Expert Copywriting Tips for Entrepreneurs

Jan 20

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Website copywriting can often be overwhelming and intimidating to tackle. Listen to top tips and helpful advice from expert website copywriter Kayla Hollatz. In this quick episode we touch base on everything from your mission statement to strategic website copy and beyond.

Kayla Hollatz is a Minneapolis-based copywriter and website strategist who loves conversion experiments as much as crafting impactful brand stories. She believes the best copy is created from a "strategy first, words second" approach.

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The episode:

Katrina Widener: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. It is Katrina today, and I'm here with Kayla Hollatz. Kayla is someone who has spoken at group coaching... I don't even know how many times. She is a copywriter and website strategist extraordinaire. She's talked about and actually given some of our most-loved guest expert times ever. She's talked to us about website copywriting, email lead generation, helping people build out wire frames for how to set up their business website. So I'm so excited to have you here today, Kayla,

Kayla Hollatz: [00:00:37] Thanks for having me Katrina. It's always fun to collaborate with you and with all the awesome people that are in your group program and now beyond.

Katrina Widener: [00:00:45] Yeah! Kayla is a Minneapolis based copywriter and website strategist, like I mentioned, and she loves crafting impactful brand stories. She believes the best copy is created from a strategy first, word second approach, which I absolutely love. And I actually hired Kayla to do my copy for my website -- that's how much I loved it!

Kayla Hollatz: [00:01:05] Which is awesome. And as I can attest, and you can as well, we definitely started with strategy instead of copywriting first.

Katrina Widener: [00:01:12] Yes, we definitely did. Which is why I came to you. So Kayla, I know that we've introduced you a little bit, but if you have anything to add or if you want to tell everybody a little bit more about yourself and what you do, we would love to hear it.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:01:26] Absolutely. So Katrina gave a really good introduction to me, but something that you might not know is one of the reasons why I got into copywriting in the first place was I had a degree in public relations, but at the same time I was in college, felt like I wasn't learning quite as much in the classroom as I was wanting to, and so I wanted to take things into my own hands and start my own blog. And I started writing about PR and social media and so many other things, and I also had a separate Tumblr blog if anybody remembers back then where I shared my poetry, but I was doing so much writing through all those different passion projects that it led me to copywriting.

And a huge reason why I was able to get started was that I had this really amazing online community that I had been building for years. So I had just a really prime audience for me to start building that copywriting business. And since then I have just completely fallen head over heels for all things website strategy and conversion copywriting and all of the things that relate to it.

Katrina Widener: [00:02:25] That's amazing. And I can say that you're really great at what you do! And I have loved collaborating with you myself, but also having you come to group coaching and just chatting in general. We were joking right before we started recording this, but we talked for 10 minutes about bathtubs and taking baths before we even started this. So.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:02:47] As one does.

Katrina Widener: [00:02:49] Yes. So you're just a gem to talk to you anyway, but I'm excited that we're going to be talking about website copywriting today. And a little bit about what someone could maybe walk away with and take some advice from and start implementing it immediately. So I think my first question is just what is the number one thing that you would tell someone, the number one piece of advice you would give them when they're sitting down and we'll say, DIYing their copy.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:03:15] Absolutely. So I would say I have one recommendation for copy in general, and then I have another one for website copy. So copywriting in, I think one of the things that can be really hard for people is trying to sound like themselves. I hear that time and time again and what we like to call this in the copywriting world is finding out whatever your brand voice is. And that can be a collection of anything from the words that you love to the words that you avoid. I actually really recommend writing those down. I like to call them your brand dictionary because I think that's a fun word for it, but really what it is it's trying to help you write more like you speak. So for the people who are listening, who may have an easier time speaking than you do writing, there's still definitely a way for you to be able to find your brand voice. So one of the things that I would recommend starting with is maybe just speaking through what you do, how you add value to your client's lives. What problems do they have? What solutions do you offer them through the products and the services that you offer? Some of those things are going to be able to help you get started and start to refine things like your mission statement, your value proposition, some of those like jargony words that we use in the marketing world that really help you narrow down your messaging.

So again, that is your brand voice. It can be everything from the words that you use to how you're exactly putting them together. It's something that might take some time, so it's okay to refine it over time. You don't have to have everything together perfectly. That's something I recommend doing -- if you have the time to do so -- is creating what I like to call the brand voice guide.

And that's just a guide almost if you've ever worked with a branding designer. A lot of times they'll give you like that brand style guide that shows what fonts, what colors you're using, what logos, and submarks, how you use all of those things. You can do the exact same thing with your messaging.

So sometimes it can help to do that before you start writing any copy. So then you can take that guide and it's not like you're starting from scratch anymore. You have a pretty clear vision of what you're going to be writing. So that would be my first thing. And then for the website copywriting side of things, I know, Katrina, you mentioned the wireframes and that's something that I use a lot. I use a different form of wire frames since typically it's something that a website designer is going to do in order to map out visually exactly what your website is going to look like before they start actually developing it through code or through whatever kind of website platform that you're on.

