By the Ocean
Cloudy 73 Degrees
7:30 a.m.
What is it? vs. What is it really?
These are the questions you ask yourself when you’re presenting what you have to the world.
I learned this lesson long ago, by participating in a copywriting contest before I had learned what it meant to truly THINK. It was painful, but instructive!
Most people think sales copywriting is about writing. It’s not. It’s about thinking. Thinking better and different.
Many years ago, I was hired (for peanuts, my fault… I agreed to it) to write a promotion for a goal-setting course. The client was going to test my promo against another copywriter’s writing and see what happened.
I wrote a promo selling a goal setting course. The other guy came back with something about having “The Cure for January Syndrome.” The “sickness” everyone gets on or about January 15 when the New Year’s Resolutions look a little less shiny and we start to fall back into acting the very same way we acted the year before.
I’ll let you guess which promo performed better.
I had asked the first question, “What is it?” and wrote based on that answer.
He had asked the second question, “What is it really?” and captured the attention of the buyer.
No one feels an emotional connection to a goal-setting course. The only reason people set goals is because they want the thing that they think the goal setting will deliver. Maybe it is a specific achievement, maybe it’s just the feeling they get when they complete something.
This is what you have to discover as it relates to what you sell. What are they REALLY AFTER? What do they really want?
Because that’s what they’re buying. And if you present what you have with that understanding in place, the ride to success will be a whole lot smoother.
“What is it? What is it REALLY?”