When I was in charge of marketing at Newcastle’s Live Theatre I was promoting a play called Attachments written by the wonderful Julia Darling. In the opening scene, a vacuum cleaner salesman called Robbie knocks on the door of a woman called Davina.
Now admittedly, Davina isn’t in the right frame of mind for buying a hoover, she’s in the middle of making sandwiches for the wake of her recently decreased boyfriend. However as Robbie blethers on, talking about turbos, suction power, gadgety bits, attachments and rpm’s, Davina finally loses patience and snaps;
“Stop telling me about the rigging! I don’t want to know about the bloody rigging!”
This line really struck a chord with me as a marketeer because, who hasn’t been stuck with a boring salesman, or received a meaningless direct mail letter, boring leaflet, or visited a frankly confusing website where you are just being told about ‘the rigging’ and by that I, and Davina, mean, all the information which you don’t need to know right away, like exactly how a product or service works, its technical specifications, the logistics of what a company does, the date the company was established etc.
How far do you think Coca Cola would have got with their global domination of the soft drinks market if they had used all of their advertising and promotional power to tell us all about their carbonated soft drink which contains sugar and caramel colour and some E numbers and comes in cans of 330mls etc?
Now I am not saying that a bit of rigging isn’t desirable or necessary, but it certainly isn’t the first port of call when writing effective sales and marketing copy. To do this you need to identify the target market’s needs, tap into their wishes (perhaps even their concerns), talk about the benefits and what happens after they buy your products or take up your service. Good marketing copy should grab attention, create interest, fuel desire and promote action.
So why not spend some time today reading through your marketing materials. Think about what you say to people at networking events and in presentations and sales pitches, what information you give them and in what order of priority. Because if it’s all about the rigging then you could be lowering your chances of hovering up all those potential sales and prospective clients by turning them off and tuning them out.
Here at tent we have 17 years of experience of writing copy for a wide range of businesses, from cupcakes to charter surveyors, dance companies to drive cleaners, we’ve done it all. So for a friendly chat about how tent can help you with inspiring, creative copy across all media, designed to create interest and generate sales and clients, why not give us a call?