So I like to use a hybrid form of that, that I've created for myself. And I've also shared with people exclusively in the group program as well, which has been fantastic to get their feedback on it and to see that it's not just helpful for me, but for other people too. But it's really nice to be able to, again, not feel like you're starting completely from a blank page. And you can start to map out what kind of content do I need on my page based on whatever my page goal is, based on whatever the call to action is.

And a lot of times in the website world, we talk about your user journey and that's really just a fancy word to talk about how you want to be able to lead your website visitor from page to page in order to get them ultimately to where you want them to go. Which a lot of times it's either a contact form, a buy now process payment page, or even scheduling a discovery call.

It doesn't matter exactly what your call to action is, but based on whatever you choose, it's going to totally change the website copy that you end up writing. So those are just some of my my tips there.

Katrina Widener: [00:06:34] I love that you mentioned the wireframes too, and your way of approaching them because I feel like oftentimes entrepreneurs are like, Hey, I really wish someone could just give me a roadmap and I can just execute this thing that you've handed me and then go off and do it on my own. And when Kayla came and spoke with the group and shared that, it was very like, it was something that was very good for all of the entrepreneurs on the call, because they were able to say, I feel like I can take this and run with it. I feel like I can go implement this immediately. Like it really was that roadmap for people. And when you think about your pages in terms of this is the goal I want to achieve with this page, whether it's conversions or I want people to sign up for "my website or whatever it is, being able to think about that strategy first really does influence everything else. So that's, I love that. So when it comes to people who like are doing it on their own, what, like what other resources would you give people as recommendations for getting started on their copy?

Kayla Hollatz: [00:07:39] Yeah. So this might seem something like something that is out of left field. But one of the ways that I got started when I started to almost just think about copywriting, especially website copywriting was very simply to look at other people's websites. But to especially look at people like even if they were outside of your kind of industry. So people that you can get some information from without almost sounding like your competitor at the end of the day, which of course we want to make sure it doesn't happen. But when you look at people that are kitty-corner to your industry, that might be semi-related, it can be really helpful to start to analyze what they're doing with their website. So just almost look at it as if you were back in school, you've got this analysis project and you're trying to figure out, okay, this person has a really successful, amazing business. How is it that their copy is helping to support them in that? And I think that helps us create that critical thinking. And it's something you don't necessarily even need to invest in a really high paid course or take tons of time on a weekend to learn all these new things. It can be as simple as just looking at some of the websites that you like, see what they're doing and try to base whatever your goals are. And look at okay is their website modeled after some of those goals? So I think that can be a helpful way to start at least thinking about copywriting before you actually have to write anything.

Katrina Widener: [00:09:01] That makes a lot of sense too. Cause I know that it's pretty common that people will do that with social media and be like, Ooh, this post really inspired me. I'm going to save it. Or, Oh, I got I got really motivated to talk about this topic because this person did. And it doesn't have to be someone in the same industry as you, oftentimes those are the ones that are going to make you feel like more doubt or less than, or competition or all that kind of stuff. Or maybe even be like, Oh, that person's doing that thing I have to too. But when you are looking at just Oh, Kayla is a copywriter. I'm a coach. We do completely different things, but she's talking about this topic or she's approaching it in this manner, or she used this like step-by-step or whatever it is, and using that as inspiration. It makes a ton of sense that then that would happen for website copywriting as well. Cause I feel like it does happen all the time on social media. That's how we got those, like pointing TikTok videos.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:09:57] I hope they'll stay in 2020 for the most part, but yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think it can be really nice to start thinking about it that way, but if it ever gets to a point, like you said, where you feel like you're almost starting to model your copy -- like the actual writing portion of it -- off of somebody else's that's where it gets into a sticky situation. But I like when you talked about their approach to it, which I think is definitely the thing to highlight there because let's say you're seeing somebody else's services page and you think, Oh my gosh, their process. It feels so high end. It feels like it's so valuable. They've taken the time to really outline every single part of it. Of course your process is going to look different, but there might be a way where you can sort of emulate some of the breakdown that they have. So that's just one kind of example, but that is a great way to start looking at other people's websites and start to gather things, because I think so many times we hear about people who are gathering design inspiration. I think that's something that happens a lot in the visual branding process, a lot in the website design process, but not as many people are thinking about the strategy, especially when it comes to their content. So thinking more about the layouts from a formatting standpoint, rather than just the design is going to be really helpful for you.

Katrina Widener: [00:11:14] I also like how you compare it to the visual branding world, because I do think that you can run into sort of the same situation too, where if there's branding without forethought, without strategy, it's just colors. It's just I picked these colors and hopefully they work well, colors, fonts, patterns, graphics, et cetera, et cetera and it's the same thing with copy where it's like, if there's no strategy, no, like I sat down and I really thought about how I wanted this to work or what the goal was or who I'm talking to. Then it's just words. It's just, this is the way that I'm describing it because I decided to describe it. And while obviously this is what you do, Kayla, and you have this wealth of knowledge on the subject because it's what you devote your time to and your education to et cetera, et cetera. That's a great way that people who maybe don't have that wealth of knowledge can say, okay, so I'm a wedding photographer and this financial analyst has this really cool like approach to describing their services. I think I like that, I can apply it to my own brand and it works just as well.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:12:20] Absolutely. And I like that. You're talking about this as something that can also happen over time. I think a lot of times people are writing their copy and they think that it needs to stay the same forever. It is great to have foundational copy that's going to be able to take you from year to year, and that's what I really love focusing with on my clients. But I even have some clients, one I'm going to be working with next month, who said, I've got a few different ways that I'm thinking about my services, I'm adding this, I'm subtracting this. I want this to become more of the forefront and what's great is we don't have to rehaul her website.

