Copywriting Is the Differentiator

Your landing page isn’t finished

Your AI-built landing page reads fine. That’s the problem.

Tools like Lovable and Bolt build the page with your app and write the copy for you. There’s a headline, a line underneath and three feature cards. Nothing on it is wrong, and nothing on it makes a visitor stop. They skim it and leave the way they arrived.

Anyone with the same tools can have a page like yours by this afternoon. So looking finished no longer sets you apart. The words can. What follows are the rules I use when I write them, each one short enough to check a page against.

The hook has one job

The title, the first sentence, the first paragraph: whatever a reader meets first exists to get them to the next line, and nothing else. Joseph Sugarman puts it as a rule: the sole purpose of the first sentence is to get the second sentence read, and the second’s is to get the third read, until the reader is on what he calls a slippery slide and can’t stop. ^[1] A first line that tries to sell, summarise or impress has taken on a second job, and that is where readers leave.

The title gets most of this weight. David Ogilvy reckoned five times as many people read the headline as read the rest, so by the time you’ve written it you have spent eighty cents of your dollar. ^[2] Treat it that way. Write ten titles before you write the page, and judge them on one question: does this make someone want the next line? On a video the same rule governs the first second, and on a post the first line before the fold.

Warm them up before you sell

A good car dealership doesn’t walk you to the car and start on the engine. You’re shown into a quiet room, offered a coffee, asked what you drive now. By the time the car comes up, you’re in the mood to want one. Sugarman calls this the buying environment, and says a page has to build its own: the layout and the first few paragraphs set the mood for the sale before the selling starts. ^[1]

So the order matters. Interest first, then the information. A page that opens with features, specifications or a price is dumping stock on someone who hasn’t decided they care, and however useful the facts are, they land on nobody. Get the reader nodding at a description of their own situation, and only then bring in what you do about it.

People buy from people

On social media especially, nobody wants to be told information, even useful information. It has to arrive as a story told by someone with a point of view and a personality, or it scrolls past. The same facts, delivered by a person with an opinion about them, get watched to the end and remembered. A page works the same way, just slower: a visitor who can picture who wrote it trusts it more than one who can’t. Write as the person your customers would be dealing with, because they are.

Plausible isn’t persuasive

The copy an AI tool writes is plausible. A removals firm gets “stress-free removals, our friendly, experienced team makes moving simple, get your free quote today”. It’s accurate, and it would work for every other removals firm in the same city, so nobody reading it has a reason to choose this one.

The tool isn’t at fault. It was told what the business does, and it wrote about that. What it can’t know is what the business does better than anyone else, and for whom. That is the part only you can supply, and it is the whole difference between copy that reads fine and copy that gets a call.

Find what you do best, and for whom

Start with three questions about your own business:

Which jobs went best, and which customers sent their friends?
How do you take a customer from their first call to the result they wanted?
What do you do that others in your line of work don’t?

Honest answers are specific. They point at a best customer, the kind of person you serve better than a firm that does anything for anyone, and at the things you do along the way that get them where they want to be. A page written for that person will turn some other people away, and that is fine. It is for the customers you serve best.

Sell the bridge, not the features

Picture your customer where they are now, where they want to be, and your product or service as the bridge between them. Each point on the bridge is something you do that takes them part of the way.

Where your customer is, where they want to be, and each step you take them through to get there.

Where they are now. Describe their situation the way they would, before you mention what you sell. This is what makes a reader think “that’s me”, and their words do it better than yours. A personal trainer’s customer says “my clients stop logging after the second week”, not “client engagement”.

Where they want to be. Their dream outcome, not your features, and not a vague benefit. The more concrete it is, the more they want it: clients who train between sessions without being chased.

The bridge. Only now does what you sell come in, as the steps that take them across. Each step should answer part of the worry on the left. A step that answers nothing is a feature, not part of the bridge, and it comes off the page.

Copywriters call this before–after–bridge. ^[3] It is also the test for words like “stress-free” and “with care”: if the reader can see the thing on the bridge, you don’t need to claim it.

Find the moment they start looking

Nobody looks for a removals firm because they’ve been meaning to move for years. Something happens that turns “one day” into “now”: a sale completes, a flat comes free, a deadline lands. Sales writers call this a trigger event. Bob Moesta, one of the people behind the Jobs to Be Done method, calls it the struggling moment. ^[4]

It matters because that’s when people pay attention. Before it, they scroll past anything about your subject. Straight after it, they’re searching, asking friends and comparing, and the first business that describes their situation back to them is the one they call. The same goes for an app: someone who signs up because of a deadline wants to see that deadline on the first screen, not a tour.

You find it by asking. Ask your last few customers what happened just before they started looking, and listen for the event rather than the reason. Their answers tell you how to open your homepage, what people type into Google at that moment, when to advertise, and which worry to answer first.

Write the long version first

Here’s an old-school way to find your strongest selling points. Before anything else, write what you sell as a print ad that asks for a response: one page in a newspaper or magazine that has to get a stranger reading, tell them the whole story and make them pick up the phone. There’s no video or animation to lean on, only words. Sugarman recommends doing this before any other kind of ad, because it’s the hardest format to get right and it shows you what really sells. ^[1]

To fill that page with things your customer cares about, you need to know their problem, their doubts and why your way is better. If you can’t, work on the offer before the words.

Then carry what you found into everything else: a page for each service or each thing the app helps people do. The short lines come last, cut from the long ones: the headline, an ad, your social bio. Written first, they’re guesses. Written last, each one is the best line you already have.

Give AI what only you know

When you ask an AI tool to write the copy for your website, it can only use what you tell it. Ask it to promote your app or service and it will describe the features, because that’s all it knows.

Give it what only you know and the copy gets much better. Talk it through the way you’d brief a copywriter: who your best customers are, where they are now and where they want to be, how you take them across, what you do that others don’t, and what happened just before your last few customers called. Paste in their messages and reviews, so it has their words as well as yours. Then hold what it writes to the rules above: a first line with one job, interest before information, a person behind the words.

This takes longer than generating a page, and that’s the trade. Once each service or product has its full page, you have the source for everything else you write, from the words inside your app to your social posts and the way you introduce yourself. Plenty of AI-built pages read fine. Yours can be the one that reads as if it was written for the person reading it.

Sources

The book links go to Amazon UK and aren’t affiliate links.

Joseph Sugarman — The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. Where the first-sentence rule, the slippery slide, the buying environment and the print-ad exercise come from. The book is about print and mail order rather than websites, but the way he builds a case on a page carries straight over. Find the book on Amazon UK.
David Ogilvy — Confessions of an Advertising Man. The headline line: five times as many people read the headline as the body copy, so the headline is eighty cents of the dollar. Written about print adverts in 1963, and still true of a page title. Find the book on Amazon UK.
Campaign Monitor — before–after–bridge. A plain explanation of the formula, with an example of each part. The article is written for email, but the formula works the same way on a web page.
Bob Moesta — Demand-Side Sales 101. Where the struggling moment comes from. It’s written for people selling a product, but its account of what happens just before someone starts looking applies to any business that wants to be found at that moment. Find the book on Amazon UK.