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    How To Write Better Copy
    How To Write Better Copy
    How To Write Better Copy
    Ebook188 pages3 hours

    How To Write Better Copy

    By Steve Harrison

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Whether you're an agency writer in need of inspiration, a one-woman-band drumming up work from new clients, an established business trying to get more from that mysterious thing called 'content', or you simply want to persuade your colleagues to adopt your point of view, How To Write better Copy by Steve Harrison will help you write better copy.

    It starts with the thinking before the writing, and how to create the all-important Brief. Then it takes you step-by-step from how to write a headline to how to get the response you want from your reader. With examples at every stage, and explanations based on both the author's twenty-five years' experience and recent scientific research, this book will help hone your skills - whether you're writing websites or press ads, e-zines or direct mail, brochures or blogs, posters or landing pages, emails or white papers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateSep 8, 2016
    ISBN9781509814589
    How To Write Better Copy

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      Book preview

      How To Write Better Copy - Steve Harrison

      Index

      1:

      WHAT YOU REALLY WANT IS ‘EFFECTIVE’ COPY

      This book’s title refers to writing ‘better’ copy. And, as we’ll see, one of the ways you achieve this is by choosing your words carefully.

      You should keep asking yourself, ‘Does this word really convey what I mean?’

      For example, I’m looking at the title right now and I think it could be more accurate. Because what I really hope to show you is how to write effective copy. And by ‘effective’ I mean copy that does three things:

      It gets your readers to notice it.

      It gets them to engage with it.

      And it gets them to do what you want them to do.

      Let’s start with getting noticed

      If you’re writing marketing copy, spare a thought for your reader. She’s bombarded by thousands of commercial messages every day. And, on the morning you send her yours, the poor girl will have been subjected to another onslaught.

      Years ago, I nearly cut short my fledgling copywriting career when I saw some daunting Nielsen research. It said the average UK citizen was exposed to 2,200 marketing salvoes every day. Worse still, it showed that twenty-four hours later, only eight had hit their target.

      Since then, our industry has invented new weapons of mass distraction. All are aimed at catching the reader’s eye, yet none have been any more successful than the equivalent of the longbow and catapult that I used when I started as a writer.

      According to our industry’s wisest blogger, Bob Hoffman, consumer interaction with this online advertising is essentially non-existent. For example, the average click rate for banner ads is eight in 10,000, and consumer engagement with Twitter posts is around three in 10,000.¹

      Why the failure? Well, the people you’re aiming at have a shield that protects them from the shell-shock that would otherwise result from this non-stop barrage. It’s a formidable defence-mechanism, but it is possible to get through.

      Here’s an example of one that made it – and one that didn’t.

      From 1960 to some time in the noughties, Volkswagen positioned itself as the most reliable car in the world. In the UK this was summed up in the strapline: ‘If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen.’

      If you are over forty years old, then you’ll have been exposed to this line. There’s also a good chance you’ll remember it. Why? Because reliability is an interesting quality in a car, especially when it comes to buying or selling it second-hand. And, as a result, VW’s promise may well have made it through your defences.

      However, in 2007, the Direktors at VW decided they needed something different, and between then and last December, every piece of VW marketing in the world carried a new strapline.

      You were exposed to the line for over eight years. However, the fact that you saw it thousands of times does not mean you noticed it.

      VW had certainly been firing blanks at the twenty-two people who attended a seminar I gave last week. When I asked if anyone in the audience could tell me the VW strapline, there were lots of quizzical faces, then a tentative hand went up and its owner muttered: ‘Ermm, Vorsprung durch Technik?’

      Which suggests that VW’s efforts to pierce the carapace of consumer indifference succeeded only in reminding some people of the slogan that has graced Audi’s advertising for the past thirty-four years.

      As the VW example indicates, getting ignored is easy. Getting noticed is much harder, but it is possible.

      A recent YouGov poll showed that ‘consumers respond well to good advertising that is relevant to them. When advertising is done right and is interesting, informative and relevant it is still the best way for brands to communicate with customers.’²

      Jakob Nielsen offers the same encouragement in ‘Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension: Making Users Read Your Words’: ‘On the average web page visit, users read only 28% of the words.’ But he adds that users ‘do read web content, particularly when it includes information of interest to them.’ As the leading authority on how to write for the web, Nielsen’s advice is worth following.³

      We’ll talk later about being interesting, and informative and relevant. But let’s move on to the next step:

      Getting your reader to engage with your copy

      If you’ve got them to notice your message, well done. But really, that’s just the start.

      Because at this stage they are only willing to skim your copy rather than read it. And in skimming, they’re subconsciously working out the risk and reward of a) wasting their time by reading on, or b) finding out something interesting or useful.

      If you’re writing for a website then it isn’t just your reader who is judging you. Google’s people could be rating your copy right now. And if they think it is difficult to get into, dull and badly written, you’ll be punished with a drop in the search ranking and a fall in traffic.

      There are several ways to win over both Google and your reader: the words you use, the order you put them in, and the way you lay them out. All of which we will discuss later.

      But bear this in mind: even when your reader has opted to read on, that decision can be changed in the blink of an eye. Actually, it happens faster than that. Our eyes fix on the screen for just 250 milliseconds before jumping on another seven to nine letters. Then they fix for another 250 milliseconds before jumping on again, or giving up completely.

      So, you cannot relax. You’ve never ‘got them hooked’. If the reader momentarily gives you the benefit of the doubt you must strive to keep their attention for another 250 milliseconds . . . and another . . . and another . . . and another . . . until your message is delivered.

