Entries Tagged 'Copywriting 101' ↓

If you’ve been following this series you are now at the point where you have a good idea of the buyer’s interests and concerns. It’s time to show how your product and service matches those interests and solves those problems because it always does, right?

A tyro copywriter will do this with features: throwing out a razzle-dazzle of technical information and forgetting to tie it back to the reasons people buy. (Remember, prospects may evaluate a product logically but their ultimate buying decision will always be emotional.) An experienced copywriter will always translate those features into benefits… how a technical characteristic answers one of the many cravings we talked about last time.

Even better is something called “FABS” which I was trained in when working for a home entertainment chain way back when. This is features, ADVANTAGES and benefits—describe why it does, explain why this is an advance or a superior solution compared to other products that claim to do the same thing, then drive home the benefit. It’s especially useful in selling high-tech products.

(In a live selling situation, a good salesperson will pause after presenting each FAB to gauge the prospect’s interest level, then adjust the presentation of the next FAB accordingly. You don’t have the benefit of the face-to-face contact as a copywriter, which is why it’s extra important to do your research or have a good creative brief.)

In my copywriting class (which is usually techie-heavy) I do an exercise where we pass a #2 yellow pencil around the room and each student has to present a feature, advantage and benefit of the pencil. This gets very interesting when it’s a large class and all the obvious FABS are claimed early.

For example:

FEATURE: the pencil is bright yellow.
ADVANTAGE: I can easily find it compared to other writing instruments.
BENEFIT: I enjoy peace of mind because I’m never without a way to express my thoughts.

FEATURE: #2 pencils are the standard used for computer graded tests.
ADVANTAGE: I know I have the ideal technology to complete the assignment.
BENEFIT: I won’t have to worry about getting marked down because my answers can’t be read by the computer.

And here’s one that came out late in the exercise in a large class:

FEATURE: #2 pencils can be sharpened to a very sharp point.
ADVANTAGE: That point sticks easily in the acoustic tiles when I throw it up at the ceiling.
BENEFIT: I have a way to amuse myself when the class gets boring.

Next time: the five buying decisions… and why buyers always make them in the same order.

Professional salespeople never forget they are selling to a human being, because that person is right in front of them. Copywriters, though, can become confused. They satisfy the requirement of filling a technical need, and forget there is a person signing the purchase order or keying in the credit card number. Unless personal emotional gratification is delivered, the sale may fall through because your solution is not perceived as relevant or important.

Why do buyers buy? Bob Stone, in his classic Successful Direct Marketing Methods, details the two categories of human wants: The desire to gain, and the desire to avoid loss.

Robert Collier, the “Giant of the Mails” who was at his peak in the 1930s, lists  six prime motives of human action:

1. Love
2. Gain
3. Duty
4. Pride
5. Self-indulgence
6. Self-preservation

And here are Roy Chitwood’s six buying motives:

1. Desire for gain (usually financial)
2. Fear of loss (again, usually financial)
3. Comfort and convenience
4. Security and protection
5. Pride of ownership
6. Satisfaction of emotion

Note that every one of these is EMOTIONAL…people buy emotionally, not logically. This is true even when selling business products to people in a business setting, because people are still people.

Next time: features, advantages and benefits.

Copywriters are at their most creative when trying to wriggle out of doing the work at hand. As with the professional salespeople I talked about in my last post, applying a system or methodology to an informal process can help you stay focused. It can also insure that you are not overshooting any decision points in the mind of your reader.

Advertising guidebooks are full of acronymic checklists to verify your copy has a logical flow, such as these three taken from Bob Bly’s excellent The Copywriter’s Handbook:

AIDA = Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
ACCA = Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction, Action
4 Ps = Picture, Promise, Prove, Push

In each case the process is to make a connection with your audience, then present your selling argument, then go for the sale or other action. If you look at failed advertising, often the problem is that the copywriter got the sequence mixed up—for example, leaping to a sales pitch before you’ve hooked the reader in, or asking for the order before you’ve demonstrated the value of what you have to sell.

My favorite checklist is the one taught by my old client Max Sacks International, and it is something I regularly use in auditing my own work. Since this was developed for use by professional salespeople, I’ll add a translation for copywriters.

1. Approach. How are you going to open the dialog? What will you do to engage your audience?
2. Qualification. Make sure the prospect does have buying authority; for copywriters, hopefully the media department has done this job for you.
3. Agreement on need. Make it clear what you’re talking about, then define a problem to be solved. Easy to do in a face to face environment where you can see a head nod, much harder in the remote medium of copywriting where you have to visualize audience reaction.
4. Sell the company. If the prospect doesn’t find the salesperson or the company credible, they aren’t going to buy no matter how appealing the pitch. That’s why you sell the company before presenting your offer. For copywriters this is done with presentation and tone as much as with specific statements.
5. Fill the need. Here is the meat of your selling proposition, presented only AFTER every other requirement has been met.
6. Act of Commitment. Ask for the order. Tell your reader specifically what you want them to do, and emphasize how easy and risk-free it is to do it.
7. Cement the sale. A salesperson will reiterate the commitment that has been made so the new customer does not cancel as soon as they leave the office. A copywriter will do this throughout the message.

