How can marketers help startup brands write a complete set of brand copy?

In August 2019, I took on a project in which I tried to use relatively mature logic to help a new brand build its brand foundation in the "early establishment" stage. Today's article is a practical assignment of mine. Hope it helps you.

1. Write copy for a new brand

In August, a friend's company approached me and wanted me to participate in the early brand building work of their new brand. The company is an eye care company, and its new product is an eye patch product named "Mushubao". There are also many competing products on the market, among which the more famous ones are old brands such as Zhenshiming, Good Vision, and Renhe Shanliang.

In the following article, I will share how I worked step by step when I received this project. The entire copywriting process, excluding design and photography, took a total of three weeks. After deconstruction and negotiation, this task included three parts of copywriting:

From the perspective of the importance and coordination of copywriting, brand copywriting is the most important. The style of brand copywriting also coordinates the style and tone of the entire brand, and even provides a series of associative content support for subsequent scene copywriting and product copywriting.

So when I first received this project, I spent three days doing research. I once wrote an article specifically about this. When we need to quickly understand a category and product, one of the quickest ways is to go through the product details pages of well-known brands in that category.

This step is more than just saving the web page and browsing it once. My habit is:

First, restore the brand's entire webpage from images to text modules to understand the logic.

The second step is to make a horizontal comparison. Restore the selling points that the operation itself wants to express from the details page. Discover the strengths and weaknesses of each brand.

In other words, this process is to help us understand each brand, understand product information, and find problems at the same time. What exactly are the other party's advantages? This will help us determine how to express our own advantages and how to present them in a better way than the other party.

From this we can get a lot of information, among which the following "Summary of Optimizable Problems" is the first part.

The second part of the information we can get is that we can use the pages of excellent merchants in the same industry as a basis to quickly build the logical framework of our own product details page. The principle we follow here is that if others have it, we must also have it. Of course, what others have not fully explained or explained poorly is our opportunity.

The third part of the information we can obtain through the investigation is that we have a better understanding of this product. The most valuable parts are:

1. Some ways to play with the product in the future

For example, for eye patches, the currently available flavors are very single. But from the product side, we can add more flavors in the future to give users more choices.

2. Product usage scenarios

How does a simple product demonstrate its usage scenarios? This involves our observation of consumers' overall behavior and insights into their original intentions.

2. Write the "Scene Poster Copy"

In the above, we have discovered a lot of information by collecting product details pages of industry competitors and breaking down their logic.

Next, we will focus on how to break down the user usage scenarios from the perspective of "scenario copywriting".

Many friends may ask, why don’t you write from the brand copywriting perspective first when it is obviously the most important? And why, after you have researched the product details page, you don’t write the copy for the product details page first?

In fact, the logic is this:

1. Brand copywriting is the shortest, but also the most important, and it takes the longest time to collect information and digest it. Therefore, we need to sort them backwards first, so that we can buy more time to understand the categories and the advantages of the products and our own brands.

2. The copywriting of the product details page is indeed the simplest. After we have understood the common page logic in the industry through investigation, we can leave the simplest part to be completed last. In addition, the content of this part, whether it is the style of the copy or the elements that appear on the page, will only be clearer after we think clearly about the tone of the brand.

3. Everything depends on people. Through communication with Party A and observation and understanding of users, we will also have a clearer understanding and planning of the brand. But why do we need to write copy about "scenes"? In fact, it is to create a deeper emotional connection with our consumers and users. Making the other party feel that we value and care about the users themselves is our original intention in writing a series of "scenario copywriting".

So when I started writing "scene copy". The following is the ideation process.

Through investigation, we sorted out some small principles that "scenario copywriting" needs to follow.

If we observe further, we will find out. In the usage scenario of the eye patch product. We can dig deeper into users and user behaviors. That is, the person who buys the eye patch and the person who uses the eye patch are often not the same person. Because our eye patches are for the whole family, we found that those who often buy eye patches for family members are likely to be female members. For example, mom.

So we can split the users and user usage scenarios into two parts in this link. As shown in the figure, they are the buyer (giver) and the user (gift recipient). For the gift giver, our focus is on her original intention of giving the gift, that is, her concern for the other person. As for the recipient of the gift, we are concerned about the user's feelings before and after using the eye patch.

From my personal experience, I felt a little sleepy and my eyelids were tired before applying the eye patch, but after about 20 minutes of applying the eye patch, I took it off and felt clear-headed and my eyes were moist and cool.

And thirdly, we also hope to find a breakthrough in both the "emotional gift" and "user experience" aspects of this product, so that we can have the opportunity to create a spiritual and self-expression interest point for the brand.

