Why you need to interrogate your copy

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Here's a really common problem: you spend ages sweating over some copy. You pour over every syllable, you readjust the sentence structure a zillion times, you mercilessly cut out every single bit of waffle. It reads really well - everyone on your team agrees, your boss agrees, everyone's happy. So you launch. 

Then, nothing.

The campaign you sweated over delivered nowhere near the results you wanted. Darn. 

Why does this happen?

This deflating story happens because it's very easy to focus too much on the visible features of copy and not enough on the invisible features. 

The visible features are things like the words you chose to use. Your sentence structure. Whether you're being concise or not. They're features that are easy to punch up and tinker with because they're right there in front of you. 

But the invisible stuff has a much bigger impact. This includes things like:

• The benefits you forgot to mention

• The other angle you could have taken

• The headline that does a better job of drawing people in

And since this stuff isn't right there on the page, it's easy to miss. 
 

Interrogate your copy

To produce copy that really makes a difference, you need to track down these other approaches and missing messages. Here's how: 

Picture someone in your target audience. Now imagine you're reading them each of your claims and messages. Each time you do so, they ask you just one question: "so what?" They're asking you that because they want to know why they should care about what you're telling them.

Now ask yourself if the answer is in the copy. If it isn't, put it in there! Your readers aren't just reading your copy because it's well written. They're reading it because they want it to add value to their lives.

In other words, this process helps you find and improve all those invisible features that you would have otherwise missed. 
 

Nobody cares where your software was born

This all sounds very obvious, but you'd be surprised at how often companies forget to ask "so what?".

Here's an example: a few years ago, it was all the rage for software as a service startups to boast that they were "built in the cloud." This (supposedly) differentiated them from the incumbent companies, who had adapted existing desktop software to the cloud. 

Sounds nice, but if you ask "so what?" it immediately falls apart. 

"Built in the cloud" is a feature not a benefit. There's no obvious reason that a customer should care about it.

If I'm looking for cloud software, the only thing I really care about is whether it's in the cloud or not right now. It's not important to me if it was in the cloud 10 years ago. 

This kind of messaging shows how important it is to interrogate your copy, rather than just edit it. You can tinker with "built in the cloud" all day long. You could write "born in the cloud." You could write "built online." You could write "online software, since day 1." You could write all kinds of things. And none of them would get you out of the trap of having not articulated why your customer should care about the fact that this software was built in the cloud. 

(Mercifully, this messaging has largely disappeared now). 

So take a look at the copy you're sending out to your customers. Is there a clear "so what"? Are you giving people a reason to care about what you're telling them? Be honest with yourself, make some changes, and let me know how you get on. 

Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash