Copywriting skills seem like a mystery to many. What makes a good copywriter? And how can you separate the “good” from the high converting great copywriters out in the world? 

Truth is: You can beef up your vocabulary. Freshen up your understanding of all those grammar rules you haven’t looked at since 6th grade. And do all the inspiration-collecting reading you can.

But until you’ve mastered the art of hitting on your readers’ pain points, your conversion rates won’t be hitting the opera singer-level high notes you’re looking for. 

(Which means fewer sales for your biz. And fewer clients popping into your inbox with “can we please, please, please get a discovery call on the books?” requests as well. Which we…definitelyyy don’t want.)

So how do you hit on pain points in a way that leads to sales? And do your own small business copywriting without spending hours trying to separate the do-do from the definitely-don’t-do?

Copywriting Skills: It All Starts with Pain Points

Your offer is great. You know it. You want your client to know it. And the quickest way to get them to be on board is to tell them about all the cool features of your offer that take it from “basic” to “above and beyond”…right? 

Turns out: not so much. 

According to one study, 62% of people want to see copywriting that speaks directly to the biggest pain points impacting their life. 

When you know what pain points are, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. 

Pain points are the persistent issues, struggles, inconveniences, or frustrations that are consistently affecting your ideal customer/client. 

To think of this another way, pain points are the things making your ideal customer/client want to: 

• Look for a new solution for their problems — because the solution they’re using just isn’t working
• Push the computer to the side and go take a coffee break. Because spending an hour trying to fix this thing that shouldn’t even be a thing in the first place…yeah, not their favorite task on the to-do list
• Shake their head and head over to Fiverr to see who they can pay to get their annoyance off their hands 

Think about how inconvenient it must have been to have spare change rolling around the floor and credit cards falling out of your pockets before the super-convenience of the wallet came along.

Or about how reusable water bottles make it easy for you to have hydration on the go: without having to keep wasting plastic along the way. 

Or how Our Place’s product the Always Pan exploded on social media — and snagged a spot on stovetops worldwide — by positioning itself as “the gold standard for versatility, doing the job of ten pieces of traditional cookware.”

In all of these cases, a solution came along that solved a particular problem. And by latching on that problem and being upfront with their audience about how they’d make sure that problem was a “been there, over that” kind of thing, all these solutions sold well. Became fixtures in our backpacks. And attracted brand fans consistently. 

How Pain Points Actually Help You Sell 

Sure, people like to know that your product comes in a variety of colors. Or that your top-selling service includes a bucketful of freebies. But what they actually care about? 

People actually care about how your product or service are going to help meet a need in their life that hasn’t been met yet. 

Branding photography services don’t just give small business owners a Google Doc folder full of pretty photos…

They help small business owners look more legit online. 

Canva doesn’t just help you create pretty images…

It helps you create graphic designer-level designs. Without paying graphic designer prices to do it. 

An online course about how to 10x your Pinterest audience doesn’t just help you get more eyes on your profile…

It gives you an evergreen lead magnet strategy to fill your roster with perfect-fit clients off just one social media platform. 

While giving your audience the low-down on the specific features of your product is a perfect way to push them across the finish line on the sale, leading with the pain point you help solve or the need you help meet is the quickest way to get people engaged. 

And keep them engaged until the point where they’re hitting “submit” on giving your product or service a try. (While you earn an A+ on the copywriting skills front.)

How to Get Clear on Your Audience’s Biggest Pain Points 

The quickest way to get clear on your audience’s biggest pain points is to ask them directly. 

Consider sending satisfied customers a survey, which includes open-ended questions like:

“What was going on in your life that made you want to give this a try?”

Or send out a quick post on social media that invites your audience to engage with the question: 

“What’s one of the biggest things you’re struggling with when it comes to [your product/niche/service]?” 

If you get cold feet at the idea of reaching out to your audience (*side note: the faster you can warm those feet up and get some audience input, the better!*), you can try review mining. 

Though review mining is often talked about Joanna Wiebe (the OG when it comes to helping you build high-end copywriting skills), she’s not the only one who boasts the sales-getting performance of the practice. 

Review Mining: What It Is

Put simply: review mining is when you dig deep into what your ideal customers are saying online.

If you already have a popping-off list of 5-star Amazon reviews, or are sitting on 300+ Google testimonials, you can start there. 

But if you’re just starting off in your small business, are still in the “build and grow” phase, or are a copywriter working for a client, then don’t start with yourself: start with your competitors. 

Get a feel for the real pains that brought customers to purchase from your competitors (or pay similar providers for your services) by looking at: 

• Reviews left on Amazon, Google, Yelp, Facebook, or other spaces online
• Testimonials posted on competitor websites

When review mining, you’re looking for insight into what your customers are thinking: and what unmet needs or ongoing frustrations made them seek out a product or service in your niche. 

To think and write like a copywriter, consider copy-pasting any reviews that catch your eye into a Google Doc that you can refer back to as you write. 

This will help you stick close to the mind of your customer as you write, and write copy that actually sticks like a Top-40s Billboard song in their head.

How to Turn Pain Points Into Actually Good Copywriting 

You don’t need a whole class, course, or high-level degree to be a good copywriter with pro-level copywriting skills.

