If you can’t say it to my face…

• Reading time: about 4 minutes

Would you take your ad copy door to door?

If you’d be uncomfortable standing in front of your typical target buyer and making the pitch, in person, that you made in your last ad… then it was, says Claude C. Hopkins, not your best ad.

Don’t forget: You are “just” a salesperson, multiplied.

We’re reading together in the classic book, Scientific Advertising. (You are reading along, right?) If Hopkins could get more emphatic in chapter two than he was in chapter one, then he did–and wanted to be sure you and I caught the bold print (though the publisher resisted the urge to actually employ that brash technique). “This book will contain no more important chapter than this one,” he says.

The good news is this: you’re getting all the very best “meaty goodness” right up front. Take this nugget of gold along with the previous, and walk away… practice/master them, and you’ll do fine. Higher even than Claude’s advice to know your customer well through constantly adjusted testing is his encouragement to you and I, though we may not welcome it as such: Cut the crap and let the selling points shine.

Yours is not a literary job. Sorry, it’s just not. Write “the next Great American Novel” on your own time. I kind of got the wind sucked out of me for a bit 2-3 years into the game, myself, over this. Fortunately, for me…

I made my single best move to become a great marketing writer, without even knowing it.

I did not get a Journalism or English degree. I did not walk in the door, already a qualified writer, and convince someone that my communications skills were the key to unlock loads of marketing revenue for them. Nope, I took a crappy little cube-dwelling sales job. And not one of those sweet-ride, incoming order-taker setups, either… I was outbound. Cold calls. Tickler files. Scripted pitch. Days on end with zero dollars on my tally.

“Shoot me now,” I said, maybe a thousand times in a couple short years. But while I schlogged through the tedious labor of the situation, something wonderful happened.

I figured out the Multiplication Formula.

If testing (Hopkins’ #2 top priority) means tracking Cost per Unit of Revenue, then that is your yardstick for the job you do as a “multiplied sales rep.” Your message may have nice side effects like brand awareness and support for actual “live” selling staff, but your ad is, literally, you in a suit. Or whatever your reps wear.

The difference is… you are in front of dozens, or hundreds, even thousands of Jane or John Q. Customers at once. If you write for a well-reputed market leader, you will likely have audience with TENS of thousands of people with a single message… get it right that once, and you rake money like leaves in the fall. Get it wrong, and you may spend years rebuilding the lost revenue from turning off all those nice folks.

You are not a “rock star.” You are not writing marketing content for applause or awards, but for revenue measured in profit dollars to the bottom line. Funny thing is, if you turn out to be very good at that, you may also very well end up scratching up plenty of applause and awards… promotions and raises.

Alright, I preach-eth at the choir. Cutting to the chase, here are the big “take-away” points I get from the substance of Hopkins’ chapter on salesmanship:

• Style must serve content, not the other way round. Get too clever or stylized, you “slick talker,” and you distract from the message, you “show your fish the hook,” and actually CREATE new obstacles and resistance.
• Your customers’ interests are the only selling points that matter. Not your manufacturer, not your Purchasing Agent, not your smarty-pants development people. Get busy with surveys, focus groups, interviews, testing, whatever you can use–get to know your customer and his/her interests, to the exclusion of all else.
• Talk to ONE person. Imagine your ideal buyer, the one you’d like to clone a million times. Forget everyone else, and write your message, in the first person (active voice, please!), to that one person.
• Tell him/her the whole story, with enough info to compel action. You can use bullets, snippets, loads of short talking points (good ideas, in fact) but keep going and keep offering the path to action… let your reader decide for himself when he’s enough “sold” to skip to your toll-free number. Tests prove, since before Hopkins and to this day, that your ideal target audience WILL read long copy, so long as it never goes all boring.
• Write (ie, print) like you’d talk. Don’t schmooze me, please. I’m gone soon as you do. Tell me how my life gets better with this thing you have to sell me, and why I will be happy I bought it from you.

Hopkins never drops the names, but more than once in this chapter talks of “the best of the best ad men” of his time having grown in the soil of direct-to-the-customer sales jobs. Apparently, the door-to-door guys made the absolute best marketers. One of them, says Hopkins, even kept on doing that after he’d established himself as an ad writer–spending about three weeks selling a product before creating a new ad.

I’m not sure I’m ready to go get another cube job, working the phones for a reseller of anything. But you know, I just might. Might spice up those occasional dull breaks between clients. I mean, I really do like this work and believe this is HOW it works…

Once again, thanks for reading, 

Ken

P.S. Do you like taglines? I’ve always thought they can be used to powerful effect, but… lately I’m coming to understand more and more how truly that is a marketing campaign all to itself. All the above rules apply. But when you are writing the ad copy for today’s thing, be careful not to lean on your tagline to much, or it quickly turns stale and hack, no matter how well it sums up your message. Thanks, Claude, for that bonus wisdom. TTFN.