Joanna Wiebe

10/10 traits every copywriter needs to learn:

Let's break them down:


1. Curious about customers

- Read the 2, 3 and 4-star reviews
- Listen to sales calls
- Put their exact phrases in quotes in your notes

"If you think you need rehab, you do" came from a book review, and it beat every other angle we tested *by a landslide*.


2. Reader-first

- Open each line with "you" or "your"
- Keep going until it feels like a lot
- Use it most with good news

We all care most about ourselves, so copy that puts the reader front and center gets read and remembered.


3. Focused

- Pick one benefit per headline
- Choose one adjective instead of two
- Give each idea its own line

Studies going back to 1935 show the more ideas you stack together, the harder the first one is to remember.


4. Brave enough to write badly first

- Write 10 rough hooks fast
- Save the editing for later
- Read them back and see what jumps out

Clarity shows up while you write, so the good hook usually comes after a few messy ones. I do this every single time.


5. Outcome-minded

- Say "this works because..." in reviews
- Point to a number: clicks, replies, sales
- Ask "what data are you drawing on?" when feedback comes in

When you talk about results, people trust your judgment and stop treating copy like a matter of taste.


6. Great at asking questions

- Ask what's slowing growth right now
- Look at the data before you write a word
- Make sure the brief solves the real problem

Your copy works hardest when it's aimed at the one thing holding the business back.


7. Clear on what you stand for

- Pick a side
- Name what your brand stands against
- Write for the people who agree with you

Patagonia ran a "Don't buy this jacket" ad on Black Friday, and they made nearly 40% more revenue that day.


These 7 have done more for my copy than my English degree ever did. (Sorry, professors.)

Which one are you working on next?

Follow me for more.

1 day ago | [YT] | 90

Joanna Wiebe

Myth: Customers buy the best product.
Truth: Customers buy the product they understand fastest.

Here are 5 ways to make yours the obvious choice:


1. Flip the status

Tassimo had a barcode on every pod that told the machine exactly how to brew. Objectively better tech.

Nespresso had George Clooney and boutiques where you sampled pods like wine. And Nespresso won, because they sold you on *who you are for choosing it.*


So look at your category and ask: what do people here feel a little embarrassed about?

Pods felt cheap. Nespresso made them a mark of taste. Your opening could be hiding in the same place.


2. Hijack the myth

Marlboro borrowed a character that had been living in American heads for over a century: the cowboy. A man on a horse, wide open sky, and the brand moved right in.

What story does your customer already tell about themselves? Show up in that one.


3. Open a hidden door

In 2014, Blue Bottle was a single cafe in San Francisco. Then they published a video course on how to brew the perfect cup.

People who took it started asking about roast dates. Once you're coffee-literate, generic coffee is just sooo beneath you.


4. Build a ritual

Starbucks asks your name, writes it on the cup and calls it out. Same in every city.

A friend once told me a guy wearing Patagonia is telling the world he's husband material. (A jacket! With a moral code!)


Your customer's day is full of dull moments: the checkout, the onboarding email, the confirmation page.

Each one is a missed ceremony.

Pick one and make it feel personal and repeatable.


5. Give them a superpower

Before Stripe, taking payments online meant bank approvals, contracts and weeks of waiting.

Then a few lines of code said, “You can build now.” I was one of them, and it made me feel like a builder.


This is the biggest question in the whole list:

“What can your customer do after finding you
that they didn't BELIEVE they could do before?”

Answer that and you're selling them a new version of who they are.


Recap:

1. Flip the status
2. Hijack the myth
3. Open a hidden door
4. Build a ritual
5. Give them a superpower


Which one is your brand missing?

Follow me for more.

4 days ago | [YT] | 147

Joanna Wiebe

I use AI every day.

It's very, very good at the first part of the job: making options.

Ask for 50 headlines and you'll have them before your coffee cools.

The second part is where the money is.

Which one goes on the page?
Which 49 go in the trash?
And can you explain why to your CEO?

That's taste.

A 2026 Harvard study found that AI makes people who already have good judgment even better. Which means the judgment part is still on you.

(Sorry.)

So when I'm staring at a wall of AI headlines, I ask two questions:

1. Which words came from a customer?

Reviews, sales calls, support tickets. If a real customer said it, then it moves to the top of the pile. Every time.

2. What would have to be true for this one to work?

If the answer is "people would have to care about our features"... delete.

(Then I delete the other 49.)

#tastemaker #RIPtheother49

5 days ago | [YT] | 83

Joanna Wiebe

The day you stop chasing original ideas, everything changes.

