Brand voice is one of the “popular” ways to niche or differentiate yourself in the crowded world of copywriting. But what is it really? And how do you do it? We wanted to go deeper than the typical discussion on brand voice, so we asked the expert on the topic, Justin Blackman to join us for the 411th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. And we think you’re going to like what he shared about it as well as writing brand manifestos and achieving mastery. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Stuff to check out:
Join the Manifesto Maker program hereBrand Voice Academy
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Full Transcript:
Rob Marsh: One of the niches that I commonly hear a lot of copywriters talk about focusing on is brand voice. Often they don’t use those words. Sometimes they say things like they help clients tell their story or that they help you sound like you. Or maybe it’s something like they help bring out your personality or capture the words that resonate with your best customers. All of those are ways of saying pretty much the same thing, brand voice. But while many writers talk about doing this brand voice thing, not many talk about how you do it. In talking about brand voice, I wanted to go a little bit deeper than the typical things that you might read in a blog post about brand voice or things that you might’ve even heard on podcasts like this one before. So that’s what this episode is all about.
Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club, and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I interviewed copywriter and brand voice expert, Justin Blackman. We’ve actually had Justin on the podcast before, several times in fact, and we’ve even talked about brand voice with him before, but I wanted to go a little bit deeper this time to go beyond the typical frameworks and see what it really takes to identify your own brand voice or the brand voice of your clients. And I think you’re gonna like our discussion, so stay tuned.
But before we jump in with Justin, you’ve heard me talk about The Copywriter Underground over and over and over. And I’m just going to remind you that the Underground is our community for copywriters who are actively investing in their businesses and in their writing skills. It includes monthly group coaching where we talk about the sticky challenges and problems that copywriters face in their business. It includes this massive library of training. There’s more than 30 different templates. It’s all focused on helping you grow your skills and get better at things like finding clients, conducting prospecting calls, writing hooks and leads, creating frameworks and processes for getting things done, and so much more. And each month we bring you a different business-focused training to help you grow your skills and grow your business. The next scheduled training is in a couple of weeks.
If you’re listening to this, when the podcast releases, it’s all about marketing on social media in a way that doesn’t disappear in just a few seconds, a few minutes, or even a day or two. Like what happens to your posts on Twitter. Instagram, even LinkedIn. That’s going to be with Heather Farris, who was a guest on our podcast a couple of weeks ago. We’ve asked Heather to customize what she’s going to share so that it’s really applicable to copywriters and content writers. And I think you’re going to like what she will be teaching us this, uh, this in a couple of weeks in September.
And then in October, we’re going to have last week’s guest, Kennedy, come back and talk about creating the perfect lead magnet. If you listened to his episode last week, you’re definitely going to want to join us for this training. So you’re not just adding people to your list, but you’re actually attracting people who buy and need the solutions that you have for the challenges that they face. That’s just the next two guest trainings. We’ll keep adding more and more to The Copywriter Underground, but the thing is they’re for members only. So to get these behind the scenes secrets, you’ve got to join. And you know, you can do that at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. Do it today. So you can be there for these upcoming business changing trainings.
And with that, let’s go to our interview with Justin.
Justin Blackman, welcome back to the podcast. Before we hit record, I think I mentioned this is like your fifth or sixth appearance. You have been on the podcast more than anyone besides Kira and myself.
Justin Blackman: That’s pretty cool, man. It’s always fun being here. It’s one of my favorite podcasts to listen to. And I can’t say I’ve listened to every episode, but it’s close.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, well, I appreciate that. It’s nice to have one listener. When my mom passed away, I lost my dedicated listener. It’s nice to have you there as my, my other mom, Justin. So you’ve been here more than anyone else, I think. And, that’s probably because you have been part of the copywriter club almost from day one. You know, you were part of the first accelerator group. You were part of the think tank we put together. You were part of the free Facebook group. I think within the first couple hundred members, if I’m not mistaken, like it’s been a long time.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you guys have been there for me since day one. So, you guys came first. You guys literally helped me build my career and gave me the confidence and success. And more importantly, the platform and the structure to build my business. Cause I had tried before I actually had launched a business once before that in the course of six months made a total of $500. And that wasn’t great. But then after going in-house for a while, when I had the opportunity to go out, I was like, I need to not make the same mistakes I made before. And that’s where you guys came in and gave me the structure that I needed to do everything and become who I am.
Rob Marsh: So for those people who maybe aren’t like you and haven’t listened to every single episode or almost every single episode, and maybe haven’t heard your story before, Catch us up a little bit on that. You just told us some of the very basics of you getting started. We don’t have to go in depth because like I said, they can go back and listen to some of the previous episodes. But yeah, where did you come from and how did you… Basically, you’ve become one of the leading brand voice people. I would say guy. You’re maybe the only guy doing brand voice. There are a couple of women out there really pushing it as well, but you’re one of the leaders talking brand voice. So, how did you get there?
Justin Blackman: Yeah, so my original background was in sports marketing and field marketing. I worked for Red Bull, Puma, 5-Hour Energy, and I was doing a lot of consumer marketing, consumer messaging, literally getting out there with the people speaking to tens of thousands of people. Then I tried to transition to creating my own business that created the messaging for the sampling programs. And that’s the one that failed miserably. I just didn’t know how to run a business. I wound up working in house for a gigantic hotel conglomerate IHG, where I was working. I became a copywriter and I was writing for 14 different brands at the same time. So every message I created had to be adjusted and altered and changed. And I got pretty good at doing it intuitively, but my work kept getting watered down by all the stakeholders who had an opinion, I don’t like this word, I don’t like that word. And it just really, really frustrated me. And I didn’t really know how to, how to change that. And it was actually at the first TCC IRL with Abbey Woodcock, where she taught me the brand voice framework of vocabulary, tone and cadence, which I then used to really stand up for my work and define it. And more importantly, redefine what each brand voice was. And that changed the game. And I was able to deliver better work. I was able to be confident in it, stand up for it, defend it. And then the work got better. And the results were better. The conversions improved. And I got more confident with it. I got a great opportunity after the headline project, which you guys helped me with, where I’d written 100 headlines every day for 100 days. resulting in a swipe file of 10,211 headlines. And that kind of grew my name as a freelancer. So I wasn’t just in-house, I was starting to build up something on the side. that got big enough where I was able to leave. And I then wrote for an agency with Facebook ads. And they had a ridiculous amount of clients.
