Five Ways to Make Your Marketing Copy a Whole Lot More Engaging
Before the Web—a
zillion years ago now—marketing copy was a one-way, broadcast affair. Companies
simply pushed their promotional messages out through mass media.
And their audiences
had no way to push back.
The Web changed all
that because it's a two-way—or multi-way—medium.
It's the perfect
medium for marketers to truly engage with their readers and viewers. It's a
place where you can really listen and get into conversation with your prospects
and customers.
Wonderful.
Transformative.
And yet...
Here we are, more than
20 years after the arrival of the Web, and most marketers are still in push
mode—still broadcasting their sales messages at their
audiences.
Perhaps it's an exaggeration a
little when we say most markets are still in push
mode. But if we do, it's not by much. Pretty much every one of us could do
better.
Here are five simple
ways to level-up our efforts to create truly engaging messages.
1.
Don't be that pushy salesperson
The pushy, adversarial
approach to selling and persuasion is a holdover from the days of broadcast
media.
Back then, simply to
be heard, you had to create messaging that was loud and pushy. Why? Because
your ads and commercials were always unwelcome interruptions. Ads interrupted
your favorite TV and radio shows.
When a message is
unwelcome, it won't be heard unless it's loud.
Online, we can take a
different path. By asking permission first, we can tone down both the volume
and the tone of our messaging.
We no longer need take
the loud, pushy, and obnoxious approach.
2.
Use simple, conversational language
Once you've put aside
the pushy sales approach, your task is to ditch that weird business writing
style so many writers picked up at some point in their careers.
Taken from the wild:
"Frakbar Cost Management empowers organizations to monitor cloud spend,
drive organizational accountabilities, and optimize cloud efficiency so they
can accelerate future cloud investments with confidence."
Seriously?
Maybe we can simplify
that a little: "Looking for smarter ways to manage your Cloud expenses? At
Frakbar, we can help with that."
Here's an easy way to
review and improve marketing copy on your website.
Sit down with someone
on the opposite sides of a table. Get yourselves a coffee and a large plate of
cookies. Open up your website on a laptop, then read a page of your website to
your colleague.
Read it as if you were
having a conversation with that person, between sips of coffee. Look your
colleague in the eye.
Imagine he says,
"Hey, tell me a little about your company."
Then start reading
from your company's "About" page.
If—within that
conversational, across-the-table-with-cookies context—reading that page out
loud makes you sound like a complete idiot, then it's time to do a rewrite.
3.
Get the language right by listening first
Imagine you're a
nutritionist attending a conference of your peers, but you accidentally join the
wrong meeting and find yourself stuck with a group of sanitation engineers.
I'm guessing you'd
find it hard to engage in any meaningful way with others in the room: different
vocabulary, different concerns and priorities.
You'll find a similar
disconnect between many companies and their prospects and customers, simply
because the companies never bother to listen carefully and figure out the
vocabulary, concerns, and priorities of their audience.
That's odd, because
it's super-easy to listen to your audience online.
Here are four ways to
get started:
1. Encourage more
interaction through your social media channels, and then study the language of
your most enthusiastic commenters.
2. Publish more surveys,
and include open-ended questions. Study the most-detailed replies.
3. Invite visitors across
all your digital channels to ask you questions.
Get a feel for their priorities and their use of language.
4. Read relevant reviews
at Amazon, and check out questions and answers on Quora.
Collect, collate, and
study all the data, and you'll be in a much better position to truly engage
with your audience.
You'll be speaking
their language.
4.
Leave space for your readers with questions and stories
The old-school way was
to write both editorial and marketing materials in lecture mode: writing at the audience.
Writing in this
one-way style is a terrible way to engage anyone.
A couple of simple
ways to correct this are to...
1. Ask
more questions in your
headlines and within the body text. A question signals inclusion. It makes
space for the reader and his or her feelings and opinions.
2. Tell
more stories that are
relevant to your audience. That's another way to make them feel included.
They'll feel you get them. They'll feel more engaged.
Either way, you
increase engagement by leaving some space for the reader.
5.
Be imperfect, approachable, authentic
Don't make deliberate
errors. But you can make your business feel a lot more human-friendly if you
stop trying to be perfect.
Your writing doesn't
have to be totally grammatically correct.
And if you make
mistakes, own them. Customers will almost always forgive you when you own up to
an honest mistake. They won't forgive you if you try to qualify or water down
your apology.
It's OK to be
imperfect. People connect with that. They'll feel closer to you.
Let's
wrap it up
There's nothing
terribly hard about any of these five ways to make your marketing copy more
engaging.
That's not the
problem.
The problem is that
too few companies make the choice to be more
engaging. They're still stuck in old-school, broadcast, command-and-control
mode.
So that's step one.
Let go of the
command-and-control thing. Commit to being more engaging.
Get into conversation
with your audience.
They'll love you for it.
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