Mel,
Back in the days when I made my nut hawking networking gear to hard-nosed engineers, I struggled with a nasty bit of cognitive dissonance:
On one hand, I was reading all this pulse-pounding, hair-on-fire sales copy from marketers I respected, guys like Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert and John Carlton.
I KNEW this stuff worked, because they had the numbers to back it up.
And then I'd pick up the phone and talk to my customers.
These were guys with PhDs and 25 years' experience in electrical engineering.
Their favorite blood sport was skewering whatever hapless corporate marketing hack made the mistake of buying them their free pizza lunch this week.
And I just couldn't square it. In my gut, I knew that if I sent my customers a Dan Kennedy letter, they'd tear me to shreds.
They wanted facts and figures and charts—and even a whiff of hype sent them running for the tall grass.
I wobbled back and forth between these two extremes for a while, and sent out a couple of letters that make me cringe today...
Once I even had an argument with Dan about it—him insisting that there's no difference between marketing B2C and B2B, and me swearing that there was, at least when it came to MY customers.
But then he clarified: Even in B2C markets, soccer moms in Cambridge, Massachusetts or San Francisco talk to each other about slightly different things than Soccer moms in Iowa City or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
To really get maximum response, a good copywriter is going to write a different letter to different kinds of soccer moms.
He's absolutely right.
I couldn't just mail my list of engineers a rip off John Carlton's "one-legged golfer" ad because that violates a fundamental marketing principle:
Talk To People The Way They Talk To Each Other And Themselves
This principle tells you exactly how and when to use every other copywriting "trick" in the book.
It tells you whether your letters or website or emails should be ballsy and bombastic or polite and genteel.
It tells you whether they should have circles and underlines and highlighter all over the place or not.
It tells you whether you can use crude language or not, how much slang is appropriate.
If you're talking to Navy Seals about knife-fighting techniques, then you need to sound like a Navy Seal.
If you're talking to grey-haired accountants, then you need to use their language, their mannerisms, their buzzwords (but add a little extra personality, please).
If you're talking to Fortune 1000 CEOs, you say to them what you'd say to one if you were one, and you met him at a CEO meeting.
When a person says "Oh, that would never work with business people" or "That would never work on a corporate client," or "That would be totally inappropriate for anyone who has real money" they're confusing principles with techniques.
A sales letter can work on ANYONE, as long as they can read. A direct response approach will work on ANYONE.
It's not a question of whether copy can sell, it's a question of the style of the copy.
Get the style wrong, and you could find yourself flooded with angry phone calls—or worse, stony silence.
But when the STYLE fits the AUDIENCE, your words flow straight from the page and into your customer's mind like water.
That'll make the phone ring too—with orders.
Carpe Diem,
Perry Marshall
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