Writing to customers (marketing copy)

`1:17:38`

who you're writing this for. There's this sort of feeling that you're writing it for your company but you're writing it for customers and these people know basically nothing about you. And so you really have to keep saying would I say this to someone I met on the street If I'm in an Uber and someone like what do you do or what do you like how would I say it? And why is that inadequate like what why can't I just put that on on the page? Because there's there's a sense of like well it's just like it's words like it's not professional that's the other thing it's like not professional to describe your product the way you describe it to an Uber driver but but what why not? Like why not just get to the point? Right. And part of the problem is and this is where I want to get to the website thing website design

`1:18:26`

is part of the problem that websites have a there's many different ways to do them but they have this format where there's like blocks of text and a picture and another block of text and a block of color and there's like it's it's all it's all shattered. You know you can't read you don't read a website usually these days there's not a cohesive story that's being told there's like these little pieces and people are scrolling through them and you browse the web you don't read it in a sense. So I think people don't think about communicating which is why what's nice about writing a letter is if I have a letter format people are familiar with what a letter format looks like and and it's short enough that someone's going to read it or they're not. But if they start they're almost

`1:19:11`

certainly going to finish because it's not that long and hopefully I'm pulling them through and it's you're able to read a letter you're it's hard to read a website how should it be different? I like long-form like more of a long-form old-school like direct mail style letter kind of style. Uh which we've experimented with in the past and and I've tried to do that. Our current site's not quite like that, but there's longer paragraphs. People are used to reading things in a certain way. Human race has been reading in a certain It could be right to left, left to right, but it's top-down usually like in a way where there's a sentence and it makes a paragraph, there's a space, there's another We don't We know how to do that. We know how to consume that. Right? I think the more you write that way, the better off it's going to be. Imagine like reading a

`1:19:57`

New York Times article that was just like Sometimes they do really beautiful visual articles, but if it wasn't an article format, it was like a web design page format of an article, you'd be like weird. I can't read this. I don't I can't absorb this. I don't know what's important. I don't know what in what order I'm supposed to really go through this. It'd be weird. So, I think that we do this on our websites because marketing. And then we're just kind of making it harder on ourselves. Yeah, what I'm taking away from you the past few minutes is like marketing professional and it's really just you are communicating to another human being and that human being is somebody like the Uber driver who maybe just started an LLC and they're trying to figure out place where am I going to how is my team going to communicate as we're going to do this? And

`1:20:44`

this comes down to people talking to people and there's all this fluff about business, the ties in the corporate world, all the corporate speak, but fundamentally it's just you're communicating to another human being and do not forget that. That's it. That's it. And I think business like the idea of wrapping it in business is what makes it hard and makes people stumble with it and it's funny like if business what what makes it hard actually is that there's money involved. If there's no money involved in a and this is like a hypothetical. If businesses didn't have money involved, they'd be more fun. People wouldn't take it so seriously. They wouldn't feel like they're so at risk all the time. And I try to think of it that way. I mean there's money of course, you got to like pay your bills and everything, but if this is more just like a fun thing to do and to make