A good name is the first step on the path to success for a brand. Of course, reputation, product quality, good customer service, and a well-planned marketing strategy play their role, but crafting a good name for a new brand is like planting a tree on a good land.
A memorable name can help a brand stand out from the crowd, especially if that crowd is a highly competitive market. We all know people have prejudices based on the first impression they get. Are you sure you want to leave this to chance?
In copywriting, the procedure adopted to find a name is called naming, and it involves various steps, including the definition of the brand positioning, which might seem unnecessary in order to complete the task, but it really is a fundamental phase.
I want to give you an example of this: here is a case study of a recent naming we worked on, in which the brand positioning played a main role.
The case
A few months ago an Italian mattress producer and seller company contacted us, as they were launching a new line of mattresses and they needed a name for it.
The peculiarity of this new line was the use of the newest technologies to guarantee the highest sleep quality standards. At the moment of the launch, the new brand had only two models, with the perspective of launching new ones as soon as they developed them. This company has been in this sector for three generations: they started as a small artisanal business, and they became more and more relevant on the market, to the point they wanted to launch this new high-standard brand, going nationwide for the first time.
The product they wanted to promote was a fine quality range of mattresses, more expensive than the market average, so intended for a high income bracket target.
So, here are the three main features of this new range of mattresses: revolutionary technologies, top-notch materials, luxury touch. These three elements will be part of our brand positioning analysis, so do not forget them.
Our ideas
We crafted many proposals, but in the end we presented to our client only the three most significant: two of them were invented words, and the third was an evocative name, but all of them had some characteristics in common, like the fricative sound to communicate the feeling of lightness experienced after a night of good sleep and the nasal consonants to make the pronunciation smooth, or their shortness, which made them easy to remember, but we also used letters that are unusual for an Italian name, like “x” and “y”, as they are not officially part of the Italian alphabet (as well as “j”, “k”, and “w”), even though they are used for a number of words, just to make the names look graphically different from the competitors.
We could have used a name generator just like a lot of agencies do, but we prefer not to automate this process, because it would only lead us to discard a high number of generated names just because they do not meet such specific criteria. Personally, as a copywriter, I prefer using mindmaps, etymological dictionaries, and other creative processes and old school tools, rather than a name generator.
However, if you want to give them a try, there are many softwares and online tools to test, such as NameStation, Namelix, or Wordoid, all of them based on the same principle: you input one or more keywords and then you get the results.
It is good when you are burnt and are looking for a hint, but honestly, I would never rely exclusively on these tools.
The first proposal
For the first name we combined the purpose of the product and its main feature, i.e.: being innovative, revolutionary (that was exactly the first part of the name). While the name was a made-up word, the meaning of the combination was crystal clear, and the result was a name that described exactly the nature of the product: a mattress developed with the newest technologies in order to guarantee a great sleep experience.
The second proposal
For this proposal we borrowed a word from Greek mythology, using the name of a goddess together with a suffix of French origin.
Basically, with this proposal we wanted to highlight the luxury aspect of the brand, elevating the concept of sleep quality to a mystical level and recalling the elegance, the finesse, the French language has in the Italian collective belief system.
The third proposal
The last proposal used no combined made-up words, but it was still highly evocative, recalling to the concepts of “soul” and “moon”.
With this proposal we meant to tighten the relationship between the brand and the customer by choosing words related to their ego and their oneiric imaginery. Two simple concepts, but very powerful, as they have been taught to us since we were children: our soul represents our interior selves, and the moon is the universal symbol for the night. For this reason, the name was also highly memorable: everytime you recall a familiar concept in a name, rest assured it will be remembered (unless everyone makes the same choice as you).
Why was brand positioning important?
None of those proposals would have come up without a prior brand positioning analysis, and I’ll tell you why.
First of all, the product was meant to be promoted mainly on the internet, and there is too much information online. I am sure you agree with me if I say that one in three notifications on your mobile is an advertisement.
In this scenario, if your message is just one among the others, your investment in marketing will generate very little or no return. Think about when you go to a supermarket to buy a box of cereals and you find so many brands you just can’t choose properly.
If you want to reach a specific target, with specific needs that your product is able to satisfy, you have to position your brand in the consumers’ mind, so when they have a problem, even if it is the first time, the most appropriate solution they can think about is your product.
If you think about our case, that is exactly what we needed: our client wanted to sell a specific product to a specific target, with specific needs: a luxury mattress, made with revolutionary technologies, designed to deliver the best sleep quality, for people who know their productivity and energy during the day depends on how they sleep at night.
How did we find out all this?
