Hello and welcome to another episode of Write with Influence. Today’s episode is all about repetition versus variation. If you’ve been sending the same content to your audiences for a while, perhaps it’s time to shake things up a bit? Repetition and consistency are important, but as every artist, composer and novelist knows, variety is what grabs attention.
Having to think up fresh subject lines for the same topic, write marketing emails for near-identical events, and craft social media feeds for same-same but different promotions can be a real struggle. So today, I am going to show you how keep your copy varied and interesting by using different angles to tell your sales story.
Listen to discover:
- Why repetition isn’t a bad thing as long as you’re also experiencing a repeat in value.
- How to find the right balance between consistency and variation.
- Ways for you to shake up your copy – the easy formula I use to find new approaches to writing emails and articles.
We all need a change every now and again, but is change always a good thing? This week’s sketches have been devised to demonstrate the consequences of tipping the balance between meeting expectations and spicing things up –we’re talking giraffe shaped sausages and a p***ed off Italian waitress dishing up cold carbonara on your birthday!
Coming up with fresh, new ideas can be challenging, especially if your product or service falls within a narrow market, so I hope that episode helps you to approach your copy from a new perspective so that you can write engaging content that attracts customers to your business and increases your sales.
As always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below and click the link for more information about my Write With Influence course.
Links:
TRANSCRIPT
EP 26: TWO ASSOCIATIONS YOU CAN USE TO FRESHEN UP THE SAME OLD COPY
AMY HARRISON
Hello and welcome to another episode of Write with Influence. It is chilly in these here parts, so settle down, wrap-up warm and let’s get ready for some copywriting chatter.
Now, despite strong protests from the cayenne pepper society, variety is actually the spice of life and that’s what we’re talking about today. When you’re writing to your audience about the same topic or product, how can you keep things varied and interesting? Now, I looked at this first in episode 14, about how to repeat your sales message without being spammy and in that episode, I gave you five different potential angles that you can use to tell your sales story in a slightly different way, and today I’m going to give you a couple more.
The first thing that I want to say is that repetition isn’t a bad thing – people love it if you do it correctly. Quick example, I used to live and work in Toronto many, many moons ago. I absolutely loved it. And the office that I was working in was just near Bedford and Blore opposite the University of Toronto. So, just about every working in day, sometimes six or seven times a week, I’d get off the subway and get a coffee from the Tim Horton’s on the corner, same coffee, every single time, Medium French Vanilla. Now, I was in Toronto last year and had one for old time’s sake and oh, my word, those things are so sweet – it was basically a dessert that I was having to kick off my morning. I don’t know how I did it, but the same drink, and I loved it. And the routine was actually a really enjoyable part of the day, I’d get the same service, the same drink and it was a nice little kickstart to the morning – I never got tired of it. So, repetition, isn’t a bad thing and there are plenty of things in our lives that we are probably happy to repeat. If I go for a run, for example, I may listen to the same playlist for three or four runs in a row. Now, I don’t want to listen to the same song on repeat, but I’m happy with the same group of songs for a while. And you might have similar daily habits that you do, or you might have, for example, a favourite movie that you are happy to watch two, three, four times a year. If you have a partner, for example, you’re probably quite fond of him or her and you probably enjoy seeing the same traits, humour and personality in them regularly because let’s face it, you don’t want your partner acting like a completely different person every single day just to shake things up, that that would be unnerving. But you also don’t necessarily want to listen to the same story from the same person again and again, and again. If you were doing one thing in exactly the same way over and over and over again, that could get incredibly boring. Like I say, we need variety.
[Open Scene – Amy working in a sausage factory]
Boss: Amy!
Amy: Yes Boss?
Boss: What the hell is going on?
Amy: I’m just putting the Cumberlands together and then I’m going to make a start on the Lincolnshires
Boss: Why are you so far behind on production? What’s that on your bench?
Amy: Sausages.
Boss: It looks like a giraffe.
Amy: Damn it! It’s supposed to be an antelope, but yeah, the neck is far too long. Is that better?
Boss: Are you making animals out of my sausages?
Amy: Yes, I am. All our sausages look the same – same old shape, same consistency, everything. At the weekends I’ve started doing balloon sculpting on the side. I put two and two together and created sausage animals.
Boss: You’re fired.
{Scene moves to children’s party – Amy making animals out of sausages}
Amy: There you go.
Child: What is it?
Amy: That is an antelope. Now, run along.