Rob Marsh: And ofcourse that was an ad sweatshop—you were the guy you were the guy sweating.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. They had this really unique style. It was kind of the direct response, short, choppy, one line paragraphs over and over, and it was long-form copy. And it looked kind of broken and weird, but knowing brand voice and knowing the vocabulary tone and cadence framework, I came in and I did a test project for them. And they said afterward, I was the first person in seven years ever to nail the test project on the first shot. And it was because of the brand voice. And I grew that. And over the course of two years, I think I wrote 329 ads. And it was all brand voice. I thought I was getting good at Facebook ads, but it was really making me really good at voice. When that ended, I started talking more about my process more. And that was actually at the Think Tank. It was the first time that I ever talked about being able to nail voice. And I remember I just sort of was in a hot seat. I actually just the words brand ventriloquist just sort of fell out of my mouth. And I was like, oh, all right. That’s interesting. Ears perked up. So I leaned into that and kind of labeled myself as the brand ventriloquist, the guy who is able to throw people’s voice into different pieces of copy and kind of leaned into it. And then. leaned into brand voice guides, partnered with Abby Woodcock, eventually wound up taking over what was Codex Persona and now is Brand Voice Academy. And now I teach copywriters how to emulate corporate voices, brand voices, and create brand voice guides.
Rob Marsh: So I definitely want to pull some of that voice magic out of you. But before we get into some of those specifics, you talked about working at the hotel brand and having people suck the life out of your copy. And I think that’s the reality for a lot of in-house copywriters, maybe even some agency copywriters, although hopefully agencies really understand that they’re trying to shine, but it happens a lot in-house. What advice do you have for that copywriter, that content writer who is doing their best to add, I don’t know, some pizazz, whatever you want to call it, razzle dazzle. and they keep getting hit with, nope, we’re oatmeal. We’re oatmeal. Don’t even add brown sugar. It’s plain here. Jack, what’s your advice for them?
Justin Blackman: Well, I’ll tell you, early on, I made a lot of mistakes. I tried to make the copy too fun, too punchy. And there were times that I was able to get some of that in. And the copy actually did work. But I got my wrist slapped. And they’re like, don’t do that. That’s off. That’s off brand. And the ego in me was like, I don’t care, it worked. And I kind of like doubled down on it. And then I was like, told you need to pull back. Like I was, I was kind of upsetting some people. And I can see now I was wrong to try to interject too much style, too much pizzazz, too much razzle dazzle into the copy. Because that was off voice. What I learned with time and experience was to sort of respect the boundaries of the brand voice and learn where the confinements were and work within those boundaries, really just embrace the constraints. And that made me a stronger writer. The challenge that I had was not being able to defend my work, even when it was good. It would just be people coming in like, well, I don’t like that word. And maybe they didn’t know that that word showed up a lot in voice of customer surveys. And it was just, they had an opinion about it and they didn’t want to, their opinion wasn’t wrong. It was right for them, but it wasn’t right for the brand. And, um, Basically, what I really needed was a way to defend my work that didn’t offend the person I was going up against. And it was owning my authority and my expertise, but doing it respectfully. Not saying this is my opinion, but this is what BrandVoice is, and this actually fits, here’s why. That’s what changed the game. You need to be able to stand up for yourself, but there are certain people, especially if you’re dealing with CEOs and vice presidents, if they want something a certain way, you’ve got to know what to back off and just be like, okay, you know what? My job is to make you happy and keep my job. So there’s a balance there.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think, and this is a hard thing, especially if you’ve been hired as a junior copywriter or if you’re new to this, to push back when appropriate or to let go of that ego. That can be hard. It’s a huge challenge. So going along with that then, you’ve sort of answered this next question a little bit, but what are the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to brand voice, whether it’s their own brand voice or writing for a client? Give us the top three things that people are doing wrong.
Justin Blackman: Sure. The first thing is trying to do too much. It’s understanding that brand voice is not the same as brand personality. Sometimes people say, oh, I’ll use Mailchimp for an example, because that’s just the go-to example. It’s what everyone talks about. Everyone’s like, Mailchimp is so fun and so punchy, and we want to write like them. And they are fun and punchy. That’s their personality. If you look at their copy, it’s relatively straightforward. It’s pretty basic. It’s basically how to blank. And it’s not interesting. It’s just straightforward. What’s fun is their imagery and their visuals. The entire personality also includes the design, the logos, the colors. They have that monkey, Freddy. Freddy is fun. The copy is not. So one of the biggest mistakes is copywriters try to do too much with the words when it’s actually the personality and the supporting elements of the personality that really do the heavy lifting. Like even another one that comes up all the time is Liquid Death, the canned water. Their copy is as straightforward as it gets. Like their homepage, the last time I looked at it, the headline is relax, it’s just water. And it’s the imagery that has all this gore and goop and fun elements to it. But the copy isn’t scary. It’s not dirty. It’s actually there to create a safe understanding and ease the concern of the people that are on the site.
Rob Marsh: That actually reminds me of a technique, an ad technique. I think I saw Lewis Faulkner, I think that’s how you say his name, writing about this recently where if you basically match straight with crazy or weird with normal. And so if the visual is crazy, weird, really eye-catching, attention-getting, the copy almost needs to be straight. And if the visual is really simple, plain, it’s not necessarily, it’s just normal, then the copy’s got to be kind of outrageous in order to catch your attention. If you do too much of both, It becomes outrageous. It becomes way too crazy and people just ignore it. And if you don’t do either, of course it gets totally ignored because it never catches attention.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. I mean, I hate to say this as a copywriter, but a lot of the best ads I’ve ever seen don’t even have words.
