09.13.07
Copywriting Alone Gives $11,000 Per Year Advantage
How One Client Recovered His $1,500 Copywriting Investment Several Times Over In the First Year
He didn’t think it was possible. A real estate client came to me just over a year ago. His Web site just wasn’t producing the leads he had hoped for. Visiting his site the first time, it took less than a minute to find out why his site was sucking wind.
The opening page was attractive. It showed a large picture of an attractive home, with the real estate agent photoshopped in. The page contained a few graphic links to other portions of his site, but that was about it for the home page. He was right. His site needed help… badly. It was a definate "fixer-upper."
What was conspicuously missing? Content. This client had his site rubber-stamped out by a company that created hundreds of sites with an almost identical look as part of a special real estate agent package. They also sold leads at a premium that turned out to be almost completely worthless. Their "all-in-one" solution had so far netted him zero dollars in sales, but the service cost about $1300 per month.
"This Old Web Site"
The way the provider put the site together was unfriendly to search engines. Worse yet, it didn’t trigger a single emotion. It provided no logical arguments in favor of his service over any other. It didn’t entice one into reading more. Before working on a paid search or search engine optimization campaign, I convinced him to give me a shot at increasing the conversion rate of the site.
I get about $1.50 per minute for consulting services. Let me give you some free advice. Before pouring dollars into bringing additional traffic to your site, make sure the site converts visitors into traffic. Even with "non-paid" search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, don’t be deceived into thinking that it doesn’t cost you.
If you have an SEO expert optimize your Web site, expect to pay $75-$125 per hour for their services. Besides, if they optimize content which doesn’t convert visitors to leads or sales, you’ll just have to pay them to optimize new content when you later replace your old content with more effective sales copy.
When your message presents the most compelling reasons to do business with you in a way that gets measurable results, only then does it make sense to pay to bring traffic to your Web site.
You Can’t Get Your Audience to Do Anything Before You Know What Keeps Them Up at Night
Before writing a single sentence of Web content, I must understand my audience… better than they know themselves. I began by doing what we call an "audience analysis." For each major audience we want to speak to (and get action from), we determine their primary emotional buying triggers.
In short, we root out their past frustrations when buying a similar product. For this client, his product was real estate. But understand, only on the surface are homes what someone buys from a real estate agent.
My wife and I had just been through the painful process of buying a new home and selling our old one. We had a bad experience buying our present home. We knew all to well how frustrating it was dealing with agents who try to work both sides of the deal, yet present themselves as fairly representing both parties. We had experienced the pain of agents who would not respond in time to make a deal happen, and so on.
We then compared the frustrations and basic needs of real estate buyers with the services and personality of this client. Alan (the agent) is an older gentleman with a grandfatherly nature. His personality is disarming. His style is a little more laid back than other real estate agents. Some home buyers wouldn’t like Alan’s relaxed approach, but others would find it a breath of fresh air when contrasted to the more typical cut-throat agents.
Messaging Laser-Targeted at Your Most Profitable Audience
This brings us to a main point. Your content MUST match the product and services you’re selling. If I had written content with a hard-hitting feel, it might have produced more leads (the goal of Alan’s site). However, they would have been the wrong leads. Once they met Alan, they would have found a complete disconnect between the aggressive tone and message that attracted them in the first place and the gentle man they met. This consistency is absolutely vital if you want sales, and not just leads.
We determined that once a home met the basic needs of the family (number of bedrooms, how many bathrooms, etc.), that typically the wife decided which home to buy. The husband normally was most involved in the practical decision of whether the home would fit the family’s needs. But once husband and wife had narrowed their choices to a short list of options that made sense, the wife had the most influence over which one they selected.
With this knowledge, we designed the site to appeal primarily to a woman. We found that often, the wife did the initial work of choosing a real estate agent to work with, so we targeted our message at her.
If You Attempt to Speak to Everyone, You Reach No One
All effective marketing begins by creating a profile of the most likely audience to buy your product and speaking to them. There are generalizations that must be made, because you’re not speaking to a single person. You speak to an audience. For women, those generalizations include that they are more in touch with their emotional side. Men also act from emotion, but they feel more need to justify it with logic.
Don’t let yourself get upset by these generalizations, even though they aren’t always true. For example, my wife typically makes very logical choices, while I make more decisions based on how I feel. But when I craft sales messages, I create content which targets the greatest percentage of my audience I can.
