When you publish content on your website or blog your aim is to persuade somebody to do something. It might be to place an order, contact you for more information, download a guide, subscribe to your mailing list or follow you on social media.
There should always be an action in mind. Something you want people to do as a result of reading the content.
Which means that for on-line marketing to be successful it needs to be persuasive. But what do we mean by persuasion and how can you make your content more persuasive?
A basic truth
Let’s start with one fundamental and universal truth: people will only be persuaded to do something when they clearly perceive it to be in their interests. If you don’t build your content around this concept you are falling at the first hurdle.
This means that you have to tap into the needs, wants and desires of your target audience. And you have to do this at the start of the process. Fail to establish this connection and all else fails.
As copywriting guru Victor Schwab put it when talking about headlines: you have to convey how readers will gain a meaningful benefit, or avoid loss, risk or something deeply unpleasant.
Put another way, you will engage somebody’s attention and get them to do what you want by starting with something they believe or want; not by talking about what you believe or what you do.
How dictators happen
Here’s a couple of non-marketing examples to illustrate. The reason that Hitler was able to seize power in Germany was because he identified what people wanted to hear at that point in history. Following the humiliating defeat in WWI they wanted to hear that their national pride could be rebuilt and that the situation they were in was not their fault. At any other point in history he would have been just another hate-filled crank.
Throw in a global financial crisis and hyper-inflation and people were even more ready for the message. Stir in a bit of civil unrest and the case for strong, authoritarian government seems compelling. Normal people got swept along because there were answers being offered to things that troubled them very deeply, not because they were inherently bad people.
Also, while I’ve never studied the speeches of Lenin and Trotsky in the run up to the 1917 revolution, I suspect they had more to do with not being hungry or pushed around by a remote aristocracy than they had with Marx’s theories of the relationship between labour and capital.
Understanding what matters to people, and framing your argument around those concerns, challenges and desires is a powerful force.
Back to marketing
Hopefully that diversion has convinced you about the power of tapping into the emotional needs of your audience. You persuade people partly by focusing on what they want and showing them how they can get it, or by understanding what they most want to avoid and showing them how to prevent it.
I wouldn’t waste one more penny on marketing until you’ve put in the hard yards to really get to grips with the interests and needs of the people you want to sell to. Talking to existing customers to clarify exactly what convinced them to buy from you can also be revealing. The reasons might not be what you think they are.
A persuasive argument
Understanding what your audience needs to hear about is only part of the story. Your argument still has to be persuasive.
And despite what most people who call radio phone-ins seem to think, persuasion doesn’t mean repeating what you believe to be true, over and over, in an increasingly loud voice.
Persuasion has a number of elements:
- The story: taking people on a journey from a promise (what they want to achieve), to a solution. Here’s what you need, here’s how you can get it.
- Proof: why should people believe what you say?
- Trust: why people should trust you to satisfy their needs rather than somebody else.
- Objections: what questions and concerns will people have that need to be answered?
- Being succinct: just tell people what they need to know. This doesn’t necessarily mean short, it just means taking out everything that doesn’t need to be there.
- Seizing the advantage: why people should do what you want now rather than later.
Before going on, reflect for a second or two on the content on your website. Would any of these elements be recognisable, or do you just have a description of what you do? If it’s the latter them I’m guessing that you’re not happy with the number of leads and enquiries it generates. Am I right?
The story
Every website project I’ve been involved with has started with some kind of statement about customer needs. These might be emotional or health related if I’m working in therapy or healthcare, or they might be operational, efficiency or profit related if I’m doing something for business software or services.
Whatever the business does is always explained in relation to meeting those needs. Often this means taking out loads of detail that businesses think is really important and fascinating but frankly doesn’t influence their customers’ decision to buy in any way.
The content then takes people on the journey from their needs and issues to solutions.
Proof
Saying something doesn’t make it true, no matter how many times you say it. People are looking for proof and for reasons why they should believe what you say. Statistics, testimonials, quotations from respected sources: all of these will help support your argument.
Trust
In the age of content and social media, the trust you have built by investing in content creation and publishing is a powerful asset. Through content you can establish your organisation as one that knows what it is doing, one that understands customers’ issues and one that offers workable solutions.
By turning your brand into a publisher you can establish the trust that you need to be persuasive. You can turn the collective knowledge and on-line authority of your team into your biggest on-line marketing asset.
Other routes to trust include customer feedback, testimonials and statistical evidence of the results you have achieved.
Objections and questions
People will not just be swept along by the force of your prose. While they are discovering more about how your product or service will help them they’ll have practical questions and concerns. If they still have some of these questions and concerns at the end of the piece then they are not persuaded.
Understand the thought processes and the critical questions. Try to look at what you do as though you were encountering it for the first time and never kid yourself that people will work out the answers to their questions for themselves.
Being succinct
Understand who you are selling to and what their real interests are, and focus on those.
Here’s an example based on a real situation. Say you are being asked to create content for a business that sells renewable energy technology to other businesses, schools, care homes, hospitals and so on. The business providing the renewable energy solutions is largely driven by enthusiasm for the technology and by the environmental benefits it offers.
The people they are selling to, however, have different concerns. They want to save money, they want to be reassured about reliability and maintenance costs and they want security over their future energy costs.
Faced with this scenario, how much effort would you put into discussing global warming or the technology behind the solution?
And, once again, go back to your own marketing and see how much of it is really focused on your customers’ interests rather than yours. How much of your content is just a distraction from the things they want and need to know?
Seizing the advantage
Customers may have understood the benefits of your solution and may even be convinced that you can deliver the advantages they are seeking. But they will still need a final push.
Finish the argument by bringing everything together. Paint a picture of them using your product or service and feeling the benefits, summarise the proof you have offered, and then tell them how easy it is to make it all happen.
This will then lead naturally to your call to action. Which means, of, course, you need to start the process by understanding what that desired action is.
Every business needs persuasive content
There are many businesses that struggle to generate leads and enquiries through their websites and on-line marketing. The good news is that it can be fixed. By applying these principles you can take people on that journey from getting attention, through interest and consideration, and through to the point where they decide to take the next step.
Richard Hussey, Copywriter, Blogger, Content Marketer
Content that persuades rather than describes
call me on 01823 674167 or email richard@rshcopywriting.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk
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Godfather: Photo Credit: Art Fuzion via Compfight cc