Since most advertising or marketing copy takes itself too seriously, it’s always a relief and a delight to find product advertising that pokes fun at itself or its industry. As I pointed out on the home page, humor is an effective tool for disarming an audience and making them receptive to a message. Kotex does a really good job of pointing out the absurdity of advertising in their industry (thanks to No BS Blog). Leave comments about the humor you’ve enjoyed in advertising or Web copy. If you write funny copy, tell us why you think it...
Read MoreThere’s talk these days about the diminishing importance of keywords, given that the search engines have become more savvy about content stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with them. Keywords are still important but they only help get the potential customer to the Web site. No matter how many keywords you stuff into a headline or body text, if the copy is not compelling enough to get the reader to keep reading and act, the keywords that got them there are a waste of time. Customers who take the time to read a web site are looking for one thing: “How does this product or service solve my problem and make my life easier.” Web copy needs to convince them that they’re in the right place. UNDERSTANDING WEB COPY Web site owners sometimes need help in understanding the value of what a good copywriter brings to the success of their Web site. Good copywriters are experts at distilling and communicating the client’s reason for being and selling their unique value to their customers. Not just any words will do that and not just any writer can find the right ones. What differentiates a good copywriter from someone who just knows how to cobble sentences together? Knowing how to sell benefits in a compelling way, instead of listing features of a product. A good copywriter is a detective first of all. They want to know who the audience is and what pain they experience…and therefore what benefits will relieve that pain. Doing this requires skill in knowing and asking the right questions. EXAMPLE Relieving pain is very much an emotional trigger. Pain often involves anxiety about solving a problem. You want a potential customer coming to your Web site to easily see why they’ve found a good solution to their problem. I once wrote Web copy for a client whose software allows insurance companies to recover overpayments. My client is not the only one in this business, of course, but by talking to them, I came to understand that their unique value was their software’s capability. Where most software would capture overpayments in the hundreds or thousands, this company’s software could capture overpayments as small as $25. This differentiated them from their competitors. Another differentiation was that their auditors were healthcare and managed-care specialists with years of experience. Writing the copy for their Web site, I was sure to place these benefits (and others) prominently. Potential customers could easily see how this company was going to make their job easier and more efficient. The tagline I wrote for them, “Are you leaving money out there?” evoked an immediate emotional response in healthcare...
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The Web design firm, neboweb, has this wonderful tagline for one of the examples in their portfolio. MARKETING IS MORE FUN WHEN YOU SMASH STUFF Aside from the fact that I would not punctuate this line in the header, it’s a perfect piece of writing. It’s unexpected, amusing, and it serves two important functions. First, it gets your attention. Smashing and blowing stuff up always gets people’s attention. It’s unexpected because we’re not very used to advertisements using destruction to sell. Second, it disarms you. You’re amused. You immediately like the design company for making you chuckle. It makes you feel like they’re human and have a sense of humor, not just a bunch of pixel sharks out to get your business. There is a benefit to working with a design company with a sense of humor. They might be able to make you seem more human and approachable to your own customers. Good...
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A tagline is closely tied to branding and like defining a brand, creating a tagline can be a difficult task. With both, you’re creating a distillation and a kind of promise, and if properly executed, they can make your product or service a household name. Volvo doesn’t sell the features of their cars (engineering, materials, construction, etc.), they sell the benefits of owning one. For years, the primary benefit they sold was safety. Whether or not Volvos are the safest cars in the world, the company has done an exemplary job of selling the safety brand. You just have to say “Volvo” and people think “safety.” Volvo owns that word in the auto marketplace by virtue of brilliant marketing. Volvo’s tagline THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN A VOLVO. Most advertising is geared toward getting you to think owning a company’s product is a requirement of happiness. At first glance, it appears that Volvo is saying you don’t need their product. This might seem counterintuitive but it grabs your attention. With the main tagline in view (in a dark blue capitalized font), they then display a series of changing lines beneath (in a different colored font). All of the secondary lines sell lifestyle benefits, e.g. time with friends, the feel of driving, the image of owning a car with great styling, and, of course, safety. The last line that appears underneath the main tagline completes the story: THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN A VOLVO. THAT’S WHY YOU DRIVE ONE. Benefits – what customers want From one-horse businesses to huge corporations, selling benefits is what counts. Customers and clients don’t care about features. They care about how the features of a product or service will benefit them. Look around at your competitors’ Web sites. Do they sell features or benefits? Do they have long pages of text that just say, “We do this and we’ve been in business since the Jurassic and we’re the best” or do they show the benefits of doing business with them? Do they actually provide benefit on their Web site by educating their readers or giving information away free? How about your Web site? Does it provide a clear differentiation from your competitors? If you sell products that have roughly the same features as your competitors’ products, what benefits do you provide your customers that your competitors don’t? Your Web site doesn’t just carry your brand, it’s part of your brand. Every word should count and all of it must provide real value, leaving no doubt in a potential customer’s mind about the benefits of doing business with...
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Don’t you wish that all you needed to get technology to work is a bigger hammer? Having worked for nearly 15 years in the high-tech industry, you’d think I’d be used to things not working the way I think they’re supposed to. Would that it were so. Take pretty permalinks fer instance, making the permanent address of a Web page look like this http://brianvhunt.com/brians-blog instead of this http://brianvhunt.com/?page_id=109 Search engines like pretty permalinks. If I’d hosted brianvhunt.com on a Linux server instead of Windows IIS, it would have been a snap to choose pretty permalinks because it’s a setting you select in WordPress. Instead, I spent what felt like half a lifetime searching the web and e-mailing people whose brains are already wrapped around languages like C++ (which I understand far less than the Japanese and Arabic that I don’t really speak). Finally, through a lot of trial and error (often making my web site disappear entirely) I got pretty permalinks to work with some C code and a server-side installation of a third-party DLL. How often do you get to say that at parties? If none of that makes sense to you, count your lucky stars. I’m not a software developer but I’m not a complete schlump (at least when it comes to technology). I tell friends and family who are complete tech-schlumps that if some piece of technology is not working, it’s not their fault — it’s poorly designed. How ironic, because when I can’t get something to work, I tend to blame myself. But I have to say, finally solving a problem that had bedeviled me for days was immensely satisfying, especially since I’ve never done any C programming before. It was a great sense of relief and now I have that in my toolbox. I mean, I can’t program in C but if you’re silly enough to use WordPress on a Windows IIS server and can’t get pretty permalinks to work, I’m your man. Photo © Christine...
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