Hey, can you give me two minutes? You need a new audience.
Every copy should be homely and acculturates to its different environments of usage. As every human part functions differently so are copy. Banner Ad crafting style is different from Ad use on social media. If Banner Ad does not speak value proposition that addresses the pain point of prospect it is most likely to be seen as trash and no one plays with trash but dispose of them. If Ad on social media is not entertaining to cause amusement or trigger fear, it might be seen as one of the Nollywood movies which prologue reveals its epilogue. And one of the mistakes most short copy makes, especially when addressing the prospect, is the lack of value-generated interest. Banner Ad sometimes falls in that category because it lacks that punchy verb that creates that visual text. Just let it convert.
The essence of any copy is for behaviour change. Which in other words, it is the conversion of the prospects and retention of the existing one. However, retaining the existing customers, which have already satisfied the Purchase Funnel Processes (the purchase funnel is customers acquisition process that shows how potential customers discover your product, service or brand and how they eventually become a loyal customer which have five stages: awareness, interest, consideration, preference, and purchase. These stages represent the typical customer acquisition process.) and converting the prospects which are still at low awareness of your brand, service or brand needs different approaches. Because the prospects are yet to start from that bottom of the funnel – the awareness stage – let alone to the apex of the funnel – preference and purchasing. Therefore, it is expedient to understand these prospects based on their psychographic segment as this will help to craft a story that will resonate with them. I will shed more light on this in the subsequent paragraphs.
Similarly, to tell that story that resonates with prospects, which is an integral part of the conversion process, there must be a reduction of friction in your flow. And I’m almost tempted to say that your expression must be sententious, although it will not be out of place to say that, it must equally be sentential and sequential. That is, your sentence must flow and link if writing a long copy. Secondly, there must be a reflection of the anticipation of reader objection.
This line of my statement on anticipation of reader objection takes me back to a narrative of a copywriter and his position on what copy is. He said that copy was what it was too creative director who owns prerogative evaluation to every copy. He has been in the business long enough to avail him of the opportunity to vividly describe every event and experience. As we walked past the discourse, Noam Chomsky's statement which has gained prominence among linguists in training and trained ones popped up. ‘A colourless green idea sleeps furiously.’ A very beautiful statement with a lot of colourations, however, I am not sure the poetic world is in grip of its meaning. It is meaningless. It may sound like a line in one of the Shakespearian sonnets. It is not. The only thing it does is being consonant with rules of concord. So a copy with no proper context evaluation is equally as meaningless as the colourless green ideas.
A copywriter needs a persona that is emotionally focused. So before you pick that pen or open that system, the first thing you need to know is your target audience. The target audience in this context could be relatively provided you’re writing for a new brand; if you are, it means you have no existing customers, only the prospects. The first thing is to start using user research procedures. Empathy, Iteration, and Ideation are the coordinating processes after you’ve known your audience. They’re coordinating because they give an insight into how to position your audience with a representation of persona on the limbic map for emotionally focused COPY unless you might probably be writing for a colourless green idea that might sleep deeply without conversion.
As I earlier said that you need to design a persona that is emotionally focused; it aids emotional communication. The strategist can flip through different persona segmentation the in course of writing a strategy document (a topic I will not delve into in this article) but you must be a strategic copywriter that writes based on psychographic segmentation position on the limbic map, which is always emotionally focused.
There are two ways to communicate: fact-based or informational communication and emotional communication. Please, permit this digression, it is necessary to drive home my point. Imagine you passed through two different plots of land, where you have two different signposts. On the first plot of land, the signpost read ‘dump refuse here and be fined 100,000 nairas.’ While the second plot of land there’s this signpost with a picture of ‘a pretty lady whose hairs are tangled and has to refuse on her hands.’ You most likely be scared dumping refuse on the second plot even at night while you may likely dump refuse on the first plot of land at night. Why? The former depicts informational communication and seeks to inform an attitude and the latter which is emotional communication seeks to probe a more powerful underlying response. This is based on the emotional systems and their influence on humans’ desire or aversion, as the case may be. These systems are three: The stimulance, The Dominance, and The Balance. So the psychographic segmentation of the persona is positioned around these systems on the limbic map. Each system has its focus but I will not be able to give a detailed explanation in this article to reduce communication friction that can ensue from these terminologies. It’ll be detailed in my next article.
Let’s not forget our destination: how to design for behavioural change in communication – copy. After you’ve positioned your persona based on psychographic segmentation, then you can move on to their MOTIVATION: pain point/problems, desired outcome, purchase promptly. How you identify your prospect motivation? And don’t forget, this mapping of motivation it only meant for prospects not existing customers; that is the main reason I said, different copies for different customers. Existing customers’ pain points are being solved that is why they keep coming and it will be incoherent to design the same copy that identifies pain points for existing customers.
The best way to design for behavioural change is to create a copy that resonates with prospects or existing ones. In the last three weeks, I’ve been researching, writing, and rewriting a copy for a small start-up which deals with investment and monthly return on investment for customers. I used the message mining technique, which I will discuss in the subsequent article, and sparking trigger for the existing customer. I created a limbic persona, which I will explain in my next article, positioned the persona indicators to find the emotionally focused technique and core value. I got the persona motivation through limbic mapping. Here is the succinct analytical approach that made my limbic persona.
It’s designed for the prospect
Big idea: build tomorrow today
Core message: you’re safe investing with us
Limbic persona: dominated by The Balance System (because of the system the persona is dominated with, I adopted two Robert Cialdini principles: Social Proof and Unity)
One of the copies
Copy Positioning:
Art Direction; Breeze wrecks havoc on a handsome building
Copy headline: Do You Know When the Next Breeze will Blow?
Subheadline; life is flexible, invest today
Copy: it is just a four-line copy which I will not share now.
You will have the whole copy in my next article and how much conversion is generating will be discussed too. If your copy cannot convert, then it is a colourless green idea that sleeps furiosly
See you next week.
