A quick-turnaround sales page for a client’s brand new offer…
Becca Maberly is the founder of A Mother Place. Alongside her father, obstetrician Roger Marwood, she offers accessible pregnancy, birth and parenting courses online.
She’s passionate about giving quality advice with no agenda, and supporting parents in making the right choices for themselves and their families. Her Instagram account is invariably popular with mums dealing with the unspoken truths about parenthood.
The challenge: no beta sales page; no course material!
Becca had an idea for a new course aimed at all mothers – not just those in the earliest years, but at any stage – who needed a serious confidence boost. It would be called the Super Mum Course (an ironic nod to our attempts to be supermums, but also a celebration of the super work all mums perform, whether we aknowledge it or not).
She wanted to launch the course in a matter of weeks with an early-bird offer: a lower price-point for those who pre-ordered the course before it went live.
Becca said:
I really wanted to start trying to sell the course before I launched it. Because I had never done that before. I had previously just waited until the course was live before I tried to sell it. I just thought, I’m really interested to see if I can generate some interest before I do actually launch it. And yeah, it was brilliant.
When she got in touch with me, none of the course content had been created yet. Becca would be recording the videos and creating the material in parallel while I wrote the sales page. So it was a case of translating the vision into a fully-fledged sales page after our conversation.
Becca has a hard deadline to work to – she has school-age children, and in a matter of weeks the family were relocating to another country and taking some time off to settle in.
So the launch date was set in stone. And we both had plenty to do!
The gold dust: make a quick-turnaround project flow
If you’re going to have an urgent project at some point, it’s a great idea to get a freelancer you love to work on your non-urgent projects first.
This project showcases exactly why.
Becca and I had worked together before, which meant I didn’t need a full brief on her business. I’d interviewed a number of her customers, and written two previous sales pages, as well as her Facebook ad copy. So our briefing session was short, and very focused on the vision for this new course and what the audience needed to know.
I also didn’t need to crack her tone of voice. Voice is one of my core concerns when taking on a project, and I might spend a lot of the brief and research time on it.
Becca’s brand is established and she really knows who she is and what she stands for – the core elements of tone of voice. The A Mother Place brand voice as intuitive – Becca hasn’t mapped it out or created a detailed voice guide. It’s just her. She’s got bags of personality, and her message is clear. She’s encouraging and assured, with a dry sense of humour (but never snide or cynical). She might swear now and then on Instagram but keeps the website clean. She’s not afraid of the gory details of motherhood, but she turns everything into a positive.
Even without a brand guide, it’s the kind of voice an experienced copywriter can really enjoy stepping into.
Another thing I knew was that Becca has my favourite star quality in a client: she isn’t afraid to give feedback!
If there’s copy that’s something she wouldn’t say, she’ll point it out. She might offer suggestions, or leave me to work out the new wording. This frankness means I can take creative risks in the first draft, knowing she’s equipped to tell me what she really thinks.
Feedback is a skill, and, like voice, it can take time to work out what you want from your copy and trust your instincts. But I always encourage clients to be like Becca – give me those gut feelings, your first impression of what you read. It’s your copy, and my job is to get it right.
The goods: what I delivered
The easy part was scheduling it all. I whipped up a first draft for Becca in around 3 days after the brief. I prioritised the redraft in my diary so the copy could get to the web developer in time for a decent early bird pre-sale. In just over a week we had finished sales page copy.
I always deliver a Google Docs wireframe so the hierarchy was clear and so it read like a web page.
I’m not a web designer.
Becca was happy with what we created. She even used my wonder woman gif (it was a holding image, but it felt like a good fit!). After a single round of feedback the copy went off to her developer.
To launch the course, Becca avoided the Facebook ads she normally leans on to promote things, and instead stuck with sharing the early bird offer through her social media accounts, and her email list.
She recruited Sarah Monteith to run an email campaign. Sarah’s campaign adopted a lot of the sales page copy for these emails, giving consistency of message (and proving it’s always a good idea to write the sales page first, because everything flows from that message).
The results
The launch was a success, exceeding Becca’s goal for launch: over 250 people pre-ordered the course at the early-bird price.
So, was it worth hiring a copywriter?
Becca says:
The way that I work, I’m not really a planner. I’ve had other ideas fall by the wayside because things didn’t come together at the right moment, when I had the energy, time and enthusiasm to get a project finished.
The idea for this course had been in my head around a year but I didn’t know when I’d be able to do it. One day I went out for a run, and while I was running, I was like, OK, I’m going to do it. Can I make it happen? And that’s when I got to you and said, I would like to do this now. Luckily, you had some time for me.
Have you ever had a copywriter create copy for a new course from scratch like this before? [Bea’s previous sales pages for A Mother Place were for pre-existing courses]
With my antenatal class, no, when I launched it, I did it myself. But I knew it wasn’t very professional looking because of my design capabilities. And my copywriting capabilities. So the page was a bit rubbish and not effective and didn’t look at all how I wanted it to look. And it didn’t sound how I wanted to sound
I’m good at writing articles, but I’m not good shortening what i want to say. I struggle with condensing things and picking out the most important things. For me everything is really important. So it’s really valuable to have a skilled outside person come in and work on the key message.
Are you still using the page as a reference for other messaging?
Yes. Because I’m thinking of the entire course when I speak about it on social media. I often have to flip back and look at the sales page to remind myself what the key messages are.
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To see this and other example sales pages from my portfolio, get in touch via the contact page.