Rob Marsh: Or have two words or three words. Yeah.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. So sometimes you need to understand what the job of the copy is compared to the rest of the piece. And then the other common mistake is trying to inject your own voice into it. As copywriters, we often get hired because people like our style, our sites. And then we think it’s our job to write in our style for everything. But then you do that, and the client’s like, well, that doesn’t sound like me. And you’re like, well, no, it sounds like me. I thought you hired me because you liked my style. They’re like, well, yeah, I want you, but different. I want you, but me. And understanding what to change and what that actually means and getting very specific. So before the first mistake is going too broad with a copy. The second mistake is not getting granular enough with understanding um, what exactly the person means when they say something’s off or what, it doesn’t sound like me and being able to really pinpoint exactly what it is. That’s off. It’s the vocabulary, the tone or the cadence is going to be one of those three things, but understanding specifically what that means to, uh, to get really down into the details and super nuanced with it.
Rob Marsh: Okay. So let’s talk about how to do that because this is a challenge. It’s certainly a challenge for me. I tend to write in a, you know, I don’t even know what to call it. The Rob voice. Let’s call it the Rob voice. And that’s my starting point when writing for clients is that, you know, I’ll sit down, I’ll write a sales page or I’ll write emails and it’s still in the Rob voice. So what are some things that I can do? I know you teach on this, and so we’ll share some of your programs as well. So if people want to go really, really deep, they can. But what are some of those things that I can start to do where it’s no longer the Rob voice, but it’s the client voice?
Justin Blackman: So one of the easiest things to do is understand what the cadence is, and that’s the sentence length. It’s the comma use, the periods, really just the grammar and punctuation to things. Because I wrote all those super short and choppy Facebook ads, that ingrained into my style. I write short. I write choppy. I use way more periods than commas. Not everybody does that. The average sentence in English is about 15 words. It’s actually getting a little bit shorter due to text messages and just mobile use and things like that. But historically, well, actually I say historically, but over the last hundred years, it’s been about 15 words per sentence. You go back 200 years, it was about 30 words per sentence. So our writing is getting shorter, but as copywriters, we’re taught to write tight and write concise. Most non-copywriters, or normies, will write more traditionally. Understanding that as copywriters we write shorter than most people is kind of ground zero for identifying voice. I just wrote for a productivity expert whose average sentence is 22 words long. For me and for most people listening, if you’re copywriters, it’s probably painful to write a 22 word sentence. It literally feels wrong. Like you’re like, no, I can’t do this. It goes against everything that we’re taught. But my job wasn’t to fix his style. My job was to emulate his style. So wherever I ended a sentence, I would have to change the period to a comma and string together two sentences, knowing that my average sentence is eight to 11 words. So two of my sentences is one of his understanding that difference is painful as it was to do. And it literally like make me cringe. And it made me anxious to write in that style. That was, that was the first step in getting his voice. And he had said that for years, copywriters kept trying to write it shorter. And he’s like, stop doing that.
Rob Marsh: And so what are some tools that you use to identify that kind of thing? Because again, when I’m doing research, I’m looking at client experiences. I’m diving into the product. I’m not always taking the client’s previous marketing and doing a deep dive and saying, how do they write? maybe even that isn’t always going to be correct because other copywriters have been messing with the, you know, tone, cadence, vocabulary already. And so if I’m looking at past us, how do you find that?
Justin Blackman: Well, the first step is really just to ask them.
Rob Marsh: And we have a beginning copywriting lesson, ask.
Justin Blackman: We ask for a very specific list of content that they have, and it’s your favorite emails, things that you’ve written, because we really want to put blinders on to be sure that we’re looking at the right content, and not something that’s been sitting on the blog for two years that they didn’t like or they didn’t write, and using that as our foundation. So we really do have a very specific list, and that’s something that we teach in Red Voice Academy about. We call it the kernel content, and that’s content that popped. So like a popcorn seed, it’s like, yeah, it’s the stuff that popped. It’s not, it’s different from pillar content or cornerstone content. It’s the stuff that resonated. It’s stuff that your audience loved. And that can go back to the beginning, but it’s the stuff that the client or brand feels really captured their voice. So we get very specific on that. And then I use verbatim, which is the tool that I created because it used to be that when I analyze things, I would have Hemingway, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Gender Analyzers, all types of different tools open. And I would have literally dozens of browser tabs open, but I would have it on on Mozilla, I would have it on Safari, I would have it on Chrome, I would have it on Edge, because I needed to see everything in multiple different places and multiple pieces of content. And then I actually worked with a developer and a designer and a coder to come up with my own platform where I could do this all in one place. And that’s VerbatimTool.com. So Verbatim allows you to put two pieces of copy in side by side and compare them as far as the vocabulary tone and cadence and get their core ingredients and see how the voice is matching up so you can identify the patterns quickly.
Rob Marsh: Okay, so basically I get the pattern. I’ve identified that. I know I need to write longer or maybe I need to write shorter depending on who it is. That seems like a first step, but also not enough. You know, if I’m just writing Rob voice, but I’m taking out the comma and I’m jamming two sentences together, you’re still getting Rob voice, but it’s long Rob, right? Instead of client voice. So what’s step two?
Justin Blackman: So there’s also the vocabulary, understanding the level of words that we use. Again, copywriters were typically taught to not use jargon, right at a grade five to seven grade level. your client probably doesn’t know that those are the rules. So they might be using utilize rather than use.
Rob Marsh: They might be saying, um, that is my least favorite word in the English language utilize. And it’s one of those that just, yeah, every time I see it, I can’t stand it. It feels unnecessary. Yeah. And it’s a techie, it’s a techie word. And people like speaking one-to-one, you don’t say, Hey, utilize the hose to water the garden. Right. It’s just one of those words that, but I, again, I know it has its uses somewhere. I just, that’s my least favorite word. You nailed it.
