Why? Who cares? What’s In It For Me?!

• Reading time: about three minutes

Don’t tell me your story… write yourself into mine.

 

“Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times.”

–David Ogilvy (a hyper-power in the history/practice of advertising)

Open Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising to chapter 3. Read the whole chapter. How long did that take, maybe three minutes or so? It’s 519 words. If I’m going to sum it up, I’d better get cracking! Here’s my first take:

1. Ask yourself questions: all the annoying, selfish questions you pestered the adults with when you were a toddler (why? so what? who cares?).
2. Answer yourself: Form your marketing message around honest, audience-serving answers. Then repeat steps 1 and 2 while you–
3. Watch cashflow happen.

If you’re super busy, you can walk away now. But I’m a long-copy guy, and I enjoy this topic. If you’re still with me, let’s explore further…

I was almost a marketing “pro” before I ever sat at my first school desk.

In a marketing trade mag a couple years ago, I read an article about writing better headlines. I think the piece was a “fishing lure” used to beef up the author’s pool of contract writers, because his sample headline really wan’t all that great. I grabbed his email from the byline and wrote him a cheeky response in which I walked through a series of progressive improvements to that headline. Just to blow off some steam one Friday afternoon.

He wrote back and offered me a job.

That’s beside my point, which is this–in that headline critique email, I leveraged everything on the first trick I learned for writing good headlines: as you write (and re-write), keep asking a single one-word question…

“Why?” As in, “why does this product have such-and-such feature?” Pow! You discover the feature’s advantage. Then, “why does that advantage have any benefit for my customer?” Bam! You unlock a deeper reason your prospect may want this item. I spent several years as a “copy cub” stuck right there. FAB: Feature, Advantage, Benefit.

But hold on there, pal. Hopkins says here in chapter three:

You’re still just talking about you. And hey, cub–guess what?

Your reader does NOT care about you.

Sorry, suck it up. Your cool prospect doesn’t care; you probably already came to terms with that. Your “hot lead” doesn’t care about you, either; might sting a bit, but you could tell youself, “I just haven’t reached them yet.” But do you understand that your best high-value repeat customer could not care less about YOU!

Not a problem. Yep, it’s okay. This relationship is not about you.

Nothing wrong with asking “Why,” and turning FAB into good, solid sales copy. You must do that along the way. But you also must learn to deliver more than just value in your product. Your reader needs trust and value from you, too.

Hopkins does dwell a bit narrowly here on a certain type of service, namely the free give-away encounter that plants you in the prospect’s experience as a value in a strong, standalone moment long before you come back to “ask for the sale.” But in one sentence he frames a rule I’ve learned from the best relationship marketers:

“He [the salesman/advertiser] pictures the customer’s side of his service until the natural result is to buy.”

Or, as one of my mentors put it (and I stole it for my headline above)… tell your reader his own story. For his imagination, paint the glorious world your customer lives in when he enters relationship with you, and includes your product or service in his life. But remember, as chummy as things may get, he only wants to know…

“What’s in it for me?”

Answer this question for him, at every talking point you’ve got. 

Once again, thanks for reading,

Ken

P.S. Have you got your own copy of this book yet? If you earn your bread in marketing/advertising, you really should. Not only do you get massive ROI every second you pursue the time-proven principles Hopkins reveals, but now you can throw down a few measly bucks and get two books in one: pick up the new edition of Claude’s autobiographical My Life in Advertising plus his Scientific Advertising, bound together in paperback for a song-and-dance price that will pay you back a hundredfold the first time you act on what’s inside.

No, this is not an affiliate link–and no, you can’t buy the book from me….

Just buy the book. And maybe send me a thank-you later, eh? TTFN.