The Copywriting Genius | Gary Stringer

Welcome back to another interview folks - today we’ve got a copywriting genius with us.

I introduce to you Gary Stringer - one of the most talented copywriters / marketers I’ve met.

Gary is currently the Senior Content Marketing Manager at HowNow.

He is the kind of guy that looks where no one else is looking - finds trends no one else sees.

Stick around to learn about how he got into marketing and how he finds and capitalizes on trends others don’t see.

Q: Tell us a little about why you decided to get into marketing in the first place?

First and foremost, I consider myself a copywriter. That was the thing I always enjoyed doing and I enjoyed writing really since I was young kid like seven or eight at school.

That was the thing I loved the most and then I kind of had this separate interest in marketing so I did a degree in advertising and marketing.

Between the degree where I kind of led on most of the written assignments in our group projects. When you write dissertation, you really find out if you like writing. Because it's like 10,000 words.

Then I did my first internship at a digital marketing agency. Between all the experience of writing in my degree and the early exposure and digital marketing I realized copywriting was really the thing I was quite good at had a passion for.

Q: Why did you choose to work at an early stage startup and what have you learned from the process?

While looking for copywriting / content roles, I saw the job for How Now and I think the thing that drew me in was the brand and the tone of voice.

I've really previously not worked at a company that was that fluid or that informal. It could also be that they were really free with how they wrote. So the job description was super blunt. It was really engaging. It drew me in.

It was so much less about sounding smart versus the person reading it understanding. That was the first thing that really caught my attention.

I ended up joining at a really interesting time, I joined during May 2020 and I was actually the first permanent marketing hire.

Since I was the first marketer, I got to put my stamp on things and do it the way I thought was best.

The advice I would give to people as well is if you can join a company in early stage, there will be a real chance to shape it and do the things you think are going to work.

Q: What are some lessons you’ve learned about copywriting, especially as a brand?

it depends on your brand, but I think most brands can afford to be more fun than they're currently being.

if you're like a big financial company, you can't just suddenly start doing this wacky stuff, but you can look for these spots to say, like we can soften it up a bit here.

This carries through to all of your touch points, the description you write about your company could be human, or it could be very I don't know what this company does when I read it.

So I think trying to soften up those touch points, especially the first ones.

Q: What are some things you do to remain creative and improve as a copywriter and marketer?

I would try and not pigeonhole yourself. Take inspiration from stuff outside your normal industry and your normal space because you can get in this echo chamber.

So, for example I work in a learning and development space, and it can be quite niche and in a bit of an echo chamber. But the best thing I do is try and look at a brand completely detached from what we’re doing.

I usually look at data on how their platform is used and how they convert into best practices. They say, based on how people use our platform, this a best practice is you can apply and I thought, wow, that's a great idea. No one in our space has done that.

Look at the data on our product, how people use it. Let's create this data driven best practices to say look, 80% of high performance teams do this 100%. Thinking wider about other spaces outside of your own and trying to incorporate those where they make sense for you would be a great place to start.

Then I guess it would just be to follow the things you're interested in. You can listen to a podcast, a webinar or you can read a book. It's like what is the thing that's actually going to help you apply what you learn.

Because I can sign myself up to a course, but if that doesn't help me learn, then. I'm not going to be engaged. I won't go and apply it.

I would also just read all the time and write all the time. It doesn't particularly matter what you're reading. Because you can read a bunch of varied stuff and you would take inspiration from any book.

Even if you read classic literature, you'll still see what a good story structure is or you'll notice little things that really piqued your interest. So I wouldn't say, just read books about marketing and copywriting. But I would look at everything around you and say, here's a lesson I can go and apply to my space.

Q: What is the coolest thing that has happened to you in your career? What did you learn as a result?

So when I worked at my first company at Curacast, we had a weekly blog where someone from team had to write something. it was about digital marketing in some way, or seo or something like that.

It was my turn, and I really didn't know what to write about. This was just after lady gaga had worn a red meat dress. She wore it around like 2011 and all I did was I decided that it would be funny to map on Google Trends Lady Cars, popularity.

Then literally using clip art, I would drop in pictures of the things she did. So she wore the meat, dress. There was a few other stunts she did, published it on the blog right at the end of the day.

I went home just thinking like this is just a usual weekly thing. Then big music website like La Times and all these other big websites are picked up and it was headlines like, Is Lady gaga's popularity decrease.

It was so funny to just see all these useful, brilliant backlinks coming back to our company's website, off the back of something I did off of a whim because I didn't know what to write about

The funny thing I learned from that is that there is no exact science to marketing, in particular, PR and SEO.

Lesson: There is really important lesson here on riding waves of trends to create viral pieces of content that can increase your backlinks and bring lots of traffic to your website or social media platforms. All it takes is one right trend for you to pull off something similar to Gary.

Q: It seems like riding trends is a good strategy in general for gaining exposure - what are your thoughts on using trend marketing in general?

I think Trends is such an interesting one. For a lot of companies I've worked at, I look at what are the trends for the year ahead. But more importantly, like when are people starting to search for them.

So without giving away the secret source, a lot of the time people don't think about when something is going to start getting search volume.

So for example, I used to work in a holiday company. Most brands wouldn't start writing about holidays until a few months away from the date when search volume actually probably starts even out.

I would start ranking for content probably two years before the actual year And we would pick up volume pretty early on because like I said, people do start searching ahead of time.

But most of our competitors Wouldn't start until in mid 2023 for example after commercial season wrapped up like around November.

So that's a way you can outcompete your competitors with bigger budgets because it gave me a really big buzz when we would be ranking for like 2020 holidays because we started early and built up authority. We were able to outrank companies with much bigger budgets.

That is it for today folks, let me know what you thought about this issue by replying to this email or emailing [email protected].

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