The Number One Rule of Copywriting is not even about writing at all.
When you’re struggling to explain what you do or why your product matters with concise, personality-full copy it’s easy to forget one important thing.
You’re not writing about something. You’re writing for someone.
And that someone is not a customer, or a buyer, or a number. That someone is a human being.
A human being that cares deeply about many, many things; getting through their to-do list, how the bank balance is looking, how their shy child or elderly parent is doing that day.
That someone is a human being who doesn’t care about your company. They just care about what you help them to do, to be or to feel.
In other words, how you’re going to make them a better version of themselves.
So the job of your copy (and in fact, your entire company) is to sell them that better version of themselves.
So how do you get to know what they actually care about, what that better self looks like or how you might help them become that person?
You talk to people! You ask them. You run surveys, reach out for interviews, invite people for drinks.
Then... you shut up and you listen. Then you listen and then you listen some more.
The real reason we're writing about this today is that we've been doing some listening of our own and as a result we're retiring our monthly content prompts and replacing them with this new Copy Hack series; a monthly tip, trick or hack you can use to write copy that rockets your results.
And if you pop back next month, we’ll look at some stealthy ways you can listen to your customers, without them even knowing and without even having to leave the comfort of your desk...
