Brand, web & content

What are the rules of good marketing copy?

The short answer

Harry Dry's three: make it visual (words people can picture), make it falsifiable (specific claims a competitor couldn't copy-paste), and make it unique to you. Vague, safe copy is invisible copy. Write like you're talking to one real person, not addressing a market.

Go deeper, your way

2 hand-picked resources, 1 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it Julian Shapiro's deeply practical framework for landing pages, including the desire-minus-friction conversion model, a canonical growth resource.

How to build a landing page (Startup Handbook)

From julian.com by Julian Shapiro 25 min read

  • Purchase rate = desire minus (labour plus confusion)
  • The hero header must be fully descriptive; visitors have short consideration spans
  • Show the product in action and test copy on both outsiders and insiders
Open julian.com →

People also ask

How do I write copy that explains what my product does clearly? Say what it is in the plain words your customer would use, not corporate abstractions like 'empowering synergies'. Lead with the concrete benefit, ... Beginner 2 resources → How do I write a headline / value proposition that grabs attention? A great headline states the specific outcome for a specific person, clear beats catchy. Julian Shapiro's advice: make the header fully descriptive ... Intermediate 1 resource → How do I find the exact words my customers use to describe their problem? Mine their language directly, sales calls, support tickets, reviews of competitors, Reddit and community threads. Then feed their phrases back into... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I structure a message so customers care (story / framework)? Make the customer the hero and your product the guide that helps them win, that's the StoryBrand framework in one line. Frame it as: they have a pr... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I learn copywriting quickly without a marketing background? Study before/after rewrites of real landing pages, you learn faster from watching a pro fix bad copy than from theory. Harry Dry's Marketing Exampl... Beginner 2 resources → How do I write the copy for my landing page hero section when I have three different types of customers using my product? Pick one. A hero that talks to three people talks to no one, so lead with the segment that pays fastest or hurts most, and let the rest find themse... Intermediate 3 resources →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Build your online store, our D2C track.

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Also in How Founders Use AI

How founders actually use AI for this, over in Content Creation.

Why use AI for blogs, newsletters, and social posts, and how do I avoid sounding like AI? AI removes the real reason most founders stop publishing: the time cost of a blank page. Buffer's study of 1.2 million posts found AI-assisted cont... 20 resources → How do top founders build content engines with AI (repurposing one idea into ten formats)? The pattern is always the same: create one dense pillar piece (a podcast, video, or newsletter), then let AI atomize it into clips, threads, Linked... 18 resources →

Also in GTM

The same ground, over in Own the story, our GTM track.

What does category actually mean in go-to-market, and why does everyone keep telling me to pick one? A category is the mental shelf a buyer puts you on before they judge anything else about you. The moment someone hears what you do, they reach for ... 3 resources → Should we create a new category or just say we are a better version of something that already exists? For almost everyone at the start, the answer is the existing category. April Dunford's own count is that around 90 percent of recently public tech ... 4 resources →
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