What is the importance of copywriting?
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Learn why copywriting is so powerful but also what other factors are involved in the success of a marketing campaign.
What is the importance of copywriting?
If you’ve been online a while, you may have heard that copy is the most important aspect to any part of your marketing. After all, copy is the foundation for video sales letters, social media advertisements, pillar content, educational content, sales pages, websites, emails and more.
It’s the words that tell a story, that evoke emotion, that compel action taking, that create desire and persuade a reader that this ‘thing’ is the solution to their problems.
So, yeah, as Joe Schrieffer of Agora Financial says… “Copy is the fuel to the fire of all sales”
But it’s remiss of us to think that the responsibility of the sale rests solely on the shoulders of the copy written for a specific campaign.There are two other factors involved in any transactions which must be taken into consideration and those are… the list and the offer.
Even with the most persuasive copy if the offer is not right for the market then your campaign is going to be a dud. Likewise for your list. If you don’t have high quality leads then your copy will totally miss the mark. Let me explain further.
The List (or Audience)
Your subscriber list is incredibly important for the success of any sales campaign. And before you go tying yourself in knots about the fact that your campaign or sales page/letter is not going to your list (or you haven’t even got a list) but is being shown to a cold audience through online advertising or print advertising, then consider this...
...the ‘list’ consists of the eyes that are seeing your copy.
These ‘eyes’ need to be the right eyes. If you’ve built a list of subscribers based on a different sales message, a different positioning or in fact a different niche you are going to find it tough (even with copy written by an A-list copywriter) to get sales.
Same goes for where you place your ad. You have to know your market and where they hang out to be able to get your copy in front of the ‘eyes’ that belong to the perfect buyer for your thing.
The Offer
This is sooo important and you’ll see many marketers online talking about past failures (after all failure is part of business and is a key learning tool - if you let it).
Many of those failures they’ll clock up to the fact that their offer was wrong. Either it was priced wrong, the deliverables included weren’t right (ex. not enough support), or the positioning of the product or service missed the mark.
What about research?
Research is where you can minimise the impact of getting these things wrong, however even the most well researched product or service doesn’t always guarantee success. How many times have you been asked a question like…
“What do you think of this ‘thing’? Would you buy it?”
And you say …
“Yes, it’s fab! I’d love me one of those”
...but at the end of the day, would you really put your money where your mouth is? The only true way to check if a sales campaign works... is to test it. Then analyse the results, adjust, refine and then test some more. There’s also one other thing to consider when you are weighing up the effectiveness of any copy for a campaign and that is…
No copy exists in a silo
No sales campaign operates in a bubble by itself. There are many moving parts that make a campaign work. Things like…
Consistency
Frequency of ‘touch-points’**
Brand awareness
Email or ad deliverability
Competition
Timing
Seasonality
[** Touch points are the number of elements a potential buyer may come in contact with around your business or brand at the time of a sales campaign. They may not be elements specific to the campaign… maybe it’s just a social media post, the number of times they see your logo (online or, *gasp* in-real-life), or a person in someones network mentioning something that is linked with your work that creates a domino effect. You can’t always control these factors, but you can be aware that all this can play into the success of any campaign.]
You may think I wrote this article to excuse bad copy...
*in my best sarcastic voice*...
“Oh it’s not the copy that’s not working, there are other things involved…”
Not at all. We just need to consider all these things when we are launching or running a sales campaign.
So, what can you do?
You need to create a plan or strategy around your campaign. One that factors in all these things mentioned above, to maximise the three factors you can control , which are…
Your list (or your audience)
Your offer, and of course
Your copy