(This originally appeared in my newsletter. Sign up now to get content like this every Monday.)
Welcome to another newsletter, folks. Today, we’re covering:
TIP: Focus your copy on one idea.
EXAMPLE: An old ad with too many ideas
THOUGHT: The traditional top-down content approach can be turned on its head.
TIP: One idea
Here’s one that sounds intuitive, but is actually easy to forget: focus on one idea. Choose one single thing you want people to take away from your writing, and build around that.
This doesn’t mean you are limited to talking about just one thing. Rather, it’s more about figuring out an overall story. If you have one overall idea you want to get across, you can start framing each benefit in terms of that idea. If you ask yourself how much each benefit contributes to your overall idea, it quickly becomes clear which benefits are the most important – and which ones can be discarded.
Also, by framing them in terms of that idea, you get a much more cohesive story, rather than just a grab bag of statements.
This doesn’t necessarily mean your copy needs to be short. Rather, it’s about the things you choose to write about versus how much time you spend on them.
So to try this: ask yourself what kind of outcome you’re selling. Then, ask yourself how each of your benefits contributes to that outcome. Then, write that answer down! You’ll be surprised at how quickly you realise which benefits need to be talked about the most, which ones need to be talked about the least, and which ones can disappear entirely.
(You can see a couple of examples of how to apply this principle in the archives – this one about a mailer from Hello Fresh, and this one about an ad from a medical indemnity insurance company. Or keep scrolling to see an an example of a train line ad that would benefit from focusing on just one idea.)