How you present your products and services to your customers matters. And while most copywriters don’t overtly say they do positioning work, the reality is, any messaging project pretty much requires it. The question is, how do you do it right? For the 412th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we talked with copywriter and product positioning expert, Kate Guerrero about the formula for positioning the products you write about in a way that makes it easy for customers to understand not only what it is, but why they need it. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Positioning by Ries and Trout

Fletch’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Positioning is a marketing term coined by Al Ries and Jack Trout way back in 1969. It refers to the practice of connecting your product or service (or your client’s products or services) to a single idea in your customer’s mind. And when it’s done well, your prospects and customers associate your brand with that idea. Some examples include Volvo and safety, Apple and creativity, and Disney and magic. Although few clients ask for copywriters to position their products, this is actually a big part of what we do, whether we do it consciously or not.  So I thought it might be worthwhile to talk in depth about how copywriters can do it and the impact it has for their clients.

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 positioning expert Kate Guerrero. Kate is the in-house writer for Fletch, an agency that focuses almost entirely on helping their clients position themselves on their home pages. As promised, she laid out the process that she and Fletch use to help their clients identify the ideas they can stand for in the marketplace. We also talked about the differences between copywriting and messaging—what she shared pairs nicely with our interview with Justin Blackman on last week’s episode. And finally we also talked a bit about fiction writing since Kate has a manuscript she’s been shopping to major publishers. That’s a lot to cover, but we did it, and I think you’ll like the result, so stay tuned.

Before we jump in with Kate…

The next expert training happening in The Copywriter Underground is coming up soon. You probably know The Underground is our community for copywriters who are actively investing in building their business and writing skills. It includes personalized coaching for you where I give you feedback and ideas to help solve the stickiest challenges you face in your business today. There’s a massive library of business-focused training to help you grow a resilient, profitable copywriting businesss. And each month we bring you a new guest expert training that will help you make even more progress in your business. 

This month our guest expert is Heather Farris who will be showing you how to use Pinterest to drive leads to your business for years after you post on that platform. Unlike Twitter where tweets disappear after a few minutes, or LinkedIn and Instagram where posts are lucky to last a day, the content you post on Pinterest is close to permanent. That’s because Pinterest is more like a search engine than social media. Any way, Heather will be sharing how to use Pinterest to drive copywriting leads to your business… it’s the kind of idea that could add new clients and thousands of dollars in new revenue for you. But to get access to these closely held strategies, you’ve got to be a member of The Copywriter Underground, which you can learn more about at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. Jump in now so you don’t miss this or any of the other upcoming expert skill trainings.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Kate…

Kate, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. You’ve heard a few episodes of the podcast, and as we like to start, I’m really curious how you became a copywriter and now specializing in product marketing.

Kate Guerrero: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so excited to be here. Love all of your guests. And this is a great opportunity for me. So my journey to copywriting was very long and winding, I think, as it is for a lot of people. I, as a kid, always wanted to be a writer. And then as I got older, was really only sort of presented with journalism, which was, I didn’t want to do that. I taught English at the high school level for a few years. I did a number of different things like educational related sales. I worked for a tutoring company… lots of different things. And then ended up being home with my kids for a time and looking for things, you know, as often we do in that stage where I could have something flexible, something just, you know, income on the side. And I started getting introduced to the world of online services. 

So I dabbled in social media content, in virtual assisting and all these different things. Worked with a lot of very small entrepreneurs, mainly in the mompreneur space. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with that as much, but that was booming about seven, eight years ago. So I just sort of started dipping my toe in and figuring out what do I want to do? And it was really funny because I was sort of trying to pitch myself doing all these other services, you know, maybe I’ll do coaching, maybe I’ll do virtual assisting. And it always came back to whenever I would produce anything written, that was when it made my clients most excited. They’re like, oh, this is so good. Your writing is really good. And at that point, I was like, hmm, maybe this is the thing I actually need to do because the other tasks felt like, yeah, I can do this, but they didn’t feel like a super niche of what I’m actually really good at. So I was like, oh, well, maybe I should just say I’m a copywriter. 

It was like one of those little light bulb moments that you’re like, I don’t know why it took so long to come around to that. But then I just really started networking with people just in the online space who needed blog content, just sort of anything. I was basically willing to do anything. And I could not believe how much opportunity there was. It was almost like I felt like I had tapped into one of the trades. Like if you’re a plumber or you’re an electrician, you’re guaranteed someone’s going to need your services. And I was just so surprised because I just thought, because writing comes easily to me, I just thought it sort of does to everybody. And the number of people that were like, A, I’m not good at writing, or B, I don’t want to do it, was shocking. So I was like, okay, I guess this is what I’m doing. 

So I very quickly built up a freelance business. It took me a couple years to get to full time, but I wasn’t even, I actually, felt like I was more putting the brakes on it than anything else because there was just such a need. And I really did it just through kind of networking. I always say I kind of use it a barnacle strategy, which I’ve heard now is called partnerships. I just find people that are in the space, you know, sort of get to know them and their needs and then start writing for them. And then generally the referrals were enough to to keep me going. 

I had a really broad slate of clients. I wrote for a curated newsletter called The Pour Over. I wrote for a social media content agency. I’ve written for a number of… partnered with web designers to do blog content. So I really at the time it was actually kind of exciting to do a lot of everything. And everybody was like, you know, you have to niche down, you have to niche down. I was like, I’m fine doing what I’m doing. Then I started working with Fletch and sort of getting into the product marketing side and I sort of saw the space that I had been pulling potential clients from was a much smaller pool. And all of a sudden there was this giant ocean of B2B clients. So it was sort of a natural flow to say, okay, there’s a lot more resources. There’s a lot more opportunity in the space and really pairing the copywriting with product marketing made a ton of sense, and particularly messaging and positioning, because it was a lot of the issues that I had seen when somebody brings a copywriter in and they say, can you rewrite our website? 

So you come in and then we say, what do you want to say? What is your company? What do you want people to know about you? And very quickly, it was not a copywriting issue. It was a messaging and positioning issue. So I had run into that myself. And