Copywriting Tips And Tricks

 

I’ve just completed a copywriting project for one of the most boring products I’ve ever written for—water softeners.  Now as important as water softeners are in preventing scale buildup on bathroom fixtures and destruction of household appliances, they are just not an exciting product to write about.

This means that, as the copywriter, I have to find some way of getting excited about water softeners.  It‘s downright hard to write on a subject you have little interest in.  Now you may argue that I took the job and so I had to find some way of getting excited about it.

First, because of my science background, I knew there would be no challenge in understanding and explaining to the prospect just how water softeners work.  The real challenge was to explain this in such a way the prospect would get excited about my presentation of the subject.

There is a common saying that every devil has his friend and for any product you may find naturally boring, there is an exciting element to it.  You may have to look very carefully to find it.

Now when I have to write copy for such products I start by reading as much about the product as I can get my hands on.  Therefore, along with the information the client submitted to me, I used the internet to help with my research.

In the next step I must now brainstorm a “hook” for the product that would serve as a platform from which to launch the sales copy.  In this case, I found this particular technology was “new” to the extent that it had been used in the commercial field for many years and was now just being introduced into the domestic market.  Some of the biggest companies were already using this technology, so the hook I decided on was: “Big companies were ‘secretly’ benefiting from this technology that the normal home owner can now get.”

Now every product has a story.  Even if the product is boring this doesn’t mean the story about the product has to be boring.  The late Steve Jobs marketed  the Apple products by telling a story about each product and its creation, which made the product secondary and the story primary—a type of selling the sizzle and not the steak.

But Mr. Jobs was not the first to use this marketing angle.  In the famous Schiltz beer commercial, the legendary Claude Hopkins used the story about how the beer was made in order to make the product more exciting.  To the beer stiller all beers are made the same and so this approach cannot be used to sell any one beer.  So the  Schiltz beer was made with the same basic technology used for thousands of years.  But Hopkins was able to win in this approach because no other advertiser had bothered to tell the story before.

Perhaps you have seen those TV ads by Mathew Lesko dressed in his famous question marks bright colored suits getting excited about government grants and the “free” money you can get.  These books that he sells read more like a phone directory with lists upon lists of government grants but he makes the subject exciting and Lesko makes a comfortable living from selling boring government information.

Almost any subject could be romanticized.  You can sell a shower head as, well, a shower head or as a means to spice up a couple’s life and a massage tool.

The idea of selling water in a bottle would have been laughed to scorn just thirty years ago but today bottled water is a $22 billion dollar a year industry.  The question is how do you sell a common thing such as water? If someone is a great sales person the comment is often made that “she can sell ice to Eskimos”.

The point is that ice is so readily available to Eskimos so why should they want to buy it.  Even though the debate over bottled water vs. tap water purity goes on, still 25% of all bottled water comes from the same source as tap water.  So the last bottled water you drank was very likely just glorified tap water with a price tag hiked by 1000%!

Somehow advertisers were able to convince millions of people that the water from their taps was not as exciting as that from their bottles.  Although these bottled water companies used some deceptive advertising, like showing snowcapped mountains and natural springs on their bottle labels even though the water came from deep well or municipal water supplies, the lesson is clear.  Any subject can be injected with some excitement and ultimately get more sales.

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Filed under: Online Copywriting