Corporate vs. Conversational Copywriting
Our company’s full-service solutions synergize the way you should incorporate and leverage B2B direct response marketing and engagement marketing in the age of web 2.0.
With a marketing message like that, who needs a semi-recession to kill sales? What we have here is a failure to communicate. It’s a perfect and common example of how companies market like robots to robots. It stems from the misconception that complex words and phrasing is synonymous with expert status. In normal conversation, it reeks of being a pompous dolt and no one likes doing business with a dolt.
What happens when the buyer experience is overshadowed by the use of Ivy League words to prove just how smart the marketer is? Nothing. No sales. No connection. No loyalty. Customers are people first, interested in purchasing products or services to improve their lives, their work, their self-image, etc.
Ever received a magazine subscription offer, request for charitable donation or cosmetic store promotion in the mail? These types of direct mail are prime examples of conversational, exciting, personable, and even emotional messages delivered through copywriting. These direct mail pieces aim to convince readers that they CAN make a difference in the world, are missing out on information they NEED to know and there are products available NOW to tackle their most tricky problems. The next time a marketing piece grabs your attention, ask yourself why it did.
There is a time and place for complexity in language—certainly the pharmaceutical industry’s lawyers will agree. But using buzz words to get your product or service noticed is far less successful than engaging a buyer in an honest to goodness conversation. Great copywriting can do that!
Save More, Spend Less takes up prime real estate on an IT Services page of one of the largest computer companies in the world. The phrase is ingeniously simple and completes their main topic: with a simple travel expense management solution.
Instead of spewing technological definitions, the copy gives a clear promise on what the customer should expect. This could be used to continue the buyer experience: save time and money, spend less time on projects and spend less money on services. Isn’t that the core of sales and marketing today?
The IT Outsourcing Services page offers another example of describing what’s in it for me? Outsourcing IT services lets me focus on strategic direction while trusting the company to manage the day-to-day operations that monopolize my time. Save time? Terrific! Who wants to be monopolized by mundane tasks? IT is complicated, yet the copy focuses on improving the buyer’s business.
Improving the buyer experience is always the end goal of any marketing effort. If a marketing message does not relate to them in some way, you cannot sell to them.
Whether the informal tone of social media or marketing saturation is to blame, consumers today have expectations. They want to be engaged with and spoken to, not distanced from and talked at. I’m certainly not trumpeting the dumbing down the English language. However, marketing messages have to be personal to be successful.
Your company has a voice. So use it! Let it come through your copywriting in all of your marketing. Deliver a message that really means something. Create a visual scenario showing that you understand where they are. Offer not what they need, but what they want.
By Brenda Galloway