Next: why people buy.

This is one in a series based on the “Copywriting that Gets Results” course I teach for the DMA. Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see more.

One of my earliest clients was a guy named Roy Chitwood who owned Max Sacks International, a sales training organization. In working with Roy for several years I attended so many workshops that his catch phrases became drilled into my brain. On the value of training: “School is never out for the sales professional.” On the role of the sales department in the organization: “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  On the importance of planning: “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which road you take.”

Unlike copywriting, personal selling is a contact sport. Salespeople have to psych themselves up to get over rejection and put on their best face for the next appointment. Having an organized system to apply to what may appear an informal activity helps them stay on task (“Once selling becomes a process, it ceases to be a problem”).  This may why there are so many sales training courses and methods; most of the students I met in Roy’s classes had taken several courses from different trainers and used them agnostically for inspiration.

Very much like copywriters, salespeople have the job of getting prospects excited about and desirous of a product or service they may not have realized they needed until a moment ago. That’s why it is so helpful to apply the “rules” followed by professional salespeople to your own work as a copywriter. In my class, I spend quite a bit of time on the copywriting/selling analogy and I’m going to do the same here, over the next several posts.

The relationship between copywriting and selling should be seamless in a well-run company: your lead generation efforts serve as the front end of the sales effort, and serve up a steady stream of prospects (or “suspects” as another mentor, Ray Jutkins, used to call them since they have not yet entered your sales process). The better you’ve done your job, the more interested they will be in learning more about your company’s product or service.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”.  Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

Business is getting better, but I still make an extra effort to seek out potential projects I think would be fun or challenging. The creative director at one such client contacted me last week and said that frankly, their management was used to seeing potential creative resources do products on spec and I’d probably have to do the same if I wanted to get an assignment.

I sent a response in which I said, politely I think, that

There are two concerns I have on a philosophical basis about the whole idea of spec:

–for the writer, if you have other, paying clients waiting you are inevitably going to spend less time on the spec than a “real” assignment.

–for the client, there is the temptation to value the work on the basis of, it’s worth what you pay for it. They have no skin in the game, so they’ll evaluate the spec result less seriously than something they’ve paid good money for.

I didn’t hear back and not sure I will. This isn’t a stretch, by the way. It’s a category where I have done a lot of work for a competitor in the past and that work is easily accessible if they want to see “what I can do” in selling their product.

It’s my loss, but also theirs I think. If you demand spec work then you lose access to all the writers and designers who are too established or busy to be able to consider it.

And here’s something else. A good writer, especially a direct response writer, is going to go through a self-editing process (often unconscious). They will go through a series of drafts they never show the client because though they may sound sweet, they don’t have the oomph, benefit statements and sharpness required to sell effectively. This is something you don’t get from junior writers who may be great wordsmiths but not experienced salespeople. And if the client is used to choosing their talent pool from spec submissions, they may never know what they’re missing.

Along these lines, here’s a nice piece from a down-under designer on “Why Logo Design Does Not Cost $5”. Copywriting neither!

This Ace Hardware email has some great offers...

Right now thousands of people are re-installing Microsoft Outlook as they upgrade from XP to Windows 7. And the majority of these folks won’t touch the default settings which don’t load graphics within emails unless the user specifically asks to do so.

... but most recipients will see it in their preview pane like this.

Right now hundreds of marketers are designing emails that ignore this reality, by placing a big beautiful graphic at the top of the message that shows up as a blank spot superimposed with a red X instead of the desired image. Which means that most recipients will never see the graphic, or the message, because there is nothing visually compelling to pull them in. The “before and after” examples from Ace Hardware are proof positive. Inviting graphic and great offers, but most of the people who got this email will never see them. (I’m on a Mac so the red X’s show up as question marks for me, but the problem is the same.)

Better: REI newsletter has HTML text to tell the story before the graphics load.

So what can you do to fix it? Use HTML text creatively at the top of your email instead of relying on graphics to tell the story. The REI newsletter example is isn’t pretty, but there is a lot of REI identity here to pull people in, including the bar of clickable links.

Best: very little of this message is lost, even without graphic.

Better yet is the email from Beasley Direct that has a good ol’ compelling headline to pull people in, and places this to the left of the page so it will have maximum visibility on small screens. This email also includes ALT text—the words “Beasley Direct Marketing” over the graphic—which appear when the graphic doesn’t load. That’s another good practice. Better yet would have been a benefit message or call to action in the ALT tag, such as “request your complimentary landing pages guide”.

Make sure you’re following these simple steps next time an email goes out. Don’t get intimidated by your art director… the design can still look great, you just need a backup scenario when the graphics don’t load. And everybody will be happier with the higher open rate and, hopefully, more clickthroughs.

