Welcome back to Copyblogger!
I'm Stefanie, Copyblogger's Editor-in-Chief, and today's quick tip from Sonia Simone is about combining your content marketing with writing that aims to persuade.
These seven copywriting strategies will help you make more sales.
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7 Strategies the Great Copywriters Wish You Knew
written by Sonia Simone
We sometimes talk about copywriting strategies and content marketing like they're the same, but they aren't — they complement each other, but they also serve two distinct purposes.
Copy, traditionally, is what we use to make the sale. To use Albert Lasker's phrase, it's salesmanship in print (or pixels). Its aim is to persuade.
Content does everything else. It attracts an audience, engages their sustained attention, demonstrates your ability to solve their problems, and paves the way for an eventual purchase.
Copywriting strategies directly from the masters (that work for your content)
Really smart content marketers borrow from their more traditional copywriting brothers and sisters.
Here are 7 copywriting strategies you'll want to swipe from the rich tradition of direct response copywriting.
#1: Headlines, headlines, headlines
Copywriters know that if the headline is weak, the ad will never get read.
The same is true for your content.
Even if you have a decent-sized audience, you still need to persuade them, day in and day out, to continue giving you their attention. Great headlines help with that.
#2: Quit being so clever
Look, I get it. You wouldn't be a professional writer if you didn't have a secret love of clever wordplay.
Puns and in-jokes and linguistic play are the writer's delight. Just realize … they may not be your audience's delight.
Writerly craft is a good thing. Thinking carefully about language will make it clearer and more powerful. But great copywriters know that cleverness too often leads directly to audience confusion.
A dash of cleverness here and there can add seasoning, so if you do use it, use it sparingly — and never in a headline.
#3: Develop your Big Idea
As a content marketer, you're not (I hope) writing endless pages of dry, factual information that merely answers questions.
You're publishing information that both entertains and educates your reader — and you're doing it in the framework of a Big Idea.
Think Apple's "1000 Songs in Your Pocket." You're looking for the instant communication of a desirable benefit, compressed into a memorable statement.
Don't just be another writer blogging about design or fashion or parenting. Frame your content with a compelling, ultra specific Big Idea.
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#4: Do your research
"The best copywriters are the most tenacious researchers. Like miners, they dig, drill, dynamite, and chip until they have carloads of valuable ore. John Caples advised me once to gather seven times more interesting information than I could possibly use." – legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga
Become an obsessive student of your topic.
Dig deeper. Scour sites like Abe for valued out-of-print books on your topic. Get beyond the "big blogs" everyone in your topic reads — go to the rare, obscure resources, especially if they're chewy and difficult for the average reader.
(Incidentally, the best Big Ideas for copywriting strategies usually come out of compulsive research — combined with some creativity and enough time to think carefully about the problem you're solving.)
#5: Find your starving crowd (then listen to them)
Notorious copywriting genius Gary Halbert liked to tell his students that the key to a successful restaurant was not location, great food, or low prices — it was the presence of a starving crowd that needed and wanted what your restaurant had to offer.
And of course, the same is true for any kind of business.
"When it comes to direct marketing, the most profitable habit you can cultivate is the habit of constantly being on the lookout for groups of people (markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving (or, at least hungry) for some particular product or service." – Gary Halbert
Your "starving crowd" is your audience — the people who are hungry for what you have to say, in the way that you say it.
The terrific thing about building a hungry audience is you can then turn around and ask (or observe) them to find out what, specifically, they're hungry for.
In the online world, we can gain a lot of that knowledge by listening to what our audiences have to say, both on our own sites and social media. As famed ad man Bill Bernbach said:
"Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it. … No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist." – Bill Bernbach
Getting the product or service right is great marketing — and when you pair it with solid persuasion skills, you'll be unstoppable.
#6. Know where you're going
Writing direct response copy always serves a specific purpose. You're writing to stimulate a specific behavior. If you get that behavior, you win. If you fail to get it, you lose.
The economics of content marketing allow us to experiment more, but you still want to develop an idea of what, specifically, each piece of content you create is intended to accomplish.
Drifting around and publishing "to see what happens" should be kept to a minimum.
#7: Don't be boring
"Tell the truth but make truth fascinating. You know, you can't bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it." – David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy was a longtime champion of education-based marketing.
But he knew very well that in order to make it work, you have to make that education fascinating.
Use:
- Personality
- Great imagery
- Your Big Idea
- Reader-friendly formatting
- Humor
Not to clownishly grab attention, but to make your good advice and useful content more interesting and readable.
Read on Copyblogger: 7 Strategies the Great Copywriters Wish You Knew
Talk with you again soon,
Stefanie Flaxman
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, COPYBLOGGER MEDIA
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