Justin Blackman: But even that it’s that it carries a level of authority to it. saying utilize versus use. There’s nine different voice types that we recommend, and the extreme opposites are translator, making the complex simple, and then there’s the voice of God, which is written with extreme authority, high grade level, high readability level, more written like a textbook. And that carries power to it. It carries weight we’re very often told to strip it down and make it so simple that an eight-year-old can understand it. But if you’re writing to a higher-level audience, there’s two schools of thought. One, you want to make it simple and respect their time, so it’s easy. But if you make it too simple, that higher-level authority, that higher-level executive might not respect you. They might not understand that you’re smart enough to talk to them. So sometimes you want to use bigger words. and it can carry weight, it can carry authority, it can give the difference between guides and gurus. You know, gurus sometimes have that more, like listen to Confucius or Buddha, there’s confusion in the words that make you think. Sometimes you actually want to do that depending on the voice. It feels wrong to do that as a copywriter, but most of the clients that we’re writing for aren’t copywriters.
Rob Marsh: When it comes to vocabulary, the advice to not use jargon has always been one that really bothers me because jargon is maybe the easiest way to signal to your niche or to an industry that you actually understand the things that they’re dealing with or the processes, the materials that are really part of that industry. So doctors have code words and lawyers have code words. And, you know, every industry has their own way of talking about things. And one of the things that signals that you don’t know what you’re talking about is when you misuse those words or when you don’t use the right word, don’t use the jargon when jargon is called for. And so that, yeah, this is one of those places where, I mean, it’s copywriting, copywriter advice, but it also maybe kind of comes from that, you know, high school education, you know, don’t write jargon in your essay kind of stuff that has leaked into what we do. Of course, don’t use jargon if it makes you sound cliche or whatever, but sometimes you do want to use the jargon. So you say, Hey, I get you.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. Yeah. It shows that you belong for sure.
Rob Marsh: Okay. So we’ve, we’ve talked a little bit about sentence length vocabulary. Now we have tone.
Justin Blackman: Yeah, tone is the emotion in your writing. And this is something that for the last couple of months, I’ve been going on a little whirlwind of a ride. Because there’s one of the best ways to define tone You can actually use an emotion wheel, and you can Google them, look under Google images for emotion wheel. There are tons of them out there, and I absolutely love it. It’s a way to get very specific. It’s not just saying we feel happy, we feel sad, we feel fear, because we can talk about joy. Joy can be jubilant and elated and boisterous, or it can also mean content. And there’s a very big difference between those two. It can feel satisfied. It can be gratified. When someone says we feel happy, what does that mean? Is it serene and calm, or is it bouncing off the walls? So there’s so many different levels of what these mean, and they’re all a little subjective. It’s easy to think that there’s an objective definition of, actually, I’ll tell you the word that sent me down the rabbit hole was modest. Like, as a guy, modest to me meant humble. It just meant kind of simple, you know, non boisterous, just, just there. It turns out that a lot of females and I’m going to use binary terms here, just for ease of convenience. A lot of females have a strong reaction to the word modest. It has a weight to it, a negative connotation about like they had to dress modest. They had to be modest. They couldn’t stand out and it feels constricting to them.
Rob Marsh: A lot of this comes out of purity culture.
Justin Blackman: Yes. Yeah. So there’s, there’s that. And every time I actually go through a list of about 110 tone words with specific clients and hearing their responses and reactions to words will show you that everybody defines these words differently. And one of the things that you need to do as a writer is set aside your own ego to understand how they define the words and understand what you use to also mean that. You’re looking for the synonyms. But it gets very, very specific. and understanding that when it comes to emotion, there really is no objective answer. There’s your truth and my truth. I don’t think that there is actually the truth when it comes to tone. It’s just sort of understanding what the difference is and knowing how to match your tones to match someone else’s.
Rob Marsh: So as I put all of this stuff together, maybe I need to be writing longer. Maybe I need to be including a few words that my client uses over and over. Maybe I see some of their key emotions that they use. They’re encouraging, perhaps. They’re never down. They’re never negative. Those kinds of things. How do I mean, I still feel like I’ve got three levers to pull, but I’m not sure I’ve got a machine here. Or at least I don’t know how to pull them in a way that starts moving things forward. So how do you do that? Like, how does it all come together?
Justin Blackman: Well, you still need to know what to write. The voice is how to write it. What you were talking about before about doing the research, the audience research, the client research to understand what it is, you still need to do that voice is just a filter. So Good copywriting rules will always lead the way. What voice does is it shows you what rules to follow and what rules to ignore. And also, you will find interesting patterns about phrases that you can reuse and levels of agitation that you want to reach. how to be supportive, how to change the tone in different channels, how you show up on social media versus the inbox versus the website versus the email. They’re all going to be slightly different. So everything that we’re taught as copywriters about the research and all that, that absolutely has to come in. You need to build your foundation as a copywriter first. So you still need to know what levers to pull. The voice analysis is really just the filters that you’re running through.
Rob Marsh: I imagine that you hear this a lot or you see it a lot from clients. Almost all copywriters see this. I want my brand to sound like, you mentioned MailChimp, or I want my brand to sound like Innocent Smoothies. This is another one here. A lot. Because they’re so unique. Or I want my brand to be like Nike. which is another very unique brand voice. When clients ask for that kind of stuff, how do you have the conversation that says, okay, I understand what you’re asking for, but you’re not Innocent Smoothies. You’re not Nike. You’re not MailChimp. What does that conversation sound like? And how do you get somebody to a place where they’re okay being not the thing that they want, but some
Justin Blackman: So what I usually do is start by figuring out what exactly it is that they like. If you want to be like Nike, okay, what is it that you like? Well, I love their brands. I love their ads. Okay, let’s look at an ad of theirs. There’s three words on here. There’s just do it. Let’s look at the overall picture. It’s a black and white photograph of an athlete in action, or if it’s a commercial, it’s almost got no, no, well, they’ve got two different fronts. One, there’s, there’s like no music. Sometimes it’s just someone running and you hear their breathing. So it’s, it’s sort of the, the moment brought to life. Other times they are manifestos. There’s the new one with the, do you hate me? I think one of the last Olympic ones.
Rob Marsh: Yeah. And that was, I think a lot of people loved it and others like, you know, were like, wow, wait a second. This is a little different. Right. Like it set a few people off.
