copywriting tips

What your business can learn from Pokémon GO

~ Wendy ~ 2 Comments

Pokémon GO is everywhere. Even if you think it hasn’t touched your life, you’re wrong.

Wherever you see people hunched over or blindly following their phones down the street, you’re witnessing the craze in action.

If you’re a business owner, then you’d do better than to turn your nose up at it. The success of this app-based game has many lessons to teach us about what makes an advertising campaign work.

  1. Sell the benefits

The obvious benefit of gaming is fun – and Pokémon GO certainly captures that with its cute collectable Pokémon (pocket monsters). But there’s another major USP for this app and the clue is in the name. That’s right, this app gets you, your kids, your elderly parents out walking…and enjoying themselves while they do it.

Successful advertising copy starts with – and reiterates throughout – the benefits of your product.

  1. Have a niche

The obvious niche for Pokémon GO is it’s novel approach of fusing gaming with exercise. It turns expectations on their head, i.e. that gaming is unsociable and unhealthy.

This niche doesn’t just set the app apart from its competitors, it endorses the app to families and schools. With new advocates and audiences on board, there is potential for spin-off activities, events or promotions.

  1. Cultivate a loyal base

Pokémon GO works because it has a loyal fan base. They’re the guys who were playing this back in the ‘90s and who climb into their Pikachu onesies every night.

If you have a core of customers that respect you, have an emotional bond with you, and show brand allegiance to you, then you have a better chance of success with new products. They will carry your message through word of mouth and become your advocate. Reward them with newsletters and discounts – in essence, keep them in the loop.

  1. Have broad appeal

Complicated isn’t always better. The original Gameboy version of Pokémon has been made more universally user-friendly with this app to encourage mass participation. The concept is simple and means it can be enjoyed by all ages, regardless of whether they have any prior knowledge of the game. Plus, by making this game available via smartphones, one of the most common devices, Nintendo has made it more accessible.

  1. Reinvent

Don’t be afraid to reinvent a classic. That’s what Nintendo did with Pokémon GO, making it relevant to an age of socially reclusive gamers and our health-conscious culture.

Ask yourself, how can this product appeal to the modern-day buyer? Is there a way I can turn it on its head? Can I create need for what is essentially a desirable product? Can I make something unhealthy, healthy?

  1. Sell ‘the game’

Gamification is the concept of making mundane, outdated or difficult tasks fun. It’s the act of rewarding ‘players’ with points, discounts, promotions and events. Think: your favourite store card or coffee shop loyalty card.

Well, Pokémon GO does this with exercise by turning it into an interactive hunt and rewarding persistence with advancement through the levels. When you get out of the house, you can find new monsters; when you walk 2km, 5km or 10km, you hatch an egg (and the bigger the effort, the better the return).

  1. Bring people together

The game channels interactivity, both with the app but also with the offline real world in the form of visiting landmarks and chance encounters with fellow players. When something brings people together in this way to bond over their nostalgia and passion for a brand, then their emotional ties grow even more.

How can you bring your customers together? Perhaps if you’re in gourmet foods, you could hold regular wine or chocolate-tasting evenings for your loyalty card members.

The success of Pokémon GO is certainly giving businesses and advertisers food for thought when it comes to future campaigns. But even if your business isn’t quite at the point of app-based gaming or GPS targeted marketing, you can still learn about what creates loyalty among your customers. And a lot of that starts with how you communicate with them through your content – both online and off.

If you want to take your copy to the next level, get in touch with me today and I’ll help you score points with your customers.

Write better copy for your business

~ Wendy ~ Leave a comment

Whatever your business, you need great copy to sell it. From product descriptions on your online shop to adverts in the local press – well-crafted words are what will get you noticed and get you sales.

The quickest and most effective way to do this is to hire a copywriter. But if you fancy trying your hand, then here are my 7 tips to write better copy for your business.

