Effective Copywriting! Part II

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.

6. Understand your medium.

As you write your copy, be aware that each different medium where an ad is placed requires a different tone or style. Depending on where you’re placing your ad, the copy you use changes based on the audience who will see the ad. Are you placing your ad in a local newspaper or on a billboard? Are you placing your ad in a woman’s magazine or in a news magazine?

Different media require different copy to most effectively persuade a particular audience to act. Furthermore, different types of marketing pieces require different types of copy. Remember, there are many ways to use copy to promote your business other than traditional advertisements. Use every possible and appropriate opportunity to communicate your marketing messages to your customers.