“When I say turn them into customers, that’s more than just making a sale today.”

As CEO of StrategiCopy, Mike Connolly creates and manages direct response marketing systems for fast-growing businesses so they can attract their ideal customers, put an iron fence around them and develop an abundant “herd” of customers for life.

He has co-created and manages marketing systems using blogs, social networking sites, newsletters, e-letters, video networks, articles, multi-media follow-up systems, direct mail, teleseminars, webinars and affiliate marketing. He’s an experienced teacher, trainer, and coach and loves sharing his passion for magnetic attraction strategies with high achieving business owners and entrepreneurs.

StrategiCopy primarily serves small to medium-sized businesses. We help them attract the type of customer they’re really most interested in finding out in the world and get found. We help them actually turn the virtual strangers into customers.

Mike Connolly, CEO StrategiCopy, Helping Clients Attract & Close More Business

I’m talking with Mike Connolly. We’re at Impact Hub in Boulder. He’s the CEO and Founder of StrategiCopy. He creates and manages direct response marketing systems for fast growing businesses so they can attract their ideal customers, put an iron fence around them, and develop an abundant herd of customers for life. Mike, thanks for taking the time. 

Thanks for having me, Bob.

Let’s start out and talk a little bit about your business and who you serve. 

StrategiCopy primarily serves small to medium-sized businesses. What we help them do is attract the type of customer that they’re most interested in finding out in the world and get found. From that point, we help them turn virtual strangers into customers. When I say turn them into customers, that’s more than just making a sale today, although that’s critical and we are very focused on creating sales. Ultimately, the idea is we want to create a lifetime relationship with that ideal client. What we do for our customers is we help them find their ideal clients, attract them, and then turn them into lifelong customers for their businesses.

How do you do that? 

These days we have an incredible explosion of media. Media is just a way for people to relate to each other. I’m going to refer back to about 100 years ago just as a point in time. One of my mentors, Claude Hopkins, wrote a book called My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising. He wrote about how they successfully implemented marketing campaigns. Back then, it was very different than it is now. I want to talk about how they did it back then and compare it to how it is now because that will help us understand what it takes to be effective in today’s age with all of the media that we’ve got. We’ve got this explosion of media.

In Claude Hopkins’ day, how could you reach people? This was the turn of the century around the 1900s. You could send a letter out to people. You could put billboards up. We didn’t have radio, we didn’t have television, we didn’t have telephones even, let alone cell phones or smartphones. Social media and email wasn’t there. Those are all things that you did not have to work with. How did you succeed? I’ll share with you a story here about how Claude Hopkins succeeded for one of his clients as an example.

My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising

There was this little beer company called Schlitz and they had a problem in that they were about number five of all the beer manufacturers. Their product didn’t seem to be very different. Their challenge was why should people by Schlitz versus all of these other guys? Claude Hopkins went to their plant and looked at everything about it. He spent three days with their engineers and looked at every single thing about the plant. Then he came back and sat with the CEO of the company and he said, “This has been an amazing experience. I was especially impressed with the way that you guys have these rooms where the water run through over these glass panels and through all these pipes.” They clean their pipes three times a day. They drill for their wells hundreds of feet into the ground. They’re close to one of the Great Lakes, they could just take the water right out of the lake, but they want the purest water and all these things.

Claude said to the CEO, “Why aren’t you telling people what you do here?” The CEO said, “It’s what everybody else does.” Claude said, “But nobody else is talking about it.” That’s exactly what he did. He had a simple message that said, “The purest water.” He talked about the way that the company purified the water, purified their whole system, their bottles, and all of this stuff. Schlitz went from number five to number one or number two. The point being, you asked, “How do you do that?” How you do that is you’ve got all these media out there. The reality is the media is just a way for us to share stories with each other. The place you begin is you understand what it is that your company is doing that’s unique and who can most benefit from that.

Everybody’s pretty much familiar with USP. 

USP, Unique Selling Proposition. What is it that differentiates you from the rest of the market? Once you’re able to identify the pain point or something that you can do for the exact type of person that you want to work with, you tell that story about how you do that. You want to also not get so focused in your own business that you don’t understand it from their point of view. The key is to look at it from your customer’s point of view, like the way that Claude Hopkins did with Schlitz. They looked at it from the customer’s point of view. The customer didn’t know about all these things until they pointed it out.

Who’s your most important client and what is it that you’re solving for them?

