The Confident Copywriter

Q: When do you want more customers?

Hmmm…I’ll bet you didn’t choose the last option. Maybe that choice made you chuckle. It does sound funny.

In reality, it’s no joke. If we agree this choice is ridiculous, why aren’t we working harder to create marketing messages that motivate our audience and demand action?

No doubt, you’d like more work right now. Yesterday might be nice. Tomorrow is even better.

Did the title of this post…with the strange word “Chin”, make you stop what you were doing to see what it was all about?

The title uses a ‘trick’ that can help you get more business: the trick is to interrupt your customer’s train of thought, no matter what they might be doing…so the attention is on you, your company, your products and services.

As a willful small child, my mother often reprimanded me by grabbing my little chin and turning my face to hers. As I grew, the chin grabbing ceased, replaced by a stern, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” Without fail, I always got her message, loud and clear.

What can you do to grab the virtual chins of your customers and demand attention? Perhaps more importantly, how can you help your clients grab their customers by the chin?

The web landscape is strewn with millions of marketing messages, all vying for the same eyes. Your copywriting skills can make all the difference for your clients. Or not.

Either way, pretty words are no longer enough.

When your customer thinks about hiring you, he isn’t thinking about your copywriting skills. He’s thinking about results. His sole goal is to get his phone ringing, his email dinging and his shopping cart singing. He wants first-time customers to make a purchase, come back again and tell their friends. He wants the search engine spiders to find his web site, eat it up and spit it out, right onto page one.

Think for a second: when your customer tells you, “You did a great job last time”, he’s essentially saying “I got great results and I want you to do that again.”

That’s a high, scary mountain for any copywriter to climb. No wonder so many remain at the bottom, slaving away for pennies, held back from greatness by fear of failure.

How would you react if suddenly someone yelled, Help!”, “Fire!”, or “Dial 911!” Just one or two tiny words…yet the immediacy, the urgency, is instantly conveyed.

I think we’ll agree that humans are procrastinators. Your job is not to force the customer to take action. Rather, your job is to prevent the customer from inaction. They are not the same.

A few tips:

For more information, visit Marketing Experiments study, Testing the Power of Urgency on Offer Pages.

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