Whether you’re writing an advertisement, a sales page, an email, or just trying to convince someone to agree with your way of thinking… These simple, yet powerful persuasion techniques will make your job of persuasion much easier.
These techniques have been used by politicians, copywriters, lawyers, and propaganda masters throughout history. But for the sake of this series of posts, we’ll be using them to create compelling sales copy for your products or services.
I’ll give some short examples for each technique, just to give you a basic idea of how they could work. But you can certainly expand each one to create much more powerful sales copy for your own business.
So if you’re ready… here we go…
1. Appeal to a persons identity
Who a person is, and how they see themselves is probably the single biggest factor in how they act, and what actions they take in the world (followed closely by who they would like to be)
If you can understand how a person sees themselves, and tie in your product or service with their identity, you’ll have a very good chance of getting them to want your product in their life.
One powerful method of bringing your offer into their life, is to tell a story of how someone similar to them acted, in a similar situation.
Telling a story about someone else allows people to enter the story in their own minds (and visualize themselves as the main character) without feeling like they’re being sold to.
As a matter of fact, if you tell a good enough story you can often cause someone to want what you’re selling, without you even needing to sell.
If you don’t have the time, or space to tell a long story… another powerful method is to quickly shortcut the connection of identity, by telling them how other people similar to them are already making the same decision.
Here’s a quick example: Say we’re selling running shoes. We could start a sentence with…
“Other runners like you have found our shoes to be the most comfortable running shoes they’ve ever worn. In fact, many trained athletes have have found our running shoes to be…”
Do you see what we started there? We took the identity of our audience (the identity of a runner) and enhanced it with the vision of trained athletes. So now our reader has been elevated to the status of a trained athlete (but only if they buy our running shoes 🙂 )
Of course people have more than one identity in their lives. They can be a wife, sister, mother, daughter, owner of a business, and more… all at the same time.
One of our main jobs as copywriters is to identify the most powerful identity our target audience has, that relates to our product or service. And then tie the two together in way that makes buying what we’re selling a natural, and obvious decision for our reader to make.
So while you’re writing your next sales piece, ask yourself “Who is this person I’m writing for…? Who do they think they are…? Who would they like to be..? And how does my offer fit into their story?”
In the next part of this series on Powerful Written Persuasion Techniques I’m going to present you with the powerful force of invoking emotions in your readers.
So get ready for that one, and I’ll see you on the other side…
Here’s to writing more persuasive sales copy… more often.
All the best,
SARubin
Powerful Written Persuasion Techniques – Part 2 (invoking emotions) >>>
