What makes a marketing asset good?
The design? The copy? The brand?
It’s actually scarcity.
Scarcity is the main ingredient that makes marketing assets “good”.
This piece is titled: Copywriters write copy that’s uncopyable.
“Hard” meaning difficult to produce, un-swipeable, difficult to emulate.
In economics this is termed “easy money” and “hard money”.
Gold is hard. Bitcoin is hard. Rare art is hard. Miami mansions are hard.
Why? Because they’re scarce.
The direct opposite of fluff.
Fluff’s on every platform and in every company. Junk content. And we’re all well-aware of how ignored it gets on a daily basis. Empty calories like candy, soda and chips.
The equivalent of startups serving up fast food to their customers that doesn’t even taste good.
So what’s the solution?
Low barrier to entry.
Write copy only you can write.
Most B2B SaaS websites have some form of the following sales arguments on their website (#1 direct-response sales pipeline channel no matter your ACV).
The proverbial sea of sameness.
You write headlines only you can write and there is unique substance behind them.
I’ll use myself as an example:
My headline is:
“B2B SaaS Copywriter - I help software companies like Looker, Impact and Yesware dial in their messaging & positioning.”
My headline’s underlying goal is simply to be difficult to swipe.
By focusing on the tangible reasons that make me different as a writer, it’s hard to get lumped into the sea of sameness.
Lots more examples out there, and every single on of them you’ll find one thing: scarcity.
Are you creating more fluff?
Or are you building hard assets that’ll last?
And the harder your assets are to produce, the more difficult it will ever be for competitors to copy you and try to re-create your success.
My experience tells me that customers, investors and partners gravitate towards the hard assets.
And the more hard online assets you can accumulate, the better they’ll last and drive results for your business for years (and maybe even decades).
My copy projects can take months to produce. Between all the internal interviews, customer interviews, review mining, strategy sessions.
It requires a really low time preference for me and my clients.
The whole goal is to build structures that last a long time and that cannot be made irrelevant every single year.
It’s like the buildings in Rome, Italy. We’re not making cheap shit here.
Why put all the effort in if it’s not build to last?
And the assets I write for myself and for clients have been working hard for years now, fetching a sum total of $millions worth of leads and sales.
You don’t build hard assets by swiping like a parasite or constantly spying on your competitors.
You get hard assets by being original.