How to find out your brand position
First of all, you have to define your target, ideally creating a detailed buyer persona, then you have to think about the differences between your brand and your competitors. In particular, you need to focus on your value proposition, hence, the added value your brand can offer, unlike your competitors.
You do not neessarily need to create something new, rather than changing the perception of what you already are in the mind of your customers.
You can also decide if you want to position your brand according to a single or multiple strategies. I personally think the brand positioning should be coherent at all times, but it is not a universal rule, and other marketers might tell you the opposite.
At this point, your brand positioning can literally hinge on everything: the quality is just one of the possibilities, which vary according to the business sector your brand belongs to. IT brands usually mark their differences with their competitors with the exclusive design, takeaway services focus on short delivery times, automotive brands distinguish themselves for comfort and onboard features, and so on.
Other examples of positioning can come from a brand’s reputation, especially luxury brands like Rolex or Ferrari, or their customer service, which is an element widely used in the banking sector.
Summing up, the element on which you should base your brand positioning should have the following features:
Exclusive: your brand should be the only one with this feature;
Relevant: your target should benefit from it;
Real: do not lie to your customers, always deliver what you promise!
Have you ever had that jingle of that commercial or the image of the mascotte of a brand pronouncing the payoff in a funny way stuck in your mind for weeks? It’s unbelievable how sometimes a limited number of words can fixate a brand in collective consciousness with such an ease.
What makes a marketing message so powerful? Sometimes science gives us the answer: psychology and marketing have always walked together, and we can’t deny that many brands use it to their advantage. There are a lot of psychology tricks for advertising that can make the difference between a good message and a memorable one. I am going to list the five most popular.
Storytelling
Abstract concepts are hard to memorise, but when you read a story, you picture those concepts in a potentially real situation, and this helps you understand them better and remember them on the long term. Differently to words and visuals, stories involve the whole brain, and the more parts of your brain are involved, the better you memorise the information.
Storytelling is not only popular in marketing, but also in politics: next time you listen to a speech made by a politician, try to spot the story they tell. The structure is always the same: a bad scenario, a protagonist that can change things, an antagonist to fight, a final resolution, and the good scenario restored.
Not long ago, I found a perfect example of storytelling in Obama’s inaugural speech:
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
The power of visual
There is a reason if we say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it is because mankind learned to communicate visually first, and then verbally.
There is a phenomenon in psychology called picture superiority effect, which simply means that we find memorising pictures easier than memorising words, and this is also the reason why we tend to remember statistics when displayed in a histogram, rather than in a list of percentages.
If you include a great visual in your ads, you will have more chances to be noticed. My advice is: think creatively, and match your copy with a powerful visual.
Rhymes
Using rhyming words is one of the oldest psychology tricks for advertising: they create a powerful copy, easy for the brain to process, therefore easy to remember.
This is why you tend to remember the jingles of old TV spots: because they often rhyme!
Many experiments have been conducted, and they showed that if a person has to judge which one of two sentences is true, and the choice is between two phrases with the same meaning, but with one of them rhyming, they will judge the rhyming one true, or more correct than the other one, anyway.
Basically, it’s like when we hear something that sounds good, we have no doubt that it is good for real.
Emotions
Touching the emotional sphere is like blowing on a fire: if you craft an emotional copy, rest assured that people will feel more sympathetic with your brand, and they will trust you. Emotions trigger impulses and leave a deep mark in people’s hearts.
According to psychology, when we make a decision because of an emotional trigger, it takes time to get back in control, but when this happens, we try to make up excuses and justifications with rational arguments to avoid the sense of guilt.
Remember we have 5 senses
Do you know why companies work so much on presentation and packaging? Because it is scientifically proven that when more senses are stimulated, the memory is also influenced.
The kind of paper, its feeling at the touch, its temperature, a sound, a taste, or a smell can significantly change human perception. That’s why you find perfumed pages in beauty catalogues or people offering you a sample of food in a bar or a supermarket.
Impulse buying happens every day. Every time we go to buy groceries and make a purchase that was not on our list, we become impulse buyers. We behave in this way because of our emotions and feelings, which, it is not a secret, play an important role in marketing. Marketers use many impulse factors on landing pages, which we know they are the most important stage in a funnel, in order to trigger those emotions that will make the customer take the final decision of purchasing.
Decision fatigue usually makes the job of impulse factors on landing pages easier, but there are some of them that are often used for their effectiveness in pretty much all contexts. We are going to list the five most popular and explain how and why they work.
Fear of loss
People would rather keep something they already have, than get something they desire. This is the reason why it is important to highlight the benefits of what you are selling on your landing page: you have to communicate to your potential customers what they are missing and what they are losing if they decide not to buy.
