If you feel like your sales messages are being ignored by your customers but don’t know what you’re doing wrong, have a listen to this week’s episode where I’ll be talking you through all of the simple mistakes that you might be making and telling you how to turn things around so that you can start seeing the results you want.
I’ll be highlighting the main mistakes that crop up time and time again and showing you how easy it can be to get it right. The key areas are:
- The complications caused by internal naming and the importance of explaining things so that customers understand what you mean.
- Including key product details and giving customers enough information to encourage them to take the next step.
- Umbrella terms and how to stand out by telling a different story.
- How to repeat your sales message without sounding spammy.
- How to get your customer to like you by involving them in your narrative.
To help you remember all of the points above, I’ve included some fun sketches in this week’s podcast. You’ll hear about bellboys with bad attitudes, inside job bank robberies and Al Pacino’s biggest regrets – I thoroughly enjoyed creating them so I hope you enjoy listening.
Hopefully, this podcast will enable you to look over your copy in a new light and recognise areas that could be worked on so that you can generate more sales. I have shared real life examples and success stories from my own clients to demonstrate how the simple techniques I use really do work.
As always, please feel free to post any comments or queries below and remember, every Thursday at 4:00pm UK time, I’m going to be online for 30 minutes doing a Q & A session so if you have anything you’d like to ask me or if you’d like me to review your copy and do a copy critique, I’d love to see you then.
Links:
- Bunches – fabulous flower delivery company with wonderful marketing
- How to Quick Pitch Your Business – Free Lecture session
- Write with Influence course https://writewithinfluence.com/course/
Show Transcript:
Amy:
Welcome to another edition of Write with Influence, the bite-size podcast that fits in your pocket and makes you a better copywriter or marketer, whether you write for your clients or your own business.
Today I want to talk to you about being ignored. Hey, hey, I said, I said I want to talk to you about being ignored. . . I’m kidding – just a little joke there!
No one likes to be ignored, and yet when you think about the competition that you have with your marketing, you are up against it to stand out. People are bombarded with advertising every day and there’s a reason why Netflix doesn’t have a channel that streams adverts on demand! So, you’re up against it to start off with and you need to put your best foot forward. And yet, there are some very simple mistakes that you can make in your copy, which do not just make your marketing less effective, they can make it positively invisible.
Now, there are some instances where it can be helpful blending into a crowd – if you’re sitting on the front row at a stand-up comedy show or if you’ve just executed a dastardly plot to commit the crime of the century and you now need to slip away quietly and unseen by authorities. In fact, that’s actually one of the reasons my dad never ever got a tattoo, because someone told him when he was younger, don’t get a tattoo so that you don’t have any distinguishing marks if you ever commit a crime. That story raises more questions than answers you know, who was this influence shaping my father’s mind and has my dad ever used this to his advantage? Not that I know of, but then, well, I suppose I wouldn’t, would I?
OK, so here are five different ways you can accidentally write invisible copy:
Number one is using internal language. One example I’ve used before in conferences, is an email I received a couple of years ago from Gatwick airport (which is my closest airport). The headline asked me if I was flying that year and it told me I could get ‘Premium Security’ for just a pound. Well, that sounds impressive except, I don’t know what ‘Premium Security’ is! I could probably guess, but while the email mentioned ‘Premium Security’ at least three times in a handful of lines, it didn’t tell you what you got for your pound. Now, a pound might sound like a bargain, but if ‘Premium Security’ means you get a kick in the shins on arrival, well, it’s not that appealing. Now, this might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many businesses develop internal naming conventions that they get very excited about, but then forget to explain them to the customer. So, I had one client who had, I think it was a called an ‘Accelerator Program’ or ‘Bootcamp’ and when I walked through this lesson, the owner just began laughing and said, “That is exactly what we do – we haven’t really ever explained in detail what the program is up-front, we just email people asking them if they want to sign up to the ‘Accelerator Course’. So, if you’re developing a new offer or a course or a framework or a system, remember that your customers have not been privy to its creation. They don’t have the close association that you do between the name and what it is. I always think about this when I stay in hotels, I mean, there must have been a time when a Superior Room actually meant you were getting something special?
[New Scene]
Hotel Receptionist:
“Erm, Ms. Harrison, we have upgraded you to our Superior Executive Room.”
Amy:
“Thank you, that sounds lovely. A ‘Superior Executive’ – wait til I tell dad!”
{Amy enters the lift and makes her way to her room}
{Sound of door opening}
Amy:
“Hmm . . . it doesn’t seem to be much bigger than the other rooms. OK, just to get my bag. . .”
Bell Boy:
“Are you coming in or out? Don’t just stand there with the door open because you’ll upset the equilibrium of the air conditioning.”
Amy:
“Sorry, I must have the wrong room.”
Bell Boy:
“What does it say on your key? Room 217?”
Amy:
“Yeah, but . . .
Bell Boy:
“A Superior Executive?
Amy:
Yes. . . yes.”
Bell Boy:
“Well, I’m your Superior Executive.”