Mike Sciosa’s decision to take out John Lackey in Inning 7 of tonight’s Angels-Yankees playoff game has to rank among the all time worst decisions. But close behind it is the new In-Synch tagline from sponsor Travelers Insurance. That’s right, not “in sync” but “in synch” even though if you do a Google search for “Travelers in synch” they’ll correct it to “did you mean Travelers in sync”?

I’ve done advertising for Travelers in the past and trust me, they are not adding piercings and tatts to the traditional insurance pitch. This is an ill-advised attempt to slap on something of interest to a younger audience that would logically have little interest in insurance.

The ads, including a cute one with a terrier that ran during the game (he frets for his lost bone which he should have insured with Travelers) are standard stuff but then the bizarre tag line appears. “Travelers. Insurance. In-Synch™.” That’s right, in addition to pandering to 25-34 they are kowtowing to the legal department which is not the way to get the attention of the young and the restless.

Travelers, welcome to the Badvertising Hall of Shame.

A well-intentioned nonprofit falls into a puddle of we-we.

In an earlier post we talked about the problem of “we weing all over yourself”, letting a plural corporate voice take over your advertising to the exclusion of reader empathy and common sense. The billboard at left is a great example.

Here we have a public service campaign which has been running for awhile in California. The original headline for this was “My kitchen, my rules.” (Quite often rendered in other languages.) That is good and makes sense: a feisty mom stands her ground and insists on healthy choices in food for her family.

But now we have “our neighborhood, our rules.” Same picture but now she’s the spokesperson for an amorphous entity which might be vigilantes or a street gang. (The billboard was photographed near one of San Francisco’s more troubled housing projects.) A single mom is endearing, a mob is scary. Except that it’s not credible. I don’t buy for an instant the notion of these angry homemakers insisting that I will bow under their demands for healthy habits, or else.

The change in tense to the first person plural is, unaided, what causes the damage. It’s not the typical corporate chest pounding but more likely an aging campaign that got relegated to the creative farm team. But the effect is the same. Don’t we we on your own marketing like this.

Free! You! Now! We’ve all head about magic words that help your copy sell more effectively. But what about words that push readership and response in the opposite direction? Here is a starter list of five words (and word categories) to watch out for…. additional submissions appreciated.

1. “I”. Nobody cares about you, except your mother. Readers want to read about themselves. That’s why the presence of “I” in a classic marketing message is a clear indicator you are wandering into dangerous territory. (Social media is an exception, along with scenarios in which you expect to create a first-person story the reader will identify with.)

2. Even worse, “we”. Still in the first person, but now we’re talking about a corporate presence. “We” is a favorite word of posturing messages that are meant mainly to be read in the boardroom. Writing such messages is called “we weing all over yourself”. Try the We We Calculator to see if you are guilty of too much wee-ism in your copy.

3. “It”. Unless they’re already engrossed in your copy, when you use “it” the reader is going to have to refer back in the message to find out what the meaning of “it” is. They’re not likely to take the trouble.

4. Words that can be read more than one way. “Read” (present tense) and “read” (past tense) is one example. As is “lead” (make people follow) or “lead” (the metal). Anytime readers get confused because they have misunderstood your meaning, they’re likely to just stop reading.

5. Words that look similar enough to be misinterpreted by a hurrying reader. Example: “through/thorough/though”. If you depend on them to get your message across, you’re toast.

And, a bonus phrase:

6. “As I just mentioned”. Using this expression is what I call “as-backwards” copywriting because the reader probably doesn’t remember what you’ve just mentioned. You’re expecting them to reverse direction to find out when, more likely, they’ll just hit the delete button.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”.  Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

Doorknob or handle: which would you choose?

The picture at left shows the inside of the men’s room door in the building where I used to rent a studio, in San Francisco. The knob is the way you get out of the room; the much more prominent grab bar is a useless appendage. During the 18 months I rented this space I used the bathroom certainly 100+ times… and at least 50 of those times I grabbed the bar because my sense memories “knew” that was the right thing to do.

People expect things to work a certain way. And this can have important implications when you’re marketing to them. Ads that play against expectations, especially in web video and TV, can surprise and delight and get through to a dulled viewer. But direct marketing pitches that veer in an unexpected direction—introducing a surprise element in the middle of a sales letter, for example—can turn off a reader and cause them to pitch your message in the recycling bin.

The difference with these scenarios: in the first, the prospect is on the outside, tacitly agreeing to let you try to entice them into your world. In the second, you’ve already created agreement and now you’re violating the contract. That’s why so many paragraphs in classic direct mail letters begin “that’s why”—to let the reader know you’ve established your point and are transitioning to another. And why many direct marketing pitches (including web pages and email, as well as print) will include what my clients at Rodale used to call “head nodders”—statements you know your audience will agree with, used to establish that you are on the same page and your message is reasonable and relevant.

It’s OK to be unpredictable… just as long as you know when to use and not use this strategy. If you’re doing intrusive advertising—which would include most examples of direct marketing—then it’s best to stay within expectations and avoid surprising your prospect except with the wonderful news of your offer and its benefits.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”.  Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.