Monday started off great and Tuesday is just following along. Let's Talk About It is making it happen. Head up, feel strong and brush any negativity off!!!
It's Day 8, grab your snacks and enjoy the party!
How would you speak to your next-door neighbour?
Every professional writer needs to study advertising in the 20th century. Advertising agencies sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of products.
In the United States, there were two major camps of advertisers:
❖ The Madison Avenue School of Advertising
❖ The Chicago School of Advertising
Everyone had their unique styles. In Madison Avenue, they preferred to educate you, so you'd feel like you were making an informed choice.
They look for the most fascinating benefit and made that the hook.
In the Chicago school, they took a different route. Instead of educating you, they made you see yourself in the advertisement.
In Chicago, they wanted you to feel like you're one the in the ad. They wanted to pass the message that the product was made specifically for you.
In both schools, one thing they did exceptionally well was to tell you about a product the way a friend would.
David Ogilvy, one of the legends of advertising once wrote:
"When you sit down to write your body copy, pretend that you're talking to the woman on your right at a dinner party. She has asked you, "I am thinking of buying a new car. Which would you recommend?"
Write your copy as if you were answering that question."
People actually don't like being sold to (or told what to do). They don't really like seeing ads and that includes your beautifully written copy.
IOS users were recently allowed to use Facebook with or without ads. What do you think accounted for the overwhelming response? Most people opted out.
This decision resulted in Facebook losing about $230 billion in market value.
The point of all these:
Content creation is big. Businesses sell with content. Thought leaders influence people with content. Everyone is selling something: it could be a product or an idea.
Even when we write a random post, we want to pass something across. It's selling. It's just not outright.
When you want to write, either for yourself or professionally, do it as if you're talking to your next-door neighbour, and you're trying to convince the person.
How do you do this?
❖ The KISS rule (keep it simple, stupid)
❖ Focus on how the idea or product adds to their lives.
❖ Use stories and case studies. Let me give you an instance. When you're having a conversation, and you make reference to a person you both know, specifically what worked for the person, you just used a case study.
I have seen a lot of writing styles in my four-plus years of content writing and marketing. I've seen people write as if the blog post is a chapter in a Ph.D. thesis and I've seen companies reject projects because it doesn't sound like a human being wrote it.
At the end of the day, we are all trying to communicate - both humans and brands. Why not just do it like we're talking to our next-door neighbour?
(Of course, except your neighbour is Dr. Sheldon Cooper of the Big Bang Theory. Then, you could really write it like a Physics textbook. 😂)
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