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Better copywriting. Better outcomes. (Better incomes.)
The service you're promoting may differ very little from the competition, either in quality or price. So why should I respond to your website, your email, or your blog, instead of someone else's?
The answer is better copywriting.
Not just itemising features and benefits. But actively touching a nerve that triggers an enquiry or a purchase from the page.
How to add perceived value - Dramatising the appeal of a service, and turning passive interest into active enthusiasm.
Quick Sell - Direct Response - selling straight from the web-page. Succeed and you hear about it at once...
Asserting the logic - How so called 'pure facts' can be presented in a way that influences that crucial decision to respond...
Inserting the magic - You need copy that can charm and seduce the site visitor closer to a purchase...
The Short-copy imperative - Brevity can strengthen and sharpen copy - sifting down a complex story into a few readable lines that get a reaction...
The Long-copy imperative - Long-copy treatments have tested favourably, year after year, in the research-heavy world of Direct Response…
Encouraging the impulse buy - Officially a code for goods below a certain price-level. But good copy can sell a high-cost product on impulse too…
Activating your niche markets - Your micro-audiences need precision marketing - tailor-made appeals that are crying out to be answered…
General bright ideas - Why most clients just seem to find that it pays to have a copywriter around…
How to add perceived value
Dramatising the appeal of your business, and turning passive interest into active enthusiasm.
Adding perceived value each time, and simply exploiting creative opportunities that the competition isn’t. That’s how you gain the edge - stimulating the web-visitor to contact you, not them. That’s how you double or treble your website responses overnight. Now Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
Quick Sell
Direct Response copywriting means concluding a sale, or at least an enquiry, straight from the page. It’s like a little dart that meets its target, in the form of a single tightly-defined group. If it succeeds in getting that group to respond, then it’s done its job, and the rest of the world doesn’t matter.
Direct Response is notable for being a highly quantifiable form of advertising. If you’ve achieved results, you hear about it at once.
Today, with the huge interactive capability of Google pay-per-click advertising, web and email, we can bring you the latest in measurable, usable response.
Want to see an instant doubling (or more) of those all-important enquiries and consequent sales? Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
Asserting the logic
Pure facts - surely not an outlet for creativity?
Yet facts can be presented in a way that may be engaging or off-putting. Holding the attention or losing it. Often suggesting qualities about you, the supplier, that go beyond the purely rational.
“It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it…”
Take one of those 50-page Tendering documents, maybe deliberately framed in pompous language to suggest gravitas. It may well need a copywriter to prune-out the needless verbiage, and let the small print flow.
Or an instructions booklet, perhaps for someone’s first laptop. Think of the frustration, even misery, that you can cause with a bad set of instructions.
And then think of all the other cases where so-called pure facts need to be processed into a set of copy that performs a selling function without appearing to.
Contributing to that crucial decision to respond - the one and only test of copywriting effectiveness. Now see how sharply we can boost response. Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
Inserting the magic
No, copywriting is not chiefly about pretty phrasing. But it is sometimes compared to music, something that holds the attention through its own special quality and rhythm.
So, for example, a set of copy written by more than one person seldom carries conviction.
Only the originator can judge what should be left in - and, just as important, left out. Because half the job is ruthlessly excluding anything that may affect the appeal. Even one clumsy word can kill it. (We call it derailment - a little thing getting in the way of a big thing).
As for clichés… Remember ‘Look no further’, ‘Cutting edge’, ‘State of the Art’, ‘Best kept secret’? Forget ’em.
You need web and email copy that moves the reader decisively closer to a purchase. Want to see a rapid doubling or trebling of response? Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
The Short-copy imperative
Sometimes it’s just a frustrating pressure on space. Or simply a brief that is calling for a short poster-style proposition - making a single point with great force and conviction.
Either way, brevity in advertising copy is usually desirable, and the art of sifting-down a complex story into a few readable lines is actively cultivated by copywriters.
The classic headline is the top trophy in the creative world: that five or six-word phrase that will carry the brand to glory for thirty years.
Copywriters, agencies and clients alike have earned immortality by being identified with perhaps just one of these - the supreme distillation of a product and its meaning.
Perhaps your product is waiting for its defining headline. Or other forms of spare, economical copy that irresistibly drive a sale. Two or three times the response is quite a normal result this end.
Now Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
The Long-copy imperative
“They’ll never get through all this” - the reaction of the nervous marketer, unsure of the interest and appeal of his product. That reaction is rooted in fear, and nobody buys from a frightened salesman.
Long-copy treatments have tested favourably, year after year, in the research-heavy world of the big Direct Response advertisers, now with vastly improved monitoring techniques afforded by the web - itself strongly slanted towards Direct Response.
By holding the reader’s attention for several minutes, a proper relationship with the product can be developed.
The features explained in suitable depth, beyond the scope of a few brief copylines.
The benefits promoted in an engaging and involving way, developing a sales argument that will convince the sceptic - and therefore multiply those responses.
Establishing a particular depth of trust, essential to purchasing decisions that could make a big difference to your life. Your mortgage or pension or health insurance would be the obvious examples. But then, when you think of it… almost anything. Now Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
Encouraging the impulse-buy
You come home from the supermarket with a basketful of items that were not on your list.
Those were impulse-buys - a code for goods below a certain price-level.
Above that level, they talk about ‘Considered Purchase’, where the product is supposed to be carefully evaluated against others in advance of a decision.
But the human mind is nowhere near as neat-and-tidy as that.
Good copy can sell a high-cost product on impulse too.
By skilfully dramatising the appeal, good copy can induce the same urge for instant satisfaction, only on a far bigger scale. (“Let’s go mad”). And suddenly you’ve sold them that round-the-world cruise - so their new car and fitted kitchen will just have to wait till next year.
If you thought your product was too expensive to be sold on impulse, let us write the eshot and website copy that disproves that. Now Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
Activating your niche markets
No doubt you’ve divided your market into certain sub-groups for administrative purposes.
A good copywriter will analyse these groups closely for creative purposes.
Often dividing them further into micro-markets, each suitable for its own individualised appeal.
Your file of standard emails - so easy to tailor for different audiences - is a good mirror of this. The insurance broker needs to follow-up his telemarketing pitches with a range of carefully-targeted emails. The Estate Agent needs to make a cold call to the owner of a house where a ‘For Sale’ sign has just gone up - quite different from his pitch to a known resident. You need different mailings to people familiar/unfamiliar with your organisation. And all of them backed up by discreet reminder-emails, reflecting persistence without pushiness.
So now’s the time to let us review your own niche markets. And generate the precisely targeted appeals that will lead to those vastly accelerated enquiries and sales. Now Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.
General bright ideas
Someone’s just sold you a page in a charity-ball programme, and you’ve nothing to put in it. Or you feel like doing a more ingenious corporate Christmas card this year. Or you suddenly need to generate a topical blog, along with a set of Tweets.
The copywriting skill is surprisingly adaptable for your various problem-solving agendas. (Among other things, copywriters can usually double as highly professional journalists - unlike the other way round).
Paid to question every assumption, they can irritate with their restless creativity. But unless it’s backed by credibility, they don’t last long.
On balance, most clients just seem to find that it’s worth having a copywriter around. So let us generate some bright ideas that will direct all those enquiries to you - not your competitors. Now Email jonathan.begg@clarkmarketing.co.uk or ring 020 7183 7111.