For StrategiCopy, our most important client is a provider of information. We tend to attract customers who either along with their service or as the virtual core of their service provide information for people, information providers. An example is one of my clients helps lawn and landscape companies have more profitable businesses. What would you guess is the average profit margin for a lawn and landscape company in this country that’s doing $2 million or $3 million a year in revenues?

40% to 45%.

It’s 2.3%. I was shocked when I heard that. That’s according to the national association. If a company is doing about $2 million, that’s the figure. What he does is he says, “There is a way to be more profitable in your company. We’re going to get you up to double digits.” He shows them how to do that. A lot of what I do is working with clients directly, but they tend to be what I call information marketers in the sense that they’re providing information as a service to their clients in a way that this coach helps his clients who were lawn and landscape companies develop more of a profitable business.

What about the professional service provider, is that a market that you serve as well? 

It is indeed. An example is one of my clients. I have a client who’s a professional photographer. He realized pretty early on that although he had a passion for photography ever since he was a kid and he knew this was his thing and totally loved it, he had an early understanding that that wasn’t necessarily going to be a way to make a living. When he was in college, he sought out professors who could give not only the training that he needed to get a job in the real world but who would help him understand that he’d be a better photographer.

He was always finding ways of getting his photography in, at the same time he ended up taking on a job in a corporation that he had this scientific data role. He worked for a number of years in a company and photography was his side business. He was continually doing more and more photography and did a lot of sports events and got involved with politics. He’s in Washington, DC and was taking pictures of leaders there. He’s done Bush, Kerry, and all these others. He eventually realized that in his business as a photographer, doing pictures of babies and weddings and different gourmet foods or whatever, that wasn’t really where it was at.

By working with companies which harked back to his original thing, he understood what a corporate culture was like and that they needed photographers. We live in an age of social media. He now specializes in taking pictures for firms. He’ll do work with law firms, medical firms, stuff like that. Instead of doing a wedding, one gig for a whole day, he can go in and shoot 25, 40 head shots in a given company in a day. He’s got a very scalable business. We’re helping him grow from being a localized business there in Washington, DC to a national business.

He’s growing a network where he’s got contacts who will follow his protocols. He’s creating the systems that will create a service that works for the whole rest of the country. He takes his skills, his passion for photography and his ability to get incredible headshots and shares that with other people in other cities through the systems that he creates. The long and short of it is that’s just an example of a professional service provider that for some reason finds what I do for StrategiCopy as real beneficial.

Thinking about the discussion, my broad premise is there are misconceptions about copywriting and what you do and the benefits to companies. For one reason or another, many have had an advertising purveyor or whatever not turn out well. First off, what are the biggest misconceptions about copywriting and what you do that you run across?

Copywriting is a term that refers to creating a message and content that is primarily driven toward a direct response.

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I’ve given up at parties and networking events ever telling people, unless they know, what this term means. I’ve given up on saying, “I do copywriting or I’m a copywriter,” because generally the response is, “You mean like the little circle with a C thing? You’re doing legal documents.” Copywriting is a term that refers to creating a message and content that is primarily driven toward a direct response. In advertising, you’ve got spectrum of types of messaging that goes out in order to attract people to do business with your company. On one hand, you’ve got image and brand-driven type of advertising that goes on. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a message that asks for an order or ask for some response. It could just be a, “click immediately.” On the one hand, you’ve got the branding and the image-type advertising which is extremely difficult.

Be like Coca-Cola.

Chevy, and a lot of the ads that you see on the Super Bowl.

The direct would be like, “Do you want a copy of your family coat of arms? If so, click here.” That’s the individual direct response. You have both ends of, “Are you just trying to build a name or are you trying to get a sale?” 

You’ll have something that you can measure on the one hand and something that’s extremely difficult to measure on the other hand. If you sold 300 coats of arms this week, you know that the message was effective; if you tell people Coke is the one.

Did your sales go up?

How do I know? That million dollars I spent for that app, did that do any good?

If you’re a business person with a budget of X and you spend on some campaign, you would like to think your revenue is greater than X. For a lot of folks, they spend X and have no idea whether X comes in or is measurable, or was it because of this or because of something else? For guys out there in the business community, my personal bias is that copywriting and this whole process is underappreciated and misunderstood, what value that it can bring to the table with clear measurable deliverables. With that, let’s go into some case studies. You’re kind enough to provide many of these. Fort Lauderdale Airport is one or you can pick what you would like.

I love the example that you pulled up. This is a real life example of the difference that a word can make. I came from a conference of direct response copywriters that’s provided by American Writers and Artists, Inc.

