You + This Copywriting Concept = More Sales

Posted on by Shannan Seely
map for customer journey

Understand your prospect’s 5 stages of awareness to write more effective copy

Copywriting. Looks easy, but it’s not.

As marketers, we have problems when we write marketing copy, whether we do the writing ourselves or hire a copywriter, we agonize over this issue:

What do we say?

and

What does our prospect need us to say?

But a concept used by experienced copywriters can help us. Let me share the concept and show you how I applied it to website copy.

What’s the Concept?

The 5 Stages of Awareness of your prospect.

How to get inside a prospect’s mind

Before we write, we think about what we need to say. We know we need to focus on the reader.

We need to determine their point of view to persuade them to take action. So how do we do that? By listening to the prospect, which includes understanding the prospect’s stage of awareness.

The 5 stages of awareness is a scale. It shows how much your prospect knows about your products and services. The concept also shows how much the prospect knows about his needs, pain, and problems.    

The concept was coined by renowned copywriter, Eugene “Gene” Schwartz. And he wrote about this in the book, Breakthrough Advertising. The book was published about 50 years ago, but don’t discount this idea of its age. The framework is foundational to good copywriting.

So you need to measure your prospect’s awareness level to write to him or her.

Continue reading You + This Copywriting Concept = More Sales

Optimize Your B2B Content: Use the 5 Stages of Awareness

Posted on by Shannan Seely
Heads collage

When I wrote articles for regional business newspapers back in the day (they were called business journals, i.e., Springfield Business Journal and Lincoln Business Journal), one criterion for the assignment was word count. I needed to stick to that number and get to the point before my word limit was up.

Every two months, my article would make the front page, and it needed to fit in the upper right section, starting above the newspaper’s fold.

Today, we don’t have to squeeze our words into printed newspapers’ limited space. The Internet offers freedom! And yet, as business-to-business companies, we’re still obsessed with word count.

In describing the project’s scope, a chief marketing officer often says, “I only want 500 words.” Why only 500 words?

There is disparity about how long content should be. In a blog post, Neil Patel breaks down the word count for each industry’s content. And he concludes no magic number exists.

“Word count is not a standalone ranking factor. Word count only has merit if the content quality is high!” says Neil Patel

So what do we need to pay attention to instead?

Our reader’s level of awareness.

Consider this report about visitors’ behavior when they go online:

“People are not likely to read your content completely or linearly. They just want to pick out the information that is most pertinent to their current needs.” How People Read Online: The Eyetracking Evidence report, 2nd edition

And according to Kate Moran, a User Experience expert for Nielson Norman Group:

“The #1 biggest mistake in writing for the web is not understanding the people who will be reading the content.”

The first question to ask yourself is:

Continue reading Optimize Your B2B Content: Use the 5 Stages of Awareness