Justin Blackman: Yeah, and that was a manifesto. That was a bold public declaration of action. That’s designed, and I have a program about manifestos. Manifestos are both a banner to bring people to you and a bouncer to not let certain people in. That was a perfect example. Very intentional, yeah. Yeah, so there’s different levels of that. But even just looking at a just do it ad versus that, you can show that to the client and be like, hey, here’s two different levels. They’re both the same voice. What do you like about this? And maybe they like the words. Okay, that’s very basic words. It’s very, it’s dramatic language. It’s punchy. It’s, it’s guttural. If they like that, that’s going to steer your vocabulary. The, the tones in that are usually optimistic, a little fiery, a little passionate. So there are elements like that, but then you can also bring them to like a checkout page of Nike and looking at the shoes. And it’s going to be pretty basic. about like, none of that passion is going to be there be like, Okay, here’s, here’s their ad, here’s their checkout page. What do you like about these? And maybe they realize, Oh, actually, you know what, I think I like what they’re selling more than I like the way that they’re selling it. Yeah. And sometimes they realize they don’t want to be that. And they’re like, Okay, cool. But now I have a good starting place. So Yeah. Same thing with Apple. Like you look at the simplicity of their homepages, but then if you go into their checkout pages, they are highly complex. That’s the voice of God. They’re talking about, like, if you read the tech specs, they’re using stuff that even most computer guys have no idea what they mean. And it’s Apple saying, we know stuff that you don’t just trust us. It’s good. So there’s a lot of different ways in there. You need to get very specific about what it is that they like.
Rob Marsh: You mentioned manifestos, and it might be worth spending a minute or two talking about this. Not all brands are manifesto brands, but there are some that stand out to me as I think about it. Obviously, Apple’s manifesto, here’s to the crazy ones. maybe the best example of that at all of all brands, but there are others. Oatly feels to me like a manifesto brand, you know, where they’re in your face about what they are and what they aren’t. Do you need like an actual written manifesto to be a manifesto brand? Or how does that show up? And if I thought, hey, I actually want to be, I want to manifest, I want to stand for that kind of thing. How do I develop that? And by the way, in asking this question, I understand you’ve got a course on this is like days long, right? I’m asking for a three minute answer, you know, or whatever. But yeah, give us the basics.
Justin Blackman: No, see, there’s actually, here’s something that I feel qualified to talk about, but I know my limits. And there are certain parts about it, I don’t feel qualified to talk about. I know a little bit about manifestos, because I wrote one for myself, I wrote one for brand voice Academy. And it’s based off the phrase mastery matters here. And it was about the depth of my work, and it happened when I got fired up over seeing a few statements that just, for lack of a better word, it triggered me. It made me mad. It pissed me off. Most manifestos come from a place of anger. Not all of them, but the fiery ones, the ones that make you just pump your fist and go, hell yeah, they have an enemy. a manifesto declares what that enemy is, even the JFK, sending a man to the moon. We don’t, we do this because it is hard. Like, it’s a manifesto against easy. It’s, it’s embracing a challenge. It’s stepping up, it’s being, it’s being better than the rest. It’s not taking the easy way out. It’s, it’s a challenge. My courses are long, my courses are days long. I don’t want to make a simple course. For me, brand voice is so intricate and granular that it can’t be taught well in an hour. I teach, I have 30 minute classes about like the basics of it. For me, what fired me up was people thinking that they’re an expert after they see that 30 minute class. And I’m like, I’ve been studying this for years. And it wasn’t until this year or last year that I actually called myself an expert. And that was about two years after other people started calling me an expert. I’ve humbly accepted the title. But to answer your question about, do all brands need one? No, they don’t. For me, I don’t really know how to write a corporate manifesto because it would have to go through revisions and approval and legal and things like that. I don’t want to do that. I teach people how to write their own manifesto so they understand what they stand for, what they fight for, so they can plant the flag on a hill that they will defend until their dying breath, and understand what their true passions and motivations are. If you’re selling fidget spinners on Amazon, you don’t need a manifesto. If you have a true corporate.
Rob Marsh: I’m imagining a manifesto for a fidget spinner. Now we stand against boredom and those moments when scrolling through your phone is just too much effort. You know, I don’t even know what, what, uh, what that manifesto would look like.
Justin Blackman: We spin to win. We will not be taken down.
Rob Marsh: Yeah. Okay. Sorry.
Justin Blackman: Not everyone needs it. If you’re just sort of selling stuff. That’s. You don’t need it. If you’re brought out because you want to do something better because of some injustice in the world or in the industry, then you might want to look into a manifesto. I think that’s kind of the pillar of a manifesto. Is there some type of injustice that you are fighting against?
Rob Marsh: It seems like there’s a risk here as well. I mean, already we know brand voice needs to repel as well as attract, and manifestos, I think, do this really well. But in doing that, depending on what you say in your manifesto, you could very easily push away a large part of an audience that you may not want to push away. Uh, I, it’s not the kind of thing that I would take lightly where you just sit down and maybe you feel about very strongly about something politically and you, you know, like I gotta make this part of my, my manifesto. You know, Michael Jordan was really famous for, you know, when he was asked, you know, well, why don’t you, uh, you know, talk more about politics? You know, why don’t you stand up for your political beliefs? And he said, you know, Republicans buy shoes too. And so he’s obviously very aware of, you know, the kind of product he’s selling, you know, needs to have broad appeal. Not all products are like that. And sometimes it’s okay to infuse those kinds of beliefs in it. But like, there’s some real risk here.
Justin Blackman: Yeah, there are ways of creating a more open manifesto. I don’t remember exactly where these terms come from. And I wish I could attribute them properly. Please know I didn’t come up with these terms. There are no manifestos and yes manifestos. Here’s what we’re against. Those are usually the strong, feisty, angry ones. And the yes ones are more the optimistic, hopeful, a little more flowery. To me, they’re not quite as strong. Those are the ones that are way less polarizing and are very often found in a more corporate setting. We believe, at so and so we believe. Most of them start like that and they’re kind of garbage. Usually if I read an about page and it starts with at X we believe Y, I don’t even continue reading past that. But it is a little bit more accepted.
