The Copy Is For Your Prospect, Not You

By Propulsion Media Labs Talent #54 Jim R.

I live in multiple worlds: one as a voiceover talent, another as copywriter for clients in various business sectors featured in print, web and broadcast mediums. Put another way: I can put thoughts and sales pitches into words and bark ‘em into a microphone – for a fee, of course. Bank deposits are a beautiful thing.

I see a bunch of, ahem, ‘writing examples’ during the course of a business day. Some are brilliantly written, many are sloppy and usually about the client or their sale. Granted you need an offer – but getting a starving crowd to your door or website requires copy based on the wants, needs and desires of your ideal prospect.

See, it’s easy for marketers and business owners to adopt the age old platitude that if you build it, they will come. The reality is 180-degrees the opposite.

Are you listening closely to your customers and prospects?

What keeps your prospects up at night? What situation would they like to eradicate from their life right now? How do they speak and verbalize their need? What itch do they have that only you can scratch?

For example, in my local area there is a hearing aid retailer who seemingly has a different message every few weeks. His pitch ranges from price, to the fact we change as we get older (that TV spot features footage of him playing drums in a college band) to the heart-tugging plea that hearing loss means you’ll miss what your grandkids are saying. None of this really matters to a hearing aid prospect.

The hearing aid industry has done extensive market research which reveals the actual reason why a seasoned citizen buys a hearing aid. The real reason they buy is fear – that their adult children interpret their hearing loss as Mom or Dad becoming feeble and time to be shuttled into a retirement or nursing home.

I have two older brothers who wear hearing aids – they each went through this. My wife tells me I’m on the same path, by the way. I pretend I don’t hear her!

A spot addressing the nursing home reality for the hearing aid market will cut through the clutter and squarely address a prospects concern, fear and offer a solution to what’s keeping these prospects awake at night, staring at the ceiling fan.

OK, so how do you tap into your prospects mind? The best way is to ask your current clients, customers and patients why they chose you and how they’ve benefitted by the association. This might also be a good time to ask them how you can better serve them.

It also wouldn’t hurt to ask your best customers for a testimonial. I sometimes write something up for clients and ask them to make whatever changes they want to make, sign it and return it to me on their letterhead. Easy for them and I have a client saying how great they think I am. Way more believable to a reader than my saying it about myself. You’ll be able to use these testimonials in your print, broadcast and web marketing initiatives, too.

Now that you’ve received some feedback from your best clients, write yourself a letter from your ideal, composite customer. “Dear Mr. Big, what I really need is a better way to control my __(blank)__. If only someone could solve _(blank)_, my biggest worries, pain and frustration would go away.” This is a trick copywriters in the direct-marketing field use to make sure they have an accurate demographic and psychographic profile and understanding of the prospect they're writing an ad for.

A friend of mine, who is a best-selling author, further fleshes out the details of the characters in her novels by “interviewing” them. I’ve seen her do this and it looks like a séance. The bottom line is that she obtains an acute awareness of the characteristics of the people she brings to life in her books. Her characters always seem very real when you read her books, too. The interview technique might sound a little “out there,” but I encourage you to do the same in order to accurately profile your ideal prospective customer.

The more your broadcast, print or web copy is completely aligned with how beneficial your product is to your target client, the more these people will beat a path to your business with cash and credit cards. You have what they want, they have what you want.

Maybe that old axiom should read: build it right – and market it right – and they will come. 

Should scripts be in ALL CAPS?

By Propulsion Media Labs Talent #27 Alyson S.

Dear Clients,

Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg, CC-BY

I know you don't mean to – but writing in ALL CAPS looks and sounds as if some of you are yelling at me and other Voice Artists. It's unintentional and apparently is what you learned in “Radio School” according to every copy writer that does it, but in fact it comes off as screaming at us. The copy is harder to read. The copywriter at that point says that he or she has VO people who in fact LIKE the ALL CAPS copy – but I have yet to meet any VO artist that does. I think it is a VO artist urban myth.

Please for the love of God and all that is good: STOP WRITING IN ALL CAPS!

(See what I did right there? I wrote in caps for emphasis and it was also me pleading with you.)

Capital letters are harder to read then standard writing – like how I am writing here. Or in any book, magazine etc... It is not natural to read in all capital letters otherwise we would be reading and writing in all Caps all the time. It is harder to read. And Voice Over Artists read the copy off the page. We don't memorize copy. We read it off the page. So in fact you are making the copy more difficult for us to read, thereby causing undue stress, and then we can't put our attention onto making the copy filled with all of our magical nuances. We are unfortunately concentrating on not making a mistake while reading your ALL CAPS COPY. So in essence, it not only makes our job harder, it might take longer for us to do our job as well as get to the right 'emotion' in the copy because of screwing up reading it.

Needless to say, when you write something in CAPS, the person reading it tends to assume you are yelling at them or making a giant exclamation point. If the whole script is in caps, how will we discern where to place emphasis? I assume you do not want us to scream the copy at you.

So there it is. I take it upon myself for all the VO artists in the 21^st century to tell copy writers that some things you learned in “Radio School” is a thing of the past. It's akin to watching a VHS tape. It is incredibly passe. And it is definitely one of my (and I will go as far to say many other VO people's) pet peeves. Most people prefer to read standard writing and not read everything in CAPS. Yes, most of us now have the capabilities to convert the formatting, but that takes an extra few minutes and as we know, time is money. So in order to make life easier on us VO artists, please DO NOT WRITE IN ALL CAPS. ;)