One of the cornerstones of economics is the theory of rational choice – the idea that people decide how to act by carefully weighing costs against benefits.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, largely unforeseen by economists, rational choice theory is looking a bit tattered.  The rationality of the big players in finance, as well as the supposedly corrective hand of ‘the market’, has been shown to be an utter fallacy. Investors systematically ignored huge long-term risks, with catastrophic consequences.

Maybe the economists should hang out more with their colleagues over at psychology and organisational behaviour, where researchers have been investigating and documenting flawed decision-making for decades.

For the psychologist or sociologist, a human decision-maker still acts to minimise costs and maximise benefits (or to avoid pain and seek pleasure). But their assessment of those costs and benefits is likely to be hopelessly inaccurate, biased or incomplete.

All this is good news for the copywriter, because these decision-making biases can be exploited in order to nudge a reader towards a buying decision – even though the purchase may not benefit them in any rational or quantifiable way. This post outlines a few of the most common biases that affect our decisions, and how they can be exploited.

Bigness bias

Bigness bias is the tendency to discount relatively small amounts that are measured against much larger amounts. For example, you might regard £1000 as a lot of money to pay for a suit. But to secure a house you really wanted, you wouldn’t hesitate to increase your offer by £1000 – or even £10,000. Context is everything. For example:

For just 1% of what you take home each month, you can protect every penny you earn from the threat of serious illness or redundancy.

Distinction bias

Viewing options in conjunction makes them seem more different than when they are viewed in isolation. Exploit this by juxtaposing the promoted offering with an alternative option and emphasising some distinction between them. For example:

The EconoHeat offers four different ways to programme your heating – most controllers have just three.

The money illusion

We tend to focus on the face value of money rather than its actual purchasing power. That’s why a £10 cashback offer is so appealing – it’s free money! – whereas a voucher worth £10 is less powerful, and a free saucepan worth £10 even less so (even if we need one). Exploit this bias by quoting as many cash amounts as you possibly can when savings or reductions are concerned (i.e. talk in pounds or dollars, not percentages or fractions).

Reactance

Reactance is the urge to do the opposite of what you’re told. (As the parent of a three-year-old, I can confirm this from extensive field research.)

Right-wingers in the US often harness reactance by suggesting that a ‘liberal mafia’ is destroying America; by doing so, they position voting for the profoundly conservative Republicans as some sort of rebellion.

Apple did something similar with its 1984 and Think Different campaigns, encouraging computer buyers to resist the domination of IBM. Reactance favours new market entrants, minority choices and fringe players, who can turn their underdog status into a virtue in their marketing by inciting customers to rebel against the established order.

Neglect of probability

Human beings are awful at estimating and comparing probabilities. That’s why millions play the Lottery, even though the chance of winning (the ‘positive expected value’, in risk terminology) is infinitesimal. (Premium Bonds are a much better bet.)

This is great news if you’re selling the chance to be, do or acquire something – simply emphasise a desirable upside and people will wildly overestimate their chances of success.

Apply for our copywriting course today and you could be earning big money from home in under two months.

Every new applicant gets the chance to win a fabulous city break for two in Prague.

Déformation professionnelle

Déformation professionnelle is the tendency to view things through the lens of one’s own professional skills or culture. You can exploit it when writing for trade magazines or niche websites – since no-one else is reading, go ahead and trot out the jargon, prejudices and petty concerns that your audience love, and generate instant rapport. (Obviously, you need to be able to do this convincingly, and sound like an ‘insider’, or it will backfire badly.)

Bandwagon theory

This is the tendency to jump on the bandwagon and do what others are doing. I’ve already covered it in my piece on social proof.

Illusion of control

We believe that we can control, or at least influence, outcomes that we clearly cannot. Most superstitions are rooted in this belief, but more ‘sophisticated’ systems of thought such as technical analysis (using charts to predict share price movements) are arguably manifestations of the same thing.

Many distress purchases appeal to the illusion of control. Insurance, for example, is often predicated on the idea that the dark, chaotic world out there can be kept at bay for an affordable monthly payment. Some cosmetic treatments also encourage us to change things that, deep down, we know we can’t.

When we use metaphors (or similes), we compare one thing to another so we can understand or explain it better. We do this to explain it, to understand it or sometimes just to make our language more colourful.

Life’s but a shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.

Here, the core of the metaphor is the equation ‘life=theatre’, with the secondary meaning ‘people=actors’. In these lines, Shakespeare is explicitly saying that our lives are as brief and futile as a play – a meaningless shadow rather than anything real. Implicitly, he’s also saying that we have little control over our destinies, like actors whose lines are written down for them. Once the parallel is drawn, a metaphor opens up a range of ways to think about something in a new way.

Metaphors in NLP

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) takes language seriously, acknowledging that it shapes the way we think. NLP practitioners pay close attention to the words people choose. By really listening to what people say, we can learn about the way they see themselves or the world.

To an NLP practitioner, metaphors are interesting because of their limits. They illuminate some truths while obscuring others; in NLP terminology, there are things they ‘allow’ and things they ‘disallow’.

For example, we might say that a trusted friend is ‘a rock’. Obviously, there are lots of unintended literal meanings: our friend probably isn’t thousands of years old, rough to the touch or permanently rooted to the spot. When we liken them to a rock, we’re saying that they’re solid and reliable.

