How Important Is Your “Copy”?

When you speak to copywriters, they all tell you that copy is everything, that without good copy your offer will not convert.

They are correct – to a point – in that you do need quality copy to explain the benefits of your product or service to potential buyers before you can gain their confidence to proceed.

However, copywriters are wrong when they say it is everything.

For as long as I can remember, the key to achieving success with any promotion has been…

The right offer to the right people at the right time

All marketing professionals create what are called “control packs”, a sales package which has proven itself to be effective for a specific product / service and / or niche.

In most cases, they create multiple “control packs” – because there is generally a different hot button within each niche.

Now when these offers are placed in front of potential buyers, they find that one target audience (let’s call it a list) responds with a 0.0001% response yet another responds with a 5.5% response.

The same copy – with small variations – may have been used to cater for “list differences”.

Fundamentally, the difference in response is that the first promotion went to the “wrong” people whereas the 2nd went to the right people (i.e. “the right offer to the right people at the right time”).

Sure, there are differences between lists which need to be factored into this as some lists are not as up to date as they claim and of course, the nature of the list itself has a huge impact as well (e.g. buyer lists work better than prospect lists).

These factors reinforce that copy is not the sole driver – in fact, a very small driver.

In fact, copy probably has no more than 15% impact on the overall result as the two factors which actually determine success are the offer and the target audience.

Most copywriters assume that you have done your research and identified the right offer and target audience and therefore write their copy according to the brief you give them.

Therefore, it is vital that you understand your target market and particularly the channels which will be used to reach it BEFORE you brief a copywriter.

If you don’t get this equation right, then you cannot say that poor copy is the reason for any failure.