Rob Marsh: I think, yeah, maybe a good example of the yes manifesto, Johnson & Johnson is famous for having their core beliefs that when the whole Tylenol fiasco happened back in the 80s, became their rallying cry and basically saved that brand. But it wasn’t the kind, I mean, it drove their daily behavior within the business, but it’s not the kind of thing anybody noticed until it became a critical thing for the business. And in fact, maybe even wasn’t noticed until somebody at Harvard put it into a business case study that now, you know, everybody studies at business school. So, yeah, it feels like a yes manifesto is never going to be. I mean, anger, fear, those we already know. These are the motivating things that get you taking action and people react to. far more than, you know, we stand for everything good.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s basically a problem agitate solution. So my brand manifesto starts with shallowness is not welcome here. The end line is mastery matters here. That’s my real manifesto. But I start with a barrier. I start with a problem, shallowness. Just the people who aren’t necessarily qualified to teach who are teaching. that became an enemy to me because I built my stuff only after years of true intense research and being confident in what I, in what I, what I found. And that’s not a knock. I mean, it kind of is a knock at some of the basic level courses, but some people need those level courses. Um, so. It’s okay to have the basic level course. I don’t want to dissuade people from that, but I want to draw a clear line in the sand that brand voice Academy is deeper. It’s not a $39 program. It’s not basic information. It goes deep, because to me, that’s what matters. That’s what made the difference in my career. And the people that I teach, that’s what makes a difference in their career. So my manifesto is based on defending the depth that I go into, and it’s going way further into brand voice and down the rabbit hole than most people ever should, to the point where you can’t even come back the way you came, and you have to come out differently. It’s about that transformation. So to me, my fight was against simplicity and embracing the complexity of it.
Rob Marsh: And before we stop talking about this, I think I should mention, you know, the only risk here isn’t necessarily political. I didn’t mean to say, you know, always avoid the political, you know, in a brand like Oatly, for example, you know, you can risk offending people who, I mean, they do, you know, it’s obviously a very natural brand, almost vegan or vegetarian in their approach. I’m not sure if it’s a vegan product or not, but Obviously, it’s not just, hey, a particular political party risk, but rather there’s all these deeply held beliefs that people have about, should I eat meat? Or how do I treat my neighbor? All of those kinds of things that come into this. So, I want to clarify that in case somebody was like, well, of course, politics. I don’t like that particular candidate.
Justin Blackman: Yeah, I think everybody knows you enough. You’ve got enough trust with the audience. I don’t think you needed to do that, but I’m sure it’s appreciated.
Rob Marsh: Who knows? Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about this mastery thing because you have spent years diving into brand voice, vocabulary, tone. You’ve created your own frameworks around this as you’ve thought about it. You’ve created ways to teach it to other people in various ways. I’ve mentioned this several different times and mastery is kind of one of my foundational principles as well. I love, you know, I think, Hey, I want to learn more about strategy. And I, you know, six books later, you know, I, I am starting to uncover the fact that I know very little about, you know, this thing I want to master. This is a challenge. Mastery is really, I mean, basically it’s a lifelong challenge for anybody who wants to do something in particular. So how do you think about mastery and adding to your skillset?
Justin Blackman: Well, it’s funny because if you had asked me this question in my twenties, I remember reading something that says, if you read six books on a topic, you’re considered an expert.
Rob Marsh: Yeah. Or five books. Yeah. I’ve heard the same thing. Yeah.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. And I used to feel like an expert and I was like, Oh, I know everything there is to know about marketing. Cause I read, I’ve read six books. I’ve read seven books. I’m above that.
Rob Marsh: Way more than that. Yeah.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. And that’s, that’s just the, the tippy tippy top of the Dun and Kruger curve. Um, You need to go down that and realize that six books doesn’t mean that you’ve actually done anything. I had read six books, but I never did any marketing. I never created an ad. And I felt like an expert. And I didn’t know anything. I only knew what other people put in their books. I didn’t know what they knew. I hadn’t done what they did. And I had this ego about me, this confidence that, oh, I can do what they do. No, I can’t. it wasn’t until I started doing the things that I realized how hard just about everything is. It’s like, look, I can, I remember watching a video about like how to do a Rubik’s cube and I couldn’t figure it out. And I’m like, oh, you know what? But I know the pattern. So I know how to solve it. And then like, you see people solve it in 10 seconds. Like, oh, I can’t do what they do just because I watched this video, but there’s this, there’s this, and I think it happens more and more with, with the shortened videos, and I don’t want to say shortened attention span, because it’s not that, but it’s like the TikTok videos where you learn something, you watch something, you think that you know how to do it. It’s not the case. By spending more and more time, I realized that I get, and I had this strong reaction, this frustration to seeing people either teach about voice or really just anything that I had done, be like, oh, I know how to do that. And I’m like, no, you don’t. You think you know how to do that, or maybe you know the basics of it. Maybe you know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean you can do it. Like I can watch a pitcher throw a hundred mile an hour fastball and be like, Oh, I, I see what he did there. I can’t do it. It’s, it’s feeling that awareness is the same as knowledge and, um, or as wisdom, you know, wisdom versus knowledge, uh, the experience. I, I think the older I got, the more. I realized how important the things that I’ve done throughout my life have become more powerful and more impactful and just taught me different things that by hearing other people who haven’t done those things say that they know how to, it felt disrespectful to me. And it brought up this really strong emotion that I didn’t quite know what to do with. And I spoke to my therapist about this. I spoke to mindset coaches with Linda Perry, Brian McCarthy, just lots of people who who helped me figure out what it was. And it was even with AI, like, oh, AI can do copywriting. We all have this, I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this has this emotion of like, no, it can’t. It can, but it can’t do it as well as we can. But by accepting that it can do copywriting, it sort of invalidates all the time and effort that we’ve put into this. And the reason why a lot of us fight this is because we don’t want to believe that it can, because it devalues everything that we’ve done. And I really had to do a lot of soul searching to figure out why I got so viscerally responsive to some of this stuff to understand and begin to respect the amount of work that goes into being really, really good at something. The deep work, the ego death, you know, if you’re listening to Cal Newport or Ryan Holiday, just understanding what it means to finally realize that there’s so much more beneath the surface and beneath the beneath, and the deeper you go, the more there is, and it’s never going to stop. And mastery is the constant pursuit of it, rather than just saying, hey, I’m pretty good at something. I’m going to stop here and call myself a master.
