How To Tell Your Story in Copy – The Easy Structure That Closes The Sale

Writing copy is like telling a story, a true, exciting story. And like all good stories, copy needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end. In my previous articles for newbie copywriters, I’ve told about how an arm-grabbing headline will get your copy off to the flying start it needs. Now I’m going to introduce the structure as a whole. Later I plan to talk about each part of your copywriting story, or jigsaw if you like, to show you how each part fits together and why copy needs the right structure.
Way back around the 9th century BC (nobody knows for absolutely certain), Homer used many subtle structures in his poem The Odyssey. This tells the story of Odysseus, who suffered many mishaps as he wandered around the Mediterranean on his way back home to Ithaca after fighting on the winning Greek side in the Trojan War. Scholars have revealed how Homer used structure, keywords and repetition, among many other devices, to hold his hearers’ attention (poems were read aloud in those days) and to remember what stage Odysseus had reached in his tortuous journey. The Odyssey is one of the longest poems ever written, but despite some digressions it still hangs together as a story right to the end, where Odysseus returns home and is reunited with his faithful wife and loyal son, and gets back his property that was being abused by wasters.
What all this amounts to is that the need for a precise structure has been proven over many centuries in countless contexts. The necessity for each part of the structure has also been proved time and again. And expert copywriters like me also know exactly why each part works. If you learn the correct structure of copy, and something about why it works, your copy will be more successful. That’s guaranteed by centuries of human experience, many thousands of authors and many millions of readers. And the sales figures speak for themselves.
I know that there’s something called postmodern literature where you don’t go start-middle-end. Maybe you’ve studied it or tried your hand at it in a creative writing class or have published such literature yourself. I can assure you that postmodern writing techniques won’t work in the field of sales and marketing. When people read about a product, they expect to go from the start through the middle to the end. They even skip bits (we all do) to get to the end, and I’ll come on to how we copywriters counteract skipping later in the series. If you want to be technical about it, we have to observe the conventions of the discourse of the genre we’re in. If we want to talk sales, we’ve got to use sales talk, and that means telling the story the right way, the way people want to hear it. If we don’t, they’ll move on and we’ll lose the sale.
This article has been the introduction, showing that the need for structure in our copy has been proven. You can say there are as many as 14 steps in a piece of sales copy. But don’t worry, I’ll take you through them one by one in order as the series proceeds. I plan to submit each article about every three days so you won’t lose the thread. And by the way, the story behind following the thread wasn’t about Odysseus. It was about another man in Greek mythology, Theseus, and Ariadne, the woman who helped him find his way back through the cruel king’s maze. Come follow my thread!
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