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DEEP THOUGHTS
6 Keys to
Effective Marketing Copy
1. Differentiation. Why do customers come to you? What scares your competitors about your business? If you can’t answer these questions, you can’t tell your prospects why to buy. By thoughtfully differentiating yourself, your marketing communications will have impact.
2. Simplicity. Simple, yes. Easy, no. A single-minded message isn’t necessarily obvious, but uncovering it is crucial in our overcommunicated society. For technology companies, it is especially important to translate complicated jargon into language that is easy to understand and absorb, even when communicating to a technical audience.
3. Substance. Support all claims with hard technical information in white papers, case studies, and data sheets.
4. Consistency. It is critical for your messaging and design to be consistent. In this way, all weapons come from a single source and are aimed at the same target, reinforcing each other and building recognition.
5. Impeccability. The brightest marketing strategy is undone by any hint of unprofessionalism. Everything representing your company should be of the highest quality.
6. Tone. Respect the reader with frankness as well as no boastfulness or verbosity. Be friendly!
The Driving Force
of the Internet:
Original and Desirable Content
Content is the lifeblood of the online space. To be successful in the hyper-competitive arena of the Internet, your company needs to provide fresh, informative, and useful content. Effective content development will not only synthesize marketing efforts but will also keep qualified traffic coming back to your website.
The key to effective content is its focus on the potential customer. Job one is to clearly identify the target audience – the decision makers and influencers – and their needs. Incisive copy acknowledges the customer’s experience and demonstrates how your product or service can improve it. When you know why your customers come to you, you can clearly tell prospects why to buy. By thoughtfully differentiating yourself with the customer in mind, your messaging and branding will have impact.
The next consideration is what you want to achieve with your marketing and what action you want potential customers to take. This will determine the relevant content, the level of detail, and the best media for the message. With web communications in particular, it is imperative that users find your content easily. Therefore content must be optimized not only for the reader but also for search engines. Well written, informative copy achieves both, not only engaging the user but also exponentially increasing search engine rankings, traffic, and the likelihood of quality links from other sites. To improve rankings, the copy on each webpage should be focused on a singular topic, using relevant keywords and search phrases without overloading and diluting relevance with a "keyword soup."
How to Evaluate
Marketing Copy
You're working on a key marketing communications piece for a new marketing campaign. You've found a writer with the right style and expertise and given him or her every piece of marketing material you've ever produced about the product or service. You, the writer, and the designer have brainstormed creative concepts. You've completed a creative brief. Or maybe you haven't done any of these things. Either way, now is the moment of truth. You've just received the first draft of the copy. How do you evaluate it?
Do you show the copy to several people in the company, winding up with dozens of comments such as, "I don't like it" or "I'd like the intro to be more compelling" or "I like the style, but the messages need work"? Do you then throw the stack of comments on the writer's desk and hope for the best?
There is a better way. One that allows you to step back and evaluate how well the copy meets your objectives and enables you to give the writer the clear guidelines he or she needs to modify the copy to meet your goals and to create copy that sells your products.
Begin with the End in Mind
As Stephen Covey wrote in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “begin with the end in mind." In other words, if you want your marketing copy to be effective, you need to define what "effective" means at the beginning of the project. Usually objectives and pertinent information are stated in the form of a creative brief, which identifies the following:
• The primary audience for the piece, whether it's a CEO or other senior-level manager, the CIO, midlevel managers, or engineers
• The secondary audience. For example, a CEO might make the final purchasing decision, but the product or service will still have to get buy-in from the technical team.
• The pain your audience is experiencing that your product or service can alleviate
• The purpose of the piece, whether it is to create awareness, generate leads, provide technical background, or stimulate purchase at the point of sale
• A description of the product or service
• The positioning of the product—how the product or service is unique and the main value proposition it offers customers
• Three to five major selling points of the product and the proof behind these selling points
Next Steps
The completed creative brief will serve as your guideline for evaluating the copy. However, translating the creative brief into strategies for interpreting content requires some commentary. So let's go through a creative brief and translate it into a list of criteria for evaluating content.
• Audience. Your audience is one of the primary determinants of the tone you will use for your piece and the type of information it should contain. For example, a piece designed for skeptical journalists should be straightforward and include plenty of facts about features and applications, market needs, and comparisons to competitive products. If the audience is a CEO or other high-level executive, the tone should be business like and include information about how the product or service affects the bottom line. A technical audience will want product specifications. In contrast, a young consumer audience will respond to a hipper style and information about how the product will improve their lifestyle.
