Want to know how to sell anything online? Start improving your copywriting!
Great copy – copy that hits the primary pain points of your target audience and copy that espouses ‘Big Benefits’ that your primary market are looking for are undeniably effective in generating conversions.
I am about to show you a quick and deadly effective effective way to do both of the above.
The purpose of this exercise is going to be to increase the conversions of your
sales letters and sales videos FAR beyond the ‘industry standard’…
After all, why settle for ‘average’ when you don’t have to?
Ideal copy needs to influence the prospect toward a buying decision by positioning what you have to offer in the best light possible. In order to do this effectively, we need to utilize the features and benefits that will resonate the most with your target market.
Most marketers are well aware that benefits far outweigh features in the ‘copywriting heirarchy’. Benefits speak to emotions while features speak to logic.
Emotional arguments are far more persuasive than logical arguments. Most people buy ‘wants’ based purely on emotions.
As an example of a purely emotional advertisement, take a look at the ad for the new Mac Pro:
Do you think there is anything at all ‘logical’ about your sudden interest in owning the new Mac Pro the day it comes out?
Of course not!
The triggers in the ad are all emotional… sleek sexy design, countless desires that Apple has already en-grained into the public conscience through its incredible branding, and the ability to ‘instantly’ be a part of The Future Of Computing.
Purely emotional, and Apple is the best in the game at this type of emotionally driven advertising.
With copywriting, it is also true that the fear of loss is far more powerful than the hope/promise of gain. This is a basic human ‘primeval’ emotion.
It is far easier to get someone to be emotionally tied to something they have, love and have experienced before, and then warning them it could be gone in an instant, than it is telling someone about some benefit they may get at some point in the future.
To better illustrate this point, let’s take a look at two separate sets of headlines – one headline in each set based on ‘gain’ and one based on the fear of loss – YOU be the judge of which one is more powerful…
VS
The fear of loss is far more powerful and more ‘real’. It hits more emotional hot buttons. Very few people can relate to the feeling of windfalls of cash. A windfall of cash ‘might be’ nice, but not as ‘nice’ as being penniless definitely sucks.
Don’t believe me?
Run an experiment where you asked 100 people with equal net worth… say… $200,000 and tell them that you are willing to play a game with them for all their money.
Tell them you are going to flip a coin in the air and have it land on the ground. If it land ‘heads’ you will give them $1,000,000. If the penny lands tails, however, you would immediately take everything they owned in the world – their home, their cars, their savings, their retirement fund -everything and they would be left penniless and homeless on the street. How many people do you think would agree to the coin flip?
Even though ‘fear of loss’ is more powerful than ‘hope to gain’ copy, we want to make sure to include elements of both for for the biggest impact. ‘Fear of Loss’ elements are something that lots of marketers either aren’t aware of, or simply forget to incorporate into their copy.
They are missing out.
In order to craft extremely persuasive copy, we first need to take our niche, and derive 2 large ‘positive’ benefits and 2 large ‘negative’ benefits (loss avoidance elements).
Unless you know your niche extremely well, or you are your market, chances are you can’t really analyze your markets’ pain points very effectively as a rank outsider. In order to create persuasive copy – copy that actually converts – we need to really drill down the BIG BENEFITS of a particular niche or market that have the ability to turn prospects into customers with very little effort on our part.
Luckily, there is a very easy way to do this…
Visit a few niche sales letters, and grab some primary benefits that seem like they might be enticing to the niche – either in the headlines, the sub-heads or the bullet points. One of the best places to do this is at Clickbank.
Pick sales letters in your niche that are converting (the higher the gravity, usually the better they are converting) and pick out a few key benefits of the products that they are pitching.
Go through the top 5 sales letters of similar products being sold in a similar niche to yours. Start looking for common benefits amongst those sales letters/sales videos.
While you are doing that, remember to keep your eyes open for any interesting ‘fear of loss’ copy that you run across. You can ‘swipe’ the fear of loss stuff, switch it around, and add in a few elements that might tie into your offer, and you can use these ‘fear of loss’ pain points as powerful hooks in your copy.
If your niche is internet marketing, you might not need to do that much research. You probably already have a really good idea of what moves people that would be interested in biz opp and internet marketing products.
