One of the copywriting and advertising myths is that it’s just about being creative.
Visions of crazy meetings, wacky ideas bouncing around as copywriters sit on beanbags and play with stress balls.
The problem with seeing copywriting as purely creative is that it becomes subjective. It’s approved or vetoed based on whether directors, colleagues and focus groups “like” or “don’t like” it.
But this has nothing to do with it. It’s whether your customer likes it enough to act in a way that you can measure its success.
For example, by:
- Buying the product
- Referring people to the product
- Writing about the product on their site
- Registering an interest for the product through a mailing list
Yes, creativity plays a part in writing the copy, but really, copywriting is more focused on following rules and measuring results.
Let’s say that you send out an email campaign and you run a split test on the headline. You “think” that one will perform better than the other, but you don’t really know until you look at your open rates:
- Headline one = 15% of people open the email
- Headline two = 3% of people open the email
It doesn’t matter whether you “like” the sound of headline one or two, what really matters is headline one motivated more customers to take the desired action.
The results say that headline one should then be repeated and sent to a larger audience.
It’s important to understand that you don’t have to be the world’s best writer to start writing copy for your business, but the sooner you start, the sooner you can test results and see what works and what doesn’t for your own audience.
Your audience is unique, and while there are set copywriting rules, the real science emerges when you begin to see what they love and what makes them take action.
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