      In other words, you must get them to engage with your copy.

      Now there’s a lot of talk in marketing circles about ‘engagement’, but not much in the way of definition. So here’s one for you: readers become engaged with what you have written when they can see themselves in the story you are telling.

      Take it from me, this definition applies to any writing, be it the kind of commercial copy that you are working on or a piece of bestselling fiction.

      Actually, don’t take it from me – take it from the chap who knows more about shifting shelf-loads of bestselling fiction than anyone else on this planet.

      Stephen King is sure that ‘book buyers aren’t attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning pages. This happens, I think, when people recognize the people in a book, their behaviours, their surroundings and their talk. When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.’⁴

      Only when this happens will you get them to resist the urge to seek more interesting alternatives (such as the articles that surround your ad) or easier options (such as not reading anything at all).

      And if you can pull that off, then you’re ready to achieve your final goal:

      Getting your reader to do what you want them to do

      Getting readers to engage with your copy is so difficult, many marketers see it as an end in itself.

      Indeed, according to the Fournaise Marketing Group, which specializes in measuring marketing performance, most marketers ‘are mistaking engagement for conversion by measuring key performance indicators such as website traffic, video views and open rates, rather than sales.’⁵

      Getting people reading but not buying is like packing your bar with Muslims and Methodists. And Jerome Fournaise, Fournaise’s Global CEO, concludes that marketers who act this way ‘need to stop living in their la-la land and start behaving like real business people’.⁶

      If you don’t want offices in la-la land, you need to accept that your copy is an exercise in competitive persuasion. Moreover, you’re using the written word to manipulate your readers. Very often, your aim is to change a course of action they’ve already decided upon, and get them to follow your suggested route.

      It could be you want them to take the ten quid they give to the Save the Children Fund every quarter, and text it to Friends of the Earth instead.

      Or free up the £30,000 they’ve got tucked away in the building society and invest it in one of your equity funds.

      Or maybe you want your client to rethink their decision to divert 60 per cent of their marketing budget into this season’s fashionable medium.

      Or you’d like your boss to review the way she’s divvied up the company’s wages budget, and top your salary up with the extra £3,000 that you think you deserve.

      Like I said, it’s manipulation. And it is very difficult for two reasons.

      Why it’s difficult

      Firstly, in many cases you’ll be trying to get someone to literally ‘change their mind’. And that brings you head-to-head with something psychologists call ‘confirmation bias’, or your reader’s unwillingness to accept things that run counter to their point of view.

      It’s hard to overcome this because, according to Michael Frank, a neuroscientist at Brown University, ‘This bias has a physical basis in the neurotransmitter dopamine, which acts as a reward signal to the brain. Acting on the prefrontal cortex, it inclines us to ignore evidence that challenges long-held views, keeping us from having to constantly revise the mental shorthand we use to understand the world.’⁷

      Or, as my dear old mum says, ‘we’re set in our ways’.

      The second reason lies in the sheer difficulty of getting the reader to understand what you mean.

      To get your message, the reader has to decipher the squiggles you’ve put on the page or the screen. There’s nothing innate about this. It comes as naturally to us as knowing how to play the banjo or speak Latin.

      As Maryanne Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, ‘we were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain.’

      Such improvisation is difficult because this primate’s brain of ours evolved to hunt and gather on the African savannah – not to scan copy on a PC screen. So we writers must make it as easy as possible for the reader’s old grey matter to work out what our squiggles mean.

      Making it easy for your reader

      When it comes to making it easy, my twenty-five years as a copywriter have led me to believe that the brain prefers signposts (headlines and subheads) that tell it what’s coming; squiggles (words) it immediately recognizes; and combinations of squiggles (sentences and paragraphs) that are structured in a way that aids understanding.

      I’m delighted to say that my hunches are borne out by the research of psycholinguists, neuroscientists and cognitive and behavioural psychologists who have studied the reader’s brain. In fact, Yellowlees Douglas has written an excellent book with that very title, and we’ll be making regular visits to its pages.

      But choosing the right words and setting them out in the correct order is only part of the battle. For if your reader isn’t interested in the subject of your copy, it doesn’t matter how adept you are at putting the squiggles together.

      So how do you achieve the most difficult task: coming up with something that the reader wants to read? How will your message stand out from the thousands of marketing communications that appear that day?

      And, more to the point, how can it compete against the Facebook posts, forums and football results; the traffic updates, tweets and TV shows; and the pub chat, podcasts and quick sessions on League of Legends that are vying for your prospect’s attention?

      Let’s see, shall we?

      2:

      THE THINKING BEFORE THE WRITING

      The best creative work produced by London’s advertising industry is delivered every Friday at 5.00 p.m.

      People cheer. Corks pop. And the person who takes delivery often keeps it for the rest of their working lives.

      The creative I’m talking about here is the leaving card that’s given to the colleague whose last day at the agency is coming to a close.

      And it is brilliant because the team who did it know all about its recipient’s likes and dislikes, fears and foibles – and what they spend most afternoons looking at when they should be working.

      Creative ideas feed on such familiarity. And if you are to write something the reader will find so interesting they’ll want to keep it then you, too, will need to know a lot about your subject.

      Know your prospect . . .

      Start by studying the data – both big and small. Better still, talk to your prospects and customers.

      However, be wary of face-to-face interviews. As Swarthmore College professor of psychology Barry Schwartz tells us, people can be divided into ‘satificers’ and ‘maximizers’. The former

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