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12/04/2005: "You Gotta Know What You're Writing About if You Expect to Sell It."

I'm putting the finishing touches on a campaign for a major U.S. company. I'll fly to New York and show the boys and girls my story board and present them with what I hope will be a major consumer product campaign, complete with great tag line.

What's amazing about the whole thing is that I had no creative ideas at the start. I was coming up blank when I thought about how best to sell the product.

Now this is a new product (yes, I'm being a bit secretive) and the packaging is good. The company is already doing television for the product and the ad campaign now in use is good. In fact, it's good enough that I bought the product and used it.

That was when the ideas for my own campaign hit me out of the blue! The entire campaign just sort of fell into place, complete with the tag line.

In my long career, I've found that you have to use a product or service if you expect to sell it. If you want the words to flow and if you want to say the right things, you need to know your audience. But you also have to understand the product.

I spend a lot of time learning about a client's business before I write a word. And when possible I use his product or service. It's easier to sell insurance after a family has suffered a loss than at any other time. That's because they feel the pain. They understand the need. In fact, they could probably sell insurance better than any salesman because that's where they're at right now. They're coming from inside the need. And no one understands it better than they do at this time.

A copywriter is a salesman. You need to feel the pain or the pleasure or whatever it is that is cured or solved or improved by the product you're selling. You have to approach it from the point of the prospective buyer to whom the product is to be sold.

Too many copywriters simply take on an assignment and set down and begin to write. That's not the way to sell your client's product or service. You have to get in it. Feel it. Smell it. Understand it. Words come hard when you don't understand. Words come effortlessly to the writer who understands well the problems his product solves and how it will improve the lives of the people who will read or hear his copy.

You gotta know what you're writing about if you expect to sell it.