Copy Poverty
by Chris Williams

Do you remember that person in college who was the great writer? The one who could help you get your term papers cranked out really, really fast because you left them until the last minute and you had no other choice?

That writer used catchy words and made you and your paper sound really interesting—took your words and gave them a shine. Your words in their hands sounded like "Wake Up! Pay Attention! Don't Miss A Detail of This A+ Paper!" I'm not that person.

Yet somehow...I don't know how, exactly...but somehow I've become a marketing copy machine. And in the process, I've learned an amazing amount about what it takes to write great marketing copy. Including the more you do it, the better you get.
So my inspirational marketing tip for you today is about...you guessed it...the rules to writing great copy.

Even if you're never going to write copy yourself, you need to know how good copy reads, because you need great copy to build your company.

Great copy gets your company’s emails, websites and letters read. It gets clients nodding their head in agreement and draws them into action. Words are the real currency in business. Words! Which is weird because nobody reads anymore! They do something else. They scan. They scan your brochure, they scan your website, they scan whatever it is that has been written about your business.

Your business has a short window, just a limited amount of time to get the point across. Here are the keys to great copy that creates brief, magic moments.

• what the offer is;
• who you are talking to (your target audience); and
• what you want them to do—what your objective is.

Sounds obvious, but keep it simple, keep it clear and stay on target. Don’t try to do too much. Remember readers are scanning, not really reading.  You don’t need to tell your whole company history. Just lay out the basics. Choose one message and get that message across.

This next one is big. Many large businesses don’t use this trick and it’s their bad.
Inject emotion. I don’t care how wonderful your vocabulary is or how fabulous your grammar is. If your words lack emotion, you are not going to move clients and get them into action.

Let me give you an example. Which of these gives you the biggest emotional jolt?

• “Get your prospects to say Yes.”
• “Does your Ego get clobbered whenever your prospect says No?”

Which one pulled more emotions out of you? Right—the second one.

Big companies love to back away from emotion, particularly if your readers are engineers or other left-brain thinkers.  However, emotion draws your clients in.  Even using it in small doses will make a difference. 

Think it through while you are starting to either write or evaluate your copy. Go through your copy and see if you can take out any or all of those delightfully rational words and replace some of them with more emotional expressions, words that really appeal to humans, not your corporate lawyers.

Put the most important point at the beginning of the first sentence in the paragraph. Hook the reader from the start. Put the real key, key points into bullets. They’re just one line each and easy to scan. Graphically they stand out and say, “Hey, pay attention to these!”

Always prove that what you’re promising is credible, that your company has done it before.

Prove it with a story. People love to read stories. I call them “success stories,” You can let your clients tell their own stories in their own words (testimonials) or you can tell the story of how you helped a client from your own point of view. Either way, a great success story says, “My client did this you can do this too!” Use case studies and significant facts, but tell me a great story.

The next time you work on copy, before you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or red pen to someone else’s work, lay these rules out, and put them to work creating that magic moment where the reader TAKES ACTION.

Connections magazine welcomes our new contributor

Chris Williams
Market OUT Loud