continued : 4) John Lennon copy When John Lennon asked us to imagine there was no heaven or hell, no countries, religion or war, he was using an effective tool of persuasion: imaginative copy. As an advertiser, you can ask your target audience to imagine a painless way to lose weight, or what it would feel like to be a successful travel writer. Imaginative copy typically begins with words like “imagine,” “close your eyes,” “pretend for a moment,” “discover,” or “picture this” in the first paragraph of the text. This is the concept behind AWAI’s Barefoot Writer presentation. In this example, you are asked to imagine your life in a certain way — to pretend what it would be like to live your dream, whatever that dream might be. Then the copywriter paints a picture of achieving that ideal life through your product. 5) Long copy The fundamental premise behind long copy is “The more you tell, the more you sell.” Ads that are long on facts and benefits will convert well. Why? Unlike a face-to-face conversation with a salesperson, a written ad has only one chance to convert a reader. If you get in front of the reader, you’ve got to lay it all out on the table. Take the Google Analytics example above. Page after page of facts and benefits are presented because the proposition isn’t simple — typical prospects are going to be asking a lot of questions. Better to anticipate those questions, and answer them in the copy. But when you’re following the basic rules of content marketing that works, remember that you don’t have to present all the facts and benefits up front. You can leak the presentation over a period of weeks through an email autoresponder (like our Internet Marketing for Smart People course), or a registration-based content library (like the Scribe Content Marketing library). In this way, you’re turning long copy into short, easily-digestible snippets. 7) 6. Killer poet copy Here at Copyblogger we love Ernest Hemingway and David Sedaris. But we aren’t so enamored by their writing abilities that we try to imitate their styles at the expense of teaching and selling. Our goal isn’t to convince our audience that we’re smart — it’s educating and selling with our copy. As David Ogilvy once said, “We sell, or else.” But we try to sell with style. We try to balance the killer with the poet. Killer poet copy sees writing as a means to an end (making a sale), and the ad as an end in itself (beautiful design and moving story). In other words, the killer poet combines style with selling. Creativity with marketing. Story with solution.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 05:30:41 +0000