copywriting

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Disarming through conversation

When someone tries to sell us something, we prepare ourselves for the onslaught.

We raise our defenses. We hide behind filters. We prepare our rebuttals and get ready to say NO.

Why such an extreme response? Because we are used to the sale process being adversarial.

And we know that an experienced salesperson has a hundred tricks and schemes in his playbook. He’s been doing this for years. He has been trained to win, to demolish objections, and to close the sale.

It’s little wonder we go on the defensive.

Of course we do. We’re under attack.

At least, this is the way things used to be.

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Marketers lie

About 5 years into my career as a copywriter I was working on a campaign for a client in the pharmaceutical industry.

The product I was being asked to write about was a hospital analgesic – a painkiller for dealing with severe pain in a hospital setting.

The trouble was, when I looked through all the clinical studies for that product, I couldn’t find any evidence that it was effective as a painkiller.

In fact – and I remember this after almost 30 years – the best I could find was a statement that described the product as “slightly more effective than placebo, but not significantly so”.

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Isn’t it a little odd that we try to communicate with our audiences in so many different voices?

Many companies – and the writers who work with them – seem to struggle when it comes to finding a single, consistent voice for their websites.

For example, a company’s homepage might be written in a fairly cautious, descriptive tone.

Their About page may feel even more formal and corporate.

Meanwhile their sales pages are much louder and pushier, written in a voice that would be better suited to old-school, broadcast media like TV and radio.

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Change minds through conversation

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…

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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.

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