The Most Important Element in Copywriting

What’s the most impor­tant part in copy­writ­ing? Is it the head­line? The bul­lets? The ben­e­fits? The tes­ti­mo­ni­als? The guar­an­tee? The offer?

Nope.

While all impor­tant, none of these are as impor­tant as this sin­gle yet pow­er­ful ele­ment. It trumps all the oth­ers by a long­shot, and it’s the one ele­ment all copy must absolutely have to suc­ceed. Once I tell you what it is, you’re going to smack your head and say, “Of course!”

But, it’s not what you think — at least, not in the way you think…

First, let me point out that “sales­man­ship in print” is a pop­u­lar def­i­n­i­tion of copy­writ­ing, orig­i­nally coined by John E. Kennedy in 1905. (Did I men­tion he was Canadian?)

Just like a sales pro­fes­sional deliv­er­ing a good sales pre­sen­ta­tion, a good copy­writer will hit all the emo­tional hot-​​buttons, give all the rea­sons why, and answer all the objec­tions. The result will be lead­ing the cus­tomer to the best solu­tion, which is to buy. But…

A debate seems to be rag­ing between con­tent devel­op­ers and copy­writ­ers as to how impor­tant copy­writ­ing is to a pro­mo­tion. One side says copy­writ­ing is all-​​important while the other side says it makes no dif­fer­ence, or that con­tent is more impor­tant.

Copy­writ­ers say, “you must sell,” while con­tent writ­ers say, “you must edu­cate.” One side says, “don’t bore them with infor­ma­tion,” the other says, “copy is too hypey.”

Both are wrong.

My take is simple.

A pro­mo­tion has many parts. Every part must be fir­ing on all cylin­ders. Like a puz­zle, if you are miss­ing too many pieces it just won’t work. Copy­writ­ing is a crit­i­cal part of the mar­ket­ing puz­zle, and can play a major influ­ence in the suc­cess of any promotion.

How­ever, there’s one thing that copy­writ­ing can­not fix — no mat­ter how great the copy is, who wrote it, how entic­ing the offer may be, how great the price is, how many bonuses it has, how much proof it pro­vides, or how strong the guar­an­tee it promises.

In fact, you could take all the great­est copy­writ­ers that ever lived, like Robert Col­lier, Mel Mar­tin, Claude Hop­kins, Gary Hal­bert, Gary Ben­civenga, Dan Kennedy, and John Carl­ton, and stick them in a locked room and force them to cre­ate a masterpiece.

And it still wouldn’t matter.

It wouldn’t mat­ter if you put a pro­mo­tion in front of a group of peo­ple who could care less about what you are try­ing to sell them. A group of peo­ple who wouldn’t buy your prod­uct to save their mother-​​in-​​law. (Hmmm, maybe that wasn’t a good example.)

Plain and sim­ple, with­out a starv­ing mar­ket you’re dead in the water. A rabid, frothing-​​at-​​the-​​mouth, wallet-​​in-​​hand mar­ket des­per­ately seek­ing a solu­tion to their prob­lem is the key to any online project. And to do that, you need to find out what peo­ple want.

This is the foun­da­tion not only to writ­ing great copy but also to build­ing any suc­cess­ful online busi­ness. Noth­ing earth-​​shattering here, right? I mean, how many times have you heard some­one say, “You must find a hun­gry mar­ket?” Count­less times, I’m sure.

I Googled “find a hun­gry mar­ket” today and it appears 4,410 times. There are a lot of peo­ple telling you to find a hun­gry mar­ket. But here’s the kicker…

Many don’t tell you how to go about find­ing that hun­gry mar­ket, much less fig­ur­ing out exactly what do they want — I mean, what do they really, really, really want!

I sus­pect it’s because most don’t really know how to do it them­selves. They just do it. For oth­ers, it may be hard to explain. After all, for many suc­cess­ful mar­keters, it’s sec­ond nature to them. It’s largely an intu­itive process. It’s almost psychic-​​like.

And that’s a shame because it’s an impor­tant skill, which can be mas­tered pro­vided you are shown how. Imag­ine if you could crawl inside the minds of some of the most suc­cess­ful mar­keters to find out how they zoom in on hot, hun­gry, eager-​​to-​​buy markets.

If you could, then how suc­cess­ful would you be? When launch­ing a new prod­uct, how con­fi­dent would you be of your return on your invest­ment of time, money, and effort?

