Copywriting is the art/science of selling with words. Most geeks do not believe in copywriting. Long copy can’t sell, right? Who reads a single sentence in Apple’s copy? All you need is a fancy product name and an incredible list of features, right?

Wrong, wrong and … wrong! And I’ll explain why in a minute.

Various styles of copy work depending on the stage of sophistication of the market and their state of awareness.

States of awareness

How aware of your product and their needs is your market?

  1. The most aware: everybody knows about your product, no need for long copy, state the price and what’s new about it.
  2. The customer knows of the product but doesn’t yet want it.
  3. The prospect knows he wants what product does, but doesn’t know yet there is a product.
  4. The prospect has a need, recognize the need, but doesn’t recognize the connection between need & your product.
  5. Completely unaware market.

Most mainstream copy is cheesy to geeks because we have a very high state of awareness (state 1-2).

Sophistication of the market

Copy also depends on how many products have been there before you. This is called the sophistication of the market.

Here are the 4 stages of sophistication of a market with a sample headline describing each.

Stage 1: (First to market) keep it simple, eg.: “Lose ugly fat” Stage 2: Push claims to extreme, answer objections, eg.: “Lose up to 47 pounds in 4 weeks or get $40 back” Stage 3: Find new mechanism, eg.: “First wonder drug for losing fat” Stage 4: Expand on new mechanism, push it to extreme, answer objections, eg.: “First no diet wonder drug for losing fat”

Those headline are old-hat. Style changes but strategies don’t.

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I have to admit, my interest in copywriting was caused by an over-exposure to Mad Men. After watching the four seasons a dozen times, I carefully studied Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini, the mythical (and out of print) Breakthrough Advertising, by Eugene Schwartz, a bunch of other books and bought a crap load of videos, PDFs and online tutorials about copywriting.

After applying some of this stuff, I started selling a lot more and my life began to change quite drastically :).

It took me some time to admit this was due to my copywriting skills, but I was literally getting emails from customers saying: “Your tag line hooked me”, “[…] then I read your [product] description and that sealed it” and “this sentence convinced me”.

So, I’ve decided to pack all my learnings in a small eBook for easy and quick consumption by you!

And … it’s FREE! For now at least ;)

Get it at “copywritingforgeeks.com”:http://copywritingforgeeks.com/

I hope you like it!

Note: The stages of sophistication and states of awareness are from the book Breakthrough Advertising, by Eugene Schwartz.