Amy:
“What?”
Bell Boy:
“Five years at Bear Stearns, three at Goldman Sachs and then JP Morgan, making my way to executive level before embezzlement charges, which were never proven. But in comparison to you, I am in every way a ‘Superior Executive’ and I’ll be with you for as long as you’re staying here.”
Amy:
“I don’t think this is going to work.”
Bell Boy:
“I am an upgrade, you know, not everyone gets me. Just be thankful . . .
{Soundtrack: “Come here you peasant, you shall serve your Royal Highness”}
. . . you could have been upgraded to the ‘King Room’.”
[End]
I’d love hotel rooms to be more honest about their level of luxury! So, do watch that internal language creeping into your marketing and make sure that you’re explaining things so that customers can understand what you mean.
Now, another way of making your copy invisible and easy to ignore is to miss out key details. This sounds obvious and it is obvious, but it happens all the time because of that very reason. Our product names mean something to us but this means that we can easily forget key details because they’re so obvious to us. So, that email that I received from Gatwick airport, remember how I said that the headline was ‘Flying this year?’ Well, what it didn’t tell me was that the deadline for the offer was actually at the end of March. So, make sure that when you write your marketing, you’re including the boring but important details (when something happens, the time of an event etc). Now, you might ask, “Well, how much detail do I need to put in? Especially if it’s only an email – do I need to include everything?” No, you need to include as much detail as needed to make them take the next step. For example, if you’ve got an offer in an email and the next step is to visit the sales page, you might not want to include the price. Instead, give them enough information to encourage them to click through. You don’t want people just reading a few lines of detail and then deciding “Are the prices too much? I’m not even going to find out more about the offer.” So, what I would put in an email like that if I’m encouraging someone to go through to the sales page are things like:
- Any deadlines for the offer – they’re going to be important.
- Any eligibility criteria or if there’s limited space.
- Any sort of urgency or scarcity that people need to know about to encourage them to take action quickly.
On the sales page, you have more room to include more detail to do the heavy lifting of selling to someone on the value of what you do before you then reveal the price.
The third thing that can make people ignore you is using what I call ‘umbrella terms’. Umbrella terms are those terms we come up with to try and capture all the individual value of what we have, for example, saying that what we have is ‘powerful’ or ‘high quality’. This is so common in marketing, so one of the first things that I do with clients is usually research the competition and a lot of the time, I find that one of the biggest struggles is that everyone in the industry is saying the same thing – ‘high quality’, ‘premium service’, ‘increase revenue’, etc. But here’s the thing, when everyone is saying the same thing, it’s easier for you to stand out by saying something different and different doesn’t have to mean unique – it doesn’t mean that you have to do something completely different to the competition. Different can just be being more specific in your marketing. So, for example, I had a client that had a property management firm in Phoenix, Arizona and they wanted to reach distant landlords; people who owned a property in Phoenix but didn’t live in the state, so would need a property management firm. We looked at what the competition was sending out to people and it was all the same things. It was ‘great rates’, ‘great ROI’, ‘high level of service’, ‘great tenants’, etc. And what we did is, I decided to drill down more on some of the pain points about being far away from a property and we designed a postcard which spoke to these pain points. On the postcard, it’s simply said, ‘Being away from your property isn’t easy – you probably wonder how your tenants are treating your property, whether they’re paying the rent on time, if that maintenance is necessary if you can’t drive by and check it . . .”, and within three days, this had someone calling up. This was a cold list, but they called up my client and said, “I want to switch and I’m ready to move to you.” So, this wasn’t even a lead, this was something that spoke specifically to the target market and was close enough to their pain points that made them say, “Yep, I’m sold because you sound like you understand my problem.” They offered a very similar service to all of the property management firms, but the story that they were telling was very different.
The fourth mistake for writing copy that people love to ignore is to say the same thing again and again. Now, I talked about this in Episode 14 and I mentioned the guy who sends me the same email pretty much every few weeks asking if I want ‘top quality blog posts’. I mean, I do want top quality blog posts, but I think I am going to have to write them. Now, in Episode 14, I tell you how you can repeat your sales message without being spammy but, in this edition of Write with Influence, I’d like to give a shout-out to a company that I think does this really, really well; bunches.co.uk is a family run firm that does flower delivery in the UK. I love Bunches. One thing I love about them is that, unlike a lot of flower delivery firms, they do a really, really good entry level budget bunch of flowers. Now, hear me out on this, I’m not stingy, but sometimes you want to send flowers for a level of thanks that just doesn’t warrant a grand gesture, you know, but needs to be more than a couple of tulips. So, say you’ve had a pleasant weekend stay with a friend, but they didn’t go above and beyond, or it’s the birthday of an auntie who’s stopped putting money in your birthday cards – that sort of thing. I’m kidding! But you know what I mean? They got me in with a really good entry level offer but then, the other reason I love them is that they have a great loyalty scheme called ‘Posy Points’ where you can collect posy points and that gets you discounts on future orders. They publish a calendar for regular customers and each month has a different code for a free offer or a discount, it might be a free vase or chocolates, etc and they email me all the time and I open every one of their emails because they’re always able to tie a promotion in really, really well with what’s happening at the time, whether it’s Easter or Mother’s day or Valentines, and because they’ve repeated their offer without it sounding the same every single time, they’re always at the front of my mind when I need flowers, I wouldn’t even think about using a different firm. And even since I started using them, I’ve recommended them and I know that my friends and family now use them as well. That’s really good marketing and like I say, they email me regularly and I always open their emails to find out what the latest promotion or offer is and usually it will give me an incentive to send flowers to someone that month.
