Sales Letter Copywriting – It’s Due for a Comeback!

I’m a regular reader of Nick Usborne’s newsletters, blogs and articles. In one of Nick’s latest articles, he expounds on the agony of getting noticed amid the churn of messages on social media sites.

As we all know by now, B2B social media should be about targeting the right prospects. That’s fine… but: whatever happened to good old-fashioned direct mail where you wrote to a named prospect and could command ‘solus’ attention – so long as he or she opened the envelope and were interested in your proposition?

No need to compete with the millions of tweets and Facebook posts that create a river of information every minute of every day! And with fewer and fewer people using direct mail – what an opportunity this is!

E-mail marketing may be the next best thing, and it does of course have the benefit of clickable links to take the reader back to your website landing page, blog or whatever. The problem with e-mail is that it’s notoriously difficult to attract and keep your readers’ attention. How easy is it to simply delete that uninvited intrusion into your inbox.

Compare this with what is nowadays an intriguing interloper slipping into your daily mailbag or letterbox – the sales letter! And how much more welcome it is than those dreaded bills and statements. With the right message, a well-targeted mailer will be just as effective in 2011 as it always has been.

No-one is suggesting you should abandon social media. Far from it. It’s an amazingly powerful tool for spreading your message in realtime and/or virally. What I AM suggesting is re-introducing sales letter copywriting and direct mail to your marketing mix.

If you’ve forgotten how effective direct mail can be (or if you’ve never given it a try), why not compare it with the time-effectiveness of your social media activities? I’m confident you’ll be glad you did. I’m also confident that sales letter copywriting is due for a mighty big comeback!!!

Social Media and the Fear of Selling

I’ve just read a fascinating piece by direct response copywriter Daniel Levis. Part of the article outlines what a lot of people have long suspected – that social media is ultimately the perfect excuse for getting you off the hook of having to sell.

Make no mistake: fear of selling is alive and well.  Social media has looked like the perfect soft option for long enough, especially when the ‘gurus’ keep telling us that online interaction is good; ‘liking’ is good; and having an online forum where you can dismantle major brands is good. Yes, it’s true what you’ve heard… God is good and he’s living just a couple of keyboards away.

By empowering individuals at the expense of big business, social media has tamed the advertising lion. No longer do ads roar. Now, the lion explains, rather apologetically, that he’d like to eat you all up – but online etiquette forbids. So is it OK if he whispers?

Revisionist conventional wisdom in the world of social media tells us that quiet persuasion and understated information is the order of the day.  Companies who fail to heed this new order will have a rude awakening in the shape of falling sales and busted brands. 

By all means soften people up by using Facebook and Twitter to create a frenzy of interest around your brand, but never ever overstep the mark by doing something as vulgar as asking for the sale!  Direct marketing and telesales are the visible villains in this particular piece of the peace – as are forthright online messages that would love to close that sale, if only they were allowed to!

Social media generates masses of activity and information that is exchanged worldwide at the click of a mouse.  Engage your audience is the mantra – but make sure you’re targeting the right people.

Hang on a second!  Did someone say ‘targeting’?  Wash your mouth out and leave this temple at once.  The world of social media is no place for heretical thoughts that hark back to the old order.

This is the new régime where selling is outlawed on pain of attracting strange looks, frowns and a communal shaking of heads.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is passport control at the gates of sales hell! 

 

Buzzwords’ new SEO Copywriting page

There’s all-new content on the SEO Copywriting page of Buzzwords’ main website – buzzwords.ltd.uk/seo_copywriting.htm

This was written in response to the big SEO changes which have taken place in the past year or so.  The way Google looks at web page copy has changed, especially with regard to keywords and fluency of style.

Social media sites and the ability to share and link pages has also had a big impact on what succeeds online and what doesn’t.  Content is still king but this constant change must be making the king a little sore in more ways than one!

Article Marketing – A Revival!

Writing articles is back on Buzzwords’ SEO agenda – as is blogging! It’s all part of an inter-linked approach to generating more traffic to the main website using social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

There’s a lot of scepticism about using Facebook and Twitter for business. Personally, I think the best approach is to leverage every digital marketing opportunity to generate a buzz around what you’re up to! Simple, but there’s no doubting the rewards that plenty of online activity brings in the SEO stakes.

