If you’re anything like me, then you probably watch most TV ads thinking “That’s not me”. You’re not the super-mum swanning around her perfect home spritzing the air with freshener, or the elegantly-dressed woman stroking her smooth-as-silk legs beside some chisel-jawed bloke in a suit behind the wheel of an SUV, and certainly not the super-model with perfect hair. But do you ever watch an ad and feel as though THEY’RE TALKING DIRECTLY TO YOU? Like they really get you? It happened to me recently when I was watching an ad for hayfever medicine. If you suffer from hayfever, you’ll know how horrible it is – runny nose, itchy eyes, and there’s almost nothing you can do about it (apart from take pretty strong and often-not-very-effective hayfever tablets.). Like me, you may have dismissed it as ‘just hayfever’ (as in, not even a cold). And that’s exactly the line they used in the TV ad – “You’ve dismissed it as just hayfever”. How did they know? I can only assume (as with most big ad campaigns) they’d done their research and worked out that this is what a lot of people do – dismiss hayfever as ‘just hayfever’. I did, literally for weeks, until I succumbed and FINALLY bought some medication. (The relief was, well, not quite instant, but I did wonder why I hadn’t done something sooner. Oh right, because it was ‘just hayfever’.) My point is that speaking directly to prospects in their own language is the Holy Grail of copywriting. All too often, businesses talk about their products and services from their own point of view. They use internal jargon, promote features which they think are important but which the customer couldn’t care less about, and generally bore people to death with talk of ‘great customer service’ and the like. So the questions you need to ask yourself are:
- What issues are keeping my customers up at night?
- What do they want from me?
- How can I let them know that I can ‘hear’ their inner thoughts, and offer them a solution?
Then you might just be on track to speaking to them in their own language – language which will resonate and turn prospects into loyal customers. ‘Just hayfever’? Just genius.
