Humans HAVE TO develop a resistance to commercial advertising and sales pitches.
Put it another way - if you said “Yes” every time someone offered you something to buy, pretty soon you will have spent all your money, and you’ll end up broke, bankrupt and starving!
That’s why it’s been a copywriter’s job to find ways to “get under the radar”.
It’s been our job to look for tactics where we can slip past people’s natural defences, their natural aversion to being “pitched to”, and sneaks into the soft fleshy part of their brain where we might be able to get them to make a buying decision…
RULE #1 OF SALES COPY: Don’t Make Your Ad Look Like An Ad
But SO MANY people are screwing this up online.
For a long time, I defended long form sales letters…
“They look horrible… They sound horrible… They’re blatantly obvious sales pitches…
…Yeah, but they sell well!”
And let’s face it - they HAVE sold well…
But do they sell the best?
Is there something that could sell better?
Step back for a minute - where did long-form salesletters come from?
They came from the direct marketing industry. The OFFLINE direct marketing industry.
They used to be delivered via post into people’s hands - and were read like genuine person-to-person letters.
It was a way of getting through the brochure-mail and junk-mail, and actually GETTING READ - because letters get read, whereas advertising mail lines the bottom of people’s budgie cages or is delivered straight to the bin.
This is why they were sales-LETTERS.
Long Form comes into the picture because you NEED 16 pages to establish a rapport with someone who you’ve never met with before.
Advertorials were born in a similar way.
Direct marketers’ ads weren’t being read in newspapers - so they came up with another strategy. They hid their sales pitch inside what looked like editorial - what looked (on the surface) to be a genuine article.
Long form sales letters worked really well in the infancy of the internet…
So did the split testing strategies behind sales letter creation…
But nobody really thought about the “why?”. People just blindly followed the advice of “Pro Copywriters” who assured everyone that long form was the way to go online - based on their 30 years experience offline. (This is the same reason EVERYONE has Red headlines… one copywriter said red headlines work the best, and within a month, every sales letter online suddenly had red headlines).
The problem is, people are becoming “immune” to online sales letters.
Via email, people are “spamming” sales letters that arrive… Via web pages, people are having a quick look, then hitting the back button.
And the reason is simple…
THE FUNDAMENTALS BEHIND GOOD DIRECT MARKETING ARE BEING FORGOTTEN
Copywriters are just blindly following what everyone else is doing - without thinking about WHY.
Copywriters are using slang and informal language in ALL sales letters… When it was originally used as an early NLP-style tactic to mirror and build rapport with targeted markets - weight-lifters, body-builders, people with a self-defence interest, cage fighters - people who use slang and informal speech normally.
Copywriters are using long-form styles that “turn off” their targeted customers instead of engaging them… Instead of fighting for attention with long form sales letters, copywriters should be engaging prospects by using writing styles that their prospects engage with - blogs, article sites, news sites, Wikipedia, video sites…
Copywriters should still squeeze before a sale - but they don’t need to use churn-and-burn strategies to hassle prospects into buying, or go away… Old-school copywriters used to have a high cost of attaining and then contacting leads - it was buy or die. Profit or lose money. Each lead cost so much more to gain, and so much more to contact.
Today, we have the luxury of communicating with our prospects online for free - so we can afford to invest into building life-long buying relationships with clients.
We don’t need to be take-take-take, pitch-pitch-pitch, sell-sell-sell as copywriters. We CAN give away value too to engage prospects.
This is the next generation of sales copy writing - particularly for the online marketplace.
We’re fighting for attention in the most distraction-riddled medium that has ever existed - the internet.
The copy writing war-cry for online marketing is not “BUY OR DIE!”
The new war-cry is now “ENGAGE!”
Are you engaging your prospects? Are you giving your market what it wants?
Are you slipping under the radar, using the same common technology, common writing styles, and common language used by your market? Or are you trying to jam your prospects faces into the much-hated long form sales letter?
Watch this space…
Copywriting is changing.