However, they are human, so their moods and opinions change. Since rocks don’t change, our metaphor obscures this aspect of their personality, locking them into an idea of stolidity that may be limiting (for us, or for them). This highlights the importance of ‘stepping out’ of metaphors when they are no longer useful.

Liquid engineering

Over 35? This might take you back a bit (click to watch the advert)

A good example of a strong metaphor in copywriting is the slogan used for Castrol GTX in the 1980s: ‘liquid engineering’. In just two words, it transformed an everyday, almost commodity product into something essential and sophisticated.

Copywriting metaphors like this derive their power from two sources: imagery and emotion. In general, people find it easy to grasp concrete images, and harder to understand abstract concepts. Moreover, they respond more strongly when their hearts are appealed to, rather than just their minds. ‘Liquid engineering’ equates Castrol’s oil (an inanimate object) with attentive, skilful human engineers, suggesting that it provides a similar level of care, while appealing to the customer’s desire to care for their engine and safeguard their investment.

Leaky umbrella

Castrol’s metaphor was apposite, elegant and memorable – a brilliant piece of copywriting. But it’s very easy to get drawn into using a metaphor for its own sake, or pressing one into service that isn’t quite suited to the job at hand. The following is the text of a magazine advert currently being used by a leading UK insurer:

Would you buy an umbrella, if it didn’t keep you dry?
Neither would we. So why should you pay for an insurance policy that won’t keep you properly covered? Unlike 8 out of 10 standard home insurance policies we include cover for your belongings if they are accidentally damaged or lost – as standard.

The text is accompanied by a picture of an umbrella, highlighting one of the key benefits of metaphors in marketing – they give you a handy hook to hang your imagery on when none is otherwise available. (Services are often hard to depict – it’s even worse in B2B marketing.)

Although ‘insurance=umbrella’ seems promising as a metaphor (if unoriginal), here it actually muddies the meaning rather than clarifying it. Have you ever had, or bought, an umbrella that didn’t keep you dry? How would you know that an umbrella wouldn’t keep you dry, before you bought it?

The umbrella is an everyday item, but the situation described is artificial and not one that readers will immediately recognise from their lives. As a result, the metaphor won’t have the sensual, concrete force that drives emotional impact.

Stop clevering off

Instead of providing a useful stepping-stone between something familiar and a new concept, the headline metaphor in this example is adding a cognitive barrier between reader and benefit – and therefore putting obstacles in the way of a sale. The headline is literally a riddle, and if you ask your reader to solve riddles you run the risk of them simply walking away.

Since the core benefit is easy enough to understand for anyone who’s ever bought home insurance (which is almost everybody), a better headline might be:

With [Insurer], cover for damage and loss come as standard.

Or, for a bit more spice:

What’s extra for others is standard for us: damage and loss cover included with every home insurance policy.

Of course, you wouldn’t be able to include a nice picture of an umbrella, but you would have a headline that would actually generate interest.

It’s well known that headlines with benefits outpull those without. So if you’ve got a benefit that’s easy to communicate, it should always lead your copy. If you want to connect with readers, resist the tendency for what my granny used to call ‘clevering off’.

Making metaphors work

Here are a few pointers for making metaphors work in copywriting.

• Use sparingly. Only use metaphors when they’re needed: to clarify points that would otherwise be difficult to explain or understand, to communicate a benefit or to add emotional or persuasive impact. Don’t use them for their own sake. 
• Choose carefully. The right comparison can illuminate a key point like a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds. But the wrong one can quickly lead you into deep water. Be sure your metaphor is appropriate.
• Dig deeper. Sometimes, metaphors have layers of meaning that you might not want. Consider what your metaphor really says about the product, service or company you’re promoting.
• Less is more. Metaphors are like tissues. At the moment you need them, they’re indispensable. But if you try to get too much use out of them, as I’m doing here, you’ll end up in a mess. In other words, most metaphors support just one or two strong points; after that, they should be dropped.
• Don’t mix it up. ‘Let’s run that idea up the flagpole and see if it holds water.’ ‘We weren’t on the same page because they were dancing to a different beat.’ Adding metaphors together doesn’t concentrate meaning; it dilutes it. Give your metaphors room to breathe, so your reader can absorb each one fully before you hit them with the next. If they’re too close, or if they overlap, the result is ludicrous. 

In my recent post on Copify and content mills, I suggested that the current vogue for pumping out reams of low-grade content in order to generate backlinks and/or attract natural traffic could not last. In this post, I’d like to expand further on that point, focusing on the issues facing natural search right now and what the future might hold.

The elephant in the room

Thank heavens we fitted that laminate flooring

An ‘elephant in the room’ is an inconvenient but hugely significant truth that no one wants to acknowledge. For SEO right now, that elephant is the unsustainability of current search-marketing practices.

The truth is that the long-term viability of the whole search paradigm (site publishes, user searches, user finds) simply isn’t served by the things many search marketers do: article marketing, online PR and ‘SEO fodder’.

While the music plays, we’re still dancing

All these tactics do is soak up resources to deliver a temporary advantage that a competitor can easily reverse by pursuing exactly the same strategy (even using almost identical content). On the downside, they clog up the internet with spam, degrade the internet experience and make it ever harder for the ‘proper’ search experience to take place. It’s a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.

