Category: Copywriting

“I don’t like your tone.” You’ve heard the adage, It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. (Actually, if you want to get your message across, you should pay careful attention to both what you say and how you say it.) When we communicate with our fellow humans, tone of voice helps us convey meaning. That’s what allows my son, in the time-honored tradition of 13-year-olds, to infuse his monosyllabic agreement to take the dog out with a rich sense of suffering and forbearance. But text has to work harder. If you use the social web at all, you probably see someone put their digital foot in their mouth virtually every day by making poor word choices. Add to that the fact that there’s a political or potentially controversial subtext that can be attached to almost any statement, and it starts to feel like a minefield out there. […]

If you’re in the mood for a special dinner and you have a farm-to-table restaurant in your city, it might be one of your favorite options. The farm-to-table movement promises locally sourced, fresh, delicious things, prepared with care and served enticingly. I’ve recently started using “farm-to-table” to describe my approach to content marketing, and here’s why. Great ingredients No matter what kind of food you like, from a fancy restaurant to a great taco truck, excellent meals start with excellent ingredients. For copywriters and content marketers, there’s no more valuable ingredient than a profound understanding of your potential customer. That’s why great copywriters and smart businesspeople are obsessed with their audiences. It’s really hard to create a delicious meal without fresh, delicious ingredients. And it’s almost impossible to put together a high-converting content marketing strategy unless you’ve collected lots of fresh, delicious customer details to inform the words you put […]

Last week, Austin wrote a post for us that quoted every copywriting geek’s favorite writer, Eugene Schwartz, and his classic insights on the five stages of buyer awareness. Schwartz observed that in order to sell with copy, we need to understand the stage of awareness of the people reading our advertisement. To recap, those stages are: Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.” Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for them. Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result she wants, but not that your product provides it. Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution. Completely Unaware: The person has no knowledge of anything except, perhaps, their own identity or opinion. If Eugene Schwartz had been able to use the communication technology that powers today’s content marketing, he would have gotten even […]

Back in the 1950s, a bedridden man faced certain death from cancer of the lymph nodes. Tumors the size of oranges had invaded the man’s neck, groin, chest, and abdomen. The patient’s only hope was a new experimental cancer drug called Krebiozen. Three days after initial treatment, the man was out of bed and joking with nurses. As treatment continued, his tumors shrunk in half. Ten more days later, he was discharged from the hospital … the cancer was gone. Strangely enough, none of the other cancer patients treated with Krebiozen showed any improvement. Stranger still, a few years later it was conclusively determined that Krebiozen had no therapeutic value whatsoever. Welcome to the power of the placebo effect. The placebo effect, and the power of belief and experience A placebo is, by definition, a substance that doesn’t actually provide the promised benefit — it’s not real. The placebo effect, […]

There’s a lot of content created every day — and most of it gains almost no attention. In 2015, Moz and BuzzSumo looked at more than one million articles published on the web. They found that 75 percent of blog posts had no inbound links, and more than half had two or fewer Facebook interactions. “It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.” – Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing One Million Articles And the web publishing environment has only gotten more cluttered. Most content simply never reaches its target audience. 

It’s no wonder so many people believe that content marketing doesn’t work, even when we have significant evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you’ve taken the time to write a well-researched blog post that can educate your reader […]