A copywriting crash course, or, not everyone cares about or likes you and that’s okay

Right, let’s get to it. I know you’re busy: Zoom meetings to look interested in, the nagging “ bing “ from Teams fighting for your attention and of course the seventh trip to the fridge to check if your standards have dropped enough to eat whatever’s left in there.

You’ve got copy to write. You’ve got things to sell. But you can’t quite marry those two things up.

It’s okay. Writing sales copy is weird. It’s awkward. But we’ll get through this together. I’m going to give you some very simple concepts that will have a profound* effect on your writing. (Unless you’re already awesome in which case, good for you, but why are you reading this? Go write stuff!).

*profundity not guaranteed

I get it. You’re a skinny seven-omega ninja. You’ve mastered dextrous project planning and waterfall strategy thinking frameworks. You’ve got mad business skills. And you’re excited and proud to announce all the things. But no one cares. Sorry. I know that isn’t what you want to hear but that’s the way it is.

When it comes to what you have to say as a business, people care about how you can help them. It’s self-centred. It’s selfish. But it’s wholly natural and predictable. When people are online or looking at an old-fashioned tree-mulch print magazine or whatever, they’re doing so for themselves. They’re after something. They want an answer to a problem. That answer may well be what you offer.

So when you wade in with “We’re passionate about…” or “Our new team was assembled in 1972 by a crack commando unit…” people switch off because it’s not about them. When’s the last time you were interested in some random event a company were attending? Or the new look to their website? How about their innovative and exciting press release transforming tech? Maybe their super profitable business merger? Or…

Yeah, not so much I would imagine.

Instead, you have to talk about them. Talk about how they’re going to benefit from what you have to offer. Don’t sneak into the murky realm of just listing features — talk about benefits. And the benefits of those benefits. Better yet, talk about the experience they’ll enjoy once they’ve bought whatever you’re selling.

THIS IS NOT NEW, but remember, you don’t sell trainers, you sell the bliss of running down an empty road into the setting sun. You don’t sell personal training sessions, you sell being able to sprint across the park to the swings with your kids without wheezing like you’re taking in your final breath. You don’t sell advanced new scientific equipment, you sell getting out of the lab seeing the people you give a shit about or the glass of wine you’ve been dreaming about all damn day.

And it doesn’t even need to be that dramatic. It can be as simple as rephrasing your social media post to be about your customers (remember them?) and what they get, rather than what you, have to offer.

Instead of

“We’re going to be at this week’s London Technology Expo and we’re bringing along our team of experts.”

Try

“Get all your questions answered by the experts — swing by for a chat at the London Technology Expo.”

Instead of

“Our website has been revamped to include advanced AI components that facilitate accelerated search capacity to return product queries and process sales faster than ever before.”

Try

“Search. Buy. Go. You can now find what you need on the site faster than ever. Go from shopping to doing the thing you love in no time at all.”

Long story short, write about them. Write about what they want. No one gives a hoot about what you’re up to. Be explicit and tell your audience how you’re going to help them.

You remember that ad that everyone was all, like, “Yeah it’s kind of good. It’s fine.”? No? Of course not, no one does. Because it sucked. It landed smack bang in the middle of the give-a-care spectrum and failed to provoke even a raised eyebrow from Gary in accounts.

Copy that falls in the middle of the spectrum is forgettable. You don’t want to be forgettable, do you? I thought not.

Good copy needs to be a bit like art (kind of). It needs to make people feel something. It needs to provoke, to polarise. Sometimes you gotta poke the bear and piss some people off. People typically form their opinions and make their purchases based on emotion. Then they try to very cleverly backward engineer a logical reason to justify their desire or that purchase confirmation email that just landed in their inbox. You need to tap into their emotion and you need to make people feel something. Mild interest to frothing excitement. Anything is better than nothing.

I understand that you don’t want to ruffle feathers. You’ve got a brand voice to stick to and those C-suite folk can be a bunch of nobs. But you’re the creative. You’re the writer. The maverick. You’re the one who needs to push the boundaries and weave words together that make people give even a tiny shit. Be the hero we need.

The consequence of this is that not everyone will like you.

That’s fine. Not everyone needs to like you. We all have preferences and we all like certain brands — quite often for wholly unknown, ill-advised or illogical reasons. It’s usually a gut feeling. And that gut feeling comes from reading the words they write that resonate with you. Listen to your gut — it’s smart.

The caveat: don’t personally attack anyone and stick to your tone of voice. But have an opinion. Know your audience and speak to them.

Some super quick final pointers before I go:

Don’t stress about grammar. Yes, you should know the rules. No, you do not have to stick them as long as you make sense.

Instead, think of grammar as a guideline. Think Different and break some of the rules, ffs. Start sentences with and. End them with prepositions. Boldly go. Whatever! Just get your message across!

Quit your jibber jabber

I have no doubt that your cross-vertical synergy overflow innovation platform will blow the socks right off the competition, helping customers leverage their inner snow leopard to reach high-performance developable success indicators.

But no one will do anything about it because they have no idea what you’re on about. Quit the jargon and jibber jabber. Cut to the chase. You need to tell people what the bloody hell the product does. Why their lives are woefully empty because they don’t have it. And why they should part with their cash for it.

Write for you

If you ever get stuck, read aloud what you’ve written and ask yourself, “Would I buy this?”

Now, go write some fucking awesome words.

Originally published at https://billhinchen.substack.com.