From my personal understanding of brands, I very much hope that the brands I am involved in will be able to stand on par with world-class brands in the future. World-class brands are often able to establish deeper connections with users on the emotional and spiritual levels. Of course not all brands need to have such a core. Not all startup brands need to have a tagline. After all, in the early stages of a brand’s life, when it is not well-known, no one will remember the brand’s tagline. However, being unimportant and not existing are two different things. As marketers, we should clearly know what the brand needs and whether these contents will resonate with consumers.

For example, in brand copywriting, I attach great importance to the tagline, which, to put it simply, is just a slogan. This slogan can be a spiritual message or a summary of the brand’s most advantageous aspects. But this sentence, in a broader sense, is the source of content production for the entire brand. Because it contains many of the high hopes and visuals we have for the brand. It condenses many elements such as the brand's tone, texture, emotion and blessings to users. So when we came to design this content for a new brand, I really wanted to find such a perspective, and a sentence.

Back to the scene copy part. Through the pictures, we know that we can write scene poster copy from the two perspectives of "giving" and "using". So for the sake of example, here is the picture below. I split the entire scene poster copy. The poster can reflect the interaction between two people, and even if you want to add the user experience, you can add it in the poster.

Based on my own writing habits, I have a method that when I am creative, I often have the habit of "shrinking the poison circle" . I will first list the many limitations and principles of copywriting. The more columns there are, the smaller the shrinkage.

Many people will ask, aren’t most creative ideas expressed in a “radiating outward” way? This involves everyone's habits. In fact, for me, the above investigation process is a process of spreading outward. And when I need to actually write, I am constantly expanding and contracting. "Diverge within the framework" can improve my own efficiency in writing copy. Even such a method helps me to accumulate knowledge and facilitate subsequent output and sharing.

In a sense, these principles are both restrictions and expectations. I hope that the copy I write will meet the above standards. So before I actually started writing, I first built a framework for writing the poster copy so that I knew what I should write about this poster.

As shown in the picture, what I need to write are these few groups of content. There are dialogue copy, summary copy, and theme copy for the entire poster.

So I officially started writing the copy, and the following set of poster copy came out. From a creative perspective, I hope to be able to use the perspective of a heroine to connect how a girl grows into a woman, and what scenes in the process will allow her to go from being taken care of to learning to take care of others.

The entire growth history is the life journey of almost all girls. I looked for some typical scenes to use as the setting and incorporated interactions between family and friends into them. That became our set of posters.

3. Write “Brand Copy”

After I finished writing this set of scenario copywriting, I began to have a deeper understanding of this brand. I started trying to organize the brand copy simultaneously.

So here is the first draft:

First, I tried to figure out why people need to buy eye patches. Start from the perspective of motivation and user experience.

Similar to the “poison circle shrinking” way of thinking mentioned above, I also hope to gradually narrow down the content of this sentence and some of its characteristics through principles and templates. The elements in the picture above are some of the characteristics I have sorted out that I hope this sentence has.

As we mentioned above, this sentence does not necessarily have to be at the spiritual level, it may also be at the product level. So I started from the user experience and looked for more concrete copywriting that could describe the user experience. But obviously, I rejected many ideas during the writing process.

After listing the purchase logic, the copywriting features, and then the usage experience, I began to have some inspiration. For example, the following are my interim thinking conclusions from the two perspectives of usage experience and usage scenarios. They are "sudden enlightenment" and "inspiration time" respectively.

But this is obviously still unsatisfactory. After all, as I said before, although this sentence itself is very short, it carries heavy meaning and content, and even tests our understanding of the brand and products, and understanding takes time.

When we have a preliminary idea but are not satisfied with it, my method is to leave it here and do other things first. My subconscious mind will help us find this sentence. This is the only way to be creative.

Although this sentence has not come out yet, I have had new thoughts on my understanding of the brand in this new week. For example, we have new thoughts on the colors in the brand VI, the texture that the brand wants to convey to users, and even the specific pictures.

So in the third week, after the investigation and analysis in the first week and the emotional copywriting in the second week, I began to have a new understanding of the brand. Following my usual "poison circle shrinking copywriting method", I started a new round of "brand copywriting":

I try to discuss this issue in the form of "Question & Answer".

Let me answer from the simplest to the most complex, what is the value of Mushubao to users.

We know that the value of a brand to users is often reflected in these three specific interest points. They are functional benefit points, emotional benefit points and self-expression benefit points. The interest point of self-expression is closely related to the spiritual connection copywriting I hope to find.