Parent: Amy, what are you doing?
Amy: Animal sculptures.
Parent: Did you just give my son a handbag made from sausages?
Amy: Look, I know it’s not technically an animal, but he was rocking that handbag.
Parent: I hired you to do balloons!
Amy: I got bored – this is my gig now.
Parent: You’re fired.
[End]
Repetition isn’t a bad thing, but we need to understand why we might have the same coffee every day, but we don’t necessarily want to watch the same movie every day. I think this is because when it comes to repetition, it fails if repeating the experience doesn’t repeat the value. For example, we get washed every day – that definitely repeats the value as we come out squeaky clean. But let’s take the coffee, for example, do I get the same value of having that morning coffee? Do I get that little caffeine boost? Do I enjoy the aroma? Whatever your morning drink might be … yeah, I do. But if I watch the same movie every day, do I get the same value? I don’t think I do because by the third or fourth day, I’m probably going to get a bit bored. I know what happens, it’s predictable and so I don’t get that same value as that initial viewing. A really good example in terms of variation and repetition when it comes to content is sketch shows or comedy characters where you get a particular trait or a catchphrase, for example, and it’s repeated again and again, but the situation may be different. So, if it is a catchphrase, you know it’s coming or you know the character is going to do a certain thing, but you don’t know when, and it’s the writer’s job to keep you guessing. One of the best shows that comes to mind when I think about this is The Fast Show which was created by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson. I love that show and whether it was the jazz singer saying “nice” or the ‘suit you’ characters suddenly getting very seedy and creepy, the writers wrote multiple sketches with such creativity that over the five series, these characters developed a surprising amount of depth. Even though we all knew that at some point the punchline was coming or the character trait was going to come out, you weren’t bored by it, you were delighted in the release of the delivery. Now, if you’re writing regular content to an audience, I think you’ve got to do something similar in finding that balance between what remains consistent and what you vary and what you shake up a little bit. I’m not talking about using comedy. I read a really good quotation by a financial writer whose name I can’t remember (apologies), and he said that his job as a financial columnist was really to write the same 10 to 15 pieces of advice in a hundred different ways because, and this is the bit that I really liked, people don’t want good advice – they want advice that sounds good. I think he’s really hit the nail on the head there and I wonder when you’re thinking about the work that you do, especially if you’re in the job of consulting or coaching others, or even just providing information about the work that you do or the products you have, I bet there’s probably some core principles that stay the same and your challenge is to keep it fresh each time you publish something. There really are a lot of ways that you can do this. When I was delivering training about content marketing, one of the things that I would do is taken a stack of specialty magazines. I had one on VW cars, one on fishing, one on weddings … if you think about it, each of these was a monthly publication on a very specialist topic. So, what we’d do is, we’d just look through the magazines and look at the different columns, the different types of articles and you knew that these columns were repeated every month but we’d have different content within them so there was a consistency of format, but a variety of the actual content. And it worked really well to help people think about different ways that they can shake up their content without having to completely come up with something radically different each time that they wrote to their audience. I also wrote a blog post on this which I will link to in the show notes.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of having a magazine and I always wanted to publish one when I was younger. I think I must’ve been about eight or nine and decided that, enough hanging about, I needed to get busy and get this done and out there. So, I had this plan, I was going to publish a regular magazine about ghost stories. What I was going to do was, I thought this was genius, I was going to interview people in my village about their encounters with the supernatural realm. I’d write them up and then leave the copies at the local post office for distribution. I lived in a village of about 500 people, none of whom had ever seen a ghost to my knowledge … so that didn’t last long. I think the next venture that I had was drawing my own treasure map and following it in the hope that I would find some treasure. Like I say, I kept pretty busy growing up in a rural village.