To illustrate the point, every article I write is linked from ezinearticles to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. My blog posts go direct to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Squidoo. Twitter goes straight to Facebook. And there’s a dedicated ‘Free Article Reprint’ page on Buzzwords’ website - buzzwords.ltd.uk/free_reprint_articles.htm – which features all my articles (as standalone and optimised web pages) for use by anyone, anywhere.

The net effect of all this is to create a virtuous cycle of activity and interest in what Buzzwords is doing – and of course generating traffic to the main website. A major reason why social media doesn’t work for so many companies is because they aren’t active enough in writing and creating the various blog posts, tweets, Facebook entries, articles and website updates needed to shake Google’s tree.

The reasons for this are really quite simple: lack of time, commitment and the opportunity cost of time and attention wasted doing what is a non-core activity – not to mention the lack of confidence in some quarters to write what’s needed to the standard that won’t let the side down.

All of this is a great shame. To give social media a fair crack of the whip needs confidence and commitment. Without it, the endeavour is doomed to failure. To coin a phrase, it’s really a question of reaping what you sow.

Copywriter manqué pictures Oz in the 50s

Visit my Facebook site for a brief snapshot of what life was like for ‘£20 Pom’ emigrants to Australia in the mid-1950s. It was written by my father, Geoff Hewitt, and showcased by England’s Dorset Echo in 2009.

Geoff has lived in Sydney since 1954 when I emigrated there with him and my mother. I’ve been back in England for longer than I can remember but it’s interesting that both my father and I share a need to write. Given a different life, I guess he too could have been a copywriter. Today, instead of ‘Buzzwords’, you could be looking at the work of ‘Hewitt & Son’.

Copywriting and the social media mix

How can a busy copywriter find the time to indulge in social media, if ‘indulge’ is the right word?  This implies social media is some kind of luxury, a bit of fun that copywriters can have instead of doing the crossword.

Well, I must admit, I’ve decided to make a fist of the social media thing and try to make it work in a B2B context.  I’ve dabbled with blogs in the past, opened an account with LinkedIn and even had a brief dalliance with MySpace some time back.

The blogs I had were fine but they took up a lot of my time, and without any apparent benefit.  When they were banned for using too many links back to my main website (or was it too many tags?), I shrugged my shoulders and got on with life. 

What I didn’t realise at the time was just how much SEO-juice the blogs were feeding back to my main website.  The content itself wasn’t earth-shattering, although I guess the spin-offs from being more industry-aware had some value (to someone, somewhere!!!).

So why the conversion (or re-conversion) to social media?  What’s brought on this Damascus-like change?  This may sound pathetic, but it’s mainly to do with my tweets ranking on Google!

My first venture into social media was in the dark days before Twitter, so I do have some kind of explanation!  It was also to do with blogs linking with Twitter, and online articles linking to Twitter and so on.  (You’re right, it still sounds pathetic – but I will persist, dear reader!)

Another reason I’m re-visiting social media is because clients are actually hinting that I should be offering this as a service or, at the very least, offering advice on its feasibility for their company.

I must confess that it feels a bit limp-wristed to say to them that social media doesn’t really apply to companies – that it’s a ‘social’ thing!  The fact is, if it can be used to benefit SEO – and even help in opinion-forming by hooking up with even a small number of customers – then B2B social media must be ‘a good thing’.

Whether it’s a ‘cost-effective’ thing or not is a moot point.  This type of SEO is not measurable in its splendid isolation.  It may add to the weight of a full-blown SEO campaign, but assessing the ROI of B2B social media strikes me as tricky.

Having said that, tweets that are ranked by Google – albeit because they have links to other content – obviously have value.  Blog links have value too, and even the content on sites like Facebook may have some PR value.

So, yes, I shall be persevering with social media, if only to say to clients: “Yes, it works!” – or: “Don’t go there!”  With first-hand experience, I will have a leg to stand on, and a bag full of mixed metaphors to boot!

Buzzwords Copywriting Manchester on Facebook

Buzzwords Limited is now on Facebook.