Let me explain...


Google, Starbucks and TikTok have something in common.

None of them had an original idea.

There's an old saying: pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land.

(Dark, I know. But true.)


AltaVista launched search in 1995 and spent millions teaching people why they needed a search engine. Yahoo bought it, then shut it down.

Then Google showed up and took the whole market.

Being first is freaking expensive because everyone learns from your mistakes.


So the better question is: how do you stand out with an idea that's already proven to make money?

There are 4 ways.


1. Win with a better brand

Peet's Coffee had specialty coffee figured out in the 1960s. Starbucks copied their store layout (with permission!) and even sold Peet's beans at first.

Then Starbucks built the better brand, and now it's the default coffee shop.


If you're in a crowded market, stop trying to out-feature everyone.

Look at what the leader's brand makes people feel, find what's missing from that feeling, and build your brand to fill the gap.


2. Win with a better product

Vine had short videos years before TikTok, and Twitter shut it down in 2017.

TikTok took the same idea and built a better algorithm, solved music licensing and paid creators. Same concept, *genuinely* better version.


Read what people complain about in the market leader (missing features, clunky experience) and build the version it should have been.


3. Position against the leader

IBM owned corporate computing, and its motto was "Think." Apple answered with "Think Different." Steve Jobs fought for "Different" because the bad grammar was the point.

Everyone already knew IBM, so Apple got to borrow that fame.


4. Win with your voice

In one study, the same bottled water got different labels: rugged, sophisticated, playful, neutral. Nobody bought the neutral one.

Liquid Death sells water in a can, and its voice helped build a $1.4 billion brand.


Even if 30% of people hate your voice, you're better off than if 100% forget you exist.

And changing how you sound costs almost nothing.


Recap:

1. Win with a better brand
2. Win with a better product
3. Position against the leader
4. Win with your voice

Which one fits your business?

Follow me for more.

6 days ago | [YT] | 88

Joanna Wiebe

McDonald's is famous. In-N-Out is interesting.

Coca-Cola is famous. Red Bull is interesting.

Famous brands get known.
Interesting brands get remembered.

If you want to build a brand people will remember...

Here are 5 secrets the most interesting brands in the world use:


1. Create the gap.

Rosetta Stone and Babbel were the serious language apps.

Then Duolingo turned its cute owl into a menace that guilt-trips you for skipping a lesson.

People expected a study app. They got an owl with attitude. Today? Try naming a competitor.


How to find your gap:

Grab a piece of paper. Make 2 columns.

Left: what everyone expects from your industry.
Right: the opposite.

A private bank? Everyone expects stuffy, so be laid-back and funny. Everyone sponsors golf, so sponsor street hockey.


2. Make the gap matter.

OneSkin was founded by 4 PhD scientists. You'd expect science jargon.

Instead, they talk like a warm beauty brand: "Collagen in your skin is like gluten in bread."

The surprise works because it's backed by real expertise.


Test your gap with 2 sentences:

"I'm different because ___."


"That matters to my people because they are ___."

If you can't fill in the second one, cut it. It’s wrong because it grabs attention but it doesn't earn interest.


Keep them guessing.

Apple guards every keynote like a secret. Taylor Swift hides Easter eggs in her songs, outfits and interviews.

Our brains can't let go of things that feel unfinished. That's the Zeigarnik effect. In copy, we call it an open loop.


To use it, stop telling people everything.

End posts and reels on a question, a hint or a "next time."

And give your thoughts some room. Posting 15 times a day will def become noise. Anticipation needs a little silence.


4. Don't be summarizable.

Red Bull is an energy drink, a media company, an F1 team and the brand that sent a man skydiving from space.

Try summing that up. You can't, so you keep paying attention.


For people, it's flaws.

A small human stumble makes a skilled person more likeable. That's the pratfall effect.

List what doesn't fit your brand: side quests, contradictions, mistakes. Pick one and show it on purpose.


5. Have the courage to make enemies.

On Black Friday, Patagonia ran an ad that said "Don't buy this jacket."

Their enemy was consumerism. It earned them nearly 40% more revenue that Black Friday.


Brands people love or hate get talked about do far more than brands everyone mildly likes.

The test: can you say who or what your brand repels?

If you can't, you're probably likable. And likable brands are easy to forget.


You don't need a McDonald's budget to get noticed. Becoming interesting is free.

Pick one secret and use it this week.

& If you want to build a brand people remember, follow me for more tips like this.

