Your copy is an integral part of your sales process. But what makes a good approach for your blogs, web copy, email, and print strategy?
Before we go any further… If you are wondering whether good copy helps to create sales or is a catalyst that brings ready to buy customers to your business, let me give you some useful advice. Stop wasting time wondering about it…It does. For the reasons why copy does this read our blog here.
If you have read through our site or follow us on YouTube (if you don’t follow us on YouTube, click here to do so, there is loads of free stuff) you will notice that we like to give everything away. We have absolutely no problem with telling people how we work and what to do so you can write your own copy or blogs. If you want to know why we do this, there is an article on our website called ‘out of date coffee beans’ that explains it.
In this article I would like to share the internal process that we use to define our overall, top-level, approach to creating good content. It doesn’t matter what the content is about or where it is used, the following process applies pretty much universally. We call it the E.N.D. game because, in the end, if you get this right, you will win the game.
What is the E.N.D. game?
I have no idea who you are, or what your business is. However, I can take an educated guess as to your motivation for reading this. You most likely want to learn how to produce better copy or perhaps you’re wondering if you can or should write your own. I suppose you could also be one of our competitors on here to see what we are up to. In which case stop sneaking about our content. Just kidding, knock yourself out and read away. In fact, email us to let us know you dropped by. If you are here for help with copywriting though, the truth is that there is no way in this article to tell you what copy to write or how to talk to your customers. We don’t know who your customers are and what your business is because we don’t know you. What we can do though is give you some help with strategy and content ideas.
So, let’s talk about END games.
All your copy should always adhere to what we call the E.N.D. game rules. This means it should be in at least one of these categories to win the sales game.
- Engagement
- Nutrition
- Decision
Engagement – This is writing that is aimed at attracting the attention of your customer. A good example is the sales email. You should have an interesting and enticing subject line that people want to open. Then inside is the information they need to click through to your website or respond to the mailer in some way. They are engaging with your brand because your content is engaging.
Nutrition – This is content that feeds your client what they need. You can feed them junk food that is all selling or blowing your own trumpet, or you can feed them a healthy plate of answers to their questions and useful information. Guess which works best? Nutrition content should far outweigh the others.
Decision – This is content that narrows down choices to encourage a sale or offers the opportunity to contact you. If you did the first two elements right, then the customer should be about ready to make their decision. Motivation to click buy or contact you to buy is usually considered the most difficult (and yet desirable) part of the sales funnel. Expecting clients to have the motivation to act is a big ask, but the space between creating action through engagement and motivation to buy or contact you, is much smaller. Decision copy is vital to tip the balance from ‘engaged potential customer’ to ‘actual customer’.
What is your E.N.D. Game?
What you actually write about for your own E.N.D. will be a decision based on your industry and customer offer. If all your writing is part of the end game though, and you also ensure the nutrition element far outweighs the other two, you should have a good foundation to your content.
So when you come to creating content the very top level question should be ‘Is this E.N.D. game material’?
