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Your customers are busy. Don’t make them play connect the dots when they see or hear your ads, read your content, and so on. They won’t do it. Instead, they’ll move on to another brand that will give them the information they want or need (even if they don’t know they want or need it), and they’ll never think about your brand again.
You should never assume that consumers will take an extra moment to find the deeper meaning in your marketing messages or self-identify how your marketing copy relates to their own lives, problems, and goals. Instead, you need to tell them, and you need to be a lot clearer than you probably think.
Here are three key areas to focus on in your copywriting to ensure your marketing messages don’t require consumers to connect the dots in order to understand your important messages.
1. Words
Customers view an ad or listen to a marketing message for just a few seconds before they move on—unless something catches their attention. Your copy needs to make it easy for people to understand how your product will impact their lives by making it easier, making them feel better, helping them save time, etc.
To do this, take your product’s features, benefits and differentiators and specifically describe how they directly affect your target audience members’ lives in positive ways. As you write your copy, remember the first tenet of marketing: Your business, product or service is far less important than its ability to fulfill your customers’ needs. That means you need to tell people exactly what’s in it for them when they spend their hard-earned money on your product or service, or they won’t buy.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming consumers will understand your marketing messages. Spell it out for them in no uncertain terms so there is no possible question left in their minds about what your product or service will do for them.
2. Voice
Your copy should tell people exactly what you want them to do. It shouldn’t simply suggest that maybe they might want to consider your product or service at some time or another. See the difference between those two sentences?
When you tell people what to do, you’re creating messages in the active voice rather than the passive voice. Give directions, not suggestions by removing all of those helping verbs you learned about in grammar school. Make sure the subject (or implied subject) of your sentence is doing the action in your messages.
3. Design
Design can take your marketing messages to the next level of success but only when words and design work together. Use design as a way to draw attention to the most important parts of your copy, but don’t get so heavy-handed with design elements that your most important messages get lost in the clutter.
Use bullet points and callouts that tell consumers what’s in it for them when they buy your product or service. Highlight important concepts in creatively designed headings and sub-headings, and use design to lead consumers through each marketing message.
Always think about words, voice and design in all of your copywriting, and consumers should respond positively. In other words, your results will improve!
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Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc. and Founder & Editor in Chief of an award-winning blog, WomenOnBusiness.com. She is a 25-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored 10 books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing.
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I agree to the suggestion of this article in many of the contexts, however there are few above ordinary advert copies which are compelling and which are easy to read and hard to ignore.