1 week ago | [YT] | 136

Joanna Wiebe

Snickers sold $376 million more chocolate bars without changing the product.

Instead, they used a simple strategy most marketers completely ignore.

Here's exactly what they did (& how to copy them):


Their agency, BBDO, studied how young men behave around other young men.

Here's what they noticed:

When a guy starts acting weird, his friends call him out.

And when people get hungry, they start acting weird.


That insight became one line:

"You're not you when you're hungry."

Same chocolate bar. $376 million more in sales.


Adman Jeremy Bulmore said a good insight is like a refrigerator.

When you open the door, the light comes on.

It shows you a hidden human truth you can use. That's what Snickers found.


Then they stuck with it.

That one point of view, held over time, beat a decade of clever one-off campaigns.

It works for people the same way it works for brands.


Byron Sharp gets hired by huge brands for his one idea: brands grow when a product is easy to remember and easy to buy.

That one idea went against decades of thinking about loyalty and rewards programs.

He led with it anyway (or because it was different?). And now boardrooms at P&G and Unilever are built around it.


One of mine is: nobody hires a copywriter to write. They hire them to sell.

Copywriters argue with me about that right up until their boss asks why the writing isn't performing.


Here's how to copy Snickers:

1. Figure out where your product fits into your customer's life.

2. Look for the hidden truth. What does your audience do that nobody talks about?


3. Fill in this sentence:

"Most people believe ___. They're wrong. Here's the truth: ___."

Example: Most people believe their teenage son is in a bad mood all the time. They're wrong. He's grouchy because he's hungry.


4. Say it out loud in your next meeting. If nobody pushes back, sharpen it until somebody does.

5. Commit to it. Organizations hire and promote the person whose thinking they can predict.


What are your thoughts on this?

Let me know below.

& If you want to think like a top 1% marketing strategist, follow me for more tips like this.

1 week ago | [YT] | 60

Joanna Wiebe

If I lost every follower tomorrow and had 30 days to build a viral personal brand from zero, here's exactly what I'd do:

1. Go to Amazon. Find the top books in my niche. Skip the books and read the reviews.


Reviews are where your audience says what they think - and they’re never filtered.

When a rehab center hired us, every competitor sounded super-soft and careful. But the language in the book reviews was blunt.

We found one interesting line: "If you think you need rehab, you do."

It beat every other angle by a landslide.


It worked because readers were already asking "should I?" And that line finished their thought.

Find the thing your audience has thought 100 times but never heard anyone say out loud. THAT is your message.


2. Look at what everyone else in your niche is saying.

If they all sound the same, cool - your message sits in the gap between what your competitors say and what your audience says.

Pick 3 possible messages.


3. Decide why you're building your brand.

Write down the goal, then attach a number to it (a KPI) so you can tell whether it's working.


4. Pick one platform to start.

Go where your audience spends time. Influencers? Probably Instagram. Sales teams? Probably LinkedIn.

I chose YouTube (and then added others!). The saying goes, “People who spend time spend money.” YouTube is great for getting people to spend time. :)


5. Pick a look people will recognize.

If someone scrolls past with the sound off, do they know it's you?

Dan Martell: blue shirt.
Alex Hormozi: white tank top.
Me: red blazer.

Wear it every time because recognition is what builds trust.


6. Test your 3 messages. A lot.

Post each msg as a personal story, a talking head, a podcast clip and a repost with your take on top of it.

Don't overproduce it though. Right now, the number of posts matters more than how polished each one is.


Plenty are gonna flop. Plenty will make you cringe. That’s fine because each post is one at-bat, which means this: one miss does NOT mean the message is bad.

We post twice a day on Instagram. Three months in, we were at 10M+ views a month and 1,000 new followers a freaking day.


7. Double down on the winner!!

Eventually one message pulls ahead. For me, that message was “the struggles of creative teams.”

Next, roll that message out to every platform your audience uses (for work and for life). Once it works organically, you’ll feel better about putting ad money behind it.


8. Set up a welcome DM before those new followers arrive.

Ours asks: "Are you here for the vids or here to grow your business?"

The answer tells you who wants more videos vs who wants help with their business.


Recap:

1. Find your message in reviews
2. Find the gap in your niche
3. Set a goal with a number
4. Pick one platform
5. Pick a look
6. Test your messages
7. Scale the winner
8. Set up a welcome DM

That's how I went from under 10,000 to over 10M views a month.


Have any questions?

Let me know below.

& If you want to build a personal brand people remember, follow me for more tips like this.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 218