Richard’s 10 Rules for Totally Great Copy: #4
Friday, April 25th, 2014This post isn’t very visual, so here’s a pic of me on my motorcycle.
#4: Great Copy is Conversational
All prospects want to believe whoever’s doing the talking knows them, their worlds, tools and needs.
It’s about addressing their concerns. Copy that reads like a colleague would speak. That treats them like a person.
So by conversational, I mean copy that speaks in straightforward, accessible and casual terms. Unless it’s done with clear intent to make a bigger point, you can’t brag—it’s off-putting. Or preach—it’s annoying. Or instruct—it’s insulting. Or backpedal—it’s pathetic.
Today my focus is on technology advertising. It’s easy to humanize M&Ms or the sexy new Fiat [see the Original, the Italians, the Mirage]. It’s much harder to humanize SaaS.
Here are a couple examples.
I was assigned a demand-generation email about database cloning. For anyone whose heart didn’t skip a beat with excitement at that, it’s a process for creating working-but-secure copies of entire databases for development and testing.
Here’s the copy I got from the technology stakeholders—with the note that they’d be comfortable using it as-is:
Database administrators face the challenge of efficiently duplicating their large mission critical databases to support demands for application development and testing, a challenge compounded by the fact that multiple copies are often required for each production database to support the many development, test, training, QA, and such, as well as FC/SAN arrays that lack feature/functionality to create these environments. Absent an efficient solution for cloning production databases, enterprises are saddled with substantial administrative burden that diverts attention away from more time critical support functions along with increased storage consumption and high cost.
The problem isn’t the copy itself, but that it isn’t written to read. Here’s my edit:
Cloning your databases can be time-consuming, expensive, and a security hazard.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Both pieces of copy say the same thing. Of course, we had to back it up with detail, but that stayed chatty as well. Professional. Technical and thorough. But easy.
Here’s another one:
With the plethora of new social channels amplifying the customer’s voice, peers now have greater influence over the buying decisions than traditional marketing. While marketing’s objectives—attract more, retain more, achieve more—have remained fundamentally the same, organizations must quickly adapt their approach and techniques to succeed in this more complex world.
Learn how leading brands are using Oracle’s marketing solutions to harness big data to better understand their customers, extend their marketing reach into social channels, and retain their high value customers through more rewarding customer experiences.
And my edit:
Today’s customers know and expect more than ever. And they expect a great customer experience.
That means you must deliver a consistent, relevant, and engaging presence everywhere they go: in-store and online, on mobile devices, social networks, and kiosks. Each fulfills customers’ needs. And each reinforces your brand promise.
Fortunately, Oracle has the tools for you to bring it all together.
The copy recognizes that it’s people who are reading it. And people who make the decision to act.
Somebody said the only job of an ad is to be read.
In my world, that’s really the case, because nobody is buying Oracle products based on an ad or email. Around here, a sale can be tens of millions of dollars (or more) and sales cycles can last years. It’s the aggregated messages, meetings and info a prospect receives that drives a sale. All I need to do is ask someone to click through and maybe request more info.
Is it so hard to ask nicely?
Great copy does just that.