Copywriting
Effective copywriting requires an understanding of the product or service being sold, the goals of a business and the needs of their clients. In a world where there is huge competition for our attention, demographic data, purchase history and market research can provide valuable information during the content marketing process.
Applying my knowledge of digital marketing and the Five Factor Model (FFM) to my work as a copywriter, I can craft text that will drive customer engagement and sales. In this section I explore the use of characters, personas and narrative in story-telling, which can help a business to develop an effective content marketing strategy.
Copywriting Using The Five-Factor Model (FFM)
The Big Five Personality Traits Test provides a psychological framework that copywriters can use to develop a better understanding of human behaviour and preferences. This article explores how copywriters can apply an understanding of the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism to their work.
Understanding the relevance of Five Factor Model (FFM) enables copywriters to craft narratives that resonate with audience traits, increasing engagement and sales. This can be applied to marketing strategies for content types including website landing pages, articles and blog posts, email newsletters, email sales funnels and white papers.
Writing Content For a General Audience
Using FFM to guide copywriting strategies requires data that can be collected by carrying out customer research of the target audience. However, if there is insufficient data to build customer personas, content should be written that will appeal to a general audience, by balancing the five traits. Some content can appeal to emotion, innovation and adventure, while other content is more focused upon logic, tradition and reliable data. Each could include calls to action (CTAs), such as invitations to complete a survey or quiz, enabling the building of FFM profiles, to use in subsequent communications.
Whether content is written for a B2B or B2C audience, the text should feature clear messaging and include elements designed to attract a broad demographic. Copywriting blending emotion and logic, could include an engaging story, or testimonial, that appeals to people high in extraversion or agreeableness and data-driven insights which resonate with individuals high in conscientious. For example: ‘Using AI, IoT and cloud services we have developed a sustainable platform that has helped businesses reduce their energy costs by 25% (data) and support communities building a greener future (emotion)’.
Copywriting should include clear calls to action, such as read a white paper, subscribe to receive a newsletter or sign up for a demo. People are more likely to take action if content resonates with their personality traits. For example, an individual who is high in extraversion might respond to an invitation to join a live chat, while someone low in extraversion might prefer to read a blog post, or download a white paper. Until you have built their audience personality trait profiles, you should include options that appeal to each trait.
Developing empathy for an audiences preferences, values and concerns can help a copywriter to craft text that resonates emotionally and intellectually with the traits of each individual. Mixing facts with storytelling can produce content that will appeal to different personality types. Gathering customer data and audience segmentation, enables information to be more tailored and use of A/B testing can refine the approach, by evaluating which messaging is most effective.
Writing a Good Story
Most people enjoy a good story featuring relatable characters and an engaging narrative. Stories can influence the way we perceive ourselves, each other and the world around us. Within them people can describe and attempt to understand the past or present and express their hopes and fears for the future. Through stories we can explore imagined worlds, such as those found within books and movies, which technology might soon make into reality. When ideas found in stories resonate with us, we are more likely to remember and share them with other people.
Each of us has the thread of a story running though our life, which reflects our past, present and potential future. That story is shaped by how our personality traits cause us to perceive ourselves, relate to other people and behave. For an author, one of the greatest challenges when writing a story is to create fictional characters, who through their words and actions demonstrate qualities readers will find both realistic and relatable. Characters, whether based upon real people or pure fiction, can attract or repel an audience and human beings can respond in a similar manner to an organisation, business, product or service.
The stories people tell each other about an individual or business can shape how they are perceived. A business selling a product or service could create better stories by learning more about their customers wants and needs and developing more realistic marketing personas. This could help a business to communicate with them more effectively. Marketing strategies could involve using surveys in order to gather audience data that informs sales and marketing strategies and development of mission and vision statements. Storytelling techniques could be employed within strategies involving AIDA, an acronym used in marketing to refer to attention, interest, desire and action.
Creating Fictional Characters
Well written characters will exhibit qualities that cause an audience to relate to them and care about what happens to them. For an author they form the centre around which their story will be built. For a business relatable characters can humanise what would otherwise be a uninspiring business brand. Through what they say and do, characters can appeal to a particular target audience and reflect themes, values and ideas that a business wants to associate with itself and the products or services that it sells. An organisation can similarly tell stories featuring characters that embody the message they are attempting to promote.
Creating fictional characters, with strengths and weaknesses, that will appear on the page fully formed and with depth is a challenge for authors when writing a story. The term show, don’t tell, is frequently used, but it is not easy to develop characters that will reflect often hidden traits indirectly through what they say and do. However, the Five-Factor Model can be used to establish dominant traits for each of the characters in a story, shaping their behaviour, according to how they think and feel about themselves, other people and the world in which they exist.
When combined with other elements, such as demographic factors, the Five-Factor Model can help a writer create characters with depth, who will be as recognisable as people in the real world. This could help them to maintain consistent patterns of behaviour when telling stories in novels, movies or plays, making the characters more believable and relatable to an audience. If you choose some famous characters from novels, movies or television shows, you could take the test for each of them, by selecting the answers you think they would give and then reflect upon the results.
The Big Five Personality Traits Test might help you to create realistic and relatable characters to use in fiction writing.
Creating Marketing Personas
Rather than use simple stereotypes, marketing professionals can develop realistic personas with back stories. For example, by answering Personality Test questions as they think individuals who have similar characteristics to their target audience would answer them. The results can be combined with demographic data, to create stories about a product or service that resonate with audiences. Improved content marketing messaging and user journey mapping, that reflects priorities of the target audience and provides clear calls to action (CTAs), could deliver more leads and increased sales.
The Big Five Personality Traits Test might help you to develop realistic customer personas for marketing campaigns.
Writing Engaging Narratives
The narrative of a story should take the audience on a journey, from which they will emerge entertained, informed and possibly even transformed. An author achieving this might attract a loyal readership, while a business could increase sales of its products or services and strengthen brand loyalty. A central character in a narrative is often portrayed as undergoing a heroes journey, in which they will overcome challenges and win some prize of great value. For example, a business could identify a problem and offer a solution that a potential customer will value. They could tell a story with relatable characters and an entertaining narrative, in which the customer imagines themselves achieving their goal using a product or service the business sells. Potential customers might feel motivated to make a purchase.
When looking for real world examples in which characters and narratives have been used to sell products or services, try to recall some memorable advertising campaigns. For example, a company selling business software might show a business owner struggling to cope with a heavy workload, which they are able to manage easily using a new piece of software. A travel agency could feature people escaping the stress of work and enjoying a holiday. Car companies could highlight comfort, reliability or affordability. A business selling leisure products might show people gathered together and enjoying the company of family and friends, while a business selling food could highlight taste and nutritional value, along with the social benefits of sharing a meal.
Customer Engagement
Every day billions of people across the world are exposed to information that is intended to cause them to think and act in a particular way. Whether designed to educate, inform or persuade, information must be noticed and engaged with if it is to achieve a desired goal. However, most people are overwhelmed by the sea of data they live within and they will ignore anything that fails to engage their active interest. Individuals, organisations and businesses that want to reach an audience must think carefully about how they are going to share the information that they want to communicate, particularly if it is abstract, novel or complex.
Around the world and across generations the most effective medium through which ideas can be shared has proven to be stories. They establish an emotional connection with their audience by using relatable characters and an engaging narrative. People are more likely to remember information woven into stories that establishes an emotional connection with them, rather than data delivered in the form of dry facts and figures. Using storytelling techniques, creative artists are able to attract an audience that will appreciate their work. A business that is marketing a product or service is also more likely to reach its target audience if it develops stories that appeal to them.
If you would like to enquire about me writing content for your business, please contact me.