There are many different ways that you can shake up your copy and I want to share with you a couple that I tend to use if I’m just looking for new angles to start off an email or an article. This is very, very simple. First of all, you think about something that you would like to write about. Now, this might be a specific lesson or a tip or a feature of your product. Then think of an associated theme – this will make more sense when I walk through an example – once you have that theme, what I tend to do is then think about positive and negative associations related to that theme. It’s a lot easier than it sounds. For example, let’s take copywriting, say I’m going to share tips on writing a headline. So, the lesson or the specific topic would be: Headlines. So, then I might think, okay, well, what would be a theme that could relate to headlines? And I might say, getting attention standing out. So, let’s take that for this example. Then all I would do is brainstorm positive and negative associations with that theme of getting attention. Now, the reason that I say “positive” and “negative” associations is that there’s likely to be some emotion tied to what you think about and emotive themes can be very powerful – as humans we do resonate with emotions unless you are a sociopath … I’m not judging. This doesn’t mean it has to be over the top though, and it’s also important that you choose something that people can easily relate to. You don’t want some sort of obscure example that only you have ever experienced in your life because you’re looking to connect with people. So, we are looking for positive associations of getting attention and these might be getting asked out on a date, being an actor or an actress winning an award, winning an Oscar, being called out for an excellent job at work … whatever you can think of in terms of the positive associations of standing out and getting attention. Then what I would do is, just try to find some parallels between those examples and the lesson that I want to talk about. Now, this might just be a simple metaphor – your headline needs to be like the leading role in a play because it pulls people in, gets people’s attention and sets the tone for the rest of the piece. You know, we have certain expectations due to the headline just as we have certain expectations if we see a new film with Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger in. Or you might think about standing out, getting attention, being asked out on a date, and we may then springboard from that and say, headlines help you attract the perfect people to the perfect product like dating, and then you could explain how your headline needs to have certain key and attractive information that someone would need to see before they asked your product on a date. Let’s look at a different example for going down the negative path. So, let’s take dog training for example, you might want to explain how you use treats or the importance of using treats to reinforce good behaviour. If we were thinking about a theme along the lines of good behaviour … I mean, we could just stop there and think of positive and negative associations around good behaviour or, one thing that came to mind was that this is associated with the theme of obedience. So, then I would say, what are some of the negative associations relating to obedience? These might be an overly strict parent or an adult growing up, it might be some arbitrary rule that really gets your goat, the kind of thing where maybe you’re talking to a company and you’re trying to do something and someone says, “No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to fill in this form, write it backwards and submit it on a Sunday because those are the rules and you’ve, you’ve got to abide by them.” Whatever you think of, just keep those ideas popping of negative associations that are associated with obedience. From there, you could pick one and we might use a story to illustrate how being too strict or focusing on negative behaviour is more likely to make someone rebel or close down – maybe you could use a personal example and then explain that this is why positive reinforcement in dog training, or any kind of behavioural training is so important. Whether you use personal stories or just come up with common scenarios that you recognize, these are just a couple of really simple angles, positive and negative that can help you shake things up when writing about what it is that you do. So just to recap, repetition isn’t a bad thing, so don’t worry if you’re talking about the same core principles or key lessons, again and again, as long as you are thinking about ways that you can shake that up so that, as the financial writer said, “You’re not only giving good advice, you’re giving advice that sounds good.”
That’s all for this week. There will be another episode along shortly, and don’t forget that when you do shake things up, don’t shake them up too much – repetition and consistency are still very important.
[Open Scene – Birthday celebration]
Husband: Surprise!
Wife: I thought you forgotten my birthday.
Husband: I planned an extravaganza for you. The car will be here shortly so buckle up for a long and loud night.
Wife: Oh …
Husband: I’m joking. I’m taking you to the same Italian restaurant that you go to every year.
Wife: Oh, phew! You had me worried then.
{Arrive at restaurant}
Husband: Here we are.
Wife: I am so excited. This place has the best carbonara. I hope hasn’t changed that much in a year. Oh, it’s a bit busier than normal, it never used to be this popular. Oh, look, there’s the owner, Rosa.
Rosa: Happy Birthday!
Wife: It’s busy tonight!
Rosa: Don’t worry. I have a lovely table in back for you.
Wife: Oh, thank you.
Rosa: And if I remember correctly, mackerel pate to start, carbonara and then tiramisu?
Wife: I’m a creature of habit, I know.
Rosa: Here go you.
Wife: Wow. Oh, that tastes different Rosa.
Rosa: I know you like the same thing every year, but I thought I’d shake it up a bit.
Wife: It’s really hot.
Rosa: Spicy pepper … here is your carbonara.
Wife: I love this carbonara. Oh, the cream is a little cold, and the ham looks different this time. Have you changed it?
Rosa: I made it with jelly and ice cream – you weren’t expecting that, were you?
Wife: No, I wasn’t.
Rosa: Ready for your tiramisu? I put in sawdust …
Wife: Actually, it’s OK, I think we should be going … bye.
Rosa: Every year she wants it exactly the same and every year she leaves lousy tip – she won’t to back.
[End]
Leave a Reply