One was green. One was blue. But they both had the same list of ingredients and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why they were two different products.

So I bought neither.

Liked this? Then you might like these too:

• Objection! Part 3: Putting it into practice
• “Work on your business, not in it.” Huh?

Rather than posting something long, I’ll give you a chance to have a look around. But I do have some people to thank, most importantly Rikki Bochow and Stuart Steel at Acorn Web who built the site for me.

I think Rikki’s done a fantastic job of designing an attractive site that’s almost all text. And Stu isn’t just generous with his employees’ time; he’s also a fount of great ideas.

One of his best ideas, in fact, was the “interactive demo” which you can get to from every non-blog page on the site. Have a look at it, it’s pretty nifty. While we’re at it, I’ve got an offer for you, loyal readers (or some of you at least). If you’ve made it all the way through the demo, you’ll see that one of the things I try to illustrate is the importance of links.

Here’s the offer

The only thing is, the bits of linked text in the demo don’t point to anything yet. Would you like one of them to point to something you’ve written? I’d be happy to do so, if you’ve written something that clearly and succinctly illustrates one of the following points:

• Most web users don’t have a lot of time and are doing several things at once
• On the web people tend to skim
• Use keywords strategically (rather than stuffing your site with them)
• Make link text useful to readers
• Tell readers what you want them to do next

So if you have anything that might be suitable, drop me a line. (If you have more than one, feel free to send me all of them, but I won’t publish more than one link per person.) No strings!

Oh, and before anyone suggests this, I’m already planning to offer a bookmark/Stumble friendly version of the demo.

Anyway, enjoy the website, and I’d love to hear your feedback. (This to Glenn at Divine Write for the very useful feedback he’s already given.)

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• Cassandra Italia and Global Health Travel: A Client Success Story
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• Objection! Part 1: Why you shouldn’t always answer objections

Yep, that’s me, the third link on the page. Pretty good, huh? Here’s what’s even better: this took almost no effort on my part. I only have a stub of a website at the moment, this blog aside. (My real website is launching very soon, by the way, and just between you and me, it’s looking good.) I haven’t gone beyond the most rudimentary forms of search engine optimisation. And I’ve been in business for a shorter time than most of my competitors.

In fact, I feel a bit sheepish about placing higher on the page than experienced copywriters who’ve obviously put a great deal of effort into SEO. How did I do it?

To cut a long story short, I did two things:

1. I listed my business with Google Local.
2. I happened to have an office close to Melbourne CBD.

This listing, you see, isn’t a “normal” search result. In regular “organic” searches - the kind the SEO industry is built around - I’m pretty much where you expect me to be (nowhere, more or less).

But when searchers type in something that Google recognises as a location, Google thinks “aha, this person is looking for something in their local area”, and so the first thing it displays is a map showing businesses that have registered themselves as being located there. Those organic results that everyone works so hard for get relegated to second place.

It probably wasn’t Google’s intention, but this is particularly good for business like mine that are located close to a CBD. Even though people searching for “copywriter melbourne” are probably looking for copywriters in the greater Melbourne area, Google starts at the CBD and works outwards. Which is rotten luck for all the copywriters in Frankston.

Here’s the call to action.

If you have a business with any kind of address, even your house, you probably can’t do much to change your physical location (not at short notice, anyway!), but you can take care of getting listed right now. Go to Google Local, and list yourself. It’s easy, and free. Go on, do it now. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Done? Good. Because what I haven’t told you yet is that for some of you, it’s just become even more important to have an up-to-date Google Local listing. You see, Google has just started serving up these local results some of the time even when searchers don’t type in a location! (They do this by making a guess about where you are based on your IP address. Hope that doesn’t feel too creepy.)

