Copywriting

1---
2name: copywriting-playbook
3description: Write sales copy that converts because it's built from real audience research, not templates. Use when the user wants to write or improve sales copy, landing pages, emails, ads, product descriptions, headlines, or CTAs, wants to research a target audience's language and psychology, or wants copy adapted to how a specific audience actually talks. Covers scraping Reddit and social platforms for voice-of-customer language, building demographic and psychographic profiles, and the copy frameworks that turn that research into converting words.
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5 
6# The copywriting playbook
7 
8Most copy fails before a word is written, because it's written for an imaginary customer in the founder's head. This skill inverts the usual process: the research is most of the work, the audience's own words are most of the copy, and the frameworks just arrange what the research found. Copy built this way converts because readers recognize themselves in it; nobody can write "it feels like you're screaming into the void" from a template, but a scraped Reddit thread hands it to you verbatim.
9 
10## Phase 1: profile the buyer until you can think like them
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121. **Funnel to the ideal customer.** Not "small business owners" but one specific person: the concrete contractor who runs his own crew, checks his phone between jobs, and has never opened a marketing tool. Every downstream decision (channel, tone, objections, price framing) comes from this person.
132. **Write the full profile.** Demographics: age, location, work, income. Psychographics: what their day looks like hour by hour, what they complain about, what they've already tried and why it failed, what they're afraid of, what winning looks like to them, who they blame. Get obsessed. The bar: you can narrate their Tuesday.
143. **Verify with real faces.** Search the product's key term on Instagram, find accounts whose audience matches, and go through the followers looking at actual profiles: their bios, what they post, how they describe themselves. This step kills the imaginary customer and recalibrates the profile against reality. Store everything in one research doc.
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16## Phase 2: harvest their actual language
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18The single biggest copy upgrade available: stop paraphrasing the audience and start quoting them. Sources, in order of value:
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20- **Reddit.** Find the subreddits where the buyer complains, asks, and celebrates. Read the top posts of the year plus the comment sections of anything touching the problem. Reddit's public RSS endpoints (append `.rss` to any subreddit or thread URL) return posts and comments with no API key at roughly one request per minute per IP, which is enough for scheduled collection, and scraping tools like Apify can pull threads at volume when needed. Harvest: exact problem phrasing, emotional language, objections stated in the wild, what they call the competitors, and the advice they give each other.
21- **Reviews.** Amazon, G2, Trustpilot, app stores, Google reviews of competitors. One-star and five-star reviews are the gold: one-star reviews are a list of fears and objections your copy must answer, five-star reviews are the transformation language your copy should mirror. Note verbatim sentences, especially anything starting "I finally", "I was tired of", "I didn't expect".
22- **Social comments.** Comment sections under competitor and adjacent-creator content (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) show the audience reacting in their own words; scrapers pull these at scale too. Recurring questions become headlines; recurring complaints become the agitation section.
23- **Direct sources when available.** Customer interviews, support tickets, sales call notes, survey answers. Ask "what was going on that made you look for this?" and record the answer word for word.
24 
25Build a **voice-of-customer file** with columns: exact quote, source, which emotion it carries, which stage it maps to (problem-aware, solution-aware, objection, post-purchase). Copy gets assembled from this file. When a headline is needed, the best candidate is usually already sitting in it.
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27## Phase 3: position before writing
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29- **Map features to benefits, then to felt outcomes.** Run every feature through "so what?" twice. Feature: memory foam. So what: adapts to your body. So what: wake up without the back pain. The copy leads with the last answer, then justifies with the first.
30- **Find the gap.** List competitors' claims and their one-star reviews. The overlap between "what people hate about the alternatives" and "what this product does well" is the positioning, and often the headline.
31- **One big idea per piece.** A page or email sells one transformation. Everything that doesn't serve it gets cut or moved to another page.
32- **Decide the awareness stage.** Problem-aware readers need the problem named and agitated first; solution-aware readers need differentiation; product-aware readers need proof and an offer. The same product needs different copy per stage, and the voice-of-customer file shows which stage each channel's audience is in.
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34## Phase 4: write with the frameworks
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36Frameworks arrange the research; they never replace it.
37 
38**PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution)** for landing pages, ads, and cold outreach: name the problem in the audience's exact words, agitate by making the cost of not solving it concrete (time, money, the Tuesday from the profile), then present the solution with proof. The agitation is where the harvested emotional language goes; if it sounds like the Reddit thread, it's working.
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40**AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)** for longer pages and email sequences: attention from a specific, curiosity-loaded headline; interest through story and relevant facts; desire through transformation language and social proof; action through one clear, friction-free CTA.
