By Justin Hitt, Professional B2B Copywriter

The US Postal Service is losing more than a billion dollars a year, Royal Mail's ‘one price goes anywhere' is losing money too, while other European services aren't doing much better. Is direct mail as a marketing medium dying?

You'll find a lively discussion at Hubspot on the failures of the US Postal Service, it however missing a fundamental point. This point is the value of copy writing that you are learning here.

If you copy sucks in print, it will suck on-line. There are just as many failures in marketing on-line as there are with direct mail, it just doesn't have as many direct costs.

Because you don't pay for mistakes on the Internet with an upfront investment as obviously as you do for direct mail doesn't mean mistakes don't cost you. It also doesn't mean they don't hurt the relationship you have with a prospect, in fact, making it more difficult to make a sale in the future.

It's the copy writing fundamentals people are missing. If your copy fails to connect a reader with a compelling offer, then in any media you have failed to do marketing. Let's examine the real costs …

Many think Internet and email marketing doesn't cost anything because they aren't being billed for middle transport service providers. When mailing by post, you pay for the paper, the envelope, ink, and postage. Online you just pay for hosting and e-mail (which can be free in many cases, or at least cheap.)

Because you aren't paying for the entire network from point-to-point, the Internet seems a lower cost medium for marketing. The Internet also provides many low costs tools to make marketing easy. Conversely, with the postal service you are paying the majority of costs associated with the transport of your message.

Most miss the bottom line here, it's not how much you paid to send the message, what matters is your return on investment on marketing investment. Advertising Agencies (or Consultants) pitching one medium over another are usually getting better commission or paid for related services. Don't make this mistake for your clients by teaching them about cost per lead, profit per sale, and other reliable measures of marketing success.

When you are able to write copy that sells, you could send your message by the Queens Guard, or Carrier Pigeon to the right audience to make the sale all the same. The determining factor of which method works best is how much that sale cost.

As long as your carefully crafted message reaches a buyer in a medium they use, using language they understand, and a story to which they can relate … you'll get the sale. Direct mail isn't dying, there is just a bigger need for qualified copywriters than there was every before.

A poorly implemented e-mail campaign is just as big a flop as direct mail in both it's cost and lack of production. Unfortunately, the bigger cost of marketing only on-line is losing a prospect forever due to short attention spans on-line, being blocked as spammer, or being missed by those millions who aren't on-line today.

If you want better success with your copy efforts, then use several mediums for testing your message. Deliver your copy with a mix of direct mail, Internet and email marketing, telephone, and any other method you can test. It's about reaching customers where they are, with copy that sells, in multiple channels with the right message.

© 2009 AdBriefing Copywriting Tips, All rights reserved.

Justin Hitt is a business copywriter who specializes in the technology services field, providing clients copy that sells. For more about his services, visit https://www.adbriefing.co.uk/

By Justin Hitt, Industrial Copywriter

The more you understand the deep desires of your potential buyers, the easier it is to write copy that sells. Unfortunately, you just can't ask them. You need to bug their house, literally spying on their every move. Is it worth breaking the law to better understand your buyers?

When you know, in the words of your buyer, what it is they want to purchase, you can more easily position yourself in their path. So why not just ask them?

First, most of your customers truly don't know what it is they want. They either don't know how to convey it in words, or only know it when they see it.

Second, if your customer knows what they want they will lie about it. They lie to save money, to protect themselves, or because want to make themselves look good.

Unfortunately when you don't know what buyers want it is difficult to give it to them. That means fewer sales, poor conversion, or worse. It's not your fault, and here are some tips to help you eavesdrop on your buyers desires:

• Monitor their complaints,
• Listen more than you speak,
• Watch how they use your product,
• Look at what they buy,
• Involve them in a conversation,

Of course, you don't have to break the law. Information is available to eavesdrop on the conversation inside the mind of your buyers, if you know where to look.

© 2008-2009 AdBriefing Copywriting Tips, All rights reserved.

Justin Hitt helps business-to-business sales professionals read the mind of buyers, to sell more in less time with fewer headaches. Sell more this year with https://www.adbriefing.co.uk/

By Justin Hitt, Professional B2B Copywriter

Truly understanding the needs and desires of your target buyers helps you write copy that sells. You could survey, but buyers lie on surveys. What is a surefire way to get into the mind of your buyer?

Because I want every one of my customer happy to the point they refer others, I start with other peoples unhappy customers. If you really want happy customers, you'll need to undo anything that made them unhappy, then set that expectation in copy.

If you don't have unhappy customers (or at least those who verbalized their complaint), you'll needed to do some research. Fortunately the Internet puts a lot of complainers at your fingertips.

There are a number of interesting resources that provide useful to understand the mindset of buyers. This isn't a complete list, but it will certainly get you started.