We only have to take the inspiration like you're talking about and take the different things that she's going to be working on and start to work that into the foundational copy that already feels really strong. So I would say by doing some of this upfront work, while also giving yourself some wiggle room to learn over time, I think that's the best approach that you're going to have to your copy.

Katrina Widener: [00:13:07] Definitely because also your business is going to evolve over time. You're going to say like I know for me, I was doing one-on-one coaching and then I was doing a book club and now I'm doing group coaching and the copy is going to change with that. But the end result that my clients are getting is the same. It's just the approach that's different. So then I can adjust parts and not everything.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:13:25] Yes, absolutely.

Katrina Widener: [00:13:28] So I have two more questions for you. And the first one is just what would you say you regularly see as like maybe the biggest mistake people make or the biggest myth about copywriting or the thing that people are intimidated by that maybe they don't need to be?

Kayla Hollatz: [00:13:46] That is a really good question. I think the first one that comes to mind because it's the one that I see usually the most often is that people don't realize not necessarily to create the design before the copy. So what I mean by that is a lot of times people will hire a designer, get into the process, their designer will ask them for content and they'll go oh boy. I did not realize that I needed that or that you needed it. So soon in the process. So a lot of times then people are either trying to hire a copywriter with hardly any lead time or because it hasn't necessarily been a part of the process, they feel like they have to just have it as a last ditch effort, so to speak. And in the end, we know that design is absolutely going to be the first thing that attracts your people. We know that design is registered and visuals are registered, I think it's 60,000 times faster than text. So the design is incredibly important to what you do. But I also know that the messaging is such an important partner to it. And you would almost think because design is the first thing to attract people that it's the first thing that you should handle, but actually it's the content itself because you can design around that content.

And most designers want it ahead of time anyway, because it makes their jobs so much easier. But starting with your content is also going to help you feel more confident in the message that you're actually going to be using to convert people. And even though conversion is towards the end of what we like to call, like the buyer journey, it's a great place for you to start and then you can build all the other elements from there, because again, like you and I have been talking about this whole time, the goal. So now you just work backwards and reverse engineer from there. So that's one of the main myths that I would say I see all the time.

Katrina Widener: [00:15:25] That makes a lot of sense because I do think that it's one of those things that people maybe don't -- as we're saying, we keep reiterating -- don't necessarily sit down and think about that before they start working on their copy and it really can be something that happens in a different order than you might think it would.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:15:42] Absolutely.

Katrina Widener: [00:15:44] Okay. So my last question is just what would be your number one implementable tip for somebody who's listening to the podcast to walk away and be able to do right now on their own?

Kayla Hollatz: [00:15:56] Absolutely. So I think one of the main pillars of your content strategy and your copywriting is to create what we've talked about earlier, which is a mission statement.

It's something where I have a free email course on my website. If you want to go and sign up, you can either find it in the footer or there's also some links to it on my website, but it walks you through the mission statement process and framework, but it really can be as simple as saying like some fill in the blanks for a formula.

So once you know: who you are, who you serve, how you serve them, and why you serve them in the way that you do. Those are some of the really simple four elements. If you can define those things, then you can start to put it into a typical format that we see all the time, which is:

I help whoever the people are that you serve with whatever you do to actually help them through whatever your services and products are, because, and then fill in that last blank.

So that's an easy way to get started. Once you keep going and refining your message. You might want to pick a different format and play around with some of those elements so you can make your mission statement feel even more unique and special to your business, but at least when you're getting started, that can be a really helpful way for you to start thinking about, "okay, If I was to go to a networking event, maybe post pandemic, or even just talk to somebody virtually, how is it that I'm going to be communicating my value in just one sentence?" And that is your mission statement.

Katrina Widener: [00:17:22] I love that because I think that also when you have that mission statement, your like elevator speech gets so much easier. And you're able to like, feel confident, especially for those newbie business owners saying this is who I am, and this is what I do. The end. I'm also, while you were saying that I was sitting here, I was like, Oh, I'm recognizing this formula and the copy you wrote for me, which is great because obviously if it works and if it is like that important, then that's something that I am excited to have. So anyway, thank you so much, Kayla, for coming and joining us. I am very excited to be able to share all this information with everybody.

Kayla Hollatz: [00:18:00] Yeah. Thanks for having me on Katrina.

Katrina Widener: [00:18:02] Last question actually is where can everyone find you?

Kayla Hollatz: [00:18:06] Ooh. So usually I'm hanging out on Instagram. It's just my name, @KaylaHollatz. And you can also find me on my website www.Kaylahollatz.com.

Katrina Widener: [00:18:14] Perfect. Thank you so much.

Find Kayla’s free email course here.