Last time we mentioned an idea called "inspiration time". This idea can actually serve as one of the content sources for the brand on social media in the future. Since we know that the main effect of eye patches is to "refresh the mind", from my personal point of view, I don't want users to just rest and sleep while wearing the eye patches. I hope that users can use this time of blindfolding their eyes to think deeply and digest some copywriting, so that new inspiration can be generated when they take off the eye patches.

Of course, I know that users who have such ideas do not account for a large proportion of the total number of users. But remember, one of the original intentions of writing this sentence was to find creative content sources for the brand's subsequent communication and marketing. Therefore, the logic of this "reminder glasses" is a little idea that we hope some users can remember when using it in the future.

OK, start the “poison circle contraction”.

For example, after thinking about the above, I came to my new conclusion:

Then, well, the very ordinary version above is actually a joke. After all, the copywriting is similar to the copywriting that Zhihu has used before. But the direction is correct.

So, after the joke, I gave my answer.

If we compare the series of principles and standards we listed in the "toxic circle shrinking" link, we can find that they are consistent. (Yes, I like sunflowers, okay?)

Even to help my friend (who is also Party A) to have a deeper understanding of this sentence. By the way, I wrote a whole set of copy to match this sentence. This set of copywriting can be used as the brand video copywriting for the film brand in the future.

By the way, through my understanding of the product, especially my experience of using it, I also listed some of the tones and colors used by the brand in my mind. As shown in the figure below, I have given Airbnb's picture as a reference for tonality.

To be honest, the pictures of Airbnb and Booking.com are really nice.

4. Organize the "sales logic" and prepare for sales copywriting

So far, we have presented the contents of the entire scenario copy and brand copy respectively. Next we start to tackle the sales part and fill in the details page. What is the position of the details page in e-commerce? In fact, it is a content that is closely related to the conversion rate of e-commerce.

We know that the conversion rate of e-commerce can be broken down into silent order rate and customer service consultation conversion rate. Only by combining these two can one be comparable to the role of a salesgirl at an offline counter.

Although the e-commerce details page lacks the offline experience, it is logically consistent with the role of the salesperson. The user's browsing process is the merchant's persuasion process. Therefore, the logic of persuasion is the logic of sales.

We begin by going back to the reasons why the entire product category was produced and discussing the issue.

As the times change, we have new problems at present. The following problems are new troubles caused by changes in work content.

To conclude, the core result of these problems is that we are all in a state of sub-health and pseudo-fatigue.

Since it is pseudo-fatigue, we have to see why it causes pseudo-fatigue, right?

Now that we have listed the problems, we have to find ways to solve them, right?

It can be seen that a lot of work needs to be done if we want to fundamentally improve this sub-health problem! But you must have heard of the "80/20 rule" that can be applied to everything.

The role of the 80/20 rule in the field of pseudo-fatigue is reflected in the fact that many problems can actually be alleviated by relieving eye fatigue.

We have given above a long-term solution to the problem of fatigue, so we are wondering, is there a short-term solution to fatigue?

Through investigation, it is found that there are indeed some solutions, and there is also a series of solutions to solve eye fatigue in the short term.

Since I’m selling eye patches, of course I have to list some of the advantages of eye patches, right? In fact, the most intuitive advantage is that it is cheap and effective in the short term, which makes it very cost-effective.

Now that the issue has been discussed in the entire category, the next step, of course, is to discuss how our products can stand out from the industry. Here I am just listing the logic for now and not discussing the pure content. In order to avoid suspicion of advertising, only the more general advantages are listed here.

Therefore, we have completed this task in stages. To review, our task is to write a set of brand copy, a set of scene & emotional poster copy, and a set of detail page copy. The content of the details page is quite long and trivial, so I won’t go into details here.

To sum up, we wrote the following set of copy in the above text. In fact, for brands, all copywriting is an iterative process of development and optimization. For example, the copy below is the same for me personally and the brand. It’s not a version that I’m completely satisfied with and would definitely use for a long time, but for a startup brand, it’s a version that can be used temporarily.

After all, for a startup brand, there are many more important things than copywriting. This includes establishing and opening up sales channels, optimizing cash flow, and continuously optimizing products, all of which are much more important than copywriting. But for those of us who work in marketing, unimportant does not mean unnecessary. Since we have accepted the project, of course we have to do our best. Only by giving your best every time writing the copy can this brand become more and more powerful in the future.

The focus of this article is actually on the writing logic of "brand copywriting" and a little trick for writing copywriting, which I call the "toxic circle shrinking" copywriting method. Hope it helps you. Copywriting itself is often very subjective, and the works here may not necessarily be the best solutions. But I believe the whole deductive logic will be of greater help to you.

Author: Summer Fox

Source: Summer Fox Marketing Disassembly Class (Sylar54)