6 Tips For Copy That Captures Attention
Every time my wife, Sarah, looks over my shoulder while I'm writing for a client, she says something along the lines of...
"Why do you write like that??"
As a graduate student studying International Relations (epic, right?), she's an academic writer through and through.
So it hurts her (and my literature teacher father-in-law) to see me writing with ellipses, bullet points, fragments of sentences, and the shortest dang paragraphs you've ever seen.
Because in academic writing, the goal is to inform and persuade with depth, structure, data, and logic.
But in marketing copywriting, the writer usually has three goals:
Capture attention
Keep that attention
Convert that attention into some kind of action
The copywriter (or the copy-writing business owner) has access to a ton of writing tools to help them do just that.
Here are just a few ways to make your marketing content more readable and engaging:
Split up lists into bullet points (like these)
Break up your paragraphs every 1-3 sentences
Use visuals (like photos, GIFs, or illustrations) whenever possible
This is some of the best advice writing advice I've received: tell your story with just the headlines. When possible, your reader should "get it" even if they skim over all the body copy and only read the headlines.
Get 'em in the first few sentences with an attention-grabbing hook. (I'm thinking about writing something just about hooks - let me know if that would be helpful).
Use text formatting like bold, underlining, and italics. But not too much, or you'll end up in bro marketing territory. And avoid CAPS most of the time.
Marketing copywriting is all about capturing and keeping attention.
Because people are like goldfish - they forget fast.
