Content marketing tools and training.
What do you really know about your prospect?
Their age range perhaps? Where they live? What they do for a living?
Useful definitely, but not enough to create copy that rouses emotion and compels action.
For that we need to take a journey much deeper into the dark recesses of our customers’ minds …
Want to join me?
Today’s article is inspired by someone who understood that in writing, how well you knew your ‘characters’ made the difference between captivating an audience, or boring them.
In 1984, two artists used a simple process to create a story that captivated an audience for years and generated billions of dollars in revenue.
That same process is being used today by a master copywriter to attract hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.
With companies creating millions of web pages of content marketing, finding an untold story or a new angle can feel like an impossible task. Especially when you want to avoid creating a story so unique nobody understands it … or wants to pay for it.
So how do you create a story that cuts through the noise and strikes at the heart of your ideal client?
I’d like to tell you about a powerful but elusive emotion that you can trigger to increase traffic, click-throughs, and conversions.
Used properly, it can entice your reader to give you their full attention and follow your call to action.
But there’s a catch.
Say you’ve been feeling under the weather for a few days, and you decide to go to the doctor.
The moment you open the door to your doctor’s office, she takes one quick look at you, thrusts a prescription into your hands, and slams the door in your face.
No check-up, no conversation, just a bottle of pills and her bill in the mail.
Are you confident she’s given you the solution — the correct medicine — you need to make you feel better?
One of the most useful lessons I’ve learned about writing engaging content came from studying screenwriting.
It’s that every single piece of dialogue or screen direction had to be working hard to hook viewers in and keep them gripped.
Audiences don’t like fluff or irrelevance.
Write like that and you won’t keep their attention.
And while there’s no absolute science to it, the screenwriters I trained under drummed into me a single golden rule to help me write powerfully engaging content …
A long long time ago, around the 5th century BC in Ancient Greece, there were a bunch of hip kids called the Sophists who loved to talk.
Actually, not just talk. They loved teaching people how to debate and come up with persuasive arguments to influence the opinions and beliefs of others through the use of rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the art of using language for persuasive ends. Not unlike copywriting.
