This week I wanted to share with you some simple psychological techniques that are commonly used in copywriting to keep people reading and spice up the persuasion in your content.
Whilst these techniques are based on how your customer’s mind works, they’re not to be used to lie or deceive, that’s a big no no and not a good path to long term success.
This is what it your brain looks like when you're copywriting...
What we’re doing is working as hard as we can to compel your customer to try a service or product that you know they’re going to love and will benefit them.
If you genuinely believe in the ability of your business to make a positive difference on your customer’s life, you need to convince them in your copy so that they can start enjoying and loving what it is you have to offer!
So let’s dive in.
Embedded commands
Embedded commands are very common in copywriting and advertising. It’s where you include the instruction for an action you want your customer to take, by squeezing it into a longer sentence that doesn’t read as an explicit command.
It’s a lot simpler than it sounds though!
For example, let’s say that our command is: “download this free report.”
We could embed this in a longer sentence that isn’t an overt command in the following ways:
- By letting you download this free report…
- People who download this free report…
- After you download this free report…
Have a look at other sales pages and advertising, and you’ll start noticing embedded commands such as these.
Suspense
Powerful copywriting flows naturally, and encourages your reader to move effortlessly through your copy from beginning to end.
Using suspense is definitely one of the psychological techniques you want to be including in your copy to encourage readers to make it to the end.
You can use suspense in a number of ways for example:
Casually:
“…as well as finding out how to finish an hour earlier every day (I’ll come to that a little later on)…”
Overtly:
“Keep reading to find out how you can master any musical instrument in just 3 weeks…”
As a cliff hanger
“…and it wouldn’t be a complete guide to creating the perfect garden without….”
The assumed sale
The assumed sale is where you write as though your customer has already made up their mind to buy from you.
This gets your customer’s mind to leapfrog past the whole “sale / buying” part and straight to the outcome.
For example:
“When we work together, we’ll discuss the best content plan for you and your business”
Or
“When you download this report, you’ll have instant access to the techniques I’ve used to build up my own work at home business…”
It basically shifts the focus from the “handing over money” to the benefits they can enjoy and helps to make the sale seem inevitable.
So there you go, simple and easy to apply, get into the habit of using these in your writing and you’ll pack more of a persuasive punch. 🙂
That’s true, I definitely have a different tone of writing depending if the goal is for people to buy there and then, or to get them to sign up and find out more. Like those phrases though – never thought of it like that before. 🙂
And don’t forget, “The probable purchaser” instead of the “visitor who might buy”.
Both are the same people but each phrase makes you think quite differently about them.