Recently, I’ve been re-watching The Wire. It’s just as good the second time around.
One scene from last night really struck me. It highlighted a massive problem people make in marketing that keeps people from buying from you.
Here’s the scene:
There’s a town hall meeting with police and community members in Baltimore.
An officer is up at the podium talking about how ending the drugs and violence in the city is a community effort. How they need community members to call them anytime they see criminal activity.
But the people aren’t having it. They talk about how they call the cops but the drug dealers are back the next day.
Another mentions how his brother tried to testify against one and was murdered as a result.
The officer speaking then says: “We’ll if you take a look at this chart…”
At this, everyone in the audience groans. A woman stands up and says:
“My kids can’t play outside no more. Some nights when we hear these pops we have to sleep under our beds. I come home from work, I can’t even get up my front steps because they’re occupied by the drug dealers. Is that in that picture you got up there?”
That’s what people miss in their copy — the human element. The snapshots of what their customer’s life looks like and can look like.
That quote right there is the exact language the police offer should be using. He should have said something like that to show he understands their problem.
Instead, he breezed over the human aspect and went straight to the charts and data.
People do this in their marketing all the time. They’ll be like “I know how busy you are. But my productivity course can save you an hour a day!”
For most people, that’s not enough. It doesn’t ignite any emotions so it won’t close nearly as many sales.
Instead, you want to dig deeper into your customer’s pains, desires, objections, and emotions using your customer’s words.
Reflect what they think, feel, and say back to them.
Show them you understand them.
Describe in detail exactly what they want.
And paint pictures to show how life looks now vs. in the future.
Don’t just talk about how the crime rate can drop to 3%. Talk about how they’ll be able to walk up to the door of their own home without having to step around a handful of drug dealers.
How do you know what stories to tell and pictures to paint?
You talk to your customers.
What do you say to them?
You can start with the same questions you ask your customers in case study interviews. (I have a list of them in my book.)
That will give you lots of quotes, stories, and imagery.
From there, it’s just a matter of organizing the information so it’s easy to access. So you or your team can copy-and-paste the quotes and stories from your customers to quickly create emails, sales pages, upsells, downsells, FB ads, and more.
If you really want to get all this done fast, you’ll want proven templates ready-to-go. This way you just plop some of those words and phrases from your customers into the template and your copy is ready to go.
This is what I do for my clients with my Buyer Multiplier system. This system lets you turn the words and phrases of your best customers into almost all the copy you need for a launch, cold traffic funnel, autoresponder sequence, and more. So you can quickly crank out high-quality copy that hits your customer’s pains, desires fears, and overcomes objections. You can learn more about this system here.
