How to pursuade your customers to buy what you're selling?
Copywriting is fascinating for a number of reasons.
For me, it’s the power it posseses. You play your cards right and you can can convince a near stranger whom you’ve never met to give you money.
Words have a lot of power in themselves. Combine that with psychology and economics, and you have a beast on your hands.
Writing + Economics + Psychology.
The magic potion of all business marketing and sales.
Think about it.
The three most powerful elements known to mankind - all coming together in one.
So let’s understand how the three elements interact with each other.
Writing is nothing but a medium for communicating ideas.
Ideas are what we connect to.
Ideas are what we sell.
Think about the Coca-colas, the Teslas, the Amazons- they’re all selling ideas.
The product is just the medium.
Here’s what legendary ad-man Ogilvy had to say about big ideas:
“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of the consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”
Whether you realise it or not, companies are in the business of selling ideas.
Intrinsic in the business of selling ideas is pursuasion.
Pursuasion is nothing but a subset of psychology.
Understand how the human mind works and what makes it trigger and you can “nudge” customers to take action.
For example, there’s a cognitive bias in humans known as “Anchoring efffect”.
And being the shrewd businessman you are, you want to use this bias in your marketing strategy. What would you do?
Well, for starters.
Don’t say “Buy our product for 125$ a year”.
Instead say: “Earn X benefit for just $0.34 cents a day”.
By showing the price per day instead of the total price, it can often seem like less.
Your customer will use this low price as an “anchor” to decide whether the purchase is good value.
When both the products cost EXACTLY THE SAME!
This is the power of psychology.
Now here’s something that will blow your mind.
There are 136 cognitive biases listed in Wikipedia alone.
Each of them can be used in so many ways across multiple permutations and combinations.
Think of the things you can do!
I don’t know about you, but I just had this evil smirk on my face. The only thing missing from me becoming a super villain is the thematic sound and the appropriate villain background.
Maybe someday.
Let’s move on.
So far, we have understood that companies are in the business of selling ideas and they do so by pursuasion.
And we learnt that pursuasion can be influenced by the knowledge of human psychology.
There’s two other aspects that factor in our pursuasion model.
Those are Economics and Writing.
Economics is the glue that holds businesses and consumers together. Every pursuasion or marketing strategy must have an economic component.
This is not to be confused with the EFFECT that a particular economic product has its users.
What I am suggesting is that purusasion works best in context.
And that context is a market.
Each market behaves in a certain way and has a set type and group of people. Maybe they’re predominantly Indian or maybe they’re in the upper middle class or maybe they’re employees.
Whatever be the case, each market has certain traits which are different from other markets.
Even though you will find that there is quite a bit of overlap between markets.
Be that as it may, any marketing strategy will be executed first if you know your market inside out.
And I don’t mean your competition.
I mean your customers.
Everything about them.
Where do they live? How old are they? Are they predominantly male or female? Are they miserly or spendthrift?
Every little thing.
Once you know your market and familiarize yourself with their persona, you will then begin to speak to them directly.
Your customers will feel heard. Which is true.
You have heard them and have taken the time to get to know them.
Once you understand their passions, fears and motiavations, you can position your value proposition to suit their needs.
Which brings me to the last element of powerful pursuasion.
Writing.
If companies are in the business of selling ideas, then writing is the medium of communicating that idea.
If the idea is powerful and reflects your market, then the writing should reflect that as well.
A writing is good only in context.
If you’re writing blog posts, your writing will be different.
If you’re writing emails, your writing will be different.
If you’re writing landing pages, your writing will be different.
Writing works well only in context.
Else it’s just freestyle.
Which is why you should be careful about every word you use.
Back in the 80s, companies used to have to pay a price per word to get in an advertisement in the local papers.
Copywriters working at ad agencies therefore had to be very economical with the use of words.
Be wasteful with words, and your ROI will be terrible.
Their motto was simple - use as many words as you need but not one word more.
So there we have it.
Our first issue is over.
I hope you learnt something.
I’ll see you tomorrow.