The parallels with the financial crisis are striking. Far from ‘sleepwalking into disaster’, many senior financiers were fully aware that their business practices would be damaging over the long term – but the short-term profits were just too attractive to ignore. ‘When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated,’ said Chuck Prince, Citibank CEO, in 2007. ‘But as long as the music is playing, you got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.’

Indefinite articles

Search marketers would certainly leave the dancefloor quick smart if Google’s search algorithm reduced the weight attached to content published at article and online PR sites.

It’s been a long time since Google respected paid links. Yet a link from Ezine Articles or another article site is effectively a paid link – but purchased with content rather than cash. You give Ezine some content, you get a backlink. It’s a transaction. For PR sites, submission fees for the sites that can deliver the most backlinks make the nature of the deal even more explicit.

Online directories with submission fees are doing a similar thing. But the nature of the relationship between client and site is much clearer – plus you can only have one backlink from each directory, not keep plugging away indefinitely.

Since Google respects article and PR links, it’s simply a case of putting in the hours to create adequate content and ‘spinning’ it across as many sites as you dare.

Yes, there are quality standards, but they’re not particularly exacting. The sanity check is ‘value for users’. Give me ten minutes and I’ll find you ten articles – on almost any subject – that add no value because they are corporate puff, embarrassingly basic or near-duplicates of other articles.

The other main way of ‘gaming’ Google is by creating banks of SEO fodder: big chunks of content that is nominally relevant but actually not that valuable to users. Since Google can’t gauge the human value of content (yet), it sees this as worthy content and often ranks it quite highly.

The cynicism of all this is well known by anyone with the slightest acquaintance with search marketing. Yet we’re still recommending it to our clients – because as long as Google works as it does, it gets results.

But that could change. We’re unlikely to see existing article links deprecated, but it seems inevitable that new links will be gradually downgraded until they’re weighted appropriately. SEO fodder represents a tougher challenge for Google.

Dark satanic mills

To sate the voracious content appetites of article, PR and SEO marketers, we’re now seeing the advent and growth of so-called ‘content mills’ or ‘word factories’, which offer a highly cost-effective way to obtain large quantities of (allegedly) optimised text. Clients pay by the word, and obtain ready-made web content that they can use for their SEO campaigns. I’ve covered the drawbacks for clients here so I won’t repeat myself.

This AdWeek article argues that content mills are one of the key growth areas in digital marketing for 2010. Maybe so, but it’s going to be a case of making hay while the sun shines. Competition will force low prices even lower, while a game-changing new Google algorithm that reduces the efficacy of content spam will result either in fewer customers (why bother?) or lower prices again (why overpay for weak links?).

Eating sawdust

As a result of all this, the internet is filling up with unreadable rubbish, damaging the searching and browsing experience for us all, as this post vividly argues. Even the AdWeek article referenced above acknowledges the point:

‘The question for 2010 is whether this automation and data-driven approach will lead to a flowering of useful information or more detritus clogging search results with low-grade, ad-heavy Web pages.’

That is indeed the question for 2010. And my money’s on the detritus, because web publishers do not presently see any value or profit in providing truly useful information – and search marketers are doing little to persuade them otherwise. 

Some observers (such as Carson Brackney in this post) argue that there’s a place for lower-quality writing, and that web users aren’t as fussy or demanding as self-regarding copywriters would like them to be. Often, a food analogy is used: sometimes you like steak, but other times a burger will do.

For me, this is disingenuous. SEO pages are created purely for search purposes, with no thought of providing any value to the reader. SEO content differs from ‘proper’ web content not by degree, but by nature: it’s not a cut-price equivalent, but a completely different animal. Again, honest search marketers will admit this.

Reading SEO spam is more like eating sawdust than munching a burger: it will fill you up, but there is literally no enjoyment or nutrition to be gained from it – because it was never intended for human consumption.

Who could argue, with a straight face, that anyone is going to get anything out of an article like this? And more to the point, do the search benefits for the firm involved really outweigh the reputational damage of having this sort of rubbish associated with their brand?

Semantic search

So the webwaves are choked with SEO flotsam and jetsam. Somehow, search has to get more sophisticated, to filter out the rubbish – or users will lose faith. And Google, though a mighty corporation, ultimately depends on users’ faith in the accuracy and usefulness of its results.

One option is a form of semantic search, where Google actually comprehends the meaning of content rather than simply analysing it with metrics such as keyword density. This could be applied to website content or backlinking pages. However, at present, it’s a long way off.

There are tools (such as this one for Twitter) that attempt to bring a basic level of semantic search to social media. However, as you’ll quickly discover if you give it a go, there’s more to analysing the emotions of a piece of writing than categorising particular trigger words into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. We have a long way to go before machines understand that ‘good riddance’ is a negative sentiment and ‘killer post’ a positive one.

Social search

Another option for improving search is some kind of link-up with social media – seemingly a ready-made source of user opinion that could be used to shape search results. All Google has to do is find a way of mining the goodwill being expressed at SM sites every day. Instead of viewing backlinks as ‘votes’ on the quality of online content, it can use SM sentiment as a measure of what people think of a site or page.

Retweets are a good example of a ‘goodwill meter’. Although they could theoretically be paid for, RTs are one of the purest online votes of confidence there is. If my article gets tweeted, a human being thinks it’s valuable. Google already uses Digg links as a measure of popularity, so this seems like a natural next step.

