Copywriting Strategies Great Copywriters Wish You Knew: 7 Content Tips

We sometimes talk about copywriting strategies and content marketing like they’re the same, but they aren’t — they complement each other, but they also serve two distinct purposes.

Copy, traditionally, is what we use to make the sale. To use Albert Lasker’s phrase, it’s salesmanship in print (or pixels). Its aim is to persuade.

Content does everything else. It attracts an audience, engages their sustained attention, demonstrates your ability to solve their problems, and paves the way for an eventual purchase.

Copywriting strategies directly from the masters (that work for your content)

Content marketing has been the new cool kid in advertising — the web lets us use content to accomplish so much with relatively limited resources.

But really smart content marketers know enough to steal from their more traditional copywriting brothers and sisters. Because when you learn how to be a copywriter, those old-school elements of persuasion will make everything in your content work better.

Here are 7 copywriting strategies you’ll want to swipe from the rich tradition of direct response copywriting.

#1: Headlines, headlines, headlines

Copywriters know that if the headline is weak, the ad will never get read.

The same is true for your content. Put a vague, waffly, or obscure headline on the best piece of content the world has ever seen, and it still won’t get read.

Even if you have a decent-sized audience, you still need to persuade them, day in and day out, to continue giving you their attention. Great headlines help with that.

Now, the best headline writing can’t help content that’s consistently thin and weak. But it will do a lot to increase audience engagement for quality content, as well as shares and links.

#2: Quit being so clever

Look, I get it. You wouldn’t be a professional writer if you didn’t have a secret love of clever wordplay.

Puns and in-jokes and linguistic play are the writer’s delight. Just realize … they may not be your audience’s delight.

Writerly craft is a good thing. Thinking carefully about language will make it clearer and more powerful, and that’s what you want. But great copywriters know that cleverness too often leads directly to audience confusion.

A dash of cleverness here and there can add seasoning, so if you do use it, use it sparingly — and never in a headline.

#3: Develop your copywriting strategies around your Big Idea

As a content marketer, you’re not (I hope) writing endless pages of dry, factual information that merely answers questions.

You’re publishing information that both entertains and educates your reader — and you’re doing it in the framework of a Big Idea.

Think Apple’s “1000 Songs in Your Pocket.” You’re looking for the instant communication of a desirable benefit, compressed into a memorable statement. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s how you write better content.

Don’t just be another writer blogging about design or fashion or parenting. Frame your content with a compelling, ultra specific Big Idea.

#4: Do your research

“The best copywriters are the most tenacious researchers. Like miners, they dig, drill, dynamite, and chip until they have carloads of valuable ore. John Caples advised me once to gather seven times more interesting information than I could possibly use.” – legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga

If you know how to write a good blog post, it only follows that you’re also an obsessive student of your topic.

Dig deeper. Scour sites like Abe for valued out-of-print books on your topic. Get beyond the “big blogs” everyone in your topic reads — go to the rare, obscure resources, especially if they’re chewy and difficult for the average reader.

Dig, drill, dynamite, and chip. Don’t just be an expert — be a dork about your topic. The depth and richness you’ll gain will show.

(Incidentally, the best Big Ideas for copywriting strategies usually come out of compulsive research — combined with some creativity and enough time to think carefully about the problem you’re solving.)

#5: Find your starving crowd (then listen to them)

Notorious copywriting genius Gary Halbert liked to tell his students that the key to a successful restaurant was not location, great food, or low prices — it was the presence of a starving crowd that needed and wanted what your restaurant had to offer.

And of course, the same is true for any kind of business.

“When it comes to direct marketing, the most profitable habit you can cultivate is the habit of constantly being on the lookout for groups of people (markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving (or, at least hungry) for some particular product or service.” – Gary Halbert

Your “starving crowd” is your audience — the people who are hungry for what you have to say, in the way that you say it.

The terrific thing about building a hungry audience is you can then turn around and ask (or observe) them to find out what, specifically, they’re hungry for.

Traditional direct marketers used expensive response lists to find this out. In the online world, we can gain a lot of that knowledge by listening to what our audiences have to say, both on our own sites and in forums or other social media.

When you also know what your audience wants by studying SEO for content writers, you can create the perfect product or service to meet that desire. As famed ad man Bill Bernbach said:

“Advertising doesn’t create a product advantage. It can only convey it. … No matter how skillful you are, you can’t invent a product advantage that doesn’t exist.” – Bill Bernbach

Getting the product or service right is great marketing — and when you pair it with solid persuasion skills, you’ll be unstoppable.

#6. Know where you’re going

Writing direct response copy always serves a specific purpose. You’re writing to stimulate a specific behavior. If you get that behavior, you win. If you fail to get it, you lose.

The economics of content marketing allow us to experiment more, but you still want to develop an idea of what, specifically, each piece of content you create is intended to accomplish.

Your copywriting strategies might help you widen your audience, get more email subscriptions, educate your market about an upcoming product … there are lots of goals you can accomplish with content.

But drifting around and publishing “to see what happens” should be kept to a minimum.

#7: Don’t be boring

“Tell the truth but make truth fascinating. You know, you can’t bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.” – David Ogilvy

We’re fans of David Ogilvy around here, as D.O. was a longtime champion of education-based marketing.

But he knew very well that in order to make it work, you have to make that education fascinating.

Use:

Not to clownishly grab attention, but to make your good advice and useful content more interesting and readable.

What are your favorite copywriting strategies?

Here at Copyblogger, we have hundreds of traditional copywriting tips that we like to apply to content marketing. It’s what the blog was founded on.

Do you have favorite old-style copywriting strategies that work brilliantly in the new world of content and social media? Let us know about them in the comments …