Why Copywriting is the Ultimate Marketing Skill
You may have heard about copywriting, or may be not. But believe me, copywriting is one of the most important skills in digital marketing.
You can make everything work, but if you can’t make your copy work, everything will fail.
Before I teach you what copywriting really is, let’s understand how these words “copy” and “copywriting” came into existence.
Long back, there was no such thing as mass advertising or marketing. I am talking like 200-300 years back. Language was born much before that. The first form of mass marketing came in the form of print.
Printing presses were invented (by Gutenberg) and people started publishing content on newspapers and magazines. For the first time content could reach a lot of people – through replication.
For approximately 4,500 years before Gutenberg invented the printing press, books were made by hand. They were written on surfaces of clay, papyrus, wax, and parchment. There was no “copy”.
That’s why no one bothered about copy-writing!
Then came the printing press (before TV and Radio came along). Which helped people make copies of the content. That’s why it came to be called as “Copy-writing”.
So before the invention of the printing press, the only kind of sales were done through 1:1 sales by Sales men. People used to sell door to door. Or people used to have their merchandise in a market square and they sold their stuff. There was no concept of an “ad” to begin with.
Only sales, directly done by sales-men. So when the printing press was invented and newspapers started getting distributed, the concept of an ad copy was born.
And it is called an ad copy because the ad can be copied into each replica of the same newspaper that reaches 1000s of people. People who wrote content for these ads became COPY-writers.
They were Ad Copywriters, but they became known as copywriters. And the art of writing ad copies became to be known as “copywriting”.
Many people think that people who are good with the English language can write good copies.
No!
Language skills have nothing to do with copywriting. Someone might not be good with writing English and they can still be a good copywriter. Copywriting is the art of seamless communication with the target reader.
Here, I am writing a blog post “copy” and you are the target reader. Do you feel I am talking directly to you?
Like I am sitting next to you and talking about copywriting? That’s the skill I have developed over the years.
When I started writing, I wrote things online that looked like English Essays. Boring and professional. Such content is good for legal documents and school essays. But it doesn’t work online.
Because online, you need to talk to people directly. Appeal to their desires. And satisfy them.
If you have read up to this point in this blog post, that’s because you want to learn copywriting. When you opened this page, you knew that you were about to learn copywriting skills from me. And I am teaching that to you with my communication via written words.
Copywriting skill is not a skill that has to be learned (or needs to be learned). Effective copywriting is just communicating properly. We all communicate very well with our friends and family in-person. But we become boring when it comes to writing online.
That’s because writing online is a strange experience for humans. Evolution didn’t prepare us for that. The art of copywriting is to bring your online writing style to as close as possible to in-person communication.
So its more like unlearning your heavy professional English and become better at communication through writing. So everyone is a born copywriter. You just forgot it because you wrote Essays at school and project notes in college.
Albert Einstein said “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
Not sure if it was really Einstein, but its a famous quote and it became famous because it is so true. And in the case of copywriting, it is truer than ever.
The way I am writing to you now, would have been the natural way I would have written if I didn’t go to school! After 20 years of schooling, I unlearned what I learned about writing words in the next 10 years. And now when I am 30 years of age, I am writing as I would talk to you directly, as a friend sitting next to me.
Copywriting engages people. It makes people read. It is just like speaking skill where you can make people listen to you.
You know that I write long blog posts and emails. But no one has ever complained that my mails are long. Because it is easy to read, it captures your attention and gives you real learning value.
I am sure your thoughts about “professional English” has changed by now. They are not for communication. School type Essay type of English is for documentation. Legal documents. Government documents. etc
Copywriting is talking with words. Talking directly, to the point, without fluff. Talk less, say more. Write less, say more. That’s what I have learned recently.
And since then, writing has become so easy. So if you want to become a great copywriter, learn to write like you would talk. Once you get that skill, you can refine it over time.
And I say Copywriting is the most important skill in digital marketing because such copy sells. Just look at how long is the sales copy for my 100-day blogging course.
I have tested short copy vs. long copy. Long copy sells. Period!
