It often happens – no, it usually happens – that advertisers, once they have run a campaign explaining the basic advantages of their product or service, think that this particular job has been done more or less for good and all.
Continue readingAuthor Archives: Patrick Quinn
Raising The Value
Every ad, brochure, website, or radio commercial should initially fulfill one very important task. And this is to raise the value of your product or service in the potential customer’s mind.
Continue readingGetting Your Message Across
It has been scientifically proven that most of us take in only around 40% of what we actually see. Our brains edit out the other 60% of visual information as unimportant.
On these grounds, if you have a serious proposition to make in your website, brochure, or sales letter, it would be wise to repeat it. And not just once, but several times.
Just because you are deeply immersed in your offer or promise, it doesn’t follow that your market will be likewise informed after only one reading. Ads, brochures, and websites are the most negligently read materials on the planet.
Aside from you, nobody has any real or abiding interest in them. Always remember that you are preaching to the indifferent.
Therefore, if you have something to say – say it often. Everything will bear repetition if it is sufficiently interesting to the audience.
If you’re stuck with copywriting problems, or suffering from writer's block, or can’t quite come up with that elusive headline may I recommend our own sales writers’ resource ebook Word Power III?
You’ll find ready-made copy such as headlines, tag lines, link lines, calls to action, price defenders, guarantees, and more, which you can lift straight from the page and adopt or adapt. You’ll also discover a sales writers’ thesaurus in the form of a theme finder, which will cure writer's block forever. You can see it in the Word Power III: Copywriting Bible.
© 2005 Markethill Publishing
The Problems With Industrial Advertising
WRITING COMMONSENSE HEADLINES
Copywriting Tips – No.1
This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.
WRITING COMMONSENSE HEADLINES
Patrick Quinn
Many well-meaning writers on the subject of copywriting are happy to tell you that the headline is the single most important element of any ad, brochure, website and so on. Which, of course, it is.
They also tell you that the headline must be so cleverly framed as to practically force the reader into the compass of the body copy. Which, again, it should
But it is right there that the commonsense comes to a stop. Because they then go on to offer you a formula of some kind along the lines of: ‘
Some even go so far as to say something like: ‘If You Can Write A Headline Like This, You’ll Be A Cash Millionaire This Time next Week.’ The latter is usually accompanied by a sample headline that, take my word for it, would get most ad agency trainees fired on the spot.
Let’s clear the decks. There are no formulae, no quick tricks, no lazy ways to produce a good headline. A good, selling headline depends for its success on just one simple ingredient a statement of benefit. Meaning a benefit inherent in the product or service that the consumer will reap if he goes out and buys it.
Every product or service has a benefit. If it hasn’t, why is it being produced? Thus, the best headlines, those that move product, say to the reader: ‘Buy this product and get this benefit.’
Simple, isn’t it?
And on the subject of commonsense copy here’s a bit more:
Me, me, me.
A lot of website writers, not to mention a lot of brochure and corporate newsletter writers, seem compelled to talk about themselves. They talk about their business, when it was founded, why it was founded and who by. Not content with this, they tell us all about their employees one by one; about the size and location of their offices or plant; and about the lengths they go to in order to satisfy their customers.
A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, but a lot of it goes right over people’s heads. And they lose more customers than they gain with such naval-gazing.
The simple truth is that nobody gives a damn about other people’s achievements. All most of us are interested in are our own achievements. Good enough reason, then, when writing your next website or promotional material, to talk more about your potential customers and what you can do for them, than about yourself. Six-to-four, you’ll get a bigger response.
END
Patrick Quinn is a copywriter, with 40 years' experience of the advertising business in London, Miami,
The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.
The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.
Word Power 1, 2 & 3.
© Markethill Publishing 2005.
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