Good sales copy stays with your customer long after they’ve finished reading it.
Think of a good novel you’ve read. Didn’t it capture your imagination and draw you in to each and every scene?
You got lost in the story and when you had to put the book down you just couldn’t wait to get back into it.
Great authors use words to create pictures in their readers mind.
Follow their example and get specific.
Why Specific?
We don’t think in generalisations, we think in details – the more specific, the more detailed you can be the stronger the image you will create.
Strong and Specific
1/ Specific Nouns
What image pops into your mind if i say ‘bird’?
Okay…. brown, feathers, beak.
OK so wipe that image from your mind, what if I now say ‘magpie’. It’s likely you see a sleek black and white bird. A much stronger image.
Bird is a generalisation, magpie is specific.
Use specific nouns wherever you can.
2/ Specific Verbs
Verbs are the life-givers that make your words dance and sing. They tell your readers if someone is walking, strollingstrolling, sauntering, jogging, skipping, jumping…
Use verbs that paint a picture.
Avoid the ‘to be’ verbs – am, is, are, was, were… They don’t create a picture – not like ‘fall. twist, squeeze’.
Although the ‘to be’ verbs are necessary, use them as sparingly as possible.
A golden rule is only 3 ‘wases/weres’ per page!
3/ Specific Situations
Compare:
A) ‘We have the experience to look after all your bookkeeping needs from invoices, doing pay roll and reconciling bank accounts’.
To this:
B) ‘Are your invoices going out late because you can’t squeeze in enough time to do them? Is your cash flow suffering because payments aren’t regularly dropping into your account (because your invoices are going out late)? How much of your hair have you pulled out over the years because of accounting mistakes? Don’t worry, those days are over when you hire us to do your bookkeeping’.
Example A is generic (look after your bookkeeping needs).
Example B shows HOW the business does it (in fiction its called ‘show, don’t tell’).
You can actually feel those business problems – late invoices, cash flow problems, hair pulling.
