Boil your company down with boilerplates
Boilerplates: Can’t live with ’em, can’t get a decent one through approvals.
Writing and editing
Why write a multi-deck headline?
Because it’s the best-read element on the page
Decks — those one-sentence summaries under the headline — do the heavy lifting on webpages.
Indeed, according to The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack III study of reader behavior:
- 95% of webpage visitors read all or part of the deck.
How to find benefits, not features
Ask these questions in the interview
Having trouble finding reader benefits? Maybe you need to ask different questions.
Ask your subject matter experts:
- What happens if our customers buy this product or service?
How to define features and benefits
Focus on the reader’s needs
If you were giving away a Hawaiian vacation to people who signed up for your webinar, which would you lead with?… Read the full article
Avoid fake benefits of the product
No ‘Pat yourself on the back for choosing us’
“Clean your face,” demands a hotel soap wrapper. No, YOU clean YOUR face! I want to respond.… Read the full article
How to turn features into benefits
Lead with the benefit, substantiate with the feature
I once reviewed an article for a company’s sales force with the headline:
Extraordinary customer experience: Be a customer advocate.
… Read the full articleHow to craft reader-centered writing
Use you for all audiences, channels
You. It’s a power tool of communications.
The second person increases readability, boosts opens and clickthroughs and is the most retweeted word in the English language.… Read the full article
Top organizations use reader-centric approach
High performers focus on readers 71% of the time — IABC UK study
Seventy-one percent of high-performing organizations focus their messaging on audience’s point of view.… Read the full article
Writer centered vs. reader centered writing
Stop We-We-ing on reader
It feels so good to talk about ourselves.
Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read the full article
What is reader-centered writing?
Avoid Institutional Narcissism
Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves.… Read the full article