Proposition Joe tries to out-think Marlo, fails

Clearly, they hadn’t bothered to check my rankings before the approach, even for the most obvious keywords. It’s hard to understand the omission. After all, how hard is it to type a word or two into a search engine? (Particularly if you’re a search agency…)

The crux of the agency’s approach was the result they’d achieved for a well-known national retailer, putting them on page one for a generic term, from nowhere. But my situation is different. I need steady incremental gains or defensive maintenance, not a ‘big bang’ result from a low base. So those results, though impressive, weren’t the right way to persuade me to take action. They were all to do with the agency’s success rather than mine.

Contrast that with the double-glazing salesmen who went to the trouble of checking out the windows at the back of our house before they knocked on the door, so they could offer to replicate our 1920s mullions in the replacement sealed units.

Bless. How could they know how much we hated the umbrageous, uncleanable mullioned panes, and longed to be rid of them for ever? Also, to be honest, I was a bit creeped out by having someone check out the house without our knowledge. So we used someone else. But at least they made an effort.

The difference between these two approaches is in the value propositions behind them. Whereas the SEO agency were offering their skills and achievements and hoping my needs would fit with them, the window sellers had something to offer that chimed with my needs – in theory at least.

Of course, defining your market is always the first step. There’s no point attracting random attention for its own sake – you need relevant attention. But in this case, I was squarely in the target segment for both firms. It’s just that one came cap in hand, the other bearing gifts.

In order to make an approach based on your value proposition, you have to know what it is. Lots of B2B firms don’t. Falling into the classic trap of mistaking features for benefits, their ‘proposition’ is actually more like a CV. Effective B2B marketing needs to arrive like a birthday present, not a job application – bringing good news, benefits and improvements right to the prospect’s door.

It may be that the prospect knows nothing about the solutions you offer. They might need some in-depth technical or commercial explanation before the benefits are fully clear. That’s fine, as long as your marketing starts from one of their problems, priorities or desires and offers them a benefit.

As I’ve blogged before, most B2B benefits ultimately boil down to one of three things: make money, save money or save time. If you can show why your product or service does one of those things, any business owner or manager is going to listen (provided the benefit outweighs the cost or hassle). Relevant case studies and testimonials are powerful persuaders.

Around those core benefits are the other ‘hard’ elements of the value proposition – service, consultancy, customisation, after-sales support, training and so on. Then there are ‘soft’ elements like your culture, your approach and your general ‘personality’ as a business. All these aspects need to come together into something that prospects genuinely value.

I’m sometimes surprised by how often these issues come up while I’m working on a website or a brochure. Instead of being told what the client’s value proposition is, I have to work it out before I can take their project forward. It just shows how powerful a discipline copywriting can be in terms of clarifying ideas.

The phrase was ‘at your fingertips’. Few would dispute its status as a cliché. It appears in Catch-22, which was published in 1961 (‘Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his finger tips’) and was surely familiar even then. So it’s clocked up a good half-century of use in print. A Google search turns up over 10 million results. By any measure, this is a familiar figure of speech.

I don’t want to rock clichés. But they’re making my readers buy

I was writing about a portable electronic device, so ‘at your fingertips’ had a literal relevance (unlike Joseph Heller’s metaphorical usage). But there’s no doubt that the phrase is what George Orwell called a ‘dying metaphor’ – a worn-out figure of speech that has lost its capacity to add colour to writing. But what could I say instead? Go literal and say ‘within easy reach’ or ‘close at hand’? Or informal with ‘right there where you need it’?

The problem is that none of the alternatives carries quite the same meaning. So I can avoid the cliché, but only by sacrificing clarity. Is that really a trade-off I want to make?

The project I was working on was a B2C landing page selling stylish electronic products as Christmas gifts. Traffic was to be generated with an AdWords campaign. For my money, there were three key perspectives, all relating (naturally) to the audience rather than me or the client.

• Mindset. Once they’re at a landing page, we know the audience is interested, motivated and actively searching for the product. They’re not in ‘socialising’ or ‘surfing’ mode. So there’s no need to ‘interrupt’ them, grab their attention or try to generate interest ex nihilo. They are, in effect, a voluntarily captive audience.
• Profile. People have different levels of literacy and vocabulary. For literate readers, ‘at your fingertips’ is painfully crass. But for others (my target audience), it’s a useful signpost. They don’t read a lot of books. They don’t analyse every ad they see. They’re short of time and buying presents is just ‘one more thing’. I need to inform and persuade, not entertain or intrigue. Trying too hard won’t add value, and could do harm. 
• Resonance. In terms of tone, I’m trying to involve the reader. So I want my words to be warm and welcoming, reassuring them that they’re in the right place. There’s no call for anything edgy, surprising or challenging.

In other words, I believe the cliché was the right choice for the task at hand (or at fingertip).

As copywriters, our aim is not to express ourselves, but to serve the interests of our clients and their customers. We choose the words that bring those two groups together for mutual benefit. Creativity and originality may be appropriate means to that end. But it’s our duty to do what works, regardless of whether we like it ourselves. Copywriters are servants, not artists.

