The following excerpt is from Craig Simpson and Brian Kurtz’s book The Advertising Solution. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes
Advertising expert Gary Halbert once said that deliberately trying to be clever and creative, to “dream up” an ad that would work, was a very dumb way to approach writing. You couldn’t possibly make up something in your head that would work. Really great copywriters are willing to “become intimately involved” with the people they’re trying to sell to.
They actively seek those people out. They want to talk with their prospects, meet with them and discover the secrets of their hearts and minds. Only from that knowledge will great copy flow. It won’t necessarily sound clever, but it will be powerful copy that speaks directly to prospects’ desires and motivate them to order the product.
To help copywriters accomplish this, Halbert suggested five steps that progressively lead to closer interaction with prospects and the discovery of what it takes to sell them a product. Some of these steps may seem pretty extreme, and some may sound a bit outdated, but their overall message is still useful and adaptable.
If you’re a business owner, blogger or website creator who’s trying your hand at writing for the first time, this is an ideal program to follow. Be aware that Halbert primarily wrote sales pieces for direct mail campaigns, so his ideas are slanted to that application. Even so, there’s a lot here that can help anyone in the business of selling a product or promoting a person or a cause.
Here’s Halbert’s technique for writing better copy in five steps:
Step #1: Get a printout of the names and addresses of your customers and best prospects, and then sit down and read that printout
When you run a direct mail campaign, you may rent a list of names and addresses through a list manager or broker. This list is carefully selected to contain the names of individuals who’ve perhaps bought products like yours in the past or who fall into a certain demographic that you believe contains prospective buyers. Or you may have collected your own list of people who’ve already bought from you or who have inquired about your product or service. This is the kind of printout Halbert was talking about.
Even if most of your work is online, you may have a list of email addresses you bought from a broker or gathered yourself. Hopefully you also have these individuals’s names and home addresses. You may even have their phone numbers and other demographic information. You can certainly adapt Halbert’s method to this kind of list as well.
Halbert started with a regular mailing list. First he looked at the composition of the people on the list. Are there more men or women? Do the names indicate that the people tend to belong to one particular ethnic group? Are they Latino? Asian? Are they the type of people who use their full names, or do they tend to use initials? Do they have professional titles, like doctor or professor?
Next he looked at the addresses. What part of the country do they favor? Do they live in big cities or in rural areas? Do they live in apartments, multifamily dwellings or single-family homes? What kind of neighborhoods do they live in? If you know the area well yourself, you can tell by the names of the cities and towns. If you don’t…