You are already engaged on this post until this moment. If you write to the right person and send the right message, people will read.
The first question that people ask me is that “Will people have patience to read such a long sales letter?”
The answer is YES and NO. YES, the buyers will read. People who are not going to buy will not read. And in such a sales page, I expect a 2-5% conversion. Which means if I get 100 visitors to the sales page, 2-5 people will convert.
These 2-5 people converted BECAUSE it was a long sales copy. The copy helped them understand if the product is for them. If the product has good testimonials and user feedback. It helps them understand the features and benefits of the product. I will get the RIGHT BUYERS. And more buyers.
With short copy, I sell 0.5% to 1%. And they are the wrong buyers – because they bought without understanding the product completely. I don’t want such customers.
If you are parting with your money, you won’t do it very easily. You will read, if you are a serious buyer.
If you are reading up to this line, you are reading because you want to learn copywriting. Some people will never see this line even if they started reading this blog post. Those are the people who are not interested in learning copywriting skill. They are not serious enough to engage in it.
If you are buying something from a door to door sales man, you will ask all the questions that you need to know the answers for from the sales man. That’s what long sales copy does. It answers all the questions, removes all the objections, explains all the features and benefits.
Choose any product or service, a great copywriter would do the best job in talking to the prospect in the best way possible, so that the prospect converts into a buyer.
Many people teach blogging in India. They have free blogs and free YouTube videos. They make money from display ads. Many people have tried to sell a blogging course. And they failed. No one has been able to do such volume as me in India when it comes to a blogging course. So far I’ve enrolled 3,254 students in the blogging course and each sale was made at 2,000 rupees at least.
Do the math. That’s 65,08,000+ in total revenue. And this happened because of long sales emails and long sales copies. Many people think that the biggest challenge in Digital Marketing is getting traffic.
NO!
Getting traffic is not the problem. The problem lies in converting that traffic into sales. If you can convert traffic into sales, you can always pay for the traffic. Or pay for creating the content that brings in the traffic.
For every 100 visitors to this sales page on my blogging course, I make at least 2 sales. Who knows, even you might become a customer 😉
2 sales of 1999 each is 3998 INR. That’s $58.31 in revenue. Even if I have to pay 30 INR for every click or $0.50 approx, it is not a problem because I will break even. I can drive unlimited traffic to this page, because all the traffic I pay for would be paid for by the sales.
So if you can figure out how to sell online using copywriting, every damn problem in digital marketing is solved. You can hire enough content writers to write, rock with content marketing and get a lot of traffic. You can hire SEO experts and make sure the site is indexed well on the search engines. You can hire paid marketers and get them to make the best of the campaigns which brings in traffic at the lowest cost. You can hire designers to get the best website and ad copy designs.
You can hire them all because you can pay them all. Because your copy converts. Because when the traffic from all the sources makes you money, you just pay a part of that income back to traffic generation.
That’s what I have realized in the recent times. Copywriting is the ultimate skill in Digital Marketing. If you can make copywriting work, you can buy off every other skill set in digital marketing.
On the other hand, your SEO, Design, Content, Paid Ads skills will be of no use if you can’t convert the traffic into sales. That traffic will only end up costing you server bandwidth.
Right now in India even businesses don’t realize that they need long sales copies. So they are not looking for a copywriter. If you learn copywriting now, the only way you can make money off it is to sell your own products. If you don’t have your own products, you can still start learning copywriting.
Read a few books on it. Write on your blog. Write copy for other businesses for free. Eventually, it will become the ultimate DM skill. I am pretty sure you will agree with me 100% on this.
Because if you are reading this line right now, It is my copywriting skill that has held your attention up to here. I got your attention for this long.
In a world where every app, friend, family member and business is trying to grab your attention and serve their needs
In an attention deficit world: Attention is the most valuable resource. It is more valuable than gold. Scarcity creates value. And in a world where attention is the most scarce thing…
The skill to get someone’s attention for this long is the ULTIMATE SKILL.
What do you think?
Leave a reply on the comments section below and let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju