The Copywriter Source

Copywriting is not always about persuasion.

It can also be informative, entertaining, helpful, and descriptive. It can be all of those things at one time.

The rhetorical method depends on the context.

In some situations, defining copywriting as “persuading people to buy” isn’t the mindset you want to get into when you are making a copywriting piece. Obviously, you want to optimize your business’s writing so that people do buy, but the truth is that while convincing people to buy is an element of copywriting, it isn’t the whole of it. Approaching copywriting with that mindset may lead to obnoxious copy that is pushy, desperate and even confusing.

The goal of copywriting for the client is to lead to sales. It leads to sales of the product.

The sale may be the client’s goal, but that doesn’t mean that the client’s goal should be the main actionable happening in the copy. Nobody cares that you want to make a sale. They want to know whether your product is useful, and therefore, whether your product is worth their money.

You don’t make effective copy by focusing on your need to win. Rather, it is your customer’s need to win that is more important. You make it through understanding effective communication. You’re not going to “sell to people who don’t want to buy”. Selling to people who don’t want to buy is what people do when they don’t understand a thing about marketing. Marketing isn’t about selling to everybody, it is about selling to somebody. That’s why companies use marketing data such as demographics, segmentation, and finding out their target customers, so that their efforts are people who do want to buy. It’s much more efficient than simply advertising to everybody.

Let’s say that you make golf clubs with some amazing engineering that makes your golf clubs superior to the competitors. Your customers want to buy the clubs because of the technology. Who is the target customer? That’s right. People who play golf.

Sometimes, persuasion is necessary in B2B sales.

Like outlined earlier, persuasion is contextual and is based on advertising to people who have a bias, but are not quite convinced that their current bias is true. Therefore, persuading is almost mandatory in B2B sales.

For instance, let’s say that you have been hired to be a B2B sales representative and that you travel to a prospect’s business.

The prospect is a business owner who is trying to choose between your business and their current provider. She needs more information. You need to persuade the business owner into realizing that your company’s product is more suitable for their needs. Businesses are often open to persuasion if you can show that your product will increase productivity, or save the business money. Therefore, the persuading is helpful rather than pushy. Businesses want to increase productivity and save money.

If the business owner realizes that she can save money, or get better results, she is open to switching. The persuasion is necessary because the owner wants to hear about what makes your company’s products a better investment for their budget. The difference between persuasion and communication is that persuasion is usually invitational, while communication is about clearly conveying awareness.

Can copywriting be persuasive for B2C sales?

In instances where the customer is not a business, it is important to show the customer that they can save money. Strong persuasive skills need to be used in copywriting when dealing with making the business stand out from competition by presenting factual and accurate incentives to the customer who is considering your product among competition. It is then that copywriting becomes like a job interview.

The best example of persuasive copy for B2C sales, is for companies that have plans that compete with plans from competitors.

These are usually companies like insurance companies, cable/streaming and telecommunications companies. For instance, T-Mobile has an incentive where you can keep your original phone while switching plans. They call it the BYOD program, or “bring your own device”. Plans like this should always be revealed in advertising along all marketing channels.

However, some people aren’t willing to save money if the other company provides less benefits. This is why persuasion is important with these kinds of companies. There is also an element of persuasion in differentiation, but it is less about bending back the finger of a buyer, and more about presenting your company in a way where the differentiating element becomes incredibly obvious.

The fact that people often define copywriting as “persuasive writing” leads a lot of newer copywriters to believe that it doesn’t matter whether what they say or don’t say about a product is true. This leads to a card-game mentality where the copywriter is trying to one-up the competition with their best hand, instead of simply communicating what the product does in an effective way.

How many times have you been persuaded into buying something from an advertisement?

Maybe a handful of times? You have to be looking to be persuaded. Persuading a large group of people into buying a product they don’t need isn’t sales. It’s selling snake oil. You always sell to people who are interested. A business model that sells to an arbitrary customer is setting itself up for failure. That’s advertising to everybody.

Copywriting is about communicating facts and truths about the value of a product for someone who is interested in buying, in an engaging way.

If all advertisements simply just listed the features, without engagement, it would bore people. We need copy to sell to a particular customer.

Movies need plots, not just action.

Creating awareness is necessary in almost everything that we do for income.

Consider the movie industry.

Some movies and films need action and explosions for the trailer.

The explosion scenes are part of the movie’s story, but they are put into the trailer to persuade people to see it, because you can’t throw an entire plot of a movie at a potential viewer in less than a minute. It’s too much for the reticular activating system, or the RAS. The RAS is a part of the brain that filters relevant information from irrelevant information. So, in a movie trailer, a small slice of the plot is all that is needed. Most of the scenes disclosed within the trailer or preview are those that convey anticipation.

The movie trailer will usually show the action scenes because it promises to the movie watcher that exciting things will happen in the movie. In addition, they also may show scenes of intriguing dialogue that suggests a story that will make you think. People do not generally watch movies to see simply explosions, but to watch a story.

Headlines are about communication.

A good copywriter is like a good journalist who gathers accurate information but knows how to pitch it and develop a headline that gets peoples’ attention.

In the same sense, as a freelance writer, I also know that the headline has to be written to lead people to read the article. Every journalist, and writer has to learn how to write a headline that promises something that the article or book is about. People want a tautological agreement between the headline and the article. If you write an article where the title conveys that it’s about otters, and the article is mostly about dogs, then the headline doesn’t fulfill the promise. If the article isn’t discussing otters by the second paragraph, people will click out. That’s called a bounce, if it’s a website.

If you took a topic that many people consider boring, such as …

• The history of algorithms in machine learning.
• A civil-engineering article about what causes traffic jams.
• The history of the Ottoman Empire.

Realize that while topics like this may be enjoyable to a very specific audience, most people will not read such articles. Therefore, what benefit is there to lead people into reading an article about the Ottoman Empire by giving them a headline that conveys that the article is about dogs doing funny things? Getting people to click isn’t the goal. Persuading people to click on the article would be to get people who are not interested in reading about the Ottoman Empire to read such an article. Such persuasion is delusional. Simply talk to the people who care. And yes, you do need the headline and article to be not be boring. But, not being boring isn’t persuasion. It’s good communication.

Good communication is almost always better than persuasion.

Whether we like it or not, it doesn’t matter how good the article is, the headline must fulfill the promise of the article, and the article must fulfill the promise of a headline. Technical writers and scientists publishing a study to a journal for peer review must also write a headline that grabs the attention and tells other researchers what the study is about, and what results were found. This isn’t persuasion. It’s good communication.

However, if the movie was nothing but explosions and action, then there would be no plot and therefore, people don’t know why they are watching a movie that has no plot. If a scientific research paper did not have a title, nobody would read it because they would not know what it is about.

So, you have to have an itinerary beyond the attention. That’s why copywriters must be well-versed in what they are writing about. The copywriting is not about the headline, it’s about what’s after the headline. It always is.

See, it’s not about persuasion. It’s about attention and engagement. First, the headline must tell you what the promise of the content is. The content should tell you the features. However, the features have to be written as benefits, using real-world understanding on value and not pretentious language.

If you take the pretentious route, you confuse or bore your audience. The key is not to overthink it and simply communicate in an engaging way.

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