Consultants and copywriters are fond of telling their clients one of two thing:
They’ll say either A) The rules are changing and you have to adjust your selling strategies to match the “new rules.” Or B) The rules aren’t changing and they never will.
Both of them are nonsense… and in a way they’re both right.
It depends on how you define “the rules.”
Human nature isn’t changing. People still have the same basic desires they had 3000 years ago…
We want to be safe, healthy, happy, and secure – and we’ll buy things that can fulfill those needs.
But the tactics of selling do change… and they change frequently. Some markets respond to video, some to the same long copy yellow highlighter text that’s been online for 10 years.
Some markets need the sales message dripped out in chunks via email, some want to have it all in one chunk.
Some markets still won’t buy things online and you need to go through the mail, get on the phone or meet them in person to sell.
I don’t have the experience of some of the gurus in the copywriting world, but I do have a control for a newsletter selling just north or south of $70,000 a month… a respectable profit.
When I started writing copy, I made the mistake of listening to a few self-proclaimed experts, with only a few more years of experience than me, saying that I didn’t really need to learn how to write breakthrough copy, I just had to learn how to effectively swipe successful copywriters.
Now these people didn’t recommend just changing a few words around and inserting my product… they were saying that I could just use the outline… I only needed to understand the structure of those copywriter’s sales letters in order to write my own winners.
That’s a dangerously seductive idea… and in my experience, it’s way off base.
Yes, there is a structure of a sales letter that needs to be in place for anything you write to stand a chance.
It boils down to: AIDA or Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (with credibility and proof mixed in somewhere between the two A’s)
But that’s the only structure you need to know. You can learn a lot from studying other copywriters. I still get excited when I get new swipe copy from the Guru copywriters like John Carlton, Michel Fortin or Carlin Anglade-Cole… But I stopped trying to be John, Michel and Carlin.
Swiping the greats won’t ever get you to their level. There’s only one way to write killer breakthrough copy…
Know Your Customer and Analyze The Market
Screw the “rules” of copywriting. Yes you need a headline and you need to ask for an action… but outside of that, you have to chuck the rest of the rules out the window if you want to write a real winner.
The only way to write a truly successful promotion is to dig into the market and learn what they want, how they need to be talked to, and which benefits of the product matter to them.
It’s downright stupid to make a product and go looking for a market to sell it to… smart companies know that you talk to your market and you create a product to meet their needs.
The same is true for copy. You don’t take a sales letter structure and force your product into it. You go out and analyze the market and you write specifically to them.
For example, if you’re selling an anti-aging supplement online, you might go out and discover that the market really wants what you have to offer but they’re extremely skeptical that it will do what you say.
You can’t steal John Carlton’s famous “one-legged golfer” structure because the lead is too indirect and the proof and credibility doesn’t start soon enough.
Right now, in the anti-aging market you need to hit them with a very direct headline that says exactly what they’ll get and how you’re going to back it up, then immediately start piling on the credibility and proof.
How do I know that? Because I went out and learned the market (interestingly, the medium makes a difference- online you need to be more direct and use less copy than offline even if the core selling message is the same).
This is the essence of salesmanship. You know you have a product that will make someone’s life better and you go out and find the best way to help your customers (they need the product so getting them to buy is helping them).
Don’t believe me and think you can still swipe your way to the big time? Here’s what Gene Schwartz says in Breakthrough Advertising:
The same pattern of investment, that spots the upturn in electronics and makes a fortune, loses that fortune in uranium. And the same advertising appeal, that builds an industry in reducing, collapses completely when applied to health foods, even though both advertisements may reach exactly the same audience.
Why? Because no formula works twice. Each and every formula is the simply written solution to a particular problem that occurred in the past. Change even one part of that problem, and you need an entirely different formula. That’s why memorizing theories won’t make you a scientist, or studying charts won’t make you a market wizard, or rewriting somebody else’s headlines won’t make you a copywriter.
What will work? Innovation, of course. Continuous, repeated innovation. A steady stream of new ideas – fresh new solutions to new problems. Created – not by the impossible route of memory – buy by analysis.
In a field which the rules are constantly changing – where the forces that determine the outcome are constantly shifting – where new problems are constantly being encountered every day – rules, formulas and principles simply will not work. They are too rigid – too tightly bound to the past. They must be replaced by the only known method of dealing with the Constantly New – analysis.
So please, new copywriters or business owners trying to hack it out yourselves… Don’t force somebody else’s copy to do your sales work for you. Get out there, get to know your customer, and write to him. It’s much more difficult – but it’s much more effective.