Two of the big desires in the internet marketing niche are:
Financial freedom
People want to Quit their jobs and work from home
Two other major desires of the internet marketing niche are:
Avoiding lots of hard, greuling and painful ‘work’
Avoiding the pain and humiliation of being forced to give up on internet marketing dream
So then, as you can see, ‘Big Benefits’ are really simple and straight forward to uncover for your niche. Just grab a few. That will suffice for now.
We are going to take these Major Niche Benefits and extract copy GOLD.
Once we have this list of niche benefits it’s time to DIG DOWN DEEP. What we want to do is dig down 3-4 levels to find the real motivating factors… the stuff that is the real emotional triggers behind these big niche benefits…
HERE’S HOW:
Once simple little word can uncover a lot: “Why?”
How exactly do we dig down and find the ‘why’s’ of our big niche benefits? We head right over to Google and ask of course!
Let’s start with the first big positive Benefit we talked about in the internet
marketing niche – the hope of, and desire for Financial Freedom.
Here is exactly how I would query Google – asking Google to bring back relevant results relating to ‘Why’ people actually desire Financial Freedom.
Remember – we are digging down deeper – much deeper – than just the skin deep, super-obvious benefits of our niche. We are uncovering very specific emotional triggers buried inside these larger, obvious ‘big niche benefits.’
Into Google I can type something similar to the following:
“What does Financial Freedom mean to you?”
Querying Google in this manner will lead us directly to the ‘Why’ people are looking for financial freedom. Everything we dig up with these results will be the 2nd level.
This stuff is great, but we will want to dig at least one level deeper still.
Of the answers we uncover at this level we are really looking for the stuff that is emotional – THOSE are the real gems. That is exatly the stuff that we are looking for.
The ‘why’s’ that are emotional reasons for wanting financial freedom. Logical reasons can be good as well, but the highly emotional stuff is the real gold…
Here are the answers that we end up with. Going through the results on the first page of Google as to WHY people want financial freedom, we end up with the following:
To help protect against ‘worst case’ financial scenarios
To build a secure financial base for my family
The ability to do exactly what I want with my time
Not being burdened down with the stresses of money – owing someone, late bills, disconnect notices, and having to go without.
Now, those answers are great – powerful, and a lot of emotion tied up in them – But – Let’s Keep going a bit and dig even further…
We want to dig down to the “Third Level” – THIS is where the really powerful emotional triggers can be found…
Let’s start with the desire to protect again the worst possible case financial disaster…
To dig down another level, remember, we need to ask ‘Why’?
To protect against the Worst Case – WHY? – You could lose ALL your money – WHY?= financial insurance. Financial insurance is a very good ‘why’ but it’s simply a bit too logical. We are looking for something more emotional…
The ‘worst case’ we are trying to protect against as well as ‘financial insurance’ would both be to protect against the exact same thing:
The possibility of being poor and not having any money!
Ahhhhh…there we go… NOW we are getting somewhere. That is a strong level 2 emotional trigger. The fear of lack. The fear of being without money. The fear of being poor…
Again, that is very powerful indeed, but we still want to keep digging. We are still only at level 2. We want to uncover the emotional trigger gold buried beneath level 2…
Here is what I queried Google With to get to level 3:
“WHY does being poor s****”
Here are the answers we are given:
The bank can hit you with a $35 fine for every charge that comes in while your account is in negative territory. The bank will not tell you they charged you this money. You will have no idea anything is wrong – until you check your balance that is. Now we are getting somewhere! When you are poor (as many people have been before OR are currently) you get hit with nasty over-draft fees each time you over-draw your checking account!
This is EXTREMELY emotional for most people. A REAL pain point…
Here are some more ‘Why’s’ – more reasons that being poor sucks….
The Constant threat of the Utility companies shutting off the — Phone — Water — Power —
YES. These are VERY real and extremely emotional triggers for many many people…
What if someone who lived in near constant fear of those horrible threats to their basic necessities could AVOID those threats forever, and NEVER have to deal with them again?