So I created sales messaging for Alan’s Web site which targeted emotion, with enough logic not to turn off those who make decisions more based on logic. Here’s a portion of one page I wrote for the site:
Finding that Elusive “Perfect Home” For Your Family How do you know when you’ve found just the right home? You know you found the right home when you’re just as happy in it years after you purchase it as you were the day it became yours. When you put down deep roots and would never consider moving again, that doesn’t come by accident. Because a home is so much more than a house, you need a realtor with a bigger goal than just making a sale. To find just the right place your family will be pleased to call home long into the future, your realtor must have as his first goal finding a home that meets not only your needs, but the way you want to live life. How can a realtor find your perfect home? First, he must get to know you personally. It’s about the relationship. Pretty much any realtor will ask you how many bedrooms you need. They focus on what a home must have to fit your needs, but selecting the right home goes so far beyond that. The right one matches your personality, your style, who you really are. Whether contemporary, upscale, or the perfect place to hang a tree swing from, your realtor must know YOU, not just your needs.
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Alan’s Competitive "Unfair Advantage" – Effective Sales Copy
Effective sales copy is a cost-efficient way to differentiate your business from your competitor’s on the Web. In fact, if you’re reselling a product, as with real estate, you likely have few ways to stand out from your competition. Often, you’re limited to these factors:
- Price
- Selection
- Service
- Messaging
Here’s your second free piece of advice. Nothing will kill your profit faster than competing on price. Unless you’re Walmart, and can afford to buy in huge quantities and sell at deep discount, cutting your price hurts your profitability.
Let’s say that you sell retail products at 20% margin. When you offer a 10% discount, you didn’t lose 10% of the profits you make at full price. You lose a full half of your profits. And how often do jump off the couch and excitedly burn rubber on the way to the store when you find a 10% discount? Besides, you don’t have to compete on price. You can differentiate yourself in other areas.
For Alan, he couldn’t discount his prices. After all, it wasn’t his own home he was selling. Any agent would get about the same price. He also had about the same selection as every other agent out there, selling homes off the multiple listing service. His service would likely not be that different from his competitors. He would show homes and write up offers, the same as they would. He might respond more quickly or be more friendly, but his services wouldn’t differ fundamentally from his competition.
So the only way for him to stand out as significantly different in the sea of real estate agents (I can find a half dozen at most networking events I attend) is in his message. In planning Alan’s marketing strategy, I gave crafting an effective message top priority. I expected it would give him an edge. What I didn’t expect was how his customers would identify the message on his Web site as the single deciding factor that led to their choosing him as an agent.
How This $1,500 Investment Turned Into $11,000 in Less Than a Year
Over the course of one year, four separate clients specifically said that the reason they chose Alan was what they read, his sales copy. In two of these, they read his bio alongside many other agents in the area and chose his service. In fact, perhaps the strongest indicator that his sales copy was spot-on for his target audience was plagiarism. Real estate agents stole his sales copy outright to use in their own promotions.
In an industry where selling a home nets $2,000 to $4,000 for the selling agent, I conservatively estimate that the sales copy Alan invested in yielded him $11,000 in his first year. He spent under $1,500 for Online Marketing Advisor to write his sales copy. I wish I could get his one-year 730% return on investment on my retirement portfolio!
What Is "Copywriting" Anyway?
So if you’re looking for ways to make your service stand out, consider improving the quality of your sales message. If the person writing your email campaigns, Web content, and direct mail doesn’t have extensive training in copywriting, you’re not getting the results you could have. "Copywriting" is a term that is not widely used, much less understood. I spoke with the head of the communications at a major university and he didn’t know exactly what the term meant either.
Copywriting is simply persuasion in writing. It’s purpose is not to entertain. It’s not meant to inform, though it may educate during the process of persuading. Copywriting’s sole purpose is to bring a prospect closer to an action which has value to you, such as generating a lead or producing a sale. When your writer knows this language of persuasion, you’re way ahead of your competition, who likely invested little in a specific strategy to reach their audience with a targeted message.
On the upside, most competing Web sites, email campaigns, and direct response mail stinks. Use a qualified copywriter, and you’ll reach your audience in a way that generates leads, response, and sales.
-Steve Myers