Copywriting; Segmenting Audience By Place In Funnel
Sometimes I think about this blog, my brain and related subjects. I’ll come to the conclusion that the entirety of my life seems to revolve around making simple things complicated just so I can make them simple again.
My journey into copywriting has definitely been like this.
Is a Sales Letter Really Just A Sales Letter?
One of the most common questions I get from the articles I write here is also one I never planned to get. It’s a variation on the following:
“What’s the difference between a sales letter, article and product review?”
This is especially common when it comes to niche sites. I’ll be talking about niche sites in regards to today’s topic tomorrow because there are some specific things I’ll say on that subject.
Now, the answer I give is basically “they’re all just the same.” I use the terms seemingly interchangeably. Any differences between a certain bit of content and another tend to be pretty subtle and it would get complicated for me to separate them out.
But that’s a giant pain in the arse for anyone reading, and I shouldn’t be so lazy.
The point for this section is that my thinking about what constitutes a sales letter and what doesn’t is a bit sloppy. I’ve been rectifying that, because it all adds up to some weird blocks I get when a client pops out of nowhere and says, “Write me an article on X.”
When A Sales Letter Isn’t a Sales Letter
Sometimes you’ll write a literal direct response sales letter. It’ll be at the end of a set of emails and your job is to sell, sell and sell some more. You have a bunch of targeted readers and your goal is to turn them into customers within the thousands of words that you have in that single interaction.
Unless you’re a pure specialist in that field though, chances are you’ll have other work to do. Like the emails in the lead up to that sales letter. Or a blog post to get people to subscribe. Or some social media ads.
All of these things can (and I’d argue should) be direct-response marketing. By this I mean you write something with the intention of getting a response, and you get that response.
Not all of those things though are going to be sales letters, even if you’re selling someone on the idea of something. For instance, you don’t “sell” a free ebook even though you sort of do and certainly use the same psychology.
While the psychology stays the same (you want your reader to invest in a particular stage of the funnel) the techniques are different. Again an example; you don’t bring out the “your life is absolutely going to suck and you’re going to hate yourself” when the action required is “like this tweet.”
You don’t see tweets that use high pressure calls to action and you shouldn’t see direct-response sales letters that use the softly-softly “maybe you could, you know, consider purchasing this if you want to make us happy” approach.
This complicates everything.
Let’s simplify it.
Simplifying The Headache That Is “What Are Your Goals With This?”
Now, if you go on most websites copywriting (or god forbid general advertising) sections, you’ll see people flounder and fail to explain simple psychology, sales knowledge and copywriting ability. That’s par for the course.
But ask a social media guru what they intend to achieve or an advertising copywriter what works about their ditties and slogans, and you’ve got to be prepared for a whole world of mumbo-jumbo on a level that’s usually reserved only for post-modernist academics in vague humanities subjects.
The answer is simple: Every step of a marketing campaign pushes your visitor down the funnel.
Now, once you understand that, the process becomes a bit clearer.
We can make it even clearer than that though.
Check out this horrendous paint-job:
This is one of the worst graphs ever and proof that I’m not exactly the most visual-spatial learner in the world. What it is intended to show you is that you can plot a course through every funnel and know exactly where to put your potential customer on it.
What’s better is that if you have a client, you can ask them three simple questions to e able to plot the point:
- Do your visitors know about your product/market?
- Are your visitors interested in your product/market?
- What’s the goal with this piece?
Now, the first two are definitely framing questions for the third. If you ask a client (especially one who isn’t a native English speaker) what they want to do with the piece of work without the previous questions, they’re going to say stupid stuff like “make it good” or “make everyone who reads it want to buy it.”
This is also true for those unfortunates who work in creative advertising agencies where you’ll get answers like, “we really want to feel the piece, you know?”
No, we don’t know. Let’s keep the philosophical stuff to the theologians.
Everything Fits
Every piece of sales material – whether direct or not – can fit on that graph and it’ll inform you of what you need to do in quite a lot of detail for such a simple system.
For instance; a guy walks into a hardware store and says to the cashier “I’d like item number 62 from your catalogue and I need it in black and a medium size.”
Where does he go on the graph? Right next to the big “you can’t get this wrong just do whatever he asks” sales sign. Be as direct as possible here.
Something more esoteric though; social media. Now, plot your reader on the graph.
Are they followers already? If so, they know about your product and are interested.
If not, then your job is to get them to be a follower. What do you need to do there? Are you on a public site where people can stumble across your profile almost randomly? (Like Twitter?) If so, they might not have any interest in your product or market. Filter for interest.
Is it a more closed system like Facebook? They probably have an interest (people with similar interests congregate and you can’t accidentally end up on a Facebook Group easily.) This means you give them knowledge of your product.
Paid Ads at the very start of your funnel follow the same system, and then once people are in the funnel you’re bouncing them down the knowledge/interest path.
Final Thoughts
This is a new system that I’m testing now. Essentially though, it’s a simple system for demystifying the process of taking a reader from 0-BUY in either multiple steps, or rarely, in a single step.
This simple method will allow you to not only build entire projects, but it’ll also allow you to step in when some terrible freelancer has designed a terrible campaign for a client and now you have to fix it.
Let me know how you find this system, whether I’ve explained it well enough or even how you get on using it. A lot of you readers are into niche sites, and so tomorrow I’ll write about how you could use this system for that purpose.
See you next time.