Now, this change will mainly affect businesses that are genuinely local - florists, dentists, pizza shops, and so on. [Edit: for businesses that aren't clearly local, like copywriters, the situation is less clear - see the comment from Glenn Murray below.] If you’re one of those local businesses, having a Google Local listing is now more important that being listed in any other directory, online or off. It’s the easiest, cheapest SEO boost you can possibly imagine. Hopefully you don’t need any more encouragement, because you took my advice two paragraphs ago, but I’m just saying.

What’s going to be interesting over the next few months is seeing businesses start gaming the system. I can see businesses registering under fake addresses in popular locations. I can see “public-spirited” competitors reporting those fake addresses to Google. I can see new businesses springing up to provide “legitimate” virtual addresses. Isn’t it funny how, in our virtualised world, a simple change on Google’s part suddenly makes actual locations important again?

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• 40 powerful emotional benefits you can offer business clients
• “Work on your business, not in it.” Huh?
• Objection! Part 3: Putting it into practice

I haven’t read Gerber myself, but from what I can gather, “Work on your business, not in it” means roughly this:

If you own a business, you shouldn’t be spending your time doing the day-to-day things that keep the business ticking over (”working in your business”). Instead, you should hire, outsource or automate these tasks, and concentrate instead on the “big picture” strategic tasks that will make your business bigger, more scalable, more efficient, more saleable down the track, and so on (”working on your business”).

Now, obviously there’s something to this idea, otherwise half the business people I know wouldn’t devote their lives to realising it. The problem is, these same people are often so enamoured of the phrase itself that they want to use it in their marketing copy. I think this is a mistake, for two reasons:

1. Some people prefer working in their business to working on it.
2. If you haven’t read the book, it’s not that easy to see the difference.

The first of these is a problem with the underlying idea of the phrase, the second a problem with the wording. But both of them lead to what I’d describe as “huh?” reactions. Something that seems totally self-evident to the person saying it seems either wrong or confusing to the person hearing it. And that’s never good marketing.

Problem 1: Some people prefer working in their business to working on it

I’m a writer, not an entrepreneur. Saying that might go against the wisdom of the moment, but it’s how I feel. I want to work on my clients’ stuff, not my own. I’m happy to do enough marketing and Big Strategic Thinking to get the clients and the work I want, but no more.

In other words, my idea of heaven is spending time working in my business! (Well, business heaven anyway.) Sure, there are a lot of mundane tasks that get in the way of doing that - bookkeeping, invoicing, CRM, etc. - and anyone who has a good, affordable way of reducing the time I spend on them* has a good chance of getting my business.

But they’re not going to get it by promising me that I’ll have more time to spend on marketing, business coaching, “blue sky thinking”, joint venture proposals, franchising, or any of those entrepreneurial “big picture” things that come under the category of “working on my business”. I just don’t care about that stuff, still less enjoy it.

Now, if you think I’m the only business person in the world who thinks that way, or if you’re confident that your target market doesn’t include people like me, then this doesn’t apply to you. But if your market includes freelancers, especially writers and designers, there’s a fair bet that anything you say that assumes your customers are setting out to create an empire will fall on deaf ears at least half the time.

Problem 2: If you haven’t read the book, it’s not that easy to tell the difference.

Let’s say you’re satisfied that your target market is full of would-be entrepreneurs. If you’re part of the “Make Money Online!!!” crowd, that’s probably a safe bet. That means Problem 1 doesn’t apply to you. As for me, if I’m not in your target market, then I’m very happy being excluded from your thoughts. Indeed I prefer it.

But there’s still a problem with “Work on your business, not in it”. This time it’s to do with the wording of the phrase itself. (I’m about to go into egghead mode, which is why I’m tackling this problem second.)

Here’s one symptom of what I’m talking about: Whenever I think of the phrase “Work on your business, not in it”, I’m always momentarily unsure which way around it’s supposed to go. Assuming this is not a personal idiosyncrasy, I don’t think this can be a good sign for your customers. As I’ve said before in one of my first posts here, phrases that force readers to think too hard about what they mean are bad copywriting. (That doesn’t mean they’re bad writing!)

