sales copy

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Making the pitch for conversational copywriting

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.

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In conversation with colleagues

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…

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Conversational copywriters have nothing to hide

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.

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Group of friends in conversation

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.

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Trust in marketing

Take off your marketing hat for a moment.

Think of your experiences as a regular consumer, buying stuff for yourself and your family.

Would it be fair to say that you’d be unlikely to buy from a company you don’t trust?

Doesn’t sound like something you’d feel comfortable doing, right?

OK, now put your marketing hat back on, and answer me this, “How hard do you work to earn and hold onto the trust of your prospects and customers?”

If you tell me that the trust of those people is super-important to you, excuse me while I go through all your marketing materials.

Because everything you do as a marketer either builds trust or burns it. Nothing is neutral.

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Love your audience with conversational copywriting

I was taking part in a mastermind group a while back and someone asked the question, “Do you like your customers?”

BOOM!

Amazing question.

It had a huge impact on everyone in the room. We all had to pause and think about our own feelings about our customers and even our prospects.

Did we like them? Did we respect them?

Did we even think about our customers in terms of liking or respecting them?

Or did we just see them as anonymous specs within a demographic group? As data points?

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