writing Archives - Page 6 of 15

A hard truth about your audience today: people are busy

By Patrick Gant

Among the rules we have here at thinkit creative for creating writing that sells, we adhere strictly to this one: people are busy, so don’t waste their time.

Let’s face it. Distractions are everywhere today. As Dr. Pamela Rutledge of the Media Psychology Research Center observes, today “we live in a socially-networked, transmedia world.”

In other words, it’s a space with a lot of people in it who have a lot of interesting things to say.

Distractions are everywhere.

Your audience gets distracted easily. That’s not a judgement on your communications skills. It’s just the way things are.

As Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert point out in their 2010 study: “people spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing.”

Some worry that all these distractions are making us kind of, well, dumb. For instance, Nicholas Carr (essayist and author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) warns that “we are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”

Old methods don’t work anymore.

Age-old marketing disruptors don’t work anymore.

The market is changing in terms of demographics, media savviness, in how people connect, and also what they use to do that. It’s reshaping the way people make choices. Despite all the handwringing you might see in some circles, the problem today isn’t that people don’t read. It’s that they have more choices. Possibly even too many choices.

There’s also a very healthy collection of research in the area of cognitive load and human behaviour all suggesting that the risks of so-called information overload are very real and can play a role in turning off an audience from your message if what you have to say strikes them as being too demanding of their time.

It doesn’t have to be as bad as all that.

What you can do to help your audience.

When you recognize something as a problem, you find solutions that are tailored to address that problem.

Since people are busy and easily distracted, make it easier for them to do business with you. The number-one place to start doing that is in your marketing content, whether it’s online material or hard-copy collateral.

Use succinct, enticing headlines to draw attention to your content.

Use plenty of subheadings to help break up your ideas into smaller chunks of knowledge.

Challenge yourself to find ways to say more with fewer words.

Be consistent and persistent in what you have to say. This is often harder to do than you might think.

Make good use of infographics and professionally developed charts to explain complex data.

Don’t confuse simplifying with dumbing down. Audiences appreciate elegant solutions to tough problems.

Professional copywriters, editors and content marketing specialists can help you with these steps to help you attract an audience and grow your message.

People embrace ideas best when they gain things that matter to them.

Q&A: What is copywriting, anyway?

By Patrick Gant

Copywriting is the act of writing text that is used for the purposes of selling a product, service or idea.

Selling in this sense does not necessarily involve a financial transaction. Rather, it’s about being persuasive—motivating an audience to take a specific action or specific steps that you want them to take.

Copywriting is a science. It is also an art.

On one hand, it relies on proven, time-honoured methods and techniques of gathering an audience’s attention, presenting a business case to them, and convincing them to respond to a call-to-action. On the artful side of the equation, it involves inventiveness and a talent for playing with words in a manner that is memorable to an audience. These two disciplines combined have the potential to inform and entertain an audience. It’s a powerful combination, when done properly.

Traditionally, a copywriter would ply his or her skills in creating direct-mail products, advertising, commercial scripts, billboards, brochures, postcards and sales letters. They often worked in partnership with musicians to develop jingles (and many still do). With the rise of online media, new products have become part of the copywriter’s domain, including web copy, banner ads, email blasts, landing pages, multimedia scripts and presentation content.

Elements of copywriting are also found in feature article writing, social media content, white papers and technical writing, in which the selling imperative isn’t as great, but the need to attract and retain a reader’s attention remains as important as ever.

[Update] Interesting fact: While copywriting has been the home of many successful writers for the duration of their careers, it has also been an important launching pad for many notable fiction authors.

Don’t be wordy

By Patrick Gant

When working on a project either as a copywriter and editor, I address the needs of two groups.

First, there is the client who is paying me to do the job.

The second one is the audience the client wants to reach, in other words: “the reader.”

On every product, I provide my best advice to every client. What I also do is advocate on behalf of the reader—the prospect or the customer that my client wants to reach—to give voice to someone who might otherwise not be heard at that important stage.

The reader won’t tell you that they don’t understand your message, or that it’s too complicated to follow. If your message doesn’t connect with people, the reader might simply not buy your products or services.

That’s why it’s important to be succinct and to avoid wordiness in your copy.

You have to engage your reader and keep their attention—and in most cases, you have far less time than you think you do to achieve that goal.

It’s not just that it’s convenient to use fewer words. Lengthy descriptions and jargony expressions also tend to imply that something is a task. Or that it’s too much work. Most people are busy enough already. They don’t want more tasks on their plate.

Concise, punchy text helps avoid that risk.

A history of title design

By Patrick Gant

History of title designLinked via kottke, a short movie on the history of title design in film. Succinct text, a well-chosen typeface and arresting visuals can tell a really compelling story. And that’s true of more media than just film.

I love that this clip closes with Enter The Void, which to my mind is the most outstanding title sequence in many, many years.

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

Entrepreneur as magician

By Patrick Gant

Photo:Lenore M. Edman

Being an entrepreneur is a bit like being a magician.

With sleight of hand, you make it look as though you make money out of nothing at all. Your income doesn’t come from a paycheque: you don’t get one.

Instead, you make things, or come up with ideas for things and then you find a market to buy those things.

But make no mistake.

Just like a master magician, your performance comes from years of practice at perfecting a thousand little things. You just make it look easy to others.

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