Yes, you can… But should you?

I mean, can you lead a seminar without having a clue about what you’re talking about?

Of course not.

Copywriting is not some kind of creative phenomenon where an enlightened person suddenly gains the ability to write a masterpiece that sells millions.

To write a good piece of copy, it’s practically mandatory to conduct solid research.

“But what am I going to research?”

Well, in copywriting, the whole research process has basically 3 pillars:

• The product: you need to become a specialist in whatever you’re selling
• The market: you need to know deeply whoever you’re trying to sell the product to
• The competition: you need to know what exactly your competitor is doing to reach the market

I won’t go into details here because each one of these would be worth a course.

But imagine trying to communicate an idea to your target audience while having no idea who they are, what they like, how they communicate, or even what their problem is. The chances of you trying to sell shampoo to a bald man are huge.

That’s not how the game is played.

Most good copywriters dedicate themselves to a ton of research before writing a single word.

In the past, for example, it was pretty common to find copywriters interviewing both the target audience and people involved in the product development. They interviewed these people personally to find out useful information about them AND the product.

Do you know this headline?

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”

For those who don’t know, this is a legendary headline from a Rolls-Royce ad written by David Ogilvy. The ad was extremely successful. And guess how David Ogilvy came up with this amazing piece of copy?

He literally spent three entire weeks researching technical documents and automotive magazines before finding this sentence.

He found it in a test-drive report written by a technical editor for a motor magazine.

Now imagine if Ogilvy, instead of researching his ass off, had thought, “Nah, I don’t need to research. I can do it by myself.”

We probably wouldn’t be using this headline as an example right now, and we probably wouldn’t even know who David Ogilvy is.

Cases like this are far from rare.

However, you don’t need to personally approach your target audience or product developers directly nowadays. You have social platforms and AI. Your research work is way easier than it was a few decades ago.

For example, if you want to find useful information about the people you’re targeting, just find where they hang out.

Do they use X more or do they prefer Reddit?

Whatever they may like to frequent, just find out and go there. It’s literally a data gold mine.

After you gather all the information, you also don’t need to organize it manually anymore. Currently, you just need to ask a good AI to organize the whole thing for you and voilà, you have everything you need to write killer copy that communicates directly to the target audience.

AI is wonderful for this kind of work.

But if you dare to send AI the data and ask it to write the whole copy for you, I really hope the Copy Gods strike you with writer’s block.

Writing may be boring now, but it’s a skill that will make you way better as a person in the future.

Face it like an investment, not a waste of time.

Stay well,

Daniel Costa