If we could craft a hook in our sales letter that talked directly to these people – a method, a step-by-step blueprint, a real PLAN to ensure that they would never again lack the necessary funds to take care of the basic utilities they needed in their lives and in their households – for themselves and their families, do you think you would have the attention (and interest) of that group of people if you had an offer that could back up the promise?
Problems paying Bills/Loans/Credit card on time = suffering from the stigma of Bad Credit. This can be a huge problem when trying to get a job -OR- trying to secure a line of credit when you really need it.
YES. Again, this is a VERY powerful reality for millions of people. You don’t even need to be ‘poor’ to experience credit problems and late payments (necessarily).
Most people who have had credit problems in the past, and found out in person how horrible it is, and how difficult it makes your life would do anything to avoid having more dinged credit/calls from creditors/letters from creditors in the mail EVER again…
Let’s play around with this extreme pain point – hitting on the ‘bad credit avoidance’ angle and see what we come up with.
Imagine the following letter were directed at homeowners who were a minimum of 60 days late on their mortgage payments. What if you had an offer that could help them bring their bills current and help them to get out from underneath the crushing mountain of debt they were living with each and every day…
Are you starting to see how powerful this stuff can be?
Obviously that was just an example I crafted around a couple of 3rd level ‘Why’s’ but it’s easy to see how copy built around a few of these very deep, emotional, 3rd level pain points or benefits can lead to some extremely compelling, emotionally driven copy.
You might not be able to provide for your family. This is extremely emotional and a HUGE motivator for many people – especially men that are the ‘head of a household’ – They view it as their responsibility to make sure that food is on the table, basic necessities are met and the lights stay on -
Again – this is very powerful and extremely emotional
You risk (or are forced into) homelessness – Yeah. Some poor people are Also homeless! Being homeless brings up a whole new host of problems that most people try to avoid thinking about at al costs. Lets put it this way – people would do ANYTHING to avoid being homeless-
- You will lose your job, and probably NOT be able to get another decent job
- You will lose your wife, your kids and your family
- You will be cold in the winter, possibly get sick and die – and you will have [b]NO medical treatment
- Would be very painful…
- Emotionally distressing
- People immediately Judge you if you are homeless..
- People who are homeless their lives often spiral out of control because they start to lose hope…
etc etc etc…
This are all highly emotional, deep seated reasons that people would do anything to avoid being poor and penniless and all of the problems that not having any money brings along with it.
If you can just touch on some of them – or let people know that there is a definitive way that they can avoid these common problems – Letting them know there is hope – and there is a way that they can avoid worrying about these issues – this will for EXTREMELY powerful copy in the right niches and with the right audience.
All of this is just from going 3 levels deep on ONE of the ‘Why’s’ we came up with on ONE of the major ‘niche benefits’ — Imagine how much more GOLD you could extract by going 3 levels deep with more big benefits and more ‘why’s'?
Even digging 3 levels deep with just a few of these major niche benefits/pain-points, do you think we could now craft some copy slightly more compelling than:
“Get Financial Freedom”….
Of course we can! All it takes is a little bit of digging.
I think you will agree, by adding some ’3rd level’ benefits, our headline automatically become far more captivating and interesting.
In addition with all of these 3rd level benefits that we have taken the time to
uncover, we now use as KILLER ammunition for the body of the sales letter and/or bullet points!
We can use these 3rd level benefits as powerful questions/imagery with two of my favorite modifiers -
“Imagine” and “What if”…
like this:
- Image what it would be like to easily and effortlessly be able to tackle the next financial ‘emergency’ that came your way? Instead of being forced to over-draf your checking account to pay for that blown out tire, you could simply dip into your 5 figure emergency cash fund and take care of the fix -without thinking twice!
- What if, instead of the constant worry and angst of losing your job due to ‘downsizing’ you were so confident, and so secure in the multiple auto-pilot streams of income constantly stuffing your bank account with cold hard cash that you could simply kiss your lousy boss ‘good riddance’ forever?
These questions/statements paint powerful pictures in your prospects minds and allow them to visualize something that they themselves may have never even thought was possible before.
I sincerely hope some of these tips help you to create some incredibly compelling copy in your niche!
Copywrite your Sales to the Top!
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