It's not me, it's YOU.

What’s the biggest mistake most businesses make with their website, sales or marketing copy? 

Making it all about THEM! 

Talking about what they do and how well they do it, their expertise, their achievements and so on.

They become that boring person at a dinner party, always trying to tell everyone how much better everything they do is, always bringing the conversation back to them. That person gets avoided! 

But it makes some sense that people try and do the same with their copy. 

We think we need to CONVINCE people. We defer to our expertise because it makes us feel secure as in our minds that is our greatest strength. 

We believe the more we demonstrate how great we are, the more persuasive we can be. 

Unfortunately, most consumers don’t find that very persuasive at all. 

They will actively avoid situations where they feel like they are being sold to. They want to feel like they are in control, that they are making the decision, and that they are understood. It might feel count-intuitive, but talking about them, and not you, is the only way to give them that control. 

Great copywriters understand this. 

Instead of writing copy that is all about THEM, they write copy that directly addresses and speaks to the reader’s problems. They are able to articulate exactly what is valuable to the person consuming the copy, not what is valuable to the person writing it. 

At the start of a relationship, your customers and clients don’t care that much about you. 

They care about them. 

They are thinking about their problems. 

All they want to know is whether you can fix them. 

Even when they do think about you, they don’t do it very deeply, as they expect you have at least the base level of competence. They really don’t care about the details of your amazing process, they only want to know that you have a solution to their problem and it's going to work. 

Now obviously, as the relationship grows, different consumers have different levels of nuance. They will look for more detail and proof. 

But not at the start.

Where your competence or skill is important is how it can be communicated to handle their OBJECTIONS. How your particular solution directly deals with the reasons why they may or may not use you. 

This is critical. 

If you don’t deal with objections, you can’t make any conversions.

Focusing your sales and marketing copy on dealing with their problems directly, and their key objections is FUNDAMENTAL to improving your conversions, no matter the type of sales process you have. 

The following are 5 steps that can help when drafting sales or marketing copy:

1. Identify your clients’ problems directly 
2. Identify, then answer as many of their potential objections as possible
3. Be clear that you are the best business to solve those problems
4. Back it up with “social proof” that you have done it (not just that you say you do it)
5. Make them a clear offer. 

Sounds easy right? Well, it is.  

The very best scientific demonstration of how communicating like this works is through data on landing page conversions. Check out any landing page of a SAAS business and they are going to be hitting these key points. Site designers live and die by how well the page converts, and they have thousands of examples of how this approach leads to better conversions. 

So next time you are writing a piece of marketing or sales copy, think about the 5 steps above and how you can craft it to give yourself the best chance at a great outcome. 

?So, yes it's not me, it's You.