Unfor­tu­nately, you can’t. Sure, you can get an idea. As I looked around I noticed there were plenty of prod­ucts on the mar­ket teach­ing key­word research, which is the most com­mon way of find­ing mar­kets. At first glance, they looked good on the surface.

But upon fur­ther exam­i­na­tion, I could see they were miss­ing a key understanding.

Some will teach you how to find a mar­ket, and find out who they are and what do they want. But this is where most of them stop. The prob­lem is, they ignore a third, more impor­tant ele­ment you absolutely need to know before you tackle any new market.

In fact, there are three crit­i­cal ques­tions you need to ask your­self when find­ing a tar­get mar­ket, cre­at­ing a prod­uct for her, and writ­ing copy to her. Because the appeal you choose is cru­cial to mak­ing a con­nec­tion with your mar­ket when you know exactly:

1. Who they are,
2. What do they want
3. And why do they want it?

Specif­i­cally, you also want to know how do they want it. Know­ing the answers to all three ques­tions, clearly and cor­rectly, allows you to craft a mes­sage that directly appeals to your mar­ket, and con­nects with their dom­i­nant fears and desires.

If you don’t know the answers, you will end up try­ing to sell to the wrong mar­ket, to a good mar­ket but one that’s not hun­gry, or to a mar­ket who’s indeed hun­gry but wants a cer­tain kind of food, for a cer­tain rea­son, and deliv­ered in a cer­tain way.

It’s like try­ing to sell an Ital­ian cook­book to a mar­ket hun­gry for home-​​delivered Chinese.

Many key­word research tools will not answer these crit­i­cal ques­tions for you. They might tell if there’s a mar­ket out there (or, if you’re research­ing an estab­lished mar­ket, what they’re hun­gry for). But they stop at this point. They don’t dig deep enough.

From a copy­writ­ing per­spec­tive, to be suc­cess­ful you need more than just the right mar­ket. You need the right offer, with the right mes­sage, deliv­ered in the right way.

Many peo­ple will have the first one down pat. Some may get the sec­ond one — but when they do, they only have half the pic­ture or do it bass-​​ackwards. Yet, the third one, which is the most impor­tant of all, is the one sim­ple key­word research can­not tell you.

The sec­ond and par­tic­u­larly the third are usu­ally the ones peo­ple ignore or fail to answer ade­quately. When they see a mar­ket with a need, they tend to jump in head first with­out know­ing if the mar­ket wants what they offer, much less in the way they offer it.

It’s about hav­ing the right appeal — one that deliv­ers a mean­ing­ful mes­sage about the prod­uct, and sells the prod­uct in the way they want it, for the rea­sons they want it.

Hav­ing the right appeal is some­thing Dan Kennedy often calls “message-​​to-​​market match.” The prob­lem, how­ever, is the fact that peo­ple focus on the first two. They may have the right mes­sage for the right mar­ket. But they don’t have the right match.

The golden rule says, “Do unto oth­ers as you would want to have done unto you.” But I pre­fer what sales trainer and behav­ioral psy­chol­o­gist, Tony Alessan­dra, coins as the “Plat­inum Rule.” It’s “do unto oth­ers as they would want to have done unto them.”

Can you see the difference?

I think one of the most impor­tant lessons in copy­writ­ing I’ve learned of late is from my good friend David Garfinkel, also known as the world’s great­est copy­writ­ing teacher.

Accord­ing to David, to write effec­tive copy you should ask three impor­tant ques­tions. They are very sim­i­lar to what I pre­sented ear­lier, but they are spe­cific to copywriting:

1. Who is your market?
2. What is their problem?
3. And how do they talk about it?

Again, the third ques­tion in David’s premise above is key — but it’s also the one most peo­ple tend to ignore, skip over, or fail to answer ade­quately or correctly.

At the same time, it’s the ques­tion most key­word research tools fail to uncover. Obvi­ously. Because tools only offer num­bers and search vol­umes, with­out a proper under­stand­ing behind them. They offer mere glimpses and not the whole picture.

Which is why typ­i­cal key­word research sucks.

Look at it like a recipe. Many ingre­di­ents are required to cre­ate a gourmet dish. But ingre­di­ents alone are not going to guar­an­tee your suc­cess with any mar­ket. Key­word research tools are like recipes that sim­ply list the ingre­di­ents — and noth­ing else.