First, let's consider a common sales objection, the fear of having this vendor fail to perform, or worse leaving the buyer in an awkward situation. Many don't buy from you because they are afraid you'll make a mistake, that's why copy that addresses this fear is very powerful.

Besides documenting all the fears my prospects have, I use a website called Ripoff Report, and various consumer review sites to discover where other companies have failed.

You can literally search on what you do with the words “complaints”, to find hundreds of sites. If what you do isn't clearly represented on-line (as with many B2B or Industrial firms) then use relevant complaints for other products to pick up on language nuances.

Every mistake your competitor has made slows down a buyers decision to choose you. You can really look into the fears prospects have around specific types of businesses by reading their complaints.

Because those who complain tell specifically what they expected, didn't get, and really wanted, you can address those concerns in copy. Look for objections, failures, and other concerns these buyers have.

Remember, these people bought something then had things not turn out as they desired. They are unhappy, speaking from emotion. This is a great resource to understand what your buyers really want and desire.

You'll find exact language, product characteristics, and emotional desires of your buyers here in these pages. Because they are official complaints, you'll discover mistakes you can avoid in your own process.

This kind of research helps you understand buyers, address their concern in copy, and move more prospects towards purchase by really connecting emotionally. It only costs you a little time, and that is well spent if you want copy that sells.

© 2008-2009 AdBriefing Copywriting Tips, All rights reserved.

Justin Hitt is an industrial copywriter who specializing in copy that sells for B2B technology services firms. Learn more about his services at https://www.jwhco.com/

By Justin Hitt, Professional B2B Copywriter

How do you connect with buyers who read your copy in a meaningful and emotional way? To do this you need to have two important insights, easily gained but often ignored.

In the November 2008 AdBriefing Newsletter, I quoted David Ogilvy with:

“I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.”

Everything you do in life influences your prospective, understanding, and ability to persuade. If you accept this fact, then understand everything in the life of your reader is influenced by the same things, but in their life. Connecting with the experiences of buyers improves credibility, believability, and their willingness to take action with you.

David Ogilvy faced financial difficulty growing up during a depression, just barely went to college. He was an apprentice chef at the Majestic Hotel (in Paris.) After returning to Scotland he sold cooking stoves door-to-door.

Through his success, David Ogilvy was asked to write an instruction manual for other sales people, considered one of the finest sales instruction manual ever written. (It's titled, “The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker“, contact this site if you have a copy of it.)

Beyond all this, David Ogilvy got his start in advertising through his brother, later offered a position and the agency sent him to the United States for a year. Through these experiences he is considered the father of modern direct response.

Through out David Ogilvy's life, his experiences influenced his copy. It helped him quickly to relate to the interests of buyers, speaking in their language one-to-one. When he wrote he started with solid research, understanding every detail of who he is communicating with.

His big ideas connected people to products emotionally, building on the same experiences he had as a sales person. This is also where his focus on results for clients was born.

To write better copy that sells, build on who you are as an individual. Think about people you know who would have problems solved by the product you present, focus in on their real emotions. Do the research necessary, both in your own life, and the life of others to know what will motivate your buyer.

Use your diverse background as a stepping stone for success in copywriting. With this mindset, everyone you meet becomes ideas for persuasive copy.

If you want persuasion in powerful copy that sells more of what you offer, then start with experiences. Practice, do the research necessary, and write to someone you know who will greatly benefit from what you offer.

© 2008 AdBriefing Copywriting Tips, All rights reserved.

Justin Hitt turns your companies experiences into meaningful business advertising that turns business relationships into profits. For complete copywriting services visit https://www.jwhco.com/

By Justin Hitt, Professional B2B Copywriter

How do you present many benefits, relieve eye strain, and help your reader get more per inch in any sales letter? You use the often abused bullet point. Here are some tips on using bullet points:

Think of bullets as classified ads in your copy that prepare the reader for a big offer or call to action. Each point will give the reader a reason to go on.

Use bullets to convert features into benefits, by listing a short feature followed by reason why benefit. If you provide 5 services, then share them in a bullet list as sentences that describe why the reader should care about each.

Properly used bullets will capture the “at a glance” reader, pulling them into copy before they have a chance to throw out your piece. Use bullets with check marks talking about benefits, numbers showing them how many bonuses, or solid dots to demonstrate points.

When writing bullets you are in effect creating a list of benefit laden headlines designed to keep the reader interested. You may have a list of bullets early in a long letter telling the reader what they will discover in the following pages.

If you want to break up copy, or need to cover a lot of information in a few pages, then use bullet lists. Just be careful not to span too many pages, or turn points into paragraphs.

Bullets are to be short, focused, and all about the interests of the reader. You can preface a bullet with a 3 or 4 word phrase, only if you are willing to follow with a punch. Go back to John E. Kennedy's “Reason Why Advertising” to focus on a buyers interests.

Do bullets work on-line and in direct mail the same?

They sure do, it's just a matter of being clearly focused. That means, your list of bullets need to along the same category, or all with the same purpose. Think of bullets as a grouping of points, ideas, or relevant concepts.

You'll often want to give your bullet list a name, like “7 Reasons Why Smart People Like You Say ‘Yes'” listing reasons to buy, “What Business Owners Over 50 Have to Fear in Retirement, that You Won't” followed by customer testimonials.

Even if you just use bullet points as a place for a few great headlines that support a benefit, your copy will be improved by organizing ideas in this way. Bullets break up long form sales letters and help you stay in touch with the reader.

© 2008 AdBriefing Copywriting Tips, All rights reserved.

Justin Hitt writes copy for successful business-to-business service firms who want more sales in any economy. For your next assignment visit https://www.jwhco.com/

By Justin Hitt, Professional Industrial Copywriter

Likely turning in his grave, Claude Hopkin's would be dismayed by today's haphazard use of graphics on websites, space advertising, and in sales copy.

“Use pictures only to attract those who may profit you; use them only when they form a better-selling argument than the same amount of space set in type.” — Claude Hopkin, Scientific Advertising.

A number of copywriters make this worse by using the images that are out of date or that distract the knowledgeable reader from good strong copy. Just look at the outdated head shots on most Copywriters websites (as just one example.)

On-line, I'm guilty of the same. My wife suggested I update the “youthful pictures” on my website with something “more recent.” I don't know if she is saying I look older today, or that I'm more refined now.

Don't know if she was implying that I'm getting older, I know I have a slightly different hair style. This got me thinking about how using the right graphic, if any, in selling copy can add to or distract from your selling message.

Without naming names … I came across a prominent data centers, they compete with larger companies but have a respectable place. However, their website showed pictures of ugly old 19″ racks without doors, wires strung everywhere.

Photographs of their network operations center were reminense of the movie “War Games.” Colors were hazy, and computers featured were far from modern (saw a few white boxes with big 21″ CRT's.)

Remember, your reader may see pictures different than your client, a creative person, or even what is available from image stocks. The meaning of a picture is even filtered by your readers experiences, all things you must be aware of when writing copy.

A buyer of data center space wants clean, organized racks, free of loose wire and great air flow. When researching your copy, find out what pictures your buyers expect (or already have in their mind.)

Buyers in your market recognize certain things that demonstrate your ability to serve them. The same items they may point out in an old picture are the same points you want to make in copy.

Writing for a data center I'd show up to date images of your neatest, best designed racks, and the best technically configured systems. You will need to get permission first if you are using real customer images, but often stock graphics are available if you know what you are seeking.

Use a caption that highlights the value of what the reader sees in the picture, “Neat clean racks help keep your equipment cool, so it lasts longer and runs faster.”

In your headshots, wear up to date clothing expected by those who may hire you. Give the reader what they expect (and will receive when serviced), rather than what you feel might look best.

Relevant graphics add credibility to your copy if used wisely to atract those who will buy. Photographs set expectations for the reader but must telegraph the benefits you'll outline in copy.

On your proven marketing campaigns you'll want to periodically test updated pictures. Refresh graphics only as they prove to increase response.

I was just plain lazy about updating the pictures on my website, I pretty much have the same picture on every site and profile. Don't be the same with your business?

© 2008 Hitt Publishing Direct, All rights reserved.

Justin Hitt helps turn common communications into relationship building and sales producing tools. Before your next advertising campaign visit https://www.jwhco.com/

The British and Americans Are

Divided by a Common Language

But Why.

By John Powell

Both the Brits and the Americans speak the same language: English.

But why is there a large difference in syntax and grammar between the two? More importantly, why do we employ different spellings for words that obviously mean the same thing. You spell program and I spell programme. You write center and I write centre. And so on.

What's the reason for this discrepancy?

Before I get into that, maybe a few facts will be in order.

Today, the English language is used by some 800 million people worldwide, with barely half of those speaking it as a mother tongue. This is because the English language is arguably the richest in vocabulary. As a rough proof of this, German has a vocabulary of around 190,000 words, while French contains some 95,000. English, on the other hand, has 500,000 and counting.

English, as you almost certainly know, came to us in its basic form with the Angles and the Saxons, who invaded Britain in the 5th century AD. Thus, it is a pot pourri of the old Germanic, Dutch and Danish languages. What's more, English has been flexible enough over the years to accept much of its vocabulary from the Greek, Latin and French languages. Not to mention a vast array of words from India, Japan and the Middle East.

Given this kind of flexibility, it comes as no surprise that when English was exported to the New World, it underwent even more changes. The early settlers had to find new words to describe new experiences. Thus, in the late 1600s, we saw such words as wigwam, bluff (a bank or cliff) and canyon entering the language.

