Editorial Marketing – The Only Way To Write Online Copy

Some people mistakenly believe that writing for the web is just the same as writing advertising copy for the ‘offline’ market. Not so! What people want online is different to what works in the ‘offline’ world. Therefore many of the techniques that work for direct marketing copy simply do not work for online copy.
In particular, it has been found that web users have an aversion to being ‘sold to’. What people want when they go online is information. It is no mistake that the Internet is termed the “information highway” -it is estimated that 97% of what people search for online is information.
Some people will have you believe that the internet is just one big shopping channel, but even if a prospect goes online to search for a product, what they really want is information about that product. What they don’t want is yet more advertising! It is estimated that in a single day we are each subjected to 3,500 commercial messages, from TV, radio, billboards and the Internet.
This leaves Internet Marketers with a unique problem – just how do you sell your product online without your site resorting to advertising and looking like an online shop? The answer is that they (your prospects) first want to be groomed and not bombarded by advertising. This grooming involves a sales pitch that does not sound like a sales pitch, but rather reads like an editorial. Marketing gurus estimate that even in the offline world, editorial style ads are likely to attract six times the readership compared to standard advertising.
What exactly do we mean when we talk about an ‘editorial style’?
Simply put, writing in an ‘editorial style’ means writing copy that reads like a story. You need to develop a theme to your copy, with characters that bring it to life, strategies that involve and entice your reader, testimonials that create credibility and headings that grab the prospect’s attention. The process involves using your imagination and a way of thinking about your product that is ‘outside the box’. Most importantly it involves writing a story, which needs to flow across your website in an irresistibly alluring way.
How exactly does editorial marketing work?
It involves writing irresistible content that simply ‘slides’ into a covert sales pitch for the product. This means that your copy must be expertly crafted for ‘hidden selling’.
Why does it work?
There are no complicated reasons for its success – it simply works because you are giving your website an aura of ‘credibility’. When you ‘hide’ your sales message into the soft confines of a story – then you will gain the trust of your prospects; set yourself up as an expert and increase the likelihood of a sale.
By writing a story, you are appealing to the emotions of our prospects. It has been proven that people use their emotions to buy online and then justify their purchase with logic. Although logic should be used on your site, its purpose is to back up your emotional claims. Therefore, you need to understand emotional drivers, such as anxiety, fear, anticipation etc and then write your copy to target these emotions.
This could be described as a right versus left brain test – we are targeting emotions (right brain) rather than logic (left brain). Studies that explore what it is that motivates people to buy (Steven Reiss: Who am I? The 16 Basic Desires that motivate our action and define our personalities) have shown that complex human desires can be grouped into two basic human needs: the desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Since this is the case, the better you structure your story to play to either of these desires/needs, the more successful you will be. Understanding Editorial Marketing is the key to having copy that sells.