In a fast-moving world of texts and selfies, it’s easy to imagine the days of holding long and meaningful conversations are behind us.
The idea of two people sitting down in deep conversation can feel a little quaint. Romantic even.
Who has time for that, right?
Not so fast.
Pretty much every important relationship in your life began with a conversation. Or a series of conversations.
If you’re going to pitch your clients or partners on the benefits of conversational copywriting, it will help if you have some solid arguments lined up and ready to go.
Fortunately, the conversational approach is rich with key points of difference and advantage.
This is particularly true when you’re competing with copywriters or marketers who are still hanging onto the traditional, broadcast approach to copywriting.
The old-school approach may still work for old media like TV and radio, but it has no place online.
Let’s explore just 5 of the ways you can power up your pitch when you’re talking about conversational copywriting.
Conversational marketing is multifaceted.
It’s about the language you use across all your digital marketing materials.
It’s about how you interact through social media and your customer service channels.
It’s even about the culture within your business.
And beyond all that… it’s also about how good a job you do to stimulate conversations outside of your own channels.
For many small business owners, the true motivation behind their business is to do some good for the world.
These are heart-centered companies.
And they face a unique challenge when it comes to marketing their products and services.
How hard can they push in their marketing materials?
On the one hand, they need to drive sales. They have to attract new customers. If they don’t, their business will fail.
And heart-centered or not, a failed business doesn’t do anyone any good.
But…
When you look at documents written by lawyers, politicians and crisis-management consultants, it’s often hard to figure out what they’re trying to say.
There’s a reason for that.
They don’t want you to understand what they’re saying.
This is called obfuscation, which is defined as “the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible”.
Obfuscation is deliberate.
It’s used when people are trying to hide stuff from you.
I’ve been around long enough to remember what marketing was like before the arrival of the web.
Back in the 1980s I was a print copywriter, writing ads for magazines and newspapers.
I loved the craft. And I worked with an art director who was equally passionate about his work.
Our ads were highly polished. We spent days or sometimes even weeks on a single ad. The final results were as near perfect as we were able to achieve.
Truth be told, we cared more about the opinions of the next industry awards committee than we did about the opinions of our readers.
In a very real sense, we lived and worked in an adland ivory tower.
But that was then. And now is now.