You need to know not only the right ingre­di­ents to use, but also how each ingre­di­ent must be used in the cor­rect order for the dish to turn out fan­tas­tic. Just one miss­ing ingre­di­ent, or one mis­used ingre­di­ent, many times will ruin a dish.

Well, there is a way to learn the answers to all three ques­tions, and how to use them to max­i­mize your chances of suc­cess. A way to get the entire recipe, so to speak. But before I share it with you, let me explain how this process came about.

My wife, Sylvie Fortin, and I have helped some of the top mar­keters rake in mil­lions in sales. What you may not know is that many of the top mar­keters on the Inter­net actu­ally hire her com­pany to con­duct much of the same research I’ve talked about in here.

(The ser­vice is actu­ally called “Via­bil­ity Research.”)

Dur­ing our coach­ing ses­sions, our stu­dents often ask us about via­bil­ity research. But explain­ing how to do this — and how to do it right — is not an easy task. How can you explain some­thing that is, for most peo­ple, con­sid­ered intuitive?

So after nine whole months, my wife has skill­fully put together the first in a series of “mar­ket­ing cook­books” aimed at answer­ing these three key questions.

We took our com­bined expe­ri­ence from over 15+ years help­ing peo­ple cre­ate prof­itable busi­nesses, launch suc­cess­ful prod­ucts, and imple­ment mas­ter­ful campaigns…

… And finally cre­ated a unique train­ing sys­tem for find­ing hot, hun­gry mar­kets online using easy-​​to-​​follow instruc­tions, videos, tools, web­sites, and resources.

This sys­tem is bro­ken down into four sim­ple, easy-​​to-​​implement steps. Steps you can use no mat­ter if you already have a prod­uct or if you have no idea where to begin. It takes you by the hand and cov­ers every­thing, step by step, and shows you how to:

1. Step #1: Find hun­gry mar­kets you can sell to.
2. Step #2: Dig deep inside your mar­ket, read their minds, and think like they do.
3. Step #3: Eth­i­cally spy on the com­pe­ti­tion to get sure-​​to-​​sell prod­uct ideas.
4. Step #4: See things through your market’s eyes to under­stand their true motives.

Called, “Mar­ket­ing E.S.P.: How to Pin­point Hot, Hun­gry and Highly Prof­itable Mar­kets,” Sylvie goes over the same process she goes through while con­duct­ing proper via­bil­ity mar­ket research for her top mar­ket­ing clients. A ser­vice clients pay her hand­somely for.

It’s one of the most impor­tant skills you will ever acquire to help build your busi­ness. It’s one that will improve your copy­writ­ing dra­mat­i­cally, too, because it allows you to dig deep so you can choose the right mes­sage to prop­erly con­nect with your market.

(In fact, via­bil­ity research is cru­cial when writ­ing my own copy, because it helps me gather more in-​​depth mar­ket research before I even write the first word.)

Imag­ine a web­site that hands to you on a sil­ver plat­ter the most pop­u­lar top­ics, an almost end­less stream of prod­uct ideas, a list of cus­tomers per­fectly tar­geted to your mar­ket, and an under­stand­ing of the mind­sets and dri­ving emo­tions behind them.

Not only does she show you how to find these web­sites (often, there are sev­eral of them for each mar­ket), but she also shows you how to pull key infor­ma­tion from each one…

… Infor­ma­tion that will ensure the next prod­uct you sell and the next piece of copy you write is a sure­fire win­ner. (And how to get max­i­mum value from each one, too.)

For exam­ple, my wife exposes a sim­ple offline source to find mar­kets with money to spend, what prod­ucts the mar­ket is cur­rently buy­ing, what offers are work­ing best, the most pop­u­lar top­ics, answers to ques­tions the mar­ket wants, and much more.

Most peo­ple are obliv­i­ous to it!

Mar­ket­ing E.S.P. gives you the tools to develop this skill. It’s almost a one-​​stop shop for research. It’s my wife’s prod­uct, so admit­tedly I am biased. But the bot­tom line is this…

Before you start writ­ing your copy, are you appeal­ing to a hun­gry mar­ket? If you are, are you giv­ing them exactly what they want, in the way they want it? Because, in the end, no mat­ter what your mar­ket­ing mes­sage is, it’s not about sell­ing or edu­cat­ing your market.

It’s about con­nect­ing with them.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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