Chris Mason is our guest on the 352nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Chris is a direct-response marketer who wrote a companion book to Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz called, Breakthrough Advertising Mastery. Chris breaks down his process for writing this book and he gives actionable tips for copywriters can use today.
Tune into the episode to find out:
What similarities are there between songwriting and direct response marketing?
Why you need to build your “sitting down” muscle.
How Chris landed Brian Kurtz as a client and how their partnership grew.
What is the 40/40/20 mix?
The best process for context switching and juggling multiple projects at a time.
How to get better at decision-making and what that means for your business.
Determining your audience’s mass desire and understanding market sophistication.
When do you incorporate a unique mechanism?
Two techniques to better understand your audience and their needs.
How to build the stream of acceptance and shift current beliefs.
How to break things down into actionable steps for your audience.
What’s a profit partner and what’s involved?
Tune into the episode by hitting play or checking out the transcript below.
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Chris's website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast
Full Transcript:
Rob Marsh: If you've been a copywriter for more than a few days, you've almost certainly been told that the preeminent copywriting book that you absolutely have to read, maybe even read over and over, is Eugene Schwartz's Breakthrough Advertising. A few years ago when the book was out of print, it wasn't uncommon to see a single copy of Breakthrough Advertising selling on eBay for close to a thousand dollars. And it is a good book, even a must read for serious copywriters, but it's not the easiest book to read or understand.
Hi, I'm Rob Marsh and my co-host of The Copywriter Club podcast is Kira Hug, and our guest for this episode is copywriter and marketing strategist Chris Mason. Chris spent much of the last two years writing a companion volume for Eugene Schwartz's book called Breakthrough Advertising Mastery. It makes learning the concepts that Eugene Schwartz taught in that book a lot easier to learn. And Chris tell us which concepts of the book he thinks are most important during this interview. He also shared his thoughts about songwriting, juggling multiple large projects at the same time, and what it takes to help shift a prospect's belief so they can buy.
Kira Hug: But first, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Accelerator, which is actually coming up pretty soon. We have a nice little wait list you can jump on that we'll link to if you have any interest in this program. And hopefully you do have some interest in this program. Rob, why should someone listening be interested in this program?
Rob Marsh: So if you are a new copywriter, a newish copywriter, or a copywriter that is trying to make a shift in your business in some way, we've actually designed this to help you go through all of those steps so that you can lay the foundation for successful business, including figuring out what niche you serve, who your exact ideal client is, what kinds of services and products they will actually buy, how you position yourself so that they want to hear from you, how you get yourself out into the world, how you price things. All of that is wrapped up into this one, I don't want to call it a course because it's not really a course, but it's a cohort based group program you go through with several other copywriters, all who are working through the same assignments. You start to create your own network and there's just a ton of bonuses stacked on top of it as well. There's so many reasons to join. I'm actually surprised everybody hasn't joined yet. It's only a little bit tongue in cheek.
Kira Hug: Yeah, we clearly drank our own Kool-Aid. Yeah, and if you think about some of my favorite copywriters working today, some of the ones who I feel like are the smartest, the most creative out there, many of them have been through The Copywriter Accelerator program. Whether or not you realize that they've been through the entire program and really focused on their positioning and everything Rob just mentioned, niching, packaging, which has helped them get to that level where they are so successful because they've been so intentional about it. They didn't just happen to fall into their business. They were intentional about all those micro-decisions and thinking through what they're building along the way. And you can do that too. If you want to be intentional about what you're building, you can look into The Copywriter Accelerator and jump on the wait list.
Rob Marsh: You can find that at thecopywriteraccelerator.com.
Kira Hug: Okay, let's kick off our episode with Chris Mason.
Chris Mason: I got into marketing because I came to Nashville where I still live in right after college, like 2003 or so. And I wrote songs and I performed, so I traveled around the Southeast and Midwest and I quickly learned that, well, if you don't learn how to promote shows and handle the business side, nobody comes to them. And I started building a email list back in the early days, people who had come to the shows and I was doing marketing, but I didn't really know that's what it was. The more I studied about how do I make this thing work, what I was doing with music, I came into contact with, there was a book that was written by one of the head marketing creative guys at Nike that I remember was really powerful for me. I'm blanking the name of it, but it really opened my eyes to this world of creativity and how commerce actually happens.
And that was how I got interested in marketing. And then I grew tired of being a traveling musician. I still write songs. I love that process, but I wasn't too keen on being a performer. And so I had a mentor, he said, "You ought to think about getting just a regular job," because I was saying to him, "I've been doing this music thing for six years and I feel like I just don't really understand business that well, and I want to be a better business person." And so he said, "Go get a job and learn that skill on somebody else's dime." And so I ended up doing that for eight years. I didn't think I would be in the corporate world for eight years, but it really helped me learn the skills that I needed to then build something on the side and get out and do my own thing again.
Rob Marsh: So starts out songwriting, then working. I got to know as a songwriter, any hits? Anything we might recognize? Is it all for yourself or have you partnered with anybody, record labels, anything like that?
Chris Mason: No, I had a song put on hold once, which was by Diamond Rio, a country artist. But that was the closest. So when the song's put on hold, it's like nobody else can have it. But that was the closest, and I probably could have pursued that a little more. And actually, my mom was just visiting this past weekend. She's like, "You got to get back to pitching more of your songs." So I told her it's been on my mind because I write music. I mean, I'm writing every week just for therapy, if nothing else.
Rob Marsh: Yeah. Well, if you hadn't made big, you wouldn't be here with us. So I mean, in some ways we're grateful that you're not playing guitar or something with Diamond Rio. That would be amazing. So before we move on though to the rest of that, what are some of the similarities between songwriting and marketing and the writing that you do? Obviously there's some lessons to pull from one that apply to the other. Talk about that.
Chris Mason: Yeah, that's a great question because I've thought a lot about this actually, because I think one of the reasons that I got really interested in copywriting, which was around 2012, is when I first got introduced to direct response because I didn't know that this style of marketing existed because I was much more familiar with brand and awareness and how many impressions are you getting, not real measurable things. But then I got introduced to direct response. And the thing that I loved about it was I just saw that this is a way that you can tell stories and you can go long as long as you're interesting. And so I really connected endless similarities of finding a good story, starting in the middle of the story, what we would call the hook. It's the same thing when you're writing a song of you've got your chorus.
The way that I start with music is I usually start with trying to find the melody of the song first, and it usually evokes this emotion. And so then you've got this emotion of this sounds like a heartache song. And then for me, it's digging of what stories have I come into contact with or read about that I feel like I could capture this emotion with. And then you just start putting words out that don't even go together.
There's a great video of John Mayer where he is given an interview and he talks about this process. And that is really what copywriting is like for me too, is when I sit down to write, I know where I'm going. Ultimately, I've got the action I want somebody to take, and I just write an ugly piece of copy and then it's easier to go back and edit it and say, "Ah, I don't want to say it that way," or "That's kind of a good idea and I'll highlight it and I'll come back to it." But it's a series of days. It doesn't happen for me quickly at all
Rob Marsh: That John Mayer video's incredible. We'll try to link to that in the show notes.
Kira Hug: Yeah,
