Features

Copywriting for Effective Marketing

By Sophia Mayengbam

If you are thinking of the best possible way to market your product, copywriting is the first and most vital aspect to make it a success. In www.copyblogger.com Brian Clark has recorded a post titled “Copywriting 101”, which gives an insight into the best practices, dos and don’ts of copywriting for effectively marketing your products.

"Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational style of marketing. Whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic by earning links from others, you’ll need to tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people,” says Clark.

Clark has designed ten easy lessons of copywriting. In the first lesson he says it is important to read what has been written to see what has been put down makes sense. It is important that the headline make sense for the reader to know what he is reading.

The second lesson tells us that writings should be simple and easy to understand. The writing should be clear, concise, simply worded and conversational. Sometimes it is alright to bend the grammatical rules to make the writing more digestible. Using bullet points and numbers help the readers grasp easily.

The third and fourth lessons are on how to write effective headlines. Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. At its essence, a compelling headline must promise some kind of benefit or reward for the reader, in trade for the valuable time it takes to read more.

“Direct Headlines go straight to the heart of the matter, without any attempt at cleverness. Bly gives the example of Pure Silk Blouses – 30 Percent Off as a headline that states the selling proposition directly. A direct blog post title might read Free SEO E-book,” Clark pointed out.

In the fourth Chapter he talks about the importance of persuasive structure. It is important to grasp the attention of the reader from the first sentence and keep the reader engaged step by step to the conclusion. To persuade a reader to read till the end the writing has to flow. For this the foremost thing is to focus on what the reader wants. Every separate part of your narrative should have a main idea, give reasons for a why and present your copy with credibility.

In the fifth chapter Clark says stress the underlying benefits that each feature of a product or service provides rather than stressing on the feature. Faking benefits never helps, it turns of the readers. Here’s a four-step process to extract true benefits from features:

• First, make a list of every feature of your product or service
  
• Second, ask yourself why each feature is included in the first place
  
• Third, take the “why” and ask “how” does this connect with the prospect’s desires
  
• Fourth, get to the absolute root of what’s in it for the prospect at an emotional level.

The sixth chapter is about communicating with the consumers through offers of the product. Offers must be communicated quickly and explicitly. In the lingo of direct-response copywriting, an offer is a call to action. For bloggers, desired actions include having a reader subscribe, bookmark you, make comments, respond to surveys, and utilize your information resources that double as sales tools.

Advertisement often gives hollow promise of satisfaction guaranteed. In chapter eight Clark says every promise you make to a prospect should be both fulfilled and guaranteed. When you sell something in exchange for someone’s hard-earned money, the promise is that the product or service will meet, or exceed, expectations. The guarantee means you will give the money back if the buyer feels that’s not actually the case.

Chapter nine is about long versus short headlines and short copy versus long copy. He says eight words in a headline is a norm and works effectively, however, sometimes longer headlines which conveys the story rightly also works. Longer copies do outsell shorter ones. The length of the copy should be decided depending on the product, the audience and the purpose.

In the last chapter, Clark says studying examples of great copywriting will help you write better copy. There are certain fundamental ways to present persuasive content, and they work over and over again. Copy pros employ tricks from past sales letters because they work.
Selling with words is not an easy thing. You need to develop and tell the big story about you, your company, and your product or service.

Copywriting is the process of writing words that promote a person, business, opinion, or idea, with the ultimate intention of having the reader take some form of action.

Or another way of saying it, copywriting is the art and science of getting people to do what you want.