OK, the final reason that people love to ignore your marketing is that you talk too much about yourself. And let’s be honest, no one likes that person.
[New Scene]
Actor:
“There I was in this acting master class with Al Pacino and he said, “Do you know what my biggest regret is?”
Amy:
“Godfather three?”
Actor:
“No.”
Amy:
“Never getting married?”
Actor:
“No.”
Amy:
“The silly little goatee?”
Actor:
“Look, I’m about to tell you.”
Amy:
“Sorry.”
Actor:
“He said the biggest regret in his life was not being more of a mentor to other actors when he was younger and then he turned to me, to me, I mean, out of everyone in the room, he looked at me and I mean, I got chills. I didn’t know what he was going to say and he said,
“I’m not gonna let that happen twice because when I saw you today, I haven’t seen acting like that ever in my life.”
Amy:
“Ahhh well, don’t you let it get you down, I mean, what does he know?”
Actor:
“No, no, he said, he said it was some of the best interpretation of a scene ever. Then he showed me his arm – it had goosebumps.”
Amy:
“Oh, was it really chilly?”
Actor:
“It wasn’t because he was cold, Amy, it’s because I was brilliant. I’m trying to tell everyone a story about how amazing I am and you are ruining it.”
Amy:
“Sorry, sorry.”
[End Scene]
Of course, you have to talk about you and what you have, but you need to leave a lot of room for your customer to be involved. This is still probably one of the top sins in marketing. Getting all excited about a new offer and then forgetting to say, “What this means is . . .” and then explaining how the customer benefits. A simple check on your copy is to count the number of times you’re saying ‘we’ and ‘I’ compared to ‘you’ and another way you can practice the habit of combating this is to say ‘so that you can . . .’, every time you write something about yourself. Now, I’m not saying that you write that every time, it’s just a really good way to force yourself to think about the customer. For example, ‘24-hour turnaround so that you can print posters even on a tight deadline’, ‘Money back guarantee so that you can buy with confidence and peace of mind’. Everything that you do has the potential to be turned into a story about the customer, you’ve just got to look for that angle. Now, if you’re more of a visual learner, I do look at this with more examples in my online lecture about to how to quick pitch your business and I’ll link to that in the show notes.
That’s all for this episode. Don’t forget, you can leave comments and questions on the show page. You can email me directly at hello@writewithinfluence.com and if you visit www.writewithinfluence.com you can also read more about the complete Write with Influence course. I hope you’re staying safe and well in these unusual times. Keep believing and remember, it’s never nice to be ignored.
[New Scene]
Employee 1:
“Night Frank.”
Employee 2:
“See ya Frank.”
Employee 3:
“See you tomorrow Frank”
Fred Fredson:
“It’s not Frank!!! It’s Fred and one day you will know my name. . .”
Narrator:
“Pushed to the edge by a world that didn’t notice him, Fred Fredson decided to make a big impression by robbing the very bank where he worked without even wearing a mask. The next day . . .”
Fred Fredson:
“Stick them up. This is a holdup. My name is Fred Fredson and I want you to put all the money into the bag.”
Employee 4:
“Ok, OK Sir.”
Fred Fredson:
“Now you know who I am.”
Narrator:
“Then later that night . . .”
{News music}
News Reader:
“An unusual occurrence at the main street bank tonight, an accounting error meant that the bank’s records were down £50,000 with no real understanding why.”
Fred Fredson:
“That’s not what happened. I robbed the bank!”
News Reader:
“We spoke to one lady who worked there.”
Female Employee:
“It was just strange, it was just an ordinary day, nothing happened, but we were unable to count for the money. We think it might be a software error.”
Fred Fredson:
“I am not a software error. I am Fred Fredson.”
Mother of Fred Fredson:
“Fred Frederick Fredson!”
Fred Fredson:
“Yes.”
Mother of Fred Fredson:
“What have I told you about raising your voice in this house?”
Fred Fredson:
“Sorry, mum.”
Mother of Fred Fredson:
“And don’t you dare rob another bank.”
Fred Fredson:
“You know about that?”
Mother of Fred Fredson:
“Of course I do, I’m your mother. Now, don’t make me call you by your full name again.”
Fred Fredson:
“I won’t. Thanks mother.”
Mother of Fred Fredson:
“Quite all right now fix me a gin and tonic and give me five grand to put on this horse.”
[End Scene]
Leave a Reply