Efficient refinery

One way of proactively digging out better results is by refining your search criteria, narrowing your focus down to filter out some of the rubbish. At present, it’s incumbent on the user themselves to try and refine their search by adding additional keywords or trying new ones.

Google knows that it has to guide users towards finer searches one way or another, but the lack of prominence it gives to its ‘related searches’ and ‘wonder wheel’ suggests that it only half-believes in them. It might have to do more in the future to develop tools that allow rapid, intuitive refining of results, including (perhaps) one-click filters to eliminate blog, article and PR postings.

Wait and see

Whatever the future brings, it’s going to be fascinating. Google’s success depends on providing useful, unspammy search results, so we can be sure that some sort of change will come. And whatever it is, it’s surely going to change the face of search marketing completely over the next five years.

Yesterday, I was approached by startup content mill Copify and invited to register as a copywriter. I decided not to, since the rates being offered (2p–4p per word) didn’t really stack up for someone with my experience (15 years).

Out of interest, I sought the opinions of my copywriter friends on Twitter, including @Mr603, @turnerink, @NoSloppyCopy, @shelovestowrite, @PenHire, @sarahcopywriter and others. Turned out a heated debate was already raging, with copywriters’ opinions ranging from the doubtful to the derisive, and many focusing on the fees.

Of course, we can’t really argue that any price agreed in a free market is ‘too low’ or ‘too high’. If both parties agree to make a deal, a deal is made. However, we can question whether the transaction represents good value – for buyer as well as seller.

I have no axe to grind with Copify or the other (mainly US) content mills out there, such as Examiner, Suite101, Associated Content, eHow, and DemandStudio. They’ve seen a gap in the market and they’re filling it. Good luck to them. However, I feel I should point out exactly what copywriting clients won’t be getting when they go down this road…

1.    Ability. Sounds painfully obvious, but there’s such a thing as writing skill, and people have varying levels of it. If you’re a UK white-collar professional using a content mill, you could be delegating your copywriting to someone with abilities only as good as (or worse than) your own. So what have you really gained?

2.    Experience. 2p a word does not stretch to a seasoned copywriter. But why should you pay for experience? All I can say is that the ‘broad but shallow’ knowledge picked up during my career has served my clients very well. Ideas from clients in other industries. Print techniques that work online, and vice versa. Ideas on ecommerce, SEO, social media and more. Ideas on improving value propositions. Ways to save time – and money. It all adds up – and you get a professional manner, calm demeanour and sense of humour thrown in.

3.    The right price. If you need to spend more, you should spend it. If my plasterer discovers rising damp, I want him to tell me, not just cover it up. Let’s say I’m working on a fixed-price job for a content mill. The client has directed me towards out-of-date sources. Halfway through, I realise this, but have no incentive to raise it since there’s no way to renegotiate the fee. So I just cut and run, having fulfilled the letter of the contract. The content is inaccurate, and some valuable learning is lost.

4.    Enough time. Closely allied to cost is the need for adequate time. Many copywriting projects throw up unforeseen issues. ‘The subject is more complicated than we thought.’ ‘There’s more to say.’ ‘Our structure needs work.’ ‘We need to rethink terminology.’ ‘Our industry jargon won’t work for SEO.’ ‘We’ve identified a new market segment.’ The professional copywriter works with the client to address these problems – with a time implication, yes, but what’s the point in rushing to the wrong destination?

5.    Reassurance. So you’ve chosen to use a content mill. Presumably you’re completely confident about factual accuracy, grammar and spelling, copyright and fair use, trade marks, US/UK language conventions, Google penalties, duplicate content and the legal implications of publication. If not, why not work with a professional whose reputation is on the line with every single job?

6.    Flexibility. Inspired by The E-Myth Revisited, I once dreamt of creating a one-size-fits-all ‘system’ for handling writing and design projects. I soon gave up. No one needed it, or wanted it. Marketing should be a bespoke suit, not a T-shirt from Asda. Savvy clients appreciate that service and expertise pay for themselves.

7.    Rapport. Clients who tender copywriting job by job never realise the benefits of working long-term with a copywriter who truly understands them. For them, every step is the first – every piece slightly off the mark, lacking sparkle, bringing nothing extra. They’ll never feel the thrill of receiving text from their regular copywriter that absolutely nails everything they wanted to say, and more – first time. (For a regular client, I recently wrote the president’s introduction to a brochure with no brief. He approved it without change.)

8.    Creativity. The fixed-price deal actively discourages discussion, consideration and indeed active thought. The copywriter’s only hope is to bang that copy out quickly and pray she doesn’t get RSI. She certainly has absolutely no incentive to put forward anything creative, inventive or alternative, even if it could help the client. The risk is just too great that it will be rejected – leading to a rewrite, obliterated profits and aching wrists.

9.    Intelligent SEO. Even basic SEO copywriting is an art – hitting keyword density targets for multiple terms without grammar and sense collapsing completely. But competent SEO copywriters take it to the next level, offering content that actually appeals to humans too. In other words, a landing page that isn’t a bouncing page.

