What Is An Advertising Copywriter?
Copywriters work with the creative team to produce ideas and the words that go into advertising. It must be compelling, state of the art and good enough to motivate customers to go out and buy whatever product is being offered.
- Writing compelling copy requires years of study and experience.
Writing the words or copy for an expensive advertising campaign to make a business succeed is both an art as well as science. The art is understanding what motivates consumers. The science is knowing how your ad is ranked on the internet. A copywriter must understand what works and what doesn’t. If you can’t communicate successfully with your prospective customers, it doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, you will fail.
You may know your product or service inside and out but do you know what matters to your customers?
- Advertising is selling.
People think of Advertising as one skill and sales as another but they are essentially the same. As an example, a copywriter creates an ad that gets consumers into a car dealership’s showroom and the car salesman closes the deal. Rarely can one do the job of the other. Most copywriters have little or no sales experience and the salesmen could not write a convincing ad unless he or she was specifically trained to do so. O
- The difference between a Feature and a Benefit.
Not knowing the difference between the two or how to employ them effectively will waste a lot of money in your advertising budget with little to show for it.
A feature is something your product does. A benefit is what that feature does for you. Here is an example:
A new personal computer is advertised as having a one terabyte hard drive. People who are technically savvy understand what it means and how it would benefit them but does the average consumer?
The size of the hard drive is a feature or what the product does. The benefit to the consumer is that it will store a large amount of software and files. They can save all their important documents on one computer without having to worry about performance issues. That’s a big benefit a WOW factor, but the feature must be explained or the non-tech consumers will gloss over it not seeing what it does for them.
Never assume the customers knows the benefit of your products features.
- Boil it all down.
Nothing turns a consumer off faster than an endless stream of gibberish about a product. If you can’t catch their attention and motivate them quickly, they move on. Look at your own life. After a hard day at work, you come home to a stack of mail. Do you open each mailer and carefully digest each offering or do you sort the bills and personal letters and chuck the junk mail? What grabs your attention? What makes you open that envelope and consider what offered?