Why is this one hard to nut out, though? At first I thought it might be that “in” and “on” are both prepositions and prepositions can be kind of vague. But a phrase like “Sit in the car, not on it” is instantly comprehensible and not at all ambiguous. So it’s not “in” and “on” themselves that are the problem.

But the thing is, “work in your business” and “work on your business” use “in” and “on” in metaphorical rather than literal senses - and not only that, they’re metaphorical senses with fairly vague meanings. Indeed the meanings actually overlap: is taking a client out to lunch “working in” or “working on”? It could be either, or both.

This is simply a fact about the English language: the verb “work” attaches itself to prepositions in vague, overlapping ways. Think about not just “work in” and “work on” but also”work at”, “work for”, “work with” and “work under” - they all mean different things, but there are plenty of situations where you could choose more than one of them.

Moral of the story? When you’re marketing something, don’t use phrases that ask the reader to make fine-grained distinctions between expressions like “work on” and “work in”. And don’t assume that they’ll share your convictions about which is better.

* Affliliate link | Image: sebastiandavies

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• 40 powerful emotional benefits you can offer business clients
• Why every local business needs an up-to-date Google Local listing
• Objection! Part 2: Gloopy Glaze Donuts and the 9 types of objector

Emotional

If you’re nodding your head, on the other hand, you probably already know about using emotional benefits as a way of persuading potential customers they need you.

This idea has become pretty well-accepted in consumer product marketing circles (which doesn’t mean it’s always applied well of course!). But when it comes to business to business (B2B) marketing, there’s still an assumption out there that the only relevant benefit of any product or service is the “bottom line” or return on investment.

That’s a mistake. A big one. When you’re talking to a business, you’re talking to a person within that business. And business people are just as emotion-driven as anyone else.

Yes, business people need to justify their expenses. But the key word there is “justify”. By all means, follow through with some convincing-sounding numbers. Flatter business customers into thinking their buying decision is 100% rational. But start by appealing to their emotions, because emotion is what actually drives their behaviour.

To get you started, here are some emotional benefits you might think about offering potential customers if you’re in a B2B industry:

1. Be less busy.
2. Stop spending time on routine tasks.
3. Spend more time doing what you like.
4. Spend less time doing what you hate.
5. Make your workplace fun.
6. Make your workplace healthy.
7. Make your workplace relaxing.
8. Make your workplace green.
9. Look more professional.
10. Look less boring.
11. Look bigger than you are.
12. Find out what your customers think about you.
13. Understand what drives your customers.
14. Help your customers understand what drives you.
15. Make your customers love you.
16. Make your customers want to spend more time with you.
17. Make your customers want to tell their friends about you.
18. Get wonderful staff.
19. Keep the wonderful staff you’ve got.
20. Cope with change.
21. Cope with stasis.
22. Learn to recognise opportunity.
23. Don’t be left behind.
24. Beat the recession.
25. Get talked about.
26. Get talked about in better terms.
27. Impress strangers.
28. Learn stuff you don’t know about your staff.
29. Learn stuff you don’t know about yourself.
30. Help people learn about the great things you’ve done.
31. Persuade people to forgive your mistakes.
32. Get on better with other departments/branches.
33. Look like a hero in front of your boss/board/shareholders.
34. Convince your boss/board/shareholders you’ve earnt your salary (or your bonus!).
35. Get a promotion.
36. Be more powerful
37. Become the boss.
38. Help your community.
39. Make history.
40. Change the world.

What do you think? Which ones have I missed?

(I know a popular one is “Work on your business, not in your business”, but I kind of hate that one. Remind me to talk about why some time.)

Photo: Diabolic Preacher

Liked this? Then you might like these too:

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“10 tips for killer copy!” “Dominate your niche with these killer content ideas!” “Killer strategies for destroying the competition!”

It’s all a bit…macho, don’t you think?

What if we stopped channeling Jean-Claude Van Damme and tried channeling Jane Austen instead, just for a change?