10. Motivation. When prospects ask what I’d charge for ‘an hour’s graft writing fresh copy’ (a genuine quote), they are perhaps puzzled as to why their enquiry fails to excite my interest. The reason is that I prefer to strike a civilised, mutually beneficial deal in an atmosphere of respect, friendship and dignity. With that in place, I’m motivated to give my very best to the project. Without it, you’ll get ‘good enough’, but no more.  

Now, the most likely objection to all this is that it’s completely irrelevant to article marketing, or the creation of banks of SEO pages. I beg to differ. For articles posted at Ezine Articles and similar sites, your best chances of republication (propagating backlinks across multiple domains) come with a compelling, high-quality article. Better to have one killer piece than five embarrassing duds. And for SEO, as I’ve argued, you need your landing pages to convert the reader, not just attract traffic.

I also feel there’s a big cloud hanging over the in-vogue strategy of gaming the search engines by posting huge amounts of nominally relevant content, hoping to boost link velocity and backlink numbers. Google’s business model depends on search results that are relevant and deliver genuine value to users. Historically, it’s never failed to weed out any attempt to reduce quality to a formula, or mere gruntwork. Would you bet against it now?

Weasel words are used to plant an idea in readers’ minds that is bigger than the actual claim being made. Working from vague, indeterminate facts (or no facts at all), you can generate perceptions that may be completely at odds with reality, without making a definite, absolute or concrete claim that could be open to challenge. 

But should you do it? I’ve already made clear my own views on honesty in marketing. But needs must when the devil dances. Whether you use these techniques is up to you!

‘Help to’

In conjunction with ‘can’ (see below), ‘help to’ positions your product or service as part of the solution to a problem without taking sole credit. For example:

Crunchaflakes can help to reduce weight as part of a calorie-controlled diet

Of course they can. Any food can. With the calorie-controlled approach, it’s simply a question of adding up the calories and keeping below a set target. The claim is very carefully delineated and hedged about, and is neither distinctive nor remarkable. But it lodges the idea of weight loss in the reader’s mind.

‘Can’ and ‘could’

Use ‘can’ and ‘could’ for indefinite claims that you want to sound definite. For example:

While traditional fan heaters have an average lifetime of 10–15 years, the RoomHeater 32 can keep on pumping out heat for decades.

Indeed it can, if used relatively sparingly. If used incessantly, its lifetime would be much shorter. Caveat emptor!

Hundreds and thousands

Look again at the example above. What period does ‘decades’ actually denote? Dunno, but it sounds like ages – just as words like ‘dozens’, ‘hundreds’ and ‘thousands’ sound like big quantities.

Strictly speaking, 101 is ‘hundreds’ – it’s 1.01 hundreds, which is more than one and therefore plural. If you’re uncomfortable with that, stick to 200 and above, which is definitely more than one hundred. ‘Hundreds’ sounds bigger than ‘217’.

Willy was weary of being regarded as devious, purely on the basis of his species

Fractions

Closely related is the word ‘fraction’, as in ‘now available at a fraction of the original price’. 99/100ths is a fraction, but your audience will think of the ones they learned at school, like 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4, which will make them think you’re offering a huge discount.

Relative improvement

Whiter teeth. Improved search engine rankings. Increased sales. Shinier hair. Whatever it is you’re offering to do, make it relative and unquantified, not absolute and specific. That way, even the tiniest improvement fulfils the promise.

Yes, of course my copywriting will increase your sales. I guarantee it. By up to 50%.

‘Up to’

‘Up to’ or ‘as much as’ are used when you want to quote a numerical or statistical claim, but can only substantiate it within a certain range.

For example, you might be marketing a service that gets people tax rebates. Let’s say that on average, people get rebates of around 10% of their bills, but some have received 50%. Instead of quoting the average, or the range, you can say ‘customers have received rebates of up to 50%’.

All you’re really saying is that the rebate is in the range 0%–50%, but it’s the upper number that will stick in people’s minds. Very few will infer the corollary, which is ‘some customers got nothing’.

Note that the ‘up to’ number must be honest: it may be unusual or exceptional, but it must be achievable.

‘Over’ and ‘more than’

Closely related to ‘up to’, ‘over’ and ‘more than’ make numbers sound larger than they are. For example, ‘over 50%’ sounds bigger than ‘51%’. When given a vague numerical range, people tend to overestimate. (If you want them to underestimate, use ‘under’ or ‘less than’.)

Watch out for using both ‘up to’ and ‘more’ together, which results in nonsense:

Save up to £50 or more!

Here, the £50 is neither a minimum or a maximum, just an arbitrary point in a completely undefined range. Although the audience may latch on to the £50, blurring the meaning twice means more confusion rather than more impact.

‘As much as’ and ‘as little as’

For a rhetorical twist, use ‘as much as’ or ‘as little as’ to imply that the figure you’re quoting is particularly high or low. For example:

The iPhone is now available for as little as £35 per month.

This suggests that £35 is low, but with no frame of reference to substantiate the claim.

Reported beliefs

Tom Albrighton is now regarded as the best copywriter in the UK.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? But who’s doing the regarding? Charles Saatchi, or my mum?

The use of the passive case, which omits the subject of the verb, allows you to say something is being done without specifying who’s doing it. With verbs such as ‘thought’ or ‘believed’, you can put out a claim that may be completely unsubstantiated, simply by saying that someone thinks it’s true.

