Think Before You Publish: Avoiding Bad Copy Doesn't Have to Be That Hard
There's a human on the other side of the screen!
Did you know that LifeLock ran an ad campaign daring you to steal their CEO's identity?
Spoiler alert - their system was breachable, at least when this ran back in 2007.
Today I wanted to talk about the effect our words have. As copywriters, we're constantly writing for a specific audience.
We ask questions like, who's the target audience? What's the unique selling proposition? How do we feel about this call to action? What's the brand voice?
As much as we talk about SEO - and it's important for discoverability - no one is going to want to buy your service, whether it's a retreat to Greece or a $500 dollar eBook, if you can't tell them why they need it and what specific problem it will solve for them.
To illustrate the "why" and the "here's the problem it will solve" aspects of your product, you also have to know the pain points of your audience and what problems you anticipate them facing.
Are they struggling to feel fulfilled in their day-to-day lives? Do they feel like they're missing out on the secret to becoming a really successful freelancer as they watch everyone on LinkedIn post their success stories? Are they afraid they'll never find the one?
Pain points are a valuable tool. It's important to know what makes your readers go, "I think I could really spend the money on this". Pain points are also where communications, from web copy to healthcare, can get sticky. Pain points are where we need to think about how our words have an impact on people - something I think we often forget to do.
As copywriters, marketers, and content developers, we write to sell day in and day out. We develop a strategy that targets people who are ready to buy and draws in those who aren't quite there yet. I think we sometimes forget that what we put out into the world can be inadvertently harmful or downright stupid, as evidenced by LifeLock.
As I was reading case studies for this article, I came across multiple healthcare communications campaigns that caused more shame and blame around 2 issues: childhood obesity and date rape.
No one had stopped to think what the impact of, "She didn't want to do it, but she couldn't say no," ( the slogan of Pennsylvania's Control Tonight sexual assault portion of a broader alcohol consumption campaign) might be on date rape survivors.
HuffPost puts it like this:
"The majority of health communication work, especially social marketing, is focused on individual behavior change. Somewhere in-between education and brainwashing, health communication specialists use carefully crafted messages to motivate individuals to take steps to improve their health. But is individual behavior change an appropriate strategy for every health issue?"
It's not isolated to health communications either - it happened in one of Bloomingdale's holiday catalogs.
While these are some of the worst examples of what thoughtless ad copy can be, they also reflect some of the most insidious parts of our society.
The human psychology behind copywriting and content creation can come down to so many things:
-brand colors
-linguistic patterns
-visual design
-font
-layout
-the way the copy is structured to pull the buyer in
At the end of the day, we're human. We make mistakes and suggest to our CEO- or maybe them to us- that it would be a good idea to put their social security number in an ad. Hey - high-risk, high-reward.
We're going to make mistakes in our writing, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
My hope for writers in any and every space is that we write with intention and thoughtfulness for the impact our words have on others.
That goes to one of the biggest copywriting tips that I don't often hear: imagine that you are the buyer.
What are you thinking when you see someone else's SSN on your TV during the NFL playoffs commercial break? How does this piece of writing make you feel?
There's been a huge ethical marketing kick recently, and to be honest, I don't know fully what that's trying to achieve. Marketing is meant to sell. Writing is meant to sell. And to pretend otherwise is to do your job badly.
However, there is definitely non-ethical marketing. Marketing that is anything from thoughtless and ignorant to intentionally meant to put others down for your own benefit (I'm looking at you, self-help gurus who promise people they can be millionaires too).
My hope for this career niche I live in is that we continue to remember the humanity of the person on the other side of the screen. Not just because it sells to write as if you were writing to another human - to be relatable- but for the sake of ourselves and for the world.