Don’t Waste Time on Me-Marketing
Q: What is ‘me-marketing’?
A: Anything that is writer-centred and shouts ‘Look at me, aren’t I wonderful!’
Frankly, I couldn’t careless and neither could your reader.
Normally when I see sales flyers I throw them straight in the bin. But when one landed on my mat the other day I took a quick peek. It was very colourful and had several nice images dotted here and there to break up the text. It was quite pleasing to the eye so I thought I’d have a read – I believe it was a conservatory company.
I learned all about how long they had been in business, the wonderful calibre of their sales team, the fact that they used special glass and wonderful weather resistant frames. They had also won a local award or something…as you can tell, I was beginning to flag by this point.
They had made one fatal mistake – they had forgotten who the flyer was going to.
At no point did they tell me how their company’s product would benefit me.
They completely missed the point. OK, you could argue that I am intelligent enough to work that one out for myself. But because the flyer was all about them my reaction to it was ‘so what?’ Why should I spend my time and money contacting a company that paid so little attention to the needs of its potential customers?
If they had hired themselves a good freelance marketing copywriter their flyer would have been customer centred. It would have told me how their windows would benefit me: their energy saving qualities, reduced heating bills etc.
The moral therefore is no matter what medium you are writing for, your copywriting must be centred on the reader and the benefits they will get from your product.
Sally Ormond
Briar Copywriting – freelance copywriting services
Tags: Copywriting, freelance copywriter, marketing copywriting