You can also use abstract nouns such as ‘concerns’ (usually ‘growing’), ‘speculation’ (often ‘intense’ due to being ‘fuelled’) or ‘allegation’ (probably ‘fresh’) to generate a sense that something’s cooking without naming the chef.

This ploy is very commonly used in political journalism, often to report an ‘off the record’ sentiment from a genuine source. A typical sentence might begin ‘Critics of the Prime Minister now believe…’.

Consider the following quote from this Guardian story, which brings all the techniques together in one sentence:

The disclosures will fuel growing concern that the prince is continuing to interfere in political matters when many believe he should remain neutral if he wishes to become king.

Who is concerned, and why will the disclosures fuel their concerns? Who are the ‘many’ who believe Charles should remain neutral? What is the factual basis for saying that he might not succeed to the throne, or that his succession is conditional on his behaviour? What, actually, is being said here?

Nothing. But it sounds good. 

Rhetorical reinforcement

Use words such as ‘clearly’, ‘surely’, ‘self-evidently’ to make a premise sound like a conclusion. These rhetorical words add weight to a statement that may have no basis in fact.

Surely the recession is now drawing to a close?

It may be, or it may not – you haven’t actually said either way, but readers will think you have.

Unprovable superlatives

The CDs entitled ‘The best rock album in the world… ever!’ and similar highlighted the useful fact that superlatives are unprovable.

Suppose you start describing your firm as a ‘leading local widget maker’. Are you including firms who make other things as well as widgets? Or just widget specialists? Or just local widget specialists?

What’s more, how do you define ‘leading’? Do you sell most widgets? Make most money from widgets? Or just make the best widgets? Or are you just one of the best at making widgets? It really doesn’t matter, because the only thing readers will remember is ‘leading’. They won’t be querying your definition.

If you’re still unsure about your claim, dilute it with ‘regarded as’ or something similar, or position yourself as ‘one of the leading…’. Does that mean one of the top 10? The top 100? The top 1000?

Or you could copy Carlsberg, whose addition of ‘probably’ to ‘the best lager in the world’ allowed them to float the most outrageous marketing claim of all (‘best in world’) without actually making it.

What is a call to action?

A call to action is a short piece of text (usually one or two sentences) in an advertisement or marketing communication that encourages the reader to take a particular course of action – buy, donate, make contact and so on.

Calls to action guide the audience towards a real-world action, so they don’t turn the page, click through to another site or just carry on browsing your material aimlessly. They set a boundary on readers’ ‘information gathering’ experience, encouraging them to move into the ‘doing’ phase.

The call to action is one of the most important ‘take-aways’ for the audience. If there’s one thing the copywriter wants the audience to read and internalise (after the headline), it’s the call to action.

Where are calls to action used?

Calls to action should be included in almost every piece of marketing, whether focused at businesses or consumers. Examples of where they might appear are:

• In brochures: on the back page, or interspersed within the text
• On websites: on every ‘selling’ page, and perhaps also on a ‘contact us’ page (possibly not on ‘more information’ pages)
• In direct mail sales letters or marketing emails: towards the end, before the sign-off, and perhaps repeated in a P.S.

Often, a call to action will be highlighted by being boxed out, emboldened or otherwise ‘biggened up’.

Calls to action are not used in pure ‘brand-building’ marketing, where the only aim is to make the audience remember the brand.

Define your desired customer response

Before you can create a call to action, you must know your desired customer response (DCR). What do you want the reader to do once they’ve read your message? Whatever your DCR is, it should be all of the following:

• Clear. A ten-year-old should be able to understand what you’re asking them to do.
• Simple. A DCR should consist of a single step. You may want people to go to a website and buy, but the first step is just to get them there – it’s the website’s job to convert traffic to sales.
• Specific. A DCR should make it clear exactly what the audience should do, in concrete terms: fill out a form, visit a shop, make a phone call, go to a website and so on.

Create a basic call to action

At its simplest, a call to action is a single sentence that tells the reader to do something, using the imperative tense:

Call us now to claim your FREE sample copy of Lawnmower World.

Note the key characteristics of the basic call to action:

• It communicates the DCR, preserving its three key attributes (clear, simple and specific).
• It links the DCR with a benefit for the reader (in this case, a free magazine). This is essential. A call to action offers a quid pro quo. ‘If you do this,’ we’re saying to the reader, ‘you’ll get that.’ The benefit need not be concrete, but there must be something in it for the customer, even if it’s only useful information on a product.
• It commands the reader directly, with no equivocation. The impact can be softened with ‘please’, but this is rarely necessary. People generally avoid the imperative in conversation, but commands aren’t always confrontational and may often be welcomed or reassuring. (For example: ‘Sit down, have a coffee and let me take care of it.’)
• It tells the reader when to act (‘now’) instead of leaving the timeframe open-ended.

The simple ‘sanity check’ for calls to action is to read them through and ask yourself whether you’d be happy if the reader did exactly what you’re asking, no more and no less.

It’s OK to vary the content of your call to action (for example, to add variety if it appears on more than one page in your site), but the message (i.e. the underlying DCR) should always be the same.

Add the power of persuasion

Sometimes, it’s not enough just to tell people what to do. They need to know why they should do it. To address this need, you can use principles of persuasion to add more power to your call to action.

There are a number of proven ways to persuade readers to act, which I’ve covered elsewhere, so here are some examples with links through to posts that will explain the persuasive principle that drives them. 

