The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘competitive copywriting’

To survive in today’s highly competitive copywriting environment, you’ve got to stand out.

To stand out, you must do things differently from your competitors.

To do things differently, you must first know what they are doing.

Many businesses will be all too happy to tell you how they are different. Websites shout about their great customer service, low prices, fast shipping, and friendly staff.

These are not the things that make you different. These are things customers expect, and you better deliver if you hope to do any business at all.

To answer the question foremost in your prospect’s mind, “Why should I do business with you?”, you must know yourself, your market, your competition, and what each of these currently thinks of you. (Yes, feedback is just as important, maybe more so, than what you are putting out there.)

If you want to do better, you must make changes.

• Are you engaged in marketing yourself?
• Are you marketing yourself differently from the industry norm? (I didn’t say crazily.)
• Are new leads, comments, suggestions, conversations, questions coming your way more regularly? If not, why not?
• Do prospects have a reason to pick up the phone and call you, or open their email and write to you, or take any kind of action to contact you?
• Do clients tell me why they like my work, why they chose me over another, why they keep coming back for more? If not, begin soliciting feedback to fine tune your offer.

Imagine if your market message was something like, “We help B2B companies sell more with smart marketing strategies that bring measurable results.”

If you were a company looking for more sales, would this interest you? It would me. I would want to know how much more I could sell, what those smart strategies are, how I can get better results, how are those results measured? This simple sentence – often called a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or Unique Value Proposition (UVP) – drives clients who are looking for your services. In essence, the reader asks, “You can? How do you do it?”

Bingo! Your phone is ringing.

When you fail to establish why the customer should do business with you instead of your competition, you are left to fight over pricing. Competing on fees alone destroys value. If this is what you are doing right now, you know exactly what I mean.

Don’t you want to find a better way? Wouldn’t you love for customers to knock on your door, instead of the other way around?

Then tell customers why they should do business with you. Determine what makes your services distinctive and say it loud and proud!