A framework by Annie Maguire
Annie Maguire is a conversion copywriter, and her process has a phase most people skip. Research first. Then a blueprint of the page, deciding which messages appear and in what order. Only then the copy. She picks the copywriting formula last, and treats the writing itself as the easy part.
Where the work actually is
research actually putting pen to paper is kind of the easy bit
Most people open a doc and start writing. Maguire calls that the common mistake, and she names what belongs in front of it.
The framework
Most copywriting advice gives you two steps. Understand the customer, then write. Maguire runs three, and the middle one is the framework.
and so once the research is complete i move into the information architecture phase which basically is like creating a blueprint of the page from a content perspective
The blueprint answers three questions before a sentence gets written. Which messages go on the page. What order they go in. What the offer is. That is a content decision, not a writing one. Separating the two stops the page becoming a list of everything true about the product.
The order does not come from her taste. It comes out of the research, and she is specific about the mechanics. Surveys, customer interviews, review mining, competitor reviews. She tags each finding as a motivation, an anxiety or a pain point, drops them into a pivot table, and reads the counts. At 150 or so insights the ranking is obvious, and the ranking is the hierarchy.
once i have the data i use that to really drive how the page comes together both in terms of hierarchy content and language
Hierarchy, content and language all come from the same pass. The language part matters as much as the order, because the words come back out of the research rather than out of the writer. Then the copywriting phase begins, and she goes back to the research a second time to pull the customer quotes she writes from.
Practice
Five steps, in her order. The writing is step five for a reason.
One action, named before anything else. A page with two goals gets a hierarchy that serves neither. Every later decision needs a yardstick.
Survey the audience, interview a few of them, mine your public reviews, then read your competitors' reviews. She rates interviews above the rest, because a handful of them yields a lot. Support and chat logs are the other place she goes hunting.
Label each finding a motivation, an anxiety or a pain point. Group them by topic in a pivot table. Once you have 100 to 200 insights, the top motivators are visible. That ranking is your message order.
List the messages the page needs, the order they run in, and the offer. Work out the length here too. This is the document you argue about, and arguing about it is cheaper than arguing about finished copy.
Go back to the research and pull the customer's own words as raw material. Choose problem-agitation-solution for a newer product where the reader needs the problem named. Skip that opening for a mature audience who already know it.
Boundary conditions
The honest limit is one Maguire states about her own method. Asked how she builds the hierarchy, she does not hand over a formula. She is not using one.
i really don't focus on frameworks or formulas
She calls the rest intuition, then corrects herself. Intuition here means experience: she has done it long enough that the order suggests itself. That is the catch. Steps one to three transfer to anyone. Step four leans on judgment she cannot hand over, so a first-timer with 150 tagged insights still has to decide what leads.
The first failure is the one that catches founders. Research-first assumes a customer base to research. Before that exists, Eugene Schwartz's 33-33 method works from the market instead of your own users. That is why the two sit on opposite sides of the split below.
Primary sources
Two interviews where Maguire walks her own process. The Masters of SaaS conversation is the long one on conversion copy. The SEO conversation is where she lays out the phases in order, start to launch.
Annie Maguire · Content and SEO
The Information Architecture Phase
"i move into the information architecture phase which basically is like creating a blueprint of the page"
Annie Maguire · Masters of SaaS
Why Writing Is the Easy Part
"research actually putting pen to paper is kind of the easy bit"
Annie Maguire · Masters of SaaS
What the Data Decides
"i use that to really drive how the page comes together both in terms of hierarchy content and language"
Annie Maguire · Masters of SaaS
On Copywriting Formulas
"i really don't focus on frameworks or formulas"
Where experts disagree
Annie Maguire
collects the words first. Surveys, interviews and review mining produce a hundred or more tagged insights, and the count of what people actually said decides the hierarchy, the content and the language of the page.
Eugene Schwartz
works from a model of the market instead. Where the prospects sit on the awareness ladder, and how many competing claims they have already heard, tells you what the headline has to do before you learn anything about an individual buyer.
The split is whether you have customers yet. Maguire's method needs a base to mine, so it is the stronger one once traffic and reviews exist. Schwartz's ladder is what you have before that, and it stays useful after: it tells you which of Maguire's top-ranked messages the reader is ready to hear.
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