A Prescription in Marketing

After an interesting trip to Philly for the jvAlert Live seminar this past weekend, I’m finally getting back into the swing of things. And I have quite a few tidbits to share with you. The big problem for me was: where to begin?

There are so many topics worth sharing, so I decided to start with a very timely lesson we discussed in the copywriting panel.

First, a little bit about the panel. The copywriting panel was made up of many many top notch copywriters, specializing in different niches and areas of expertise. We had “Million Dollar” Mike Morgan, Jay White, Karl Barndt, Vin Montello, Rachel Rofe, Andy and Shawn Catsimanes, Mike Humphreys, and many others (I was there too).

The attendees had the opportunity to ask questions about copywriting, conversions, and anything related, and boy, did they deliver!

The panel was supposed to run an hour, but when Mike Morgan said we’d be there until every last question was answered, we knew we were in for a long haul! In fact, it ended up running just shy of 2 1/2 hours! But it was time well-spent for all.

In any case, it was a nice diverse bunch of pros dishing out advice and hard-won lessons. I’ll have to grab the recording when it’s available, because I wish I had someone out in the audience taking notes for me!

One of the questions was one of those open-ended questions about copywriting. How do you write a salesletter? Or how do you decide what to put in the copy? Something like that.

I mean, we could have spent the whole 2 and a half hours discussing that one topic, and we’d have barely scratched the surface. There was lots of good advice given. I don’t recall all of it, which is why I want that recording. But I do remember what I said, because it was a very timely question for me.

You see, a few days before the event, I was sitting in a friend of mine’s office discussing his marketing. He asked me about putting up a website, and whether we could put up a page that had an order button to accept credit cards.

Well, yes, I told him. But what are you going to tell them before you ask for the sale?

He hadn’t thought that far, but he was more concerned with the credit card “order-taker-thingy,” as he put it.

So I said to him, “Look. Imagine you’re calling a potential client on the phone. Would you just call him up and say, ‘Hey, I have a great deal for you, and all I need is your credit card info?’ I think they’d hang up in your face, right?”

He laughed and nodded.

“No,” I continued. “You’d talk to him one-on-one, telling him all about your product or service first, the many benefits he’ll get from it, and how your product will solve a problem he has, etc.”

In short, you’d give your pitch and close him on the deal before you moved to taking his order.

I mean, that seems straight forward when you talk about selling something on the phone or face-to-face, but not everyone thinks that way when it comes to a website. A direct response website (or any printed ad, for that matter) is just salesmanship in print, right?

So I told him (and the crowd at jvAlert Live) about a little trick I picked up from John Carlton to get a decent first draft of your salesletter.

Basically, it comes down to giving your pitch on the phone or in person and recording it. Then have that recording transcribed. Take out all the “umms” and “ahhs,” edit it and polish it up, and you have the makings of a good first draft.

You want to tell your story. You want to discuss the big benefits and overcome objections. You want to sell them using emotion and back it up with logic. You want to have tons of proof to back up all your claims. This is something any good salesman (or saleswoman) will know how to do readily enough. It’s no different in print.

Remember you are talking to one person at a time. Just like a face-to-face meeting.

John actually explains it much better than I can, but that’s essentially it in a nutshell.

Now when you look at it that way, suddenly writing sales copy isn’t so daunting anymore, is it? I’m not saying you’re going to have world-class copy. But I’ll wager you’ll have something far more personable and effective than 99% of the “hype zone” copy you see floating around the net.

And remember, that was just one topic we discussed. And I still need to get that recording!

But I’ll have more to write about straight from jvAlert Live in the days ahead.

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