Others quickly followed. Seaboard, calculate, presidential and bookstore are all American home-grown – meaning that they were borrowed from Native Americans, the Spanish and the French, among others.

In inventing a brand new nation, the early Americans were also devising a new language. Yet there is more to it than even that. When the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, the majority of people on board were from East Anglia – a region in England which has its own particular dialect. For that reason, one can still hear today in New England speech the long ‘a' in such words as car, far and apartment which is peculiar to Norfolk and Suffolk in England.

Which brings us to Noah Webster, who was born in Connecticut in 1758 and who abandoned the law in favour of teaching. Between 1783 and 1785, he published a book titled A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which was, in essence, a speller, a grammar and a reader for elementary students.

In this work, he set out to regularize what he termed the American language. This, combined with a later work, Dissertations on the English Language, a volume that was fanatical in its arguments for divorcing American English from its parent, set the fundamental seal of approval on the new American English.

It was Webster who coined the vast proportion of spellings used by Americans today – from color (colour) to theater (theatre), from fiber (fibre) to defense (defence). It was he, also, through his contention that children should be taught to spell by rote, en masse in the classroom, that we now recognise the distinctive pattern of American speech, which gives due emphasis to each syllable in a given word.

I take it that you've also heard of his dictionary.

So, whatever side of the fence you are on, you can either praise or blame Mister Webster for all the discrepancies. For my part, as an Englishman, I find the whole business most edifying. Let's be honest, the development of the English language has resulted from hundreds of years of dedicated illiteracy.

Don't you just love it?

© Markethill Publishing 2005.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

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By Patrick Quinn, Professional Copywriter

Back in the 1760s, the great Dr Samuel Johnson delivered himself of the dictum that ‘promise, large promise is the soul of advertising‘.

It's a good thought, a great thought; and I contend that what was true then is equally true today.

But it seems to me that modern advertisers are tying themselves into unnecessary knots in an attempt to reach audiences which they believe are becoming increasingly indifferent to their blandishments.

Well, yes, markets are turning deaf ears and blind eyes, but they always have done, though not for the reasons generally espoused by the world's marketers. I am convinced that despite all the sophisticated research and marketing effort that goes into advertising these days, the real reason that markets are indifferent to advertising is because much of it ignores the many splendoured principle that people don't buy products, they buy the benefits of owning those products.

Today, the great proportion of advertisers don't deliver sales messages, they tell what they hope are emotive stories with which the market can empathise, then they drop the product in as an afterthought, hoping that enough emotional cross-communication has been achieved for people to reach for their credit cards.

That it doesn't and people won't has resulted in huge advertising budget cut-backs in the developed world in recent years. Only a manufacturer who has taken leave of his senses will throw even more money at a strategy that doesn't work.

The strategy responsible operates under the title Emotional Sales Proposition (ESP), thought in some quarters to be an advance on the Unique Sales Proposition (USP) which, on the contrary, does actually work.

What has been overlooked or, more likely, ignored, is that in developing the principle of the USP in the late 1950s, the brilliant Rosser Reeves was striving to replace an advertising strategy that had been in situ for 30 or so years and was fast running out of steam. What was the device he was hoping to supersede? Well, by any other name, it was the emotional sales proposition.

I won't bore you with the detail, but if you'd like to find out more, you should lay your hands on Reeves' book, Reality in Advertising (MacGibbon & Kee – 1961). It could be an eye-opener.

So, it's true – the one thing we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history.

Let's go back to Dr Johnson. It's worth remembering that the kind of advertising old Sam was talking about in the 18th century was fairly innocuous and largely unexceptionable. It could be read in coffee-house flyers, in chapbooks and in rudimentary newspapers; and it consisted of sales messages as diverse as where to get your wig powdered and the date of the next public hanging at Tyburn. Even so, the products and services on offer were as important to the people of the time as mobile phones and computers are to us.

In the human condition, nothing much changes. Our egos still need to be massaged and we are all in hot pursuit of happiness. Only our methods for achieving these goals, only our technologies, vary with time.

So the next time you are tempted to commit advertising, think about Sam Johnson and give your market a reason for owning your product. A good reason.

Which prompts me to suggest a visit to the Word Power III Home Page. There, you'll find an e-book that could make your working life a whole lot easier. It contains close to 200 ready-made headlines, taglines, copy openers and clinchers, plus a comprehensive theme-finder that will give you just about every promotional word and phrase you'll ever need.

It's called Word Power III. Over the years, its content has helped me make a lot of money. What it has done for me, it can do for you. And that's a large promise.
© 2005-2009 AdBriefing Copywriting Tips, All rights reserved.

Patrick Quinn is an award winning copywriter with 40 years' experience of the advertising business in London, Miami, Dublin and Edinburgh. He has trained more than 500 copywriters via he Copywriting One-to-One distance learning course, and the founder of AdBriefing.