• Pain. The pain the audience is experiencing determines the need for your product. Only if you really understand that pain can you come up with an effective solution. Like a novelist who maps out an entire life history for each character and then uses only the telling details, the writer for a marketing piece should use extensive knowledge as a backdrop. The copy itself shouldn't dwell on the pain. After all, the audience already knows its pain. Instead, the piece should quickly get to the real point—how the product or service solves the prospect's problem.
• Purpose. The purpose of the piece is also a key to determining what type of information the copy should include. If the piece is meant to be a leave-behind after a sales call, the copy might summarize the main sales points brought out in the presentation. White papers spell out all the details. A white paper for a business audience will often provide in-depth descriptions of the business problem, the requirements for addressing that problem, and often how the product or service meets those requirements. A technical white paper might provide an in-depth description of product features. An advertisement designed to create awareness, in contrast, might provide just enough information to get prospects coming back for more information when they're closer to making a purchase.
• Positioning. The positioning and messages are the heart of any marketing piece. These determine content, including the key benefits the piece will highlight, as well as proof of those benefits. Such proof might take the form of in-depth feature descriptions, such as examples of how the product is easy to use, accompanied by screen shots of the user interface. Or it might include customer testimonials, benchmark test results, and awards from trade magazines.
A Logical Structure
In addition to evaluating whether the piece contains the right content and is presented so that the audience can relate to it, you need to look at whether the overall structure of the document makes sense and whether each element does what it is supposed to. All marketing materials should have a clear and logical structure that includes a headline and a lead, body copy, and a close.
The headline and the first few paragraphs, often called the lead, are meant to attract the target audience's attention and pique their interest. The body copy convinces them to act. The close tells them how to act.
A Compelling Lead
The headline and lead must perform the following four tasks:
• Get attention
• Select the audience
• Deliver a complete message, preferably one that states the most important product features and why the customer would want to buy the product
• Draw the prospect into the body copy
As the parenthetical examples show, headlines must:
• Appeal to the prospects' self-interest
• Give prospects news
• Offer them useful information
When evaluating the headline, look at whether it:
• Offers a benefit or reward for reading the piece. For a product or service brochure, the headline should ideally state the primary benefit
• Gets the point across simply and quickly
• Is specific, definite, and concrete. Does it include facts, figures, and real product features? Does it relate specifically to your product, or could it apply to many products?
• States the message in a fresh new way, making it dramatic and memorable.
• Relates logically to the product. Avoid cute headlines that grab attention but don't mean anything unless you read the copy underneath.
• Avoids negatives. Instead of highlighting the solution, which is what prospects want, a headline with a negative assertion highlights the problem. Prospects want to avoid the problem. So they may avoid your ad.
• State the name of the product and the advertiser's name. That way, if prospects go no further, they will know what the product is and from whom they should buy it.
A Well Developed Body
The body copy should cover all the important sales points in a logical sequence with a beginning, middle, and end. One way the copy might organize major sales points is in order of importance, with the most important point in the headline, then major features, and finally minor features as you go through the body copy. If the copy is a testimonial ad or a case history, it might be organized in chronological order to tell the story as it happened. Or the copy might use a problem/solution format to show how the product solved the problem.
When evaluating the body copy, look at whether the copy fulfills the promise of the headline in an interesting, believable, easy-to-read way. Interesting copy states how the product or service will improve customers' lives. It should cover benefits rather than features. Copy is boring if it covers the company, its philosophy, and its success; if it deals only with how the product is made or how it works; if it talks about features rather than benefits; or if it presents facts without showing prospects how those facts relate to their needs.
For copy to be believable, it should include concrete facts that back up what you say. These facts can include customer testimonials, quotes from analysts, demonstrations, or scientific evidence that support your claim. In addition, it should be specific, including facts, features, benefits, savings, and other reasons why a customer should buy your product.
Persuasive copy must attract attention, hook the prospect's interest, create a desire for the product, and prove the product's superiority.
The writing itself should be easy to read and must flow smoothly. The copy should be written in plain, simple language, using short sentences, short paragraphs, and short words. It should flow smoothly from one point to the next without awkward phrases, confusing arguments, or strange terms that break the flow.
A Call to Action
The conclusion should include one last strong statement of the most important reason the customer should buy the product. Then it should tell the prospect to take the next step in the buying process.
Although there's nothing wrong with using your gut instincts as part of your copy evaluation process, it helps to have a few objective tools at your disposal. By using the criteria discussed here, you will have a road map of what to look for in evaluating any piece of marketing copy and a way to provide your writers with specific, relevant comments to improve their copy. As a result, you'll have a greater chance of getting the copy you want at less cost in less time.