Anyone agree? What other copywriting clichés annoy the bejesus out of you?

Image: simon.wright

Liked this? Then you might like these too:

• How not to talk to the public
• “Work on your business, not in it.” Huh?

My credit union (which, by the way, is a terrific organisation that employs excellent customer service staff) has recently launched a fancy new website that’s mostly very pleasant to use. But there’s one thing I think they’re doing very wrong: using modal windows to advertise their products.

It’s been a much-discussed trend in web interface design lately, littering sites with these windows that require users to take some action before they can get on with what they came to do. They do look pretty nifty and have their uses - they can work really well for quickly displaying full-sized versions of thumbnail images, for instance. In fact, I’m planning to have a (user-initiated) modal on my website, so I’m certainly not against them in principle.

But when they’re used for advertising, they really do suck - it’s the ultimate form of “interruption marketing” because users can’t get on with anything else until they’ve interacted with the ad in some way. On a banking site, which existing customers use on a daily basis to accomplish specific tasks, that’s an even bigger sin.

When my credit union started using modals to advertise credit cards a couple of months ago, I wrote to them with a polite objection. They sent me a prompt reply, which was great, but they didn’t really seem to be taking in what I was saying. They pointed out that there was a cookie preventing anyone seeing the ad more than once (fair enough, but some people disable cookies, and maybe once is one too many). And they went on to tell me again how wonderful the credit card was. So I guess they think it’s OK to interrupt people if the product you’re selling is good.

This week I see the modal ads are back, this time advertising mortgages. What do you think - am I being a drama queen, or do you agree that this is really not on for a financial institution?

Photo credit: House of Sims

Liked this? Then you might like these too:

• Objection! Part 3: Putting it into practice
• Meet my new site
• Why every local business needs an up-to-date Google Local listing

The story so far: We’ve established that, for any objection that might potentially get in the way of a person’s decision to buy your product and service, there are three broad types of objector: explicit objectors (those who have the objection and will voice it), latent objectors (those who have the objection, at least at some level, but won’t voice it), and non-objectors (those who don’t have the objection at all).

We then went further and divided each of these three categories of objector into a further three subcategories. And we finished the last post by saying that the way to deal with all these different types of objector is not to try to write something that will please everybody. So what do you do instead?

How to deal with multiple types of objector

I could deal with this topic at very great length (well, OK, I could deal with most topics at very great length) but I’m going to boil it down to five steps:

1. Think about the audience for this specific piece of writing.
2. Try to work out approximately what proportion of this audience will fit into each category of objector.
3. Work out how much impact answering the objection will have for each category.
4. Write your copy for the category of objector that looks most important taking both Steps 2 and 3 into account.
5. If you get the chance to address other categories implicitly, go for it.

So let’s take each of these in turn.

1. Think about the audience

Hopefully, you do this for every single piece of copy you write. But it’s just as important to keep your audience in mind when you’re answering objections as when you’re promoting benefits.

To see why, let’s go back to the example of “Gloopy Glaze donuts are ultra-fattening”. Obviously if your audience is teenage video gamers, this objection will have a completely different valency than it would if your audience was middle-aged stay-at-home mothers.

2. Assign a proportion of your audience to each type of objector.

Now we’re getting into “easier said than done” territory! Yes, you can and should research your market, but what about latent objections? By definition, people in a focus group aren’t going to mention objections they’re embarrassed to admit to, still less objections they don’t even know about!

I’m not a market researcher, so I can’t tell you how to solve this problem. (Tom?…) What I can say is that when businesses do manage to identify the latent objections their customers might have, they gain an incredibly powerful marketing advantage.

For an example of this, check out this wonderful post by Havi Brooks (I should mention that the whole idea of latent objections largely came together for me after reading this post). Havi talks about how for years she avoided trying acupuncture because she was worried she’d have to take off her clothes…something she understandably felt awkward about actually saying. If an acupuncturist had simply put something in their FAQ answering the question “Will I have to get naked?” (answer: no), they could have had Havi as a customer a lot sooner…and possibly a lot of other customers like her.

