[MUSIC] Welcome back. Great to see you. We're continuing in our 7A sequence, and for this lesson, we're going to turn our attention to taking or prompting an action. So all those earlier As that we've talked about so far, things like attention, authority, and audience, need to be translated into action. In this lesson, we will discuss the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 formula for taking action. Specifically, we'll generalize the first three steps within this lecture. On completing this lesson, you will apply the first three steps of the formula to your content marketing strategy, to build your customer or audience base. Let's get started, so there are folks out there who have massive followings, but they don't really have businesses. And a lot of otherwise very good writers forget that content marketing is marketing. A good writer has to be a good marketer in order to call herself or himself a content marketer or a content strategies. And so action is the point at which we take that attention that is brought to us by an audience and we converted into an action, into some sort of behavior could be registering to vote. It could be eating a different kind of food. It could be making a purchase. It could be signing up for your email list. And the techniques and the tools that are use for this come out of a tradition called direct response copywriting. And this goes back to more traditional advertising and particularly advertising by mail. The people who are really really good at this, where the people most of the man who created advertising that you are getting your mailbox junk mail. That was selling things from gardening books to financial newsletters to health products. And this course that you're taking now is a content marketing course. It's not a persuasive copywriting course per se. But we do have quite a few tools for you, because as a working writer, this is something you want to get good at, and you want to make really a career long study of. The art of persuading people to take action, there's a lot to it, you get better at it the more of it you do, and it's really worth studying because there are techniques that will help your work function better. So today, I'm going to give you a distilled formula, if you will. It's really more of a checklist than a formula. It's the elements of a persuasive piece that will help you get the result that you need. And if one of them is missing, you'll tend to find that the persuasion doesn't work that well. So, we can just call it the 1-2-3-4-5 formula, there are five steps to it, and I'll run through them. The first step is, who are you? Setting the context. Who are you to deliver this solution to your audience member, and of course, this is where the whole authority and authenticity elements do come in handy. Because they let the audience know who you are. Of course, who your organization or your client is that you're writing for and let them know that they can trust you. So the first part of the formula is to establish a baseline of trust and authority. You know what you're talking about, you have experience solving this kind of problem and you can solve the problem for the person that's coming to this webpage. Persuasion is persuasion, brain chemistry changes very little, and these techniques of direct response, persuasive copywriting actually don't tend to change a lot over time because we're wired pretty much the way we've always been wired. So the first step is setting that context, letting them know who you are. Second step is to let them know what your thing does. Here's what I've got. So you know it could be a pair of shoes. It could be an orthopedic procedure. It could be a switch for a power plant. It could be a granite countertop. Whatever it is that you have to offer this customoligist client, and these are of course, what you might have seen called features, there are important. What is the product about. What is it made of? What are its components? What is it? Make it visible to your potential customer, and of course, for a lot of products this literally means including some visuals that they can look at. The third step or component is what it does for you. In other words, what it does for that audience member? And these are the flip side of copywriting features, these are the copywriting benefits. What it does for the person who's going to make the purchase, what they get out of it? So, the improve resell value of the house, the pain for any, the admiring looks on the dance floor even in business to business, this is very widely misunderstood. There are emotional benefits. It was a great tagline, long ago. No one ever got fired for choosing IBM. That's a perfect example of an emotional based business to business benefit. It's all about addressing fear and uncertainty in your workplace in a B2B context. Try to pin a picture of how this person's life, in other words, this audience member's life is going to be transformed once they have this solution. And so this can be done gracefully and this can be done in a way that is cheesy and salesmany and feels infomercially. So obviously, you're going to try for some grace here. One really elegant way to do this is to use case studies and customer stories. You're painting the picture of what the person's life is going to look like once they have subscribed to the solution that you offer, the product, the service, what have you. So very roughly speaking there are two kinds of benefits. There are emotional benefits, these are things like, you're going to feel more confident, you're going to feel less stressed out, you're going to have a more loving relationship with your family, you're going to feel like you look good and that's going to make you feel proud and happy. You're going to feel successful, you're going to feel wealthy. Emotional benefits, about how you're going to feel. And then there's a division that a lot of writers make between this benefits and the logical benefits. So the logical benefits are the things like, because of this patented formula this has been shown in clinical trials to do X. So it is now quite well-demonstrated by very smart neuroscientists, that people decide with the emotions, with the heart and justify with the brain. And good copywriters have known this for a long time. People make the decision I want that with what they may call their gut or their emotional mind, and of course, that whole distinction is a little bit artificial, it's all your brain. Emotions are just a flavor of thought that carries some physiological energy makes your heart beat faster, create a physiological response. It's all thinking, all of it is thinking, but that kind of thinking that we label emotional is where people make the decision they then have to go back and justify that decision to themselves, to their neighbor, to their family, to their boss, with the logical benefits. So you need to speak to both. Logical benefits might include things like the quality of stitching that makes a difference between a quality handbag and a cheap knockoff. It can be the research behind a particular procedure. And very often with logical benefits, you're going to find some numbers. You're going to find some facts and figures. But think about justifying the purchase, giving the evidence that will convince the quote unquote logical part of our brain that this is a good decision to make. So, you've established a context of trust. You've described the product or service. You've spoken to the emotional benefits of purchasing and the logical benefits, and you're going to work to find some emotional benefits even in a business-to-business context. And they're almost always there.
