A Cautionary Tale About Using Teardowns in Your Marketing Material

Alright folks, I'm going to tell you a cautionary tale about using teardowns in your marketing material.

Tune in.👇

First: just for the uninitiated. A teardown is a really common tool copywriters use in their content marketing. They look at a page, find things to improve, then do a video or blogpost outlining what they would do to improve it.

Pretty straightforward stuff. It's a good way to show how you think about things and the value you add - as well as get some conversation going on social.

When I consolidated my service offering in January of this year, from "any writing needs you could possibly have" to "home pages and landing pages specifically," I realised that I was going to have more gaps in my pipeline than I was used to.

If I was going to turn down work that didn't fit into my new, narrow offering, I was going to have to actively go out and find work that DID fit into it.

So I started cold emailing.

My strategy was pretty simple: I'd get a list of software companies. I'd look at their home pages. I'd rewrite their home pages to make them better. I'd email a marketing boss with my rewrite. Hopefully that would turn into a relationship and the relationship would turn into work.

So I found a CRM with the headline "All-in-one business management software." And this is the feedback I sent them:

(My cold emails were way too long, but that's another story. The TL;DR is that I suggested they get rid of "all-in-one" and replace it with "simplify, reduce costs and grow").

The marketing director I'd contacted replied to me! He was very kind, and he said something to the effect of "well, our best leads come from searches for the term 'all-in-one'. There's really nobody searching for the terms you've suggested in your proposed headline."

Do you see the mistake I made?

I just barrelled in with some feedback with no regard for the context. I didn't know where their traffic came from. I didn't know the goals of the page. I just took one look at their headline and said, "ooh, that sucks, here's a better one."

But had they taken my advice, all those great leads searching for "all-in-one software" would have evaporated!

What you can take from this:

Teardowns and feedback are a good way to exercise your copywriting muscles and show the way you think. But you need to tread carefully. The most common answer to a question in copywriting, or any professional services really, is "it depends."

Unless a page is REALLY bad, it's pretty hard to give meaningful feedback without knowing its goals, its context and how people get there.

If you follow me on Linkedin or Twitter, you'll know that I still do home page teardowns - but I work hard to:

1. Caveat the heck out of them.
2. Try to be positive as much as I can - it's much better to be wrong about how something is good than to be wrong about how it is bad.
3. Try to generalise into a wider lesson or point, rather than just talk about how a specific page sucks and how I would change it.