How to Appeal to Your Readers

Me, me, me, me.

I just thought I’d give you a bit of a clue as to what your reader is most concerned about when they are reading your copy.

Whatever you are trying to sell, your reader will only want to know what’s in it for them.

It’s human nature – if you want them to part with their hard earned cash, they have to benefit from it in someway.

Every copywriter should therefore be familiar with 3 market-proved elements that must appear in their copy to make the cash registers ring:

• promise a benefit
• make an offer
• deliver relevant news

Get it in your headline

The strongest headlines will contain all of these elements. which is quite a task.

Let’s start with the benefit. The easiest way to get this into your headline is to use this formula:

VERB + desirable quality (+ additional feature) = BENEFIT

So for example if you were looking to sell an anti wrinkle cream, your headline could look something like:

“Enjoy younger, softer skin in just 14 days”

For the offer you could include details of a reduction in price, or a limited quantity of the product. This will help create urgency – they have to buy or they’ll miss out! And no one likes to think they are missing out on a good thing.

So now our headline would look something like:

“Enjoy younger, softer skin in just 14 days – now with 50% extra free, available until the 31st October only.”

Eek! Quick or you’ll miss out!!! See where we’re going with this? Now suddenly we have created a sense of urgency because the offer won’t be about for ever.

The final stage is to add relevant news. This could be done by adding a question or adding credibility. So if we go back to our headline we would do something like this:

“Enjoy younger, softer skin in just 14 days with the new clinically proven formula – now with 50% extra free, available until the 31st October only.”

So now we have shown that it has been ‘clinically proven’ – we are adding credibility. More information about the approval can be shown in the body of your advert.

So hopefully you can see from this blog how important it is to write headlines that grab your readers attention and interest. If you are ever going to have a hope of them reading the rest of your ad, you’ve got to grab them immediately.

Sally Ormond, Briar Copywriting – freelance copywriter