Here’s another example: I enjoy cooking, and where possible I buy meat from traditional butchers rather than supermarkets. I’ll often come across one of those recipes that says something like “ask your butcher to bone and butterfly the joint” or “see if your butcher can get hold of aged mutton” or “don’t buy pre-ground mince, get your butcher to grind it in front of you”. That’s all well and good, but I am far too shy to actually ask a butcher to do any of those things. So if a butcher decided to put a sign up saying “Feel free to ask us to bone, joint, grind, or order in anything you like”, they’d instantly get my custom for life…irrespective of price.

I don’t know that there’s any quick way of getting this kind of intelligence from your customers. I suspect you just have to build up trust and keep listening to them. (And obviously, if they write blogs, read them!)

3. Work out the impact on each type of objector.

If you’ve ever played poker, you know that some hands are foregone conclusions. If you have the second best possible hand and your opponent has the best possible hand, you’ll almost certainly lose all your money; on the other hand, if she has the third best possible hand, you’ll almost certainly get all her money.

What good players know is that, because these hands will play out the same way no matter what you do, the correct strategy is not to worry about them. Instead, you concentrate on making the most from the situations you actually have control over.

In the same way, there are some types of objector on whom answering an objection will have no impact. These people might form a large proportion of your audience. But they should play almost no part in your decision about how to answer an objection. In particular, those people who aren’t going to buy your product no matter what you do can safely be ignored altogether.

As for people who will buy your product regardless of what you say…well, don’t ignore them, because they’re your best customers and you can’t take them for granted. But recognise that when you’re answering this specific objection, it’s not these people you’re addressing. It’s the people who might change their decision depending on what you say.

This might all sound obvious, but in practice it rarely is. How many businesses waste their time trying to justify their prices to people who won’t buy their products no matter what? Or to take something closer to home - how many of us writers have spent hours trying to convince some blowhard who thinks he’s the next Hemingway that his prose is, in fact, unreadable and he should be paying us to fix it?

4. Work out who’s most important and write for them.

This is the really crucial step. If you’re Gloopy Glaze Donuts, how do you actually deal with the fact that a consumer magazine has come out and described your product as a heart attack with a hole in the middle?

First of all, you ignore the “no impact” groups. Don’t worry about the ones who won’t buy regardless; and forget (for the time being) the “Gloopy Glaze 4 Life” crowd.

Now, if you decide that of your remaining prospects, the majority will have read the magazine article and will therefore be affected by this objection in some way, it’s better to just come out and address it. Mention the magazine by name and tackle it head-on. (How you do that is another matter.)

If, on the other hand, the magazine is so obscure and little-read that you can rely on most of your customers not having read it, then you’ll probably want to take a different tack. In fact, you probably won’t even want to mention the magazine story directly, otherwise you risk turning lots of non-objectors into objectors!

Now, I’m not saying lie about your product. By all means, list nutritional information and talk about eating in moderation and so forth simply as a matter of corporate responsbility. But are you morally obliged to go out of your way to mention a publication that has panned your product? Feel free to disagree, but I’m going with no.

5. Twofers!

There is where it gets fun. As I’ve said, write your responses for one kind of objector. But the cool thing about putting this stuff in writing is that not everyone who reads what you’ve written is going to be the kind of person you’re targeting - and sometimes that doesn’t matter!

Here’s a common example: when you answer an objection for explicit objectors, you pick up some latent objectors along the way. That truck driver who’s too embarrassed to mention he’s worried about calories? That’s fine, he can happily pretend you’re talking to other customers, but he gets his objection answered anyway.

Here’s an even cooler kind of “twofer”: when you address an objection, you also send a message to the people for whom your objection is actually a point in favour. So, for instance, by mentioning the study that says your donuts are high in calories, you reassure those people who actually like the fact that it’s high in calories. Nifty!

