The Art of Copywriting

Never before, in the history of advertising, marketing and communication have words been more important than they are now. To cut through the morass of poor promotional messages and laughable approaches, you need to create messages that sell.

Words do the selling. Not pretty pictures.. Yet people still cut corners with copy. Some try to write it themselves, others employ agencies who have little knowledge in this area.

Writing copy that sells is a specialist discipline. It demands a dedicated, knowledgeable approach that very few people understand, let alone master.

These days, to originate effective selling copy, the writer must deal in primitive human psychology and attack the very root of human motivation.

Without exception, the best selling copy comes from the minds and pens of experienced direct marketers. So much has been written about the different approaches and cultures of traditional advertising copywriters and that of their direct marketing counterparts.

In short, there is a massive gulf between them. Traditional agency copywriters are storytellers. Direct response copywriters are salesmen…

…quite simply because they have to be…

Direct marketers are measured by the success of their work, by how well it has achieved its purpose. Or not, of course…

And, in most cases, that information is at hand reasonably quickly.

Good direct response copywriters question and review every single word in a draft. Then review it again. And again. Until it's right.

On many occasions, just a one-word change can affect the performance of a campaign quite dramatically. A well-known example of this was a headline for an automobile repair kit advertisement in the sixties.

The headline was originally " How To Repair Cars". This was changed to
" How To Fix Cars" and the ad consistently pulled over 20% more business.

This is not a surprise to the professional writer, who knows that every word is a weapon.