Thousands of businesses have already unlocked huge productivity gains by switching to BookKeeper. Call us to discover how you could join them. (Social proof: do as others are doing.)

Are you tired of scrubbing off limescale? Pick up a FREE trial pack of ScaleAway at your local store and say goodbye to it for ever. (Consistency: taking the desired action is consistent with the response to the question being asked.)

We all know how hard it is to find presents that friends and family will really love. So make Christmas easier this year at greatgifts.com. (Liking: alluding to a rapport or shared interest with the reader.)

Doctors recommend eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Call today to order your regular organic box from Willow Farm and make sure you have delicious fresh produce ready to eat, every day. (Authority: the opinion of a reputable source supports the DCR.)

Embedded commands

In NLP, embedded commands are sentences embedded within longer sentences that act as cues on the unconscious level. In theory, they direct the reader towards the DCR by subliminally planting an idea in their mind.

The great thing about embedded commands is that they can be scattered throughout the text without interrupting the flow or irritating the reader (if you have a good enough copywriter, that is).

Here are a few examples, with the embedded command in bold:

When you choose our service, you’re tapping into decades of expertise.

How good would it feel to book a short break right now?

You can call our order hotline 7 days a week.

Think about the benefits that will be realised for your business when you work with a professional accountant.

Most customers who buy in bulk from us make big savings.

You don’t even need to visit your nearest branch – we’re also available online and by phone.

It won’t always be possible to include the DCR explicitly in an embedded command. Instead, the embedded commands can ‘soften up’ the reader by gently introducing the general theme of the DCR, before you hit them with the direct call to action at the end.

The other day, I asked the Twitterverse its opinion on a particuarly hackneyed phrase I was considering using in a copywriting assignment. Predictably, the reaction was equivocal. I felt unsure myself. And yet I submitted the text with the phrase intact. (The client didn’t complain.)

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.

‘Do you need a wee?’ I wonder how many times I’ve asked my little daughter that question. If only I was given a penny every time she stubbornly refuses to spend one.

And, in a different sense, many of my freelance, sole-trader or consultant clients face the same question: when to go for a ‘we’ and when ‘I’ is sufficient. In other words, they have to decide whether to position their one-person enterprises as companies (‘we’) or as individuals (‘I’) in their marketing communications.

Yes, behind the façade, ABC is just one man

There’s plenty of precedent for individuals speaking in the first person plural. In the days of the divine right of kings, sovereigns adopted the ‘royal we’ as an indication that they spoke on behalf of a nation, or as both of the ‘king’s two bodies’ (the notional ‘body politic’ and the physical ‘body natural’). The tradition continues today. In publishing, the ‘editorial we’ is affected by individuals opining on behalf of a newspaper, as opposed to expounding their own personal views.

Both these examples show that using ‘we’ puts distance between the authorial voice and the individual writer or speaker, while ‘I’ positions the author as a single person and nothing more. ‘We’ is used when a conceptual entity such as a company, newspaper or nation state is ‘speaking’, while ‘I’ denotes that we are listening to an individual.

So, which is right for your one-person business? It all depends on your own personality, how you plan to do business what you feel comfortable about in terms of marketing and promotion.

If you’ve got a catchy or memorable name (unlike me), there’s a case for trading under it. And if you feel comfortable building up brand equity in that name through self-promotion, networking and personal exposure (again, unlike me), then it probably makes most sense to use your own name. If you choose this path, you should speak as ‘I’.

On the other hand, if you want to distance or differentiate yourself from your work, and/or give the impression that your business is larger than it is, you’ll want to position yourself as a company and choose a non-personal name for it. This is the road I went down – as I’ve blogged elsewhere, I find freelancing much easier to handle with a clear division between ‘me’ and ‘my work’. Although ‘ABC Copywriting’ is nothing more than a legal/financial ‘wrapper’ around the work I do, I still find it easier to make decisions for the good of ‘the company’ rather than myself as an individual.

The half-way house would be to use your own name in conjunction with ‘associates’ or ‘company’ – positioning yourself as a firm, but making it clear that you’re the principal. Here you can use either ‘I’ or ‘we’ – but it’s probably worth choosing one or the other and using it consistently.

The issue is definitely worth thinking about, because there’s a risk of mixed messages. If you speak as ‘I’ under a company banner, who is speaking? An individual on their own behalf, or a director on behalf of the firm? Should we expect personal opinion, or company line? Equally, if you use ‘we’ when you position yourself as a person, it begs the question of who else is involved in your enterprise.

Once, I commissioned freelances. Then, in a Sméagol-to-Gollum style transformation, I got made redundant and had to scrape together a living in the hand-to-mouth, twilight scavenger world of the freelance copywriter. I could have been a contender. But more to the point, here are the top ten things I’ve learned in five years as a wandering content-ronin.

1.    Believe in abundance. If you’re short of work, it’s easy to fall into anxiety. Instead of focusing on scarcity, switch your attention to the many opportunities around – online, in your local area, around the world. If local competitors spring up, that’s great – it means there’s work around! We get what we expect in life, so start expecting that opportunities – and cash money – will be coming your way.

2.    Hold on tightly, let go lightly. In other words, focus on the copywriting jobs you get, not the ones you don’t. It doesn’t matter why your quote wasn’t chosen, or why that client stopped using you. What matters is serving the clients you have today.