If you search fear of loss on the web, you will often find a sentence that says it is greater than the need for gain, which is another impulse factor widely used in marketing in the past, but now it can be considered outdated and ineffective.
Urgency
Sense of urgency can be triggered with a good copywriting or graphic elements such as a countdown to the end of the offer. Limits in time are the most common way to communicate the necessity of taking immediate action.
Many funnels just do not convert because there is no sense of urgency, so people think longer and judge harder, putting a wall of objections between them and the product, and when this wall gets too thick, it can’t be broken down anymore, and the conversion simply won’t happen. Triggering urgency will avoid all the overthinking and make buyers act out of impulse.
Scarcity
Many people consider scarcity a particular kind of urgency, which is partly true, but if we had to be accurate, scarcity comes from a different bias: the more something is running out, the more people want it.
This means that when you write on your landing page that your product is running out for any reason, like limited edition products or high demand, its perceived value increases. Scarcity can be faked on purpose, which makes it one of the most powerful impulse factors on landing pages. Scarcity has the power to eliminate procrastination.
Greed
The urge of saving money makes people greedy, and it is something we can use on landing pages as well as traditional marketing means, like shop windows and advertising on magazines and newspapers. The greed factor can be easily triggered by proposing a discounted price: basically, you have to convince people the price they are paying is lower than the real value of your product. Everyone wants to have more for less, it is a natural instinct.
Jones’ effect
Have you ever heard the saying keep up with the Joneses? It is referred to someone who compares their family with their neighbours and thinks about them as an indicator of their own social class. Basically, if you fail to keep up with the Joneses, you are inferior. At the same time, it means people will do whatever others are already doing.
Including a social proof like testimonials or big numbers (e.g.: 10,000 people already bought this!) on your landing page, you will trigger the Jones’ effect, i.e. their desire to keep up with the others.
Other impulse factors
There are dozens of impulse factors and cognitive biases that can be used on landing pages, but it is hard to master all of them. If you are building your first landing page, we recommend you follow these ones before concentrating on all the others.
Storytelling is the process of telling a story by using certain styles and tones of voice already known to the audience, often with a deep meaning. It is generally referred to fiction, folk traditions, literature, and wherever people have a protagonist role. That being said, how to make good storytelling?
Altough at a first glance it might seem easy to do, storytelling requires the intervention of a professional, because making a credible story, and making sure it reaches the heart of the audience with the right keywords, is not exactly a job everyone can do.
In marketing, storytelling can be part of a strategy, in which a brand tries to transform their mission in a more customer-oriented format. This is because we all know the characteristics of a fiction story, so it is a language we all understand. When storytelling is used in marketing, it can serve many different purposes, such as entertaining, persuading, selling, and so on.
What makes a good storytelling
Stories where born along with mankind: they were used to pass information, knowledge, emotions, and much more. There are civilisations in the history that were able to ignore the invention of the wheel, but you’ll never come to know of a civilisation survived without stories, and all the stories have common characteristics, well defined in this infographic by ABC Copywriting:
Let’s see a brief overview of all of them:
Trust in the teller: do people who listen the story, who actually taste your storytelling, trust the teller? Do they know your brand? This aspect is critical, if you want to get good results with this technique.
Drama: stories need to touch people’s feelings. Great stories are based on great feelings, and you can’t do without. Conflicts, solutions, tension, mystery… open the toolbox and get to work!
Relatability: the audience should be able to identify themselves in the story. This creates a special relationship, in which the readers identify themselves in the protagonist, and trigger their imagination.
Immersion: if you can grab the attention of your audience, and put them so much into a story, they will feel like they are living the same experience and their soul matches with the one of the protagonist. If it happens, that’s it: you achieved your goal!
Simplicity: a simple story is a strong story. Take out all the unnecessary details, like secondary events, secondary characters, secondary places, and so on. Just ask yourself this question: does it serve my purpose? If the answer is no, well, you know what to do.
Agency: people find meanings in everything they read and in all the experiences they do, and this also happens with stories, so people will tend to give your story their personal meaning, but that’s good, because if your story is meaningful to them, you will easily persuade them.
Familiarity: people make comparisons, and they will compare your story with the stories they heard in the past, somewhere else, but as we can see, different stories can have similar structures, so if your audience finds your story familiar, its power will be immense.
Storytelling in marketing and politics
Storytelling is something you find in primary school, but also in big companies, that’s why it is critical you familiarise with the steps I mentioned above. However, keep in mind that storytelling doesn’t usually bring to a sale. Storytelling is a soft selling technique, but it is more focused on the brand reputation. There millions of selling techniques even more powerful than this, after all.