41 
42**FAB (Feature, Advantage, Benefit)** for product sections and comparison copy: state the fact, what it enables, and the felt outcome, always ending on the outcome.
43 
44**Story-led** for founder brands and warm audiences: the founder had the reader's exact problem, tried what the reader has tried, found what the reader is looking at. Story converts because it delivers proof and empathy in one shape; keep it true.
45 
46## The rules that hold across every framework
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48- **Emotion decides, logic justifies.** Purchases are made emotionally and rationalized afterward, so lead with the felt problem or the aspiration, then hand the reader the numbers, studies, and specs they'll use to defend the decision. Strongest levers: fear of loss, urgency and FOMO (honest scarcity only; fake countdowns burn trust permanently), hope and transformation, belonging, curiosity, status. Trust beats all of them: honesty, precise claims, and admitting limits convert skeptics that hype loses.
49- **Specificity beats vagueness, always.** "Save $3,500 in 16 weeks" beats "save money." "Join 46,700 others" beats "join thousands." Exact figures (23.7%) beat rounded ones. Real numbers from the user's actual results outperform everything, and no number gets invented, ever; fabricated specifics are both dishonest and detectable.
50- **Benefits over features**, with features kept as the proof layer underneath.
51- **Simple wins.** Sentences around 11-14 words, active voice, one idea per sentence, roughly 8th-grade reading level unless the audience expects jargon. The main message must land in the first 3 seconds of reading. Every word earns its place or gets cut.
52- **Write in their register.** The voice-of-customer file sets the vocabulary, the formality, even the grammar. Copy for contractors sounds different from copy for designers because the research file for each sounds different. When copy reads like something the audience member could have typed themselves, it's calibrated.
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54## Headlines and CTAs
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56Most readers never get past the headline, so it gets a disproportionate share of the effort:
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58- The four qualities to check every headline against: useful (a clear benefit), urgent (a reason to act now), unique (nothing a competitor could also claim), ultra-specific (numbers and concrete detail).
59- Reliable shapes: number headlines ("7 ways to [outcome]", digits not words), how-to with the outcome ("how to [result] without [pain]"), question headlines using a question the audience literally asks (from the file), problem-call-outs ("still [pain] every month?"), and testimonial fragments as headlines, since a customer's own sentence is often the best one available.
60- Write 10+ per piece, shortlist by the four qualities, and let data pick where testing is possible.
61- CTAs: one per goal, action verb first (get, start, claim, see), state what happens next ("see your first report in 2 minutes"), and remove friction words like "buy" or "submit" where a lower-commitment framing is honest. Repeat the CTA down long pages; never vary its promise.
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63## Proof
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65Social proof carries decisions: reviews, named case studies with real numbers, logos, counts ("46,700 businesses"), expert or press mentions. Rules: real people with names and specifics beat anonymous praise, proof placed next to the claim it supports beats a testimonial wall, and the strongest proof answers the top objection from the one-star-review research. No proof gets manufactured; if the user has none yet, the copy leans on specificity, guarantees, and honesty instead, and says "early" plainly, which itself converts a certain buyer.
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67## Formats
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69- **Landing page:** headline + subhead (the one big idea), hero proof, PAS body, feature-benefit blocks, objection-handling section built from the one-star research, proof cluster, single repeated CTA.
70- **Email:** subject line follows headline rules with curiosity weighted higher; one idea, one CTA per email; sequences run problem → agitation → solution → proof → offer across sends. Plain-text tone outperforms designed blasts for most audiences.
71- **Ads:** hook in the first line (feeds truncate), one pain or one desire per ad, and the audience's own phrasing matters most here because ad readers are coldest. Test hooks, not colors.
72- **Cold outreach:** shortest of all, personalized first line that proves it's not a blast, one pain, one proof point, one low-friction ask. The research phase matters most here: a message using the prospect's world's vocabulary reads as a peer, not a pitch.
73 
74## Running this skill
75 
76When the user asks for copy: check whether audience research exists, and if not, run Phases 1-2 first (build the profile, harvest at least a starter voice-of-customer file from Reddit and reviews) before writing, because copy without it is guessing. Then position, pick the framework by format and awareness stage, and write. Deliver copy with the research visible: note which harvested phrases were used and which objections the copy answers, so the user can judge the calibration. When the user brings existing copy to improve: diagnose against the rules (imaginary-customer language, vagueness, features without benefits, buried CTA, missing proof), rewrite, and show the before/after reasoning. When the user asks only for research: deliver the profile and the voice-of-customer file as standalone assets, because they power every channel, not just copy.