it.
Rob Marsh: So we haven’t really even talked much about, like, specific psychological tactics or things that you know you’re paying attention to, or that you’re doing with ads and advising your clients to do. But do you have like, just a top two or three tactics? You’re like, okay, these are my go tos. I’m gonna start here. I’m gonna try this stuff first, because I know it’s a good place.
Sarah Levinger: This is not copywriting related, but rounded buttons tend to produce better clicks, better conversion than sharp ones do, which I find really interesting. They’ve done a lot of studies around that and that, that one in particular has to do with sharp things feel a little unsafe to the mind. Now, I’ve seen a couple of studies that have gone the opposite direction with this, that talk about the fact that it depends on the product. If you have a tool or something utilitarian, rounded corners don’t do anything at all for conversion rates on button, interesting. So if I’m selling an ax or something dangerous, I might want a square, right? Something with sharp edges?
Okay, so second one… I saw it here that was really, really interesting study I read talked about the fact that italics, italics and ads in particular, tend to increase engagement, where people like, like it and share it and do all kinds of stuff. Like, if the text is slanted, now they they specifically said over slanted, but typically italic says, like, I don’t know, it’s like eight to 10 degrees, not that much, right? Yeah, they were talking about like 30 to 33% like, really slanted text, for some reason that does really well. And they said it happens not just on ads, but landing pages and emails everywhere. So without…
Rob Marsh: Would you do it in with, like, small blocks, or like, the entire piece of copy, like, in a Facebook ad, you’ve got that introduced the introductory block, or whatever you want, that whole thing slanted.
Sarah Levinger: From what I read, I’m pretty sure it’s just headlines like, don’t do the whole thing. Slanted, yes, but headlines, as long as they’re short, like, I don’t know, and that was probably the third study I read, was sweet spot for headlines on advertising in particular, at least, is four to eight words long, interesting. Tapped at eight, yeah, they seem to lose effectiveness at over eight words. So and again, I. I only know studies that pertain to pay to advertise, because that’s what I’ve been to. But for the slant, it’s interesting. If they’re short headlines, make the whole headline slanted, but then your subhead, your body copy, all the rest of it, just keep it a normal, normal font. So weird stuff. Humans are really sensitive to a longer,
strange thing.
Rob Marsh: I think maybe part of this goes back to just standing out, just being different, right? Because every other headline is straight or slightly italicized, right? So something’s different that triggers our innate sense that I need to pay attention to this, because, again, it might be dangerous, it might be food, it might be an opportunity for connection, right?
Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the lesson here is, try lots of stuff. Try lots of different stuff, be different from everyone else. Yes, the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to, awesome.
Rob Marsh: This has been fascinating for me. I wish I had another hour, because I think we could just keep going and going. But Sarah, you have a newsletter, if people want to get on your newsletter and follow you, where should they go?
Sarah Levinger: You can actually go to tetherinsight.io. That’s probably the only place to get access to it right now. I feel really bad. I should probably update my email. I get so deep in the weeds on my own business, I’m like, I should really work on that this week. But yeah, so sign up for that. I usually do brand breakdowns in particular. So if you’re looking for studies of brands that have used psychology in the past and how they used it to grow or get more customers or cut costs, that’s usually the first half of it. The next section on that newsletter is most interesting to me. They’re Tether signals. So all of the little insights that we pulled out today from all the brands that I work with. I’m providing those inside that newsletter. So if you want to get access to like a random trend that nobody sees yet, they’re going to be inside that.
Rob Marsh: And then you also write a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter, and so we’ll link to to your accounts there, so people can follow. And before we start recording, you mentioned you might be launching a community here, or by the time this goes live, have launched a community. Tell me a little bit about that.
Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I’ve been asked to do this for years and years, and I just haven’t had time to do it. But I’m finally going to do it this year. I have a community that’s going to be starting up specifically around consumers, consumption, behavior, psychology, identity, and in particular, we’re going to be studying not just d to c, but basically any customer type, anybody that you want to bring into your ecosystems. How do you use psychology to get them in the door faster and cheaper? And primarily, I think this community, it’s going to be good, because I want to start talking to the people who are studying the consumers the most. So I’m hoping to bring in a lot of people from the large scale universities, large scale market research firms, people who know and understand consumers really well. So we can start to talk to them a little bit about what they’re seeing as well. But primarily we’re going to do brand breakdowns basically once a week, so you can submit your brand, or if you want to come in and submit your service, whatever it is, and I’ll take a look at it, and then we’ll talk about here’s all the psychology things you need to put in place. Here’s the way you need to shift emotionally to bring people in. And then I got lots of resources, tons of courses and trainings and things around learning psychology specifically for marketers.
Rob Marsh: So I’ll link to those in the show notes as well.
Thanks to Sarah for walking through her research and analysis process, how she uses—and doesn’t use—A.I., and we can all get better at spotting changes in trends before they happen. If you’re not already on Sarah’s newsletter, you definitely should be. She write about her research and shares case studies about how she’s applying the strategies and frameworks we talked about on this episode. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making this stuff work and Sarah is one of the best.
I’ve linked to her site in the show notes as well as her brand new community if you’re interested in finding out more about that as well.
And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.
That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.
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