Tell me your examples

That’s it from me. I’d love to hear what you’ve thought about this series of posts. What have I missed?

I’d also really love to hear your own examples of dealing with objections. Don’t be shy!

Liked this? Then you might like these too:

• Objection! Part 2: Gloopy Glaze Donuts and the 9 types of objector
• Objection! Part 1: Why you shouldn’t always answer objections
• How not to talk to the public

But as long you can deal with that much taxonomy before breakfast, this post should give you a more nuanced way of working out how different groups of customer might relate to a potential objection. And there will be donuts.

I’ll also briefly talk about how to deal with these different kinds of objector. But this will be mostly theory: the applied stuff will come in the final post in the series. (Yes, it’s a trilogy!)

Explicit objectors, latent objectors and non-objectors

I ended my last post by saying that any given objection will split your potential customers into 3 different categories:

• people who have that particular objection, and would bring it up if you were talking to them
• people who have the objection, but wouldn’t bring it up if you were talking to them
• people who don’t have the objection at all

For what I hope are obvious reasons, I’m going to call the first type of person an explicit objector, the second type a latent objector, and the third type a non-objector.

But not all explicit objectors are the same, and neither are all latent objectors, nor indeed all non-objectors. In fact, each of them splits further into three different types. Those of you with calculators will have worked out that this makes a total of 9 types of objector.

To clarify what I’m going on about, here’s a hypothetical example of an objection. Say you run a company called Gloopy Glaze that makes extremely delicious donuts like the ones on the left.

Now, a consumer watchdog magazine recently published a study revealing that while your donuts may be yummy, they’re by far the most fattening on the market - in fact they have over double the calories of your nearest competitor’s product.

So we have a possible objection right there. Some of your customers will be more reluctant to buy your donuts because they’ve read or heard about this study. Others won’t.

But this reluctance and this non-reluctance both have several possible causes, and can be manifested in several different ways. Nine different ways, to be precise. (If you come up with a tenth, let me know.)

1. Explicit objectors

Explicit objectors are the people who, if you were trying to actually sell them donuts face-to-face, would actually mention the offending study. There are three types of explicit objectors:

1a. They have no intention to buy. These people are never going to buy your donuts, and nothing you can say will convice them. For some of them, the calories really are the dealbreaker; others are just argumentative. In either case, time spent trying to convince these people to change their minds is time wasted.

1b. They can be convinced. These people are wavering about whether their love of your donuts outweighs their concern about their waistlines. They’re not only open to being convinced; they secretly want to be convinced.

1c. They’re just going through the motions. These people have every intention of  buying your donuts. They only mention the calories for form’s sake  If you can make them feel less guilty, that’s a bonus, but you’ve already made the sale.

2. Latent objectors

These people wouldn’t mention the calorie thing out loud. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not playing on their mind and affecting their decisions at some level:

2a. They’re vague on the details. These people remember hearing something about donuts and calories a while ago. But was it actually Gloopy Glaze that was the bad one? Wasn’t it Krispy Kreme? Perhaps Gloopy Glaze was actually the best? An objection this vague can easily push a customer in either direction.

2b. They’re embarrassed. These people are worried about calories, but they’re too embarrassed to mention it out loud. Maybe they’re men who, even in these Biggest Loser days, still think worrying about calories is for chicks. Maybe they’re scared that if they mention worrying about their weight you’ll actually agree with them.

2c. They don’t know their own minds. These people don’t actually think they have an issue with calories, but after reading the offending study, they’ve gone from scarfing down Gloopy Glazes by the dozen to gagging at the very thought of them. Something’s going on there.

3. Non-objectors

These are people who know all about the calorie count of your product, but it makes no negative impact at all on their buying decisions. Even non-objectors, it turns out, come in different flavours:

3a. They don’t care. They might buy your donuts, or they might not, but either way the calories are not a factor in their decision-making.