3.    Accept blame. In fact, actively seek out blame. If things go wrong, claim responsibility, even if it’s not your mistake. Failures of communication, missed deadlines – whatever. Blame rarely sticks to those outside an organisation, but your contact or client will be flattered at the implication that they’ve done nothing wrong.

If some copywriting work didn't come in soon, he might have to consider becoming a social-media guru

4.    Pricing is a game without rules. I don’t mean ‘rip off your clients’. I mean that people’s expectations on price vary so wildly that it’s almost impossible to find a consistent approach. Get used to pricing job by job. If the client proposes a price, be thankful you don’t have to. Love clients who will negotiate instead of never contacting you again if your price doesn’t stack up.

5.    Networking takes time. With social media, anyone can rustle up a big network in weeks. Unfortunately, its power to deliver freelance copywriting work will be limited. What actually works is referrals from friend to friend, and they happen when your contacts’ contacts realise they need a copywriter – which can take years. But as long as you keep meeting expectations, referrals will come. 

6.    Learn to listen. Forget impressing the client. Learn to listen, not speak. First and foremost, you’ll do better work because you’ll learn more. On a human level, people love the chance to chat with an impartial outsider – so give them it. It’s a big part of the value you offer.

7.    Cultivate detachment. I’ve found I can handle freelance copywriting much better if I’m not emotionally involved. I try not to get excited about new opportunities so I’m not disappointed when they don’t pan out. I don’t pat myself on the back for a good month, in case the next one is awful. Becoming a company is a good way to create distance between you and your work, and worthwhile for this reason alone.

8.    Don’t flatter yourself. Clients do not spend that much time thinking about you and your copywriting, so don’t waste time and effort over-thinking about what they might want, or what a particular reaction (or lack of reaction) might mean. They have a job that needs doing, and you’re a tool to get it done – end of story.

9.    Under-promise and over-deliver. Tell the client the worst-case timescale, then beat it by four or five days. Maybe even reduce your price because you did the work quickly. Sounds like a cheap trick? Believe me, your customers will have dealt with too many flaky suppliers to feel that way. They will absolutely love it.

10. Be in the moment. Because the future is always uncertain for freelance copywriters, some worry is always present. Try to let go of it and enjoy the work you’ve got today. Remember, no-one really has any security in today’s working world, so let tomorrow take care of itself.

When discussing copywriting assignments with my clients, I sometimes feel obliged to point out that whatever I write about their business should be true.

It’s not that they’re asking me to tell outright lies. It’s more a desire to be over-optimistic or economical with the truth in areas such as the scope or depth of their services, the size of the business or the nature of their approach. The urge to ‘big up’ the offering is powerful.

Many small marketing firms fall prey to this temptation, anxious to position themselves as ‘full-service’ agencies instead of playing to their unique (albeit narrow) strengths. I have also worked with many sole traders who wanted to position themselves as companies (in fact, I do it myself).

Paradoxical Pinocchio

Since words can carry so many shades of meaning, it’s easy enough for the copywriter to bend or stretch the truth without overstepping the mark. Trusty stalwarts like ‘leading’, ‘extensive’, ‘premium’, ‘consultative’ and so on can make any firm sound fantastic without really making any concrete claim at all. But should we always do this, just because we can?

NLP teaches us that in order to communicate effectively on a personal level, we have to be congruent: our words, looks and gestures should all tell the same story. A job candidate who claims to be confident but can’t make eye contact is not congruent; nor is a consultant who can’t stop talking about himself.

It’s easy to see how this principle can be extended to businesses as well as individuals. In terms of marketing, your design, branding and copywriting all need to be ‘on brand’ – expressing a consistent message. But promises are easy to make and words are cheap; problems arise when the message doesn’t match reality.

Customers aren’t stupid, and they know when they’re being lied to. Will the marketing claim be justified by their experience? And if it isn’t, what will be the long-term effects on the relationship, or the firm’s reputation?

In the case of the small marketing firms and sole traders mentioned above, the illusion is often shattered in the very first phone call. So was it even worth creating it in the first place? Does putting up a front bring us closer to our customers, or just build a wall between us?

I once saw a memorable talk by brand guru BJ Cunningham, creator of Death cigarettes (’the honest smoke’). He spoke of his consulting work for an insurance firm called Pinnacle (now part of BNP Paribas). In common with many service companies these days, they wanted their branding to carry a softer, friendlier message. Yet internally, their employees called the company ‘cynical Pinnacle’ – a reference to its reluctance to pay out on claims. As BJ pointed out, this was a strength, not a weakness – who wants to buy insurance from a soft ‘n’ cuddly firm that pays out on weak claims and charges big premiums as a result?

BJ’s marketing advice to Pinnacle – based on commercial sense as much as ethics ­– was to emphasise their actual strengths, not cover them up with fake ones. The honest truth expressed a benefit that customers really wanted to hear. And it would be congruent with the way staff actually dealt with customers, without any need for patronising education about ‘brand values’.

Admittedly, there’s a case for being ‘aspirational’ in your marketing. Articulate a future and believe in it and you can make it real. But it’s important to guard against marketing completely to your own people – or to yourself. Address yourself to your customers, and talk to their priorities with honesty and integrity. There simply is no stronger basis for marketing.