  1. Sell the experience
    Nowadays we are bombarded with sales messages. If you’re going to make your product irresistible, you need to make sure it is experience-driven. In short, write about the benefits of what your customer will get rather than just the facts, and start with your biggest selling point.
  2. Build a story
    Creating a story helps push your reader along through your copy and builds their engagement with your product. By story, I don’t just mean a fantasy tale. Have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end to your copy (e.g. start with a product’s rich history and end by showing how it is still beneficial to your customer today).
  3. Hook with headlines
    Your headline should be relevant to the text that follows, but it should also be simple. Headings of around 6 words work best and will be fully visible in Google. Great headlines are active, informative and intriguing. Subheadings should be used to break up a lot of text and keep the reader moving through your copy.
  4. Picture perfect
    Images can help clarify a point and they are visually more appealing than a page full of text. But make sure they are relevant in some way and quality (not just clickbait). There are some websites where you can get license-free images (such as Creative Commons) which are not half bad, but if you want more choice then be prepared to pay and head to somewhere like iStock or Shutterstock.
  5. Keep it short and sweet
    There’s no set amount of words that is perfect to hook your reader. Use as many as it takes to sell your message. However, be aware that unless you’re writing about an academic or technical subject, making your content easy to read hinges on shorter sentences (up to around 16 words) with shorter words (ideally up to two syllables).
  6. Call to action
    It would be pretty silly to spend hours crafting a piece of copy only to forget to include a call to action. This is what gets you sales. In your CTA you need to ask your reader to do something, such as ‘visit our website’, ‘browse our online shop’, ‘download our free ebook’ or ‘sign up to our newsletter’. Anything you can offer your reader (ideally for free) is another incentive for them to act.
  7. Edit, edit, edit…
    Great copy undergoes rounds and round of extensive editing and proofing. Not only do you want to avoid glaringly obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, which plant doubt in your readers’ minds, but you also want to ensure your copy is as fluid, inspiring, engaging and seamless as possible.

A lot of time goes into crafting great copy that gets results. Writing your own is cheaper in the short term, but it can cost you big business if errors and bad writing put off your customers.

If you want to keep your time free to run your business in the best way possible, why not hire a copywriter to write your next webpage, flyer or job advertisement? I can take the hassle off your hands and save you time. Contact me today for a free and informal consultation.

My Tip for Writing Sales Copy

Image ~ ~ Wendy ~ Leave a comment

The modern world is fluid: there are no longer strict times to work, to go shopping, to connect with people. This fluidity is even more dangerous to those who work freelance, especially if that’s from home. It can be difficult to switch off from the endless list of things that can be done at any one moment, causing constant distractions – some welcome, but most not.

One of the bonuses of being a professional copywriter is that clients give you work. However, if you write sales copy full time, there’s a significant chance that at some point you will experience that awful feeling of writing yourself into a corner full of clichés, and it can be a tiresome task trying not to recycle your own work.

But it was while I was tuning up my new TV that I made a career-defining discovery. When you can’t think of any more ways to sell that ugly pair of leather cowboy boots simply take my advice and…turn on the TV.

Yes, you heard me. Turn on the TV.

Switch straight to the home shopping channels – you’ll find you have plenty. And, for once in your life, that’s a good thing.

Watching the endless hours of furious waffling will give you a crash course in how to sell. Home shopping channels are divided into hour-long slots where a presenter is challenged to shift as many units as possible, as though trying to bargain their way out of a hostage scenario. Often they have a whole range to peddle, but the real feats of salesmanship are the solus endorsements.

As the minutes tick away, the programme swiftly descends into farce as the host becomes desperate to snag that potential customer. It’s true. I have actually seen, with my own eyes, a frantic presenter furiously force the backstage crew to fashion a pet fish out of a carrot and a bowl of water, just to show off a panoramic camera.

But the highs (and the many lows) of this kind of television are invaluable to the ‘blocked’ copywriter.

As you sit there in your be-throned armchair, all smug in your new position as the ‘potential customer’, you can see what works – Wow, that mobile really does look like it has everything I want and at such a reasonable price – and what doesn’t – Hmm, I’d rather take memorable photographs of my grandchildren than my goldfish.

As we all know, one of the most important things in copywriting is selling the experience. And that is what these guys (usually) do so well.

To gain your trust, the presenter will start out with the product specifications – the brand, the quality materials, the craftsmanship – but before you know it they’ve segwayed these indisputable facts into the ways that this product will make your life easier, more efficient, and, in turn, make you a better person/worker/mother/friend.

The sole point of the programme is just like a piece of sales copy – it is to build a gradual argument for why this specific product will change your life, and by the end, even the most dismissive viewer can’t help but agree with everything they’ve just said. Except for maybe that bit about the fish.

Of course, I’m not saying this little technique is without its risks. Turning on the TV while you’re trying to work does, after all, take a lot of stamina, mostly to not let yourself get sucked in by Pointless or Bargain Hunt (I’m not judging). But, if you’re stuck on the roundabout of sales clichés, there are worse things you can do than switch to the home shopping channels. And besides, all that red-faced shouting and carrot-bobbing means they can be pretty fun too…