3b. They don’t know. These people haven’t read or heard about the study in question, and persist in their happy delusion that Gloopy Glaze donuts are a health food.

3c. They know, and they like it. The more calories the better! These are people who are desperate to gain weight, actors who need to get fat quickly for a role, or unrepentant gluttons who love to rub their unhealthy food choices in the faces of “health Nazis”.

OK, so how do you talk to all these people at once on your website?

The short answer is, you don’t. You work out one or two key types of objector you have the most chance of making an impact on, and talk to them.

Sure, it might be tempting to run through all nine types of objector and tweak your FAQs to take all of them into account - give persuasive reasons for the 1b types, vague it up for the 2a’s, strut for the 3c’s, and so on.  But you’d end up with a confusing, unfocused mess. Web content that tries to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to no-one.

Now, it is possible to get a “twofer” by writing answers for one type of objector that also deal tangentially with another type. I’ll talk about how in my next post.

But in the meantime, the very process of thinking about each objection in terms of how different customers might relate to it is something that should help you write better-targeted responses.

Image: lucianvenutian

Liked this? Then you might like these too:

• Objection! Part 3: Putting it into practice
• Objection! Part 1: Why you shouldn’t always answer objections

One of the things good web copy does is answer objections - the niggling blockages people have that prevent them from buying what you’re selling. According to marketing guru Sonia Simone, “FAQs” should really be called “FROs” - Frequently Raised Objections.

So when you’re developing web content, you should certainly try to anticipate objections your potential customers might have. But here’s something that might sound a bit odd: you shouldn’t answer every single potential objection! Let me give you a (rather gross) example to show why not.

If you’re eating, stop reading now. Especially if you’re eating ice cream.

Say you’re writing copy for a restaurant website, and the restaurant happens to be one that recently served ice cream containing human faeces to some lucky customers. Call me crazy, but I suspect this is going to be a significant objection for a lot of your potential customers. But does that mean you should make one of your FAQs “Are you still serving shit-flavoured ice cream?” I’d suggest not.

The reason? When you’re writing web copy, everybody is going to see what you’ve written. Any objection you answer will only be an objection for some of your readers. But you need to think about the others as well! In the case of the restaurant, there will be readers who:

• haven’t read or seen any news stories about the ice cream excrement incident
• are aware of the incident, but haven’t made the connection to your specific business

In other words, there are ignorant customers you want to stay ignorant, and vague customers you want to stay vague. (Copywriting can be a black art at times! This might be a good time to point out that if a client approached me needing this level of whitewashing, I’d turn the job down.)

Talking to customers who aren’t talking back

Writing copy is like doing sales in a lot of ways. But there’s a basic difference between answering objections in written form and answering them in a one-to-one sales context.

To see why, let’s think about conventional sales for a minute. If you’re a salesperson in a call centre or on a shop floor, you’re talking directly to the customer, and they’re talking back. So the objections you answer are mostly the ones the customer actually brings up. They say “wow, that sounds expensive”; you tell them why it’s worth it.

If you’re very good, you also answer the objections a customer has but doesn’t bring up. (You do this by reading and responding to nonverbal cues.) If you’re very bad, on the other hand, you start answering objections the customer doesn’t even have! (That’s why I was a very bad salesperson: “It costs $500. I know that sounds incredibly expensive, but it’s totally worth it!”)

But if you’re writing something like an FAQ page, the situation is totally different. You don’t know whether any given reader has or doesn’t have a given objection. Instead, you have to answer objections for three types of people at once:

• people who have the objection and would bring it up if you were talking to them
• people who have the objection, but wouldn’t bring it up if you were talking to them
• people who don’t have the objection at all

In Part 2, I’m going to talk about the various ways customers can fit into one of these three categories, and how to write copy with all of them in mind. As it turns out, this isn’t just a challenge; it’s also an opportunity.

Image: Sklathill

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