Rob Marsh: This is a really interesting thing to think about. And I Like I said, I’m really into the concept of mastery and like trying to master various things, but I’m not sure that I’ve thought about it in the same way. So I want to reflect back a little bit of what you’re saying and see if I can clarify this from my own mind. So one of the things that has bugged me is when I see somebody jump into copywriting the first time and after six months or a year, they launched their own course. And, you know, this is how I, you know, made my success in business and whatever. And that’s always bugging me because I’m like, what can you possibly know in six months or in a year? But, and probably 95% of the time, I think that that reaction is completely valid and they don’t know. But I can think of two or three examples of people who got into it very quickly. They had success very early and they have gone on to be incredibly successful and did that exact thing. And I have to step back and say, they’ve got something, whatever that it factor is that allowed them to achieve a level of mastery that maybe took me 10 years or longer to achieve. And in some way they achieved maybe not exactly what I have, but something similar or something different, but equal that has, has given them, you know, the, the success that they’ve had. Uh, and, and, you know, hearing you say that actually bothers, yeah, that it still bothers me. And yet I still look at a few of them and think they’re doing something pretty amazing and it’s worth trying to figure out why or how.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s really interesting to do it. And that’s sometimes where the ego death comes in. Yeah, to realize that someone else doing something well, isn’t competition to you. There’s, it’s just different paths that we’re going down. There definitely are some people who, you know, you can kind of say shouldn’t be doing that. And it’s okay.
Rob Marsh: There’s a lot. I mean, it’s more than a few. There are a lot. But you know, there are some that are worth paying attention to.
Justin Blackman: There are some, but we all need to start somewhere. Maybe if you look forward in 10 years, maybe these people are true masters of the craft. And maybe they are going to keep getting deeper. This is just their phase one. But it’s understanding why you care about it and what the underlying reasons are. That’s where the therapy and the mindset stuff come in. I know Linda Perry’s got the suitcase exercise about what you’re carrying with you and bringing forward. all of those things, you figure out what your personal values are, and they’re way deeper than you think. I’ve done a lot of soul searching on this stuff, months and months. But even that, compared to other people who have done years, I can’t say that I’m an expert on this stuff. I’ve learned what I’m really good at, and I’m going to keep doing that, and I get more specific, and I get more focused. And all the other noise and all that other stuff, the deeper you go, it begins to fade away. And you just get, I don’t even notice the other courses anymore. And one of the things that helped when I truly made it my goal to become an expert, to become a master, is I don’t have to buy other courses anymore. Unless I know that what’s being offered is specifically going to help me reach the next level of what I am trying to To become as a brand voice expert as a teacher as a master as just someone better and more focused. I don’t have to buy anything else. I bought a total of one course this year. I think 25% of my expenses this year by not buying courses or general coaching. I’ve worked with very specific people for very specific goals, and when that’s done, that’s done. So I feel freer. I feel more focused. The times when I feel a little bit more burnt out in my job, which still happens every now and again, is because I’ve took on stuff that doesn’t align with the goal that I’m trying to achieve, and it just sort of floods me. Going deeper and understanding that drive and what the emotions are, it just makes you such a more dialed-in person. I become happier, I become more focused, I become more free, I become more content. It just feels easier and I have one pursuit and everything else just sort of falls into place.
Rob Marsh: Tell me if you’ve seen something in your own experience with this that’s similar to mine. So as I think about this process in my own life, you know, as a copywriter and a content creator, I started out studying a lot of copywriting books, taking copywriting courses, you know, all of that kind of thing. But at some point, you know, by the fifth or sixth book, like, you know, we refer back to you, you are, you have reached some level of expertise that might not be, it might not be wisdom, or it might not be mastery, because you maybe you haven’t done everything, but you do have this level of knowledge. Then you, in order to continue to grow, obviously practice and doing the thing is a number one. Like if you’re not doing that, you’ve got to be putting it into practice. But to expand that level of knowledge, it’s no longer, Hey, I need to write, I need to read the sixth copywriting book or take another course on copywriting. But now I need to step into something similar and I need to learn more about say emotions or more about how persuasion works or more about like sales theory or different approaches to problem solving and those kinds of things, which are, I mean, in one way of looking at it, have nothing to do with copywriting. But in order to really become a master of copywriting, you’ve got to grab these other bubbles that sort of surround it. Is your experience the same? And I guess the real question here is, now that you’re an expert in brand voice, and I will call you the expert so you don’t have to, how do you expand that knowledge? What is the next thing that you are looking at to learn in order to grow that bubble?
Justin Blackman: It’s gross to say, but emotion. Like I’ve always been more of a straightforward, just like, Hey, here are the rules play with this. But it was, it was that whole modest thing that really kicked off the understanding the objective or subjective definitions around emotion and what drives people. And as I’m writing, working with some of the higher level, uh, industry experts on brand voice, understanding their internal drives and how it’s coming out. it’s, it’s a deeper conversation with them. It’s, it’s a little therapeutic. I’m not going to call it therapy because I have tremendous respect for therapists who understand this stuff way more than I do. But understanding an event that, that is kind of a catalyst to everything that they’re doing and understanding a lot of that. I know Parris Lempropoulos has talked a lot about this stuff. Some of the internal drives personal stories that he shared. the stuff that’s happening within the brain, within the soul, within the heart, that peppers into the brand voice in some way everywhere. And understanding how that can come across and whether it comes out, whether it’s healing or whether it’s holding on to some identity or protecting something. Going into brand voice is currently sending me on this this deeper path of philosophy and just theology and just sort of understanding what and how different people interpret actions as good and as personal. And it’s a place I did not expect to go, but it’s making my writer stronger.
