Persuasive Copywriting: Using Psychology to Engage, Influence and Sell

Keep your call to action emotionally engaging by staying focused on the promise, not the purchase.

If you’re going to write socially you can’t be a corporate stiff so try writing in a more relaxed way than you normally do.

… and short.

Remember: the key word in social media is ‘social’.

At its heart, copywriting is about behaviour modification. Your customer wakes up in the morning with no intention of doing X. After reading your copy, they do X.

Why did you want to see me?
What do you want to talk about?
How do I know I can trust you?
How are you going to make my life better?
Can you prove it will work?
Who else has it worked for?
How do I get hold of it?
What if I don’t like it?

Twelve questions to ask about your customer

What are they like?
What drives them?
What do they love?
What do they hate?
What are their values?
How do they see themselves?
How do others see them?
How would they like others to see them?
If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?
Why would they change it?
How would they change it?
What does your customer want to know?

Good: Dear Copywriter, Has this ever happened to you? You’re just about to print out the first draft of that website you’ve been slaving over for days when your printer bleats that it’s run out of toner? Bummer!

The only message the writer manages to convey is, ‘Hey! Guess what! I know what you do for a living and where you work. Aren’t I clever?’ Without any further research, but with a lot more imagination, they could have written something truly personal, left out the personalization altogether and still produced something emotionally engaging.

When you’re telling a story, always remember that your reader hasn’t paid to read it – it’s still business writing. Or, as they probably call it, junk mail, spam or marketing fluff. So it pays to keep the story rolling along at a brisk clip. Forget about long introductions, or passages of exposition. Just as with good fiction, you should aim to tell your story through action not description. Dialogue is action. Events are action. Adjectives, superlatives and clichés are not action.

People love hearing secrets. That makes them a powerful word in your lexicon of