But (you object), surely creativity and originality are worthwhile in themselves? My personal answer is ‘yes’. But that’s because I’m university-educated and aesthetically sensitive (in theory at least). And the idea of ‘worth’ is a value judgement that has nothing to do with what works commercially. If I want to be creative, I should do it on my own time. (That’s one reason why this blog exists.)

Anyway, why do clichés become clichés? Because they’re so useful. Orwell exhorted his fellow journalists to comb through their text for over-familiar idioms and replace them with something newer and fresher. But this misses the point. Clichés endure because they serve a unique purpose. Like favourite cardigans, they get worn out precisely because of their appeal.

To sum up: if a cliché is the right tool for the job, the conscientious copywriter goes right ahead and uses it.

The first and foremost benefit of a product or service is meeting a need. Don’t underestimate the power of stating this to a reader. It’s particularly important online, where people are impatiently searching and seeking to confirm that they’ve found the right thing. If your product solves a problem, make sure people know it.

Then we come to ‘hard’, concrete benefits. These usually boil down to one of three things: save time, save money or (for businesses) make money. They have tangible effects that can be measured – they’re bigger, faster or cheaper. A kettle that boils water faster than competing products offers this type of quantifiable benefit.

However, people are also interested in ‘softer’ emotional benefits such as convenience, fun, style, fashion or the sense of having made a sound buying choice. For example, when you buy jeans or trainers, you’re looking for more than the optimum cost-benefit ratio – you want to buy into a brand that feels cool and appropriate for your age and style.

Fred Perry offers customers benefits including product quality, cultural resonance and fashionability

‘Quality’ might appear in both lists, since its definition is so fluid. For example, it might apply to something as concrete as ‘build quality’ in engineering – the durability, tolerance and precision of the components used to make something. But in more subjective areas of judgement, such as graphic design, one person’s concept of ‘quality’ may be very far from another’s, and affected by a range of personal or cultural factors.

We might say, broadly, that ‘hard’ benefits are more important in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, while ‘soft’ benefits appeal to the consumer (B2C). But even if you’re marketing to a business, the buying decision will always be taken by a human. And that human has emotions. So if you know who they are (either as a specific individual, or in terms of their likely profile) you can appeal to those emotions. The need to feel that the right decision has been made is particularly strong in B2B buyers – hence the saying ‘no-one got fired for buying IBM’.

You may have heard of the marketing formula AIDA, which stands for ‘attention, interest, desire, action’. These are the four stages through which a piece of marketing should (supposedly) guide its audience en route to a sale. If we look at it again, we can see that benefits are behind every one. Simple, strong benefits in a headline or slogan attract attention, while interest is generated by adding more detail. Desire is aroused when benefits are made real in the reader’s mind, and action is elicited by giving a persuasive push to the promise of a benefit.

Whatever thought structure you use, the end result needs to be copywriting that speaks directly to your customers’ needs, desires and hopes by offering something of benefit to them. If it doesn’t, it won’t bring much benefit to you.

Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. If it was, we’d all be buying random goods against our will because we’d seen them advertised on buses or the internet, emerging later from our trance with yet another unwanted pair of shoes.

If we’re honest, we all know from our own experience that momentary distraction doesn’t translate into a purchase. But somehow, when it comes to writing our marketing materials, wishful thinking or delusion sets in and we fall into the trap of trying to get attention.

Not really anything to do with clothes

A few months ago I walked past a clothes shop, outside which was a model skeleton sitting at a table and a sign saying ‘clothes to die for’. It raises a smile, which is nice, but would it actually make you want to buy clothes? The slogan links the skeleton and the clothes, but only through a play on words; there is no real connection. So it functions as an attention-grabber, but nothing more.

What really draws the reader in? In a word, benefits: the good things that will happen as a result of buying what you’re selling. Even something as lame as ‘look hot this summer’ would be better than the skeleton, because it communicates a benefit, however generic.

A product as sensually rich as clothes will sell itself – the product should have been out on the street in place of the skeleton. But it’s tougher when your subject can’t be touched or even seen – because it’s a service, for example. Many print ads for B2B services get stuck at this point. Feeling that they should include some kind of visual content, the advertisers lose the plot completely, opting for jokey, obscure or downright irrelevant picture/headline combinations that say nothing about what’s being sold.

It would be far better for them to choose a headline that communicates a key benefit and use images purely as illustration or decoration – if at all. A strong benefit, simply expressed, will always sell better than an attention-grabbing stunt. It might not be arresting, but it will attract the right kind of readers – those who are interested in buying.

It may also be worth considering a simple positioning statement – ‘IT support services’ or ‘Facilities management’ at the top/beginning of the ad. This orients the reader and tells them what the ad’s about, while freeing you up from having to use such clunky language in your main headline.

Rather than trying to ‘convert’ readers, remember you can only sell to people who are interested. There’s no point grabbing irrelevant attention that can’t be converted into sales. If you believe that willing customers are out there, your task is simply to reach them with the right message.