Let’s face it, humans have created massively complicated systems as part of growing economies. As a single consumer in that system, it can sometimes be overwhelming and feel vaguely predatory. Feeling like a human, especially while looking at marketing writing and sales copy, is becoming rarer and rarer.
How Writing for Marketing and Sales Works
There are many potential reasons to write, from entertainment to committing history to paper to communication. For this article, let’s focus on writing for marketing and sales, which is arguably its own critter.
Marketing and sales writing is all about persuading people. From convincing humans to trust brands and products to fostering connections where there aren’t necessarily natural ones to “get it done” customer service, it’s its own type of communication.
For example, my mother had a birthday recently. She got many cards from businesses following some of the recent push for “personalization to create connection” business models. It perplexed her greatly why these businesses needed to wish her a happy birthday when she hadn’t crossed their threshold in a decade.
That’s one example of the overwhelm that can be created for a single human in the face of marketing and sales writing machines. All of the businesses that wrote to her probably thought they were doing great and looking personable. In reality, the effort accomplished nothing.
The goal in marketing is to create connection and trust, which then get converted into sales. The material must work together, or there will be no trust. However, since these principles are well known, companies tend to copy each other, and consumers have wised up to approach.
Instead, companies are still committing to telling us what we want to hear. They’ve devised whole systems to lie like the fae about their products and create the feeling of human-to-human connection with faceless, uncaring brands. No wonder humans feel stressed and lonely!
How Writing for Marketing and Sales Should Work
While there are bottom-line benefits to doing the above, it generally doesn’t work for humans who are the targets of marketing and sales writing. Like friendships, brand connections are work, and copying someone else’s system is cheating your company. Eventually, things will change.
The best way I’ve found to find the human in writing for marketing and sales is by writing to a single avatar. We’ve all had moments where we’ve looked at something and gone, “Huh, X would love that.” In this case, X would be the person you focus on writing to. It’s something monolithic brands don’t tend to do well, though they can fake it.
There may be a little research into why X would love a product or what X might use the product to solve beyond the obvious. However, more detailed “avatars” lose the human connection factor that’s usually present when we’re writing to our friends.
Audience research matters, but it goes beyond dry statistics and ad guidance. Knowing the product matters, but it’s not everything. Understanding the best options for various platforms is important, but not at the expense of writing like a human being.
Creating connections cannot be forced or mass-marketed without consequence. It can be a team activity, but beyond a small team, it loses the spark. Instead, it would be better if we all wrote like we’re writing to a friend and not an audience in the millions.
What About SEO in Writing and Sales?
SEO is a tool that’s useful for all writing that will be on the web. For web pages and social media, it has greater weight. It’s less important but still relevant for private marketing options like email since it can create continuity.
SEO no longer relies on exact keyword matches to feed the algorithm, just like the percentages for word inclusion have gotten hazier over the years. Instead, SEO can now be done based on straightforward research and natural word usage.
Sales and marketing writing with SEO is more human-friendly now, but only when someone knows what they’re doing. It takes time to change big systems, so more nimble small businesses actually have the advantage.
The AI Exacerbation
As with many things, AI is exacerbating the problem rather than solving it. People can generate massive amounts of text with little effort using AI. However, that doesn’t mean it’s quality text or good writing for marketing and sales.
AI is trained on long strings of well-edited text, which usually means books, even if they won’t say that for legal reasons. The way humans tell stories and write stories is very different from how we communicate with each other. This difference is part of why we don’t connect as well with the text.
Essentially, there has been a flood of AI content, and some people think that’s benefitted them. It may be a while before we see it return to Earth. However, just because it’s out there does not mean it’s beneficial.
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