Copywriting (A&BM 08Oct2020)

Copywriting

Copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. The product, called copy or sales copy, is written content that aims to increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade a person or group to take a particular action.

Copywriting is re-arranging words to make things sell better. It is a text form of salesmanship. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Copywriting is the reason why the people buy something.

10 Steps to Effective Copywriting

 

1. Exploit your product's benefits.

The first step of the copywriting outline is the foundation for your advertising campaigns. A benefit is the value of your product to a customer. In other words, a benefit is what the product can do for a customer or how the product can help a customer. You need to put into words the reasons your product is the best available and better than your competitors' products based on the added value it provides to your customers. The key to success is for you to fully understand all the benefits of your product. Only then can you ensure that the audience knows them and can relate to them.

 

2. Exploit your competition's weaknesses.

To write compelling copy, it is essential that you know what differentiates your product from the competition. Once you know your competitors' weaknesses, you must make sure your audience knows them and understands why buying your competitors' products would be a terrible mistake. Get started by thoroughly researching your competition and understanding what they offer in terms of products and services. Next, list the elements of their offerings that are inferior to your own. Feel free to tear the competition apart but be realistic in your comparisons. You want to be able to support your claims if you are challenged.

 

3. Know your audience.

Every person in the world is not going to see every ad in the world. Each ad has a specific audience that will see it, and it's the marketer's job to find the best placement to ensure the target audience will see it. For example, an ad for skateboards placed in a local senior citizen housing association newsletter is not likely to generate a lot of sales. In fact, it would be a waste of advertising. The target audience for skateboards is teenagers or young adults. The vast majority of senior citizens do not use skateboards, and it is not a product category in which they typically purchase gifts. Before you buy ad space, make sure you're spending your money in the right place to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of exposure and building awareness of your product or service.

First, take the time to research your customers thoroughly. In most businesses, 20 percent of customers are responsible for 80 percent of sales (this is called the 80/20 rule in case you're curious about the official marketing terminology for this phenomenon). That 20 percent represents your best customer, and your job is to determine who that 20 percent is. Evaluate your customers and put together a demographic profile of your most valuable customer, so you can advertise in the best places to find similar people who are likely prospects. If you're a small business owner, you probably don't have a budget set aside to conduct a thorough research study and analysis of your customer base, so you'll have to improvise by using your own communication skills and visual investigation. Remember, you're trying to develop a basic profile of your target customer, not a CIA profile of each individual who buys your product. Do your best with the information you have.

There are many attributes you can use to develop a demographic profile of your customers.

Following is a list of examples of traits to help you start your own demographic profiling initiative:

·                  Gender

·                  Age

·                  Ethnicity

·                  Family Status

·                  Income

·                  Occupation

·                  Interests

 

4. Communicate W.I.I.F.M. (What's In It For Me?)

There are a variety of reasons to create an advertisement or marketing piece. Before you write copy for your promotional piece, you need to understand your goals for that piece. What do you want to get in return? The copy you use in each ad or marketing piece will vary based on your goals for that promotion. While this book does not focus on the development of marketing plans and strategies, I will offer some examples of different objectives for ads or marketing pieces that, in turn, will affect the copy you use:

·                  Communicate a special offer

·                  Share information and raise awareness

·                  Generate leads

Your customers need to understand how your product or service is going to help them by making their lives easier, making them feel better, helping them save money, helping them save time, etc. In this step of the copywriting outline, you'll build on the work you've done so far by taking your product's features, benefits, and differentiators and specifically describing how they directly affect your target audience members' lives in positive ways. Remember the first tenet of copywriting--your product or service is far less important than its ability to fulfill your customers' needs.

Answer your target audience's question "What's in it for me?" Remember, you're paying for your ad space and possibly graphic design too. Don't waste your money by placing an ad with ineffective copy that does not clearly tell your customers what they'll get by buying your product or service. Large companies with big advertising and marketing budgets can test snappy, cliché headlines and copy in an attempt to find the best way to catch their target audience's attention, but small and medium-size business owners typically have limited budgets. For smaller businesses that only have one chance to communicate their message, copy must be written so the message, including benefits and differentiators, is heard and understood by the target audience. There is no room in a small business owner's advertising budget to risk not getting that specific message across to the right people every time.

5. Focus on "you," not "we."

It is essential that you are aware of how you're addressing your customers in your copy. To do this, you need to understand pronoun usage. Think back to your school days. Remember your English teacher explaining first person, second person, and third person? As a refresher, first person (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours) is the person speaking and second person (you, your, yours) is the person to whom one is speaking. It's essential that you write copy that speaks to your target audience and not at them--and not about you. Therefore, the majority of your copy in any ad or marketing piece should be written in the second person. For example, do you prefer copy that says, "Through our first-rate sales department, we can deliver cars within 24 hours" or "You can drive your new car tomorrow"? While the first copy example focuses on the business, the second example focuses on customers and speaks directly to them. It's more personal, and thus, more effective.

Remember, writing in the second person helps your audience quickly connect the points in your copy to their own lives and allows them to personalize the advertisement or marketing piece. This is how the ad is connected to an individual customer's own life. By writing your copy so it focuses on the customer rather than yourself, the customer can personalize the ad and product you're selling and act accordingly.