What is AWAI? 

They are an information company that trains and provide support for both direct response copywriters and marketers. That conference took place in Delray Beach, Florida. I was on my way out to the airport. I walked out of the hotel lobby and saw a super shuttle there. I said to the driver, “Are you going to the airport?.” I may have said, “Are you going to the Fort Lauderdale airport?” I don’t remember at this point, but there was a little bit of a language thing going on and he said, “Yeah. Hop in.” I said, “How much is it?” He said, “It’s $27,” whatever it was. He took me to the airport. I got out of the super shuttle and he drove off and I realized I’m at the Palm Beach Airport. What a difference a word can make.

As another example of that, one of my mentors, Dan Kennedy, tells a story of an ad for a music service. It’s a piano lesson type service that came out years ago. The headline for the ad was “Put Music in Your Life.” In the process of sending out one of their mailings, a typo occurred in the mailing. All of a sudden, they noticed a 600% increase in their sales from this typo. Miraculously and fortunately for them, it increased sales. It was one letter that was wrong in this headline. “Put Music in Your Life” was what it was supposed to be. What would you guess made the difference?

I have no idea.

They put an S at the end of “put,” “Puts Music in Your Life.” The psychology of the thing is so different. “Put Music in Your Life,” if you think about it, that sounds like work. It’s like I’ve got to do that. That’s what your prospect is thinking. On the other hand, “Puts Music in Your Life” paints a whole different picture. We communicate through words, but those words create pictures in our minds. To get back to the question here of the case study, the Fort Lauderdale Airport is an example of what a difference a word can make. Not a business case per se, but that’s the type of thing that getting your content right, getting your message right can make a huge difference.

Let’s say that I’m one of your business clients. I come in with a particular problem. I have this, I’d like it to be discovered. I think I have good problem like all of you do. It’s that people don’t know you’re there, and so let me help them find you. Is there a case study that you can talk down that road? 

I did a webinar for Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is a sales and marketing software primarily for small businesses. It helps small businesses get their sales and marketing done more easily. It frees up the owners to be able to have a little bit more time and yet increase their sales. This is a way that you can partner with a company to get found. I’m going to give you an example of how my company was able to do this as a case study.

A lot of people at Infusionsoft know me as a direct response copywriter. They know that that’s something that can help their customers and people who are interested in buying that software. One of the ways that they have found to be extremely effective in attracting customers is by creating valuable content that answers questions that their customers have. They’ve created a center or what they call a learning center on Infusionsoft’s website. If you go to Learn.Infusionsoft.com, you can explore topics on how to get found, how to convert customers, how to automate your business, all these things related to their software, but also solving problems for their clientele.

StrategiCopy: One of the ways that is extremely effective in attracting customers is by creating valuable content that answers their questions.

What they found is that people who are searching for solutions online, let’s say you type in, “How do I get found?” they would find an article in their learning center. That article then would lead to either opting in for a free report or, in the case that I’m about to share with you here, it would be an invitation to a webinar. Infusionsoft invited me to share some information with their audience on a webinar. The way that worked was people came searching for a solution, business owners are searching for a solution. They find the learning center on Infusionsoft. They get invited to a webinar, they sign up for the webinar. We had 400 people signed up. On the day of the webinar, we had 80 people showed up.

During the webinar, what happens is they’ve brought in a content expert, that happened to be me. In that process, they’re nurturing the people who have this problem that they can help solve. At the same time, they are introducing that client to me and my company. They’ve already been found. They’re now helping me get found. Maybe to answer the question directly, how do you get found and what would be one case study? That right there, the fact that they’ve got this content that they know that they can provide for their customers and they put it out there on the web in a way that people can easily find it, enabled them to bring in. My company and Infusionsoft are both already benefiting from the business from that particular webinar. It’s a three-step process and we’re already making sales from simply providing that content in a way that helps people.

I’m going to do a hypothetical. I’ve got a gimpy dog. I’m looking for a sleeve for an arthritic old bird dog. Let’s say on the manufacturer. I’ve now made an elbow brace for an arthritic bird dog to help her get her around. My dog likes it. A couple of other friends said, “I want that for my dog.” I go, “I’ve stumbled into a company.” I come to you and said, “I’ve got the world’s best arthritic dog elbow appliance. Can you help me find the audience for that?” What would be sequence of thoughts or steps that you might pursue with that?

One of the big mistakes that marketers and business owners often make is starting with the product. The questions that you ask are going to drive your success. The first question that often comes to mind for people is, “How can we sell this