Are your leaflets confusing your audience? Lessons from a personal trainer
I had a one to one marketing consultation with a Personal Trainer yesterday who was frustrated that her leaflets weren’t bringing her in any business. She recognised that the paper quality and design were having an impact on this, and realised that she needed to invest in some professional design and print. But what surprised her was that her copy wasn’t pulling enough of a response.
Be brave and just use one proposition
Heather had used a common copywriting technique to grab her reader’s attention by asking them lots of questions. “Would you like more energy? Would you like to feel fitter and healthier? Would you like to lose weight? Would you like to invest more time in YOU?” It’s a common technique, but the challenge with this approach is that you’re confusing the reader with too many propositions. What are you trying to sell? Weight loss? Vitality? Time for yourself? Successful copywriters are brave, they just stick to one proposition and then ‘unwrap’ that proposition by leading the reader on a journey, via subheadings and body text, which makes the product or service they’re selling irresistible.
Create interest and generate desire
Secondly Heather had made another common mistake – assuming that her readers would be as passionate about her services as she was. And so she’d skipped straight from her questions to the call to action. “If this sounds like you, call me on 07xxx xxx xxx.”.
The challenge with this approach is that she simply hadn’t built up enough desire in her reader’s minds. It was all to easy to do nothing, to take no action at all.
So to combat that you need to make sure that you save some space to build the story. Imagine if you were selling your products face to face with someone. You’d talk to them, understand their needs, overcome their objections and only then would you ask them if they’d like to make an appointment with you. And you need to follow exactly the same process on paper. Persuade, engage and entice your target audience and then ask them to buy.
