Week 2: Copywriting Basics

Copywriting is a process that calls upon the concepts of influence, persuasion and human engagement to boost marketing and sales for companies looking to advertise goods and services. Such companies are aware of how subtle changes in wording and overall content can have a big effect on grabbing a customer’s attention, earning a conversation with them and ultimately closing a sale. Throughout the week, I explored copywriting strategies and secrets that brands use and how these techniques influence the human mind and human emotions to great success.

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Emotional connections

Consumers often buy with emotion and justify with logic (something that can explain why consumers of Apple products will continue to buy the latest upgrade of an iPhone even if they own one of the latest versions already). Copywriting taps into this idea and emphasises the importance of emotive, sensory language to draw readers of your content in, and eventually turn them into consumers.

As it pertains to emotive language, there are often two key emotions/feelings that prompt readers to take action: pain and pleasure. The dream scenario for readers is to look at a product and find it minimises the former and maximises the latter. Copywriters can expand upon this and utilise agitative language (aka fear words like stress, anxiety and trepidation) to try and explain what the reader’s current state would be like, before using warmer and more calming language to describe the dream state that readers could attain by acquiring the said product (e.g. peaceful, tranquil, serene). Such emotive language and imagery will help the reader to immerse themselves into these experiences, which gives them a much clearer idea of how a good or service can directly benefit their life and hence why they should consume it.

This leads to sensory language, which as the name suggests, builds on the immersive experience for the readers by appealing to their senses (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell). A lot of food and drink companies play into this well, as they can use a plethora of onomatopoeic words that can make the reader feel as though they are consuming the product already and can ‘taste’ the benefits already before they have even made the purchase. For instance, marketing a ‘sizzling selection of the most exquisite spicy chicken’, the ‘crispy crunch of the finest biscuits’ or hearing your coffee machine ‘whirl into life to create your own refreshing and rejuvenating cup of coffee in the morning’ would bring these all into life as you can use all of your senses to engage in the experience on a deeper, more personal level.

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The reader is the central focus

What the above points helped me to conclude was that at the heart of all these techniques is the reader of your text, and everything that you write should be tailored towards them and their wants and needs. One of the best ways to think through this is to create some kind of avatar or model consumer to whom you market and imagine you are talking directly to them in your copy (essentially putting yourself in their shoes since they are the ones who you will look to market towards at the end of the day).

One of the major advantages of thinking from this perspective is that it will encourage you as the copywriter to think of any hurdles or roadblocks that the avatar/reader might face when looking to buy your product, meaning you can then answer those hurdles and questions as part of your marketing before the reader even needs to ask the question themselves. This makes them far more confident in the product you provide. This emphasises the importance of market research for your product, and looking at reviews for similar products is a good starting point. For example, looking through Amazon reviews, Reddit forums and YouTube comments, especially some of the negative ones, can give you an idea of what hurdles previous customers have gone through which gives you a blueprint of the information you can include in your copy to ensure you answer those obstacles so your reader does not have to go through those same negative thoughts as the related products you explored.

Finally, this leads to how copywriters can adapt their language to put their readers first and not their brand. Here are some of the key pieces of advice I picked up throughout this week that have been extremely helpful in some of the copywriting drafts that I have created:

· Using second person language (you/your/you're) or first person plural (we) so the reader feels not only included but also valued and respected as part of the conversation

· Zooming in on specific features (using stats and other factual data) whilst also using those features to highlight what the benefits to the consumer are

· Providing instructions to the consumer on what to do (people often like to be told to take action rather than to act on their own initiative, so copywriters play a role in walking them through the entire process and conversation)

· Simple, concise language that is easy to digest: whilst long, fancy and niche words might look and sound nice on paper, you risk alienating any readers who may not have the industry knowledge to understand niche terms, whilst also confusing them with words that may now know. The purpose is to market to them, not to show off all the cool vocab that you know to sound smart

· Grab attention at the beginning, but once it dies down (because it inevitably will the longer the text goes on), add in some of the techniques and language discussed earlier to maintain interest and desire (sensory language, onomatopoeia, any rhyming, alliteration or figures of speech to make your writing sound catchy and to re-engage readers who may have started to lose interest later on in the text)

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For anyone looking to enter into the field of copywriting or anyone who simply seeks to understand just how important they are in the marketing and sales side of a business, I hope the above examples and explanations of emotional connections can help illustrate how much of a difference such nuances in language can make and why it is a key focus for any copywriter operating in any industry. This will not be the end of the copywriting series, as later on in the year I will look to home in on these basics and apply them to a specific side of copywriting (e.g. headlines, social media, web pages, emails, and see how the language and tips may differ amongst them all).