There is one principle underneath every high-converting ad, sales page, email, and piece of marketing copy I’ve ever studied.<\/p>\n
It’s not clever wordplay. It’s not a power word or a psychological trigger. It’s not urgency or scarcity or social proof \u2014 though those things can support it.<\/p>\n
It’s this: the copy meets the reader where they are.<\/p>\n
Not where the copywriter wants them to be. Not where they’ll be after they read the copy. Where they are right now, today, in their actual life.<\/p>\n
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most marketing copy is written from the perspective of the business \u2014 here’s what we offer, here’s why it’s great, here’s why you should buy it. It’s inside-out marketing. It starts with the business and tries to get to the customer.<\/p>\n
The copy that converts starts with the customer and works backward.<\/p>\n
It opens in the reader’s world. It names something they’re thinking about or feeling or struggling with in language specific enough to feel personal. It demonstrates that whoever wrote this actually understands their situation \u2014 not in a vague, demographic sense but in the specific, experiential sense of having spent time inside the problem.<\/p>\n
This is called meeting the reader at their level of awareness. Eugene Schwartz, one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived, built his entire framework around this principle. Before you write a word of copy, you have to understand where your prospect is in their journey: are they unaware of the problem, aware of the problem but not the solution, aware of solutions but not yours, or ready to buy but evaluating options? Different stages require completely different copy.<\/p>\n
The most common mistake is writing solution-aware copy to problem-aware prospects. The business knows what it offers and leads with the offer. But the prospect is still at the stage of trying to understand what’s wrong and whether it can be fixed. The offer lands on ears that aren’t ready for it and bounces off.<\/p>\n
Problem-aware copy starts with the problem. It says here’s what you’re experiencing, here’s why it’s happening, here’s what most people try and why it doesn’t work. By the time the offer appears, the reader is primed to receive it because the copy has met them exactly where they are and walked them forward.<\/p>\n
Find out where your prospect is. Start there. Walk them forward.<\/p>\n
That’s the principle. Everything else is execution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is one principle underneath every high-converting ad, sales page, email, and piece of marketing copy I’ve ever studied. It’s not clever wordplay. It’s not a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ad-copy-social-media","tag-ad-copycopywritingconversionpersuasionmarketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyphonmedia.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}