Video:
Write Now! Persuasive Writing Prompts:
Find the Story in Your Prospect’s Mind
Practice your copywriting skills with this prompt from The Professional Writers’ Alliance (PWA).
With this Write Now! tip, you’ll learn a new way to develop your story.
Marketing leader, David Deutsch, believes that in order to write successful sales copy, you must know your prospect well. That means being able to delve into his mind to understand his worries and concerns to provide him with solutions. (Or read the transcript below.)
You know most people when they teach story teach it from the point of view of how to write a story, how to tell a better story. And what I teach people instead is to try to find the stories that are already going on in the minds of the people that you’re writing to because we live by story. We live by the stories that we tell them ourselves.
And if you can influence, if you can enter and you can influence and you can impact the story that I'm telling myself, then as a reader, as a writer, you'll be able to much powerfully influence me.
So for today's prompt, what I'd like you to do is try to figure out. Try to imagine what is the story that's going on in the minds of your reader or in the minds of your prospect, and address that story in a way that you change it. If it’s a negative story, if it's a story of how I've tried maybe it’s to lose weight or something like that and how I failed and I'm going to keep failing. If that's their story, then try to enter that story and somehow influence them to see that story in a new light and to change it.
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I think getting into the minds of whatever demographics I am targeting would require research, I guess I would look up similar products and read the reviews, ask if the company has done any questionnaires, etc. If it were something I was interested in , I would ask myself questions. Thanks for jump starting my brain!
Musick –
A challenging prompt.
Something that helped me to think about how to draw out someone's story; or if I had to write a sales copy to help/ influence someone else:
the books/articles/newsletters I read (!):
about self-help, creativity, mindfulness, habits & steps to a happier/healthier/ more successful you, and so on.
lisa25 –
sample:
The journey of weight loss is so challenging. I mean You get on the bandwagon, you get off and your weight reflects that. You’re tired of all the failed attempts. I know oh to well. I was losing so well. I started at 330 lbs and got down to 290, then 260, then hit a plateau. My was it hard to keep doing the work and getting no results. It finally knocked me into depression. I thgt I’d never loss the weight. Another epic fail. I started to gain and then realized that I had come way too far to give up now. I started looking into other ways to eat and getting diverse with my workouts. Joined a boot camp for two months and broke thru the plateau and lost 60lbs! That boosted my confidence in the journey and I am now 153lbs.
Noelle100 –