You just need to start by having an awareness of your ideal customers’ pain points in hand. And by understanding the time-tested formulas that every good copywriter relies on to boost their conversions with every page of copy they write. 

Wait, Copywriters Use Formulas? 

Yes, my friend. Good copywriters totally do. 

Not because they’re lazy or can’t do things the totally-original way. But because copywriters and thinkers all the way back to the olden-times of Aristotle have understood that organizing your messages in certain ways is one of the easiest and most effective ways to make a big persuasive impact. 

And while you can find a compete guide to different copywriting formulas here, let’s keep things a little simpler with one of the most time-tested and sales-earning formulas in the book:

PAS

Or, if you’re more in the know:

Problem – Agitation – Solution 

What’s PAS in Copywriting? And Why Is It Such an Important Copywriting Skill? 

In copywriting, PAS refers to problem, agitation, solution.

If we shake out that acronym a bit, it begins to look like this: 

• Problem: The biggest pain point or problem that your reader needs solved
• Agitation: A deep, intimate look into the problem—where its symptoms and pains are so vividly portrayed that the reader can feel that problem viscerally 
• Solution: A clear look into how your product or service can totally solve the problem and help your reader overcome their pain points

The power of the PAS formula boils down to simple human psychology. 

As humans, we’re highly motivated to avoid immediate pain. We’re more likely to grab a painkiller to overcome our back pain than spend time fixing our posture—even if posture is the real cause of that searing, burning feeling we have in our lower backs. 

Though your offer might be perfectly suited to give your readers long-term freedom from pain—the posture clinic, if you will!—humans are psychologically wired to respond more positively to solutions that are causing them current discomfort than they are wired to respond positively to future benefits. 

By framing your offer as the ointment that will ease a current pain point, you can have a bigger impact (and score higher conversion rates!) than focusing on future benefits alone. 

Before looking at some of the best copywriting examples of this formula in action, let’s imagine what this would look like in simpler terms.

PAS in Copywriting: Set in the Simplest Terms 

Let’s say you’re an organization expert who specializes in making small apartments multi-functional for work-from-home families. Perfect! You’ve already settled on a niche with plenty of growth potential. 

Your clients have a clear problem: they have a small living space, and they need that living space to serve a lot of purposes. 

But beyond that big problem, they have a few others that show up as highly-emotional lived experiences. 

Because they don’t have an office door that they can close at the end of the day, they feel always “on.” Rather than clocking out at 4pm, they keep making excuses to check their email, reach for that work phone, and get one last thing! done before heading off to family time. 

And because their office space also doubles as a living room-playroom combo, they always end up with adorable 4-year-old fingers getting into their work documents and messing up all attempts at organization. 

And because that office space-living room-playroom is also the roomiest spot in the apartment to do some morning sun salutations, they find it hard to relax their body and mind when they’re off work—no matter how much “me time” they schedule in. 

I feel their pain!

And if you were the copywriter building a web page around this service (or the owner of this business trying to bulk up your copywriting skills to do all the advertising yourself), you should too. 

For this business, the PAS formula might look a little something like this: 

• Problem: You have a small living space. But it needs to do a lot. 
• Agitation: Clocking out never actually means leaving work behind. Family and work are all intermeshed, so you can’t feel centered in either. There’s no separation between work, family, and self-care. 
• Solution: My service, which will de-clutter your small space while helping you finally find the work-life balance/compartmentalization you desperately need. 

Of course, you can’t just publish these PAS notes on a web page and expect them to convert on autopilot. 

As a copywriter or a business owner writing your own copy, your job is to turn this collection of problems, agitations, and solutions into an on-brand and effortlessly engaging piece of copy. 

One that helps helps your audience know exactly what you’re selling. And exactly why they need what you’re selling so gosh darn badly. 

This might mean taking a headline-body copy combo like this on a web page: 

(What not to do:)

Organization Services for WFH Professionals 

I streamline the functionality of your space by turning your work-from-home corner into a beautiful home office. Whether you need to get your documents in order, make things look a little neater, or just fit it all into your small space: I’m the one to help!

Into this (what to try):

You should be able to work from home: without feeling on the clock 24/7 

When you work-play-live all in the same place, it can be hard to put work away for the night. Because being just a stone’s-throw away from your computer and the blinking email inbox that’s gathering unread steam as we speak…that’s not a recipe for relaxation. It’s a recipe for getting up at 2am to put out any client fires that have come up in the hours since you promised to turn off for the night. 

Let’s help you find a better work-life balance as a work-from-home pro. By organizing your space to boost productivity during the day. While helping you settle easily into “me-time” at night. 

On Building Copywriting Skills 

When Semrush did some down and dirty research into the state of marketing, they found: 1). Only 47% of people research their audience before writing marketing materials or coming up with a marketing plan. And 2). 44% of people said that improving the value of their content led to greater business success. 

What should you take away from this? 

Focusing on improving the value of your website copywriting, or content marketing efforts can have a real impact on your biz. 

And making that impact by tapping into copywriting skills only a portion of people are using (ones that stay focused on your audience’s most deeply-felt needs)? That doesn’t just make you a good copywriter. It makes you someone who is ahead of the game.