I was talking with a couple of very experienced and successful copywriters recently.
The three of us were at an industry event and catching up. Talking about work, clients and so on. The usual stuff.
Then one guy says something that really grabbed my attention.
I don’t remember his exact words, but here’s the gist what he shared with us…
A few people have asked me whether conversational copywriting is simply a different name for web content.
That’s a reasonable question.
The short answer is no. But with a few shades of yes.
Take a look at the labels in the image above and we’ll figure out exactly how and why conversational copywriting sits where it does – right in the middle, between sales copywriting and editorial content.
Step by step…
If you watched the video, you already know the story.
But if you’d rather read than watch, here goes…
I received an email the other day from a student of the Conversational Copywriting course.
He’d spotted not one but two typos in an email I sent out. And he wondered if, perhaps, I had done it deliberately.
His thinking, I assume, was that the typos somehow made me appear more “real”… imperfect and perhaps vulnerable.
The web is not and never has been a one-way medium where companies get to talk AT an audience.
It’s a two-way medium. Our audiences are as active online as we are.
They get to talk as well… among themselves… to us… and about us.
This has a huge impact on how companies should pitch their products and services online.
And that, in turn, has a huge impact on we, as copywriters, use our craft.
Here, in no particular order, are 7 attributes that make conversational copywriting different… and make it the perfect fit for online marketers.
At school we are taught to write properly. Our work is marked and graded. Grammar matters. And so on.
But when we talk with our friends, we don’t worry about that stuff.
We’ll talk in fragments of sentences. We’ll start sentences with the word “and”. We’ll end sentences with prepositions.
We don’t worry about the structure of our sentences or paragraphs. Not that we really speak in paragraphs.
The point being, when we communicate through writing, everything is more formal, more structured, more correct.