The Key Thing To Bear In Mind For Your Swipe File
A swipe file is a collection of great ads and copy that you can draw inspiration from. It’s a great idea to have a swipe file, but it can all go horribly wrong if you get just one element of your swipe file or folder wrong.
I’ll tell you about what that is later in the article. Here’s a clue though; today, I was browsing some internet marketing blogs looking for answers to some questions I was having.
I stumbled across a blog that looked quite decent. I was reading an article of reasonable quality and lo and behold up popped an opt-in offer. It said:
I’ll Send You 500 of The Best Ads From Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and More!
I thought that sounded OK, so I put in a throwaway email address and went through the subscription process. I thought I could add these amazing ads to my swipe file without much trouble.
A lot of people would probably do the same… and they’d be wrong to do so. I opened up the free PDF file and realised almost immediately that the adverts that this guy had selected were useless.
Now, before I tell you why they were useless, let’s talk about what I use a swipe file for and how I use it.
How To Use Your Swipe File
Most people have a swipe file and they do the worst thing they can with it: they don’t use it at all.
It’s easy to save images on your PC or copy/paste articles into some corner of your hard drive never to be seen again. This is the worst thing to do because it’s useless.
Now, some people copy their ads out by hand or otherwise read through them. This is better, but you can take it a step further.
I like to pull my ads and copy apart and break them down into templates of varying complexity. So if I’ve got a long-form sales letter, I’ll break it down into a structure format and then write down what each sentence does and what each paragraph does in generic terms.
Then, when I need to write a sales letter quickly, I can go straight to the templates and slot in the new information.
This saves many hours of work over the long run and helps you understand copywriting at a deeper level.
Now, there’s one issue with this approach. There’s one particular thing that can go wrong, and that’s what I’ll talk about next.
The Key Ingredient For Your Swipe File
Let’s get on to the heart of the matter and the key ingredient that I talked about in the introduction.
If you’ll remember, I signed up for a mailing list and the free opt-in was a collected edition of social media ads that big companies had run.
I also said that it was useless, and I’ll tell you why now.
The swipe file was useless because the ads weren’t good.
Sure, they were ads by some of the biggest companies in the world. Sure, those ads were beautiful and good examples of how to do product photography. Some of those ads had incredibly witty catchphrases.
But the ads were terrible despite those things.
How do I know?
I’m not going to tell you that the reason they’re bad is some massive secret of copywriting, like, I don’t know, they didn’t even have calls to action. While that’s true for a lot of ads and thus proves that hiring an advertising agency is a waste of time and money, that’s not how I knew immediately that the ads were rubbish.
The reason is that across all of these guides, the screenshots of these ads had been cropped in such a way as to show much engagement each ad had.
Some of those ads had less engagement than I get on my Twitter feed… and friends of the blog will know that Twitter isn’t something I necessarily work hard at.
If you’re Toyota and you run an ad that gets two comments and six likes… then that is a massive engagement failure.
Now, I don’t care about the success of the corporate machines, but I do care about my reader’s success.
You Can’t Make a Great Cake Without Decent Ingredients
There’s no point in creating a list of ads or a swipe file of copy if those materials aren’t very good. There’s no point in having five hundred different ads in your swipe folder if none of them converted the first time. Sure, you can use your copywriting magic and hope you’ll turn the sow’s ear into a silk purse, but at that point you’re better off not using the ad as a template and starting from scratch.
In other words, the opposite of what a swipe file is supposed to help you do.
So, in closing, make sure your swipe file only contains examples of good copy and adverts.
If you need to, analyse examples with a critical eye in terms of fundamental copywriting basics… but most of the time, you’ll be able to tell because of engagement figures (at least on social profiles.)