Rob Marsh: I think theology, philosophy, that kind of stuff, there’s obvious connections in the copy, sales, all of that. So it feels like really open fields to explore in order to expand that level of knowledge. When we were talking about emotion earlier, you mentioned just briefly going through tone words with clients. So you have a list of tone words. Talk about that process just a little bit, because this is something I’ve not ever considered doing with a client that maybe I should be doing in order to be a better writer. What is that?
Justin Blackman: What do you do there? Yeah, so it’s something that I teach in Brand Voice Visionary. It’s not a process I do with everyone. If you’re just hired to write a five-part welcome sequence for someone, you don’t need to do this. But if you’re working deep with a client and
Rob Marsh: Or maybe you’re an in-house copywriter and want to get this right. So you’re writing all the time, right? Yeah.
Justin Blackman: Yeah. And when I’m writing for personal brands, if I’m creating a voice guide for them, now my voice guides aren’t three pages, it’s not three adjectives and an avatar. The one I just did, it was 78 pages plus an index of 40 pages. So it was well over a hundred pages by the time we were done. If you’re just writing a five part welcome sequence, you don’t need that. But for people that have a lot of content and have years of content that they need to train writers quickly and get them on board, I do these sessions where we start out with about 100, I think there’s 111, 112 words, and we whittle them down and we place them into different boxes of yes, no, maybe. And then ultimately you get it down to a top four to nine words that uh, with the, the brand voice Academy, with the framework we have and the nine voice types, we can identify what the primary voice type is. That’s the end result. But the really important stuff is when people have their top four to nine and they’re important, but not essential. And there’s also like the heck, no category understanding when people like they’ll see a word and like, it might be, uh, cheery and they might be, Oh, heck no. Like never cheery. But then I’ve also got the word cheerful and they may put that in maybe. It’d be like, well, why heck no to cheery, but why maybe to cheerful? And their rationale and their explanation of the way that they’re interpreting things is eye-opening. So it’s not so much about where the words end up as it is the discussions that happen during this process and hearing, because you’re going to have certain opinions, like you’re going to like some words that they’re going to say no to. And you’re going to feel like, you’re going to feel it inside. You’re going to feel attacked. You’re like, oh, I love that word. They don’t like that. That’s where the ego death comes in, like setting that aside and just saying, Oh, that’s an interesting choice. And then letting them talk and they’ll tell stories and they’ll elaborate on certain things. Or maybe I didn’t like this word because I had a teacher in college that used that word. And I didn’t like that teacher. It just, it tells stories and you learn so much more about the person or the client or the brand. And more importantly, it teaches the person about themselves and it brings up all of these different things that sets them on different paths and clear paths and moves them forward. I’ve had people create different programs after this exercise. I’ve had people drop certain programs after this exercise. It just brings this enlightenment to both the writer and to the person going through the exercise that is deeper than most writers will ever go.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s much deeper than I’ve thought. I mean, when it comes to specific language, I suppose it even pulls in some of that emotion that’s connected to those words deeper than I’ve thought about going, but an interesting exercise that I may have to adopt. We’re almost out of time, Justin. What is next for you? What are you working on and excited about coming up in the next few months?
Justin Blackman: It’s really more of the same. Because I’ve gotten more focused, I’m not looking to create new programs. I’m actually streamlining what I have and everything’s becoming more focused. Primarily, my main passion these days is helping copywriters understand brand voice. Brandvoice Academy, write like anyone, voice guide creator, Brandvoice Visionary. We did create Manifesto Maker. And that’s not to teach copywriters how to do it for clients. That’s to help copywriters write their own manifesto to truly understand what fires them up. So all things Brandvoice. And then I do create some Brandvoice guides for clients. I’m very selective with who I work for these days. It has to be that deeper, more involved level. But that’s it. It’s Brandvoice, Brandvoice, and Brandvoice.
Rob Marsh: Someday I’ll be that client who needs the 140 page BrandVoice guide and we’ll sit down and you can, I know you’ve actually analyzed some of the stuff that we’ve written in the past as well, a few years and taken a look, but yeah, someday we’ll go even deeper on that. But yeah, we’ll definitely check you out at BrandVoice Academy. Thanks, Justin.
Thanks again to Justin for taking the time to go so deep on brand voice and manifestos and mastery. As we were talking about emotions and the importance of emotions when it comes to tone, I wanted to break into that moment and tell you about our how to write emotional copy masterclass, but I didn’t do that because I thought our conversation was, it wasn’t really the time to break in, but I definitely I want to mention that now before we go.
As Justin said, Tone is all about emotion. And while everyone seems to talk about how you need to write emotional copy in order to connect with your readers, the way that most so-called experts tell you to write emotional copy really doesn’t work. What they usually say is that you need to use emotional words, words like angry or scared or fearful, to trigger those emotions. And you just pepper them into your copy. But that just doesn’t work.
Peppering so-called emotional words is not how you develop emotion. That’s not how you communicate the things that you need to communicate in order to get an emotional response from your clients. Instead, you need to uncover both your prospect’s dominant emotion and the transformative emotions and motivators that get them to take action, and you communicate those with stories. That’s the stuff that we cover in the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass. And there are a bunch of valuable bonus extras that help you basically use the process that we teach in your own business. We even show you how to use AI so that you can do it all faster. It’s definitely worth checking out. You can learn more at thecopyrighterclub.com/emotion.
One more thing that I want to point out before we go, I appreciate that Justin said that all of this work on Brandvoice goes on top of your regular research. It’s basically the spice that makes your final recipe different, but it doesn’t replace the main ingredients that you are already putting into the recipe. You still have to research your customer, research your offer, understand what the competition is doing. All of that stuff is worth spending time and effort on. And then you add what we were talking about today to create this recipe that’s really unique for your clients.
Let me make one last mention of those workshops that are coming up to The Copywriter Underground on how to do social media marketing that lasts longer than a few minutes or a day or two, and creating lead magnets that bring buyers to your doorstep. Those workshops share the kind of knowledge that’s really hard to come by if you’re in the, I’ll just Google it to find my answer world. Shortcut your learning curve and get the results faster when you join The Copywriter Underground at thecopyrighterclub.com/tcu.