Storytelling is also crucial in politics, where the trust in the teller is a critical factor. Not everyone realises, but storytelling is widely used in politics. Can you remember 2016 US elections, and how Republicans depicted Democrats as “part of the establishment”, elitarian, cynical, and distant from people? They reverted eight years of Obama administration in a few months.
And what about the tale of Saint George and the Dragon given by Tony Blair, about the war in Iraq? We all know what happened.
You can learn how to make good storytelling for many purposes, but you will always find the same structure and the same elements.
Let’s say you have a website, or a corporate blog, and an acceptable presence on social media. You may think you are all set to go and get some contacts that you will convert into sales.
However, something seems not right: people land on your website, but they never fill the decisive form, or worse, they leave in a few seconds. When you start noticing this trend, you will likely invest in technical optimisations, like improving SEO, making the navigation smooth with some UX design tweaks, and calling your web developer to do some magic and increase the loading speed. However, many times it is “just” a matter of words. If your calls to action are too weak and the content of your blog posts is not useful for your target, you might need to include some copywriting services in your optimisations list.
What is copywriting
Copywriters write texts for advertising and marketing, both online and offline. The texts they write, called copy, aim to convert prospects into leads, and leads into sales. On the internet, the copy drives the journey of a user from the first contact to the final purchase, so you may need copywriting services either on all the stages of your funnel or on a particular one.
Being on the web, also means you have to look good not only to users, but also to search engines, even though there is a huge difference between what users search and waht they want to read. Therefore, the language you use must be suitable for both. Again, the answer lies in copywriting services. A copywriter, in fact, is capable of writing easy-to-read contents and optimise them for search engines at the same time.
Copywriting services you might need
Our focus here is on digital communication, so we won’t talk about other kinds of advertising, but the web is not grudging of marketing tools and techniques in which copywriting is involved, and there are some copywriting services in particular that may drastically improve your conversion rate. Let’s see them in detail.
Sales e-mails
Not just direct e-mail marketing campaigns, but even the classic cold e-mail needs some good copy. This kind of e-mail has a double purpose: presenting your company and services, and persuade the user to do some kind of action.
A good copy should highlight a few elements in your sales e-mails:
The benefits your products could deliver to buyers;
A particular problem you could solve for them;
The core values of the company;
The main differences between you and your competitors.
It may seem obvious, but a lot of businesses just focus on their numbers, their position on the market, and some technical details that a common consumer would not understand. It’s you who has to speak your target’s language, and not the opposite.
Landing pages
Landing pages are one of the most important stages in any marketing funnel: it is the part in which the actual conversion happens, so a good persuasive copywriting is vital.
The logic is the same: what is the action you want your visitors to perform? Opt-in? Purchase? Whatever is the case, you should explain the benefits of accomplishing that particular action, supporting your argument with a good reason why. Psychological levers will be useful, too.
The tone of voice is also very important, as it should be coherent with the communication style of the brand, otherwise your page will be inconsistent, and you will lose potential buyers.
A copywriter can make sure your landing page has got what it takes to get you a good ROI.
Website copy
An impressive headline and some resounding words on how you and your team are good at what you do.
Are you sure it is enough? It’s probably not, neither for your visitors nor search engines crawlers. In order to craft a good website copy, a copywriter must take into account not only the target, but also other factors like the communication style, the layout, the font used, and the keywords to include. You have to make sure your website is readable both for people and search engines, and it is not as easy as it sounds. That’s why you should think about using some copywriting services.
Discover all copywriting services benefits
Do you think you need to improve your texts? You can count on us. There is a vast range of copywriting services we can offer, from naming to microcopy. Check out our dedicated page and contact us.
Your priority is still to write useful content, but you cannot forget about the main goal of a blog post: convince your reader to read the next one. And then another one, and another, and another, and another, until your occasional reader becomes a regular one.
So, how to keep a reader on the blog after the first post?
A good idea is placing internal links in your post, making sure they are related to the topic of the main post, as it is the one which attracted the readers on your blog.
Plan internal links
Once you chose the topic you are going to talk about in your next post, before starting to write it, do a research on your own blog and take note of all the posts with a similar topic, so that you will already know which ones you should mention even before you write your first draft. Also, consider landing pages and take into account cornerstone articles.
On top of placing interesting internal links, this technique also allows you to make your post thinner: let’s say you are writing a post on topic A, which is related to sub-topic B and sub-topic C, and you wrote a post for each of them. Instead, of writing again of B and C into the post A, why don’t you just put internal links to those two posts, which are likely more accurate and specific?
Internal links raise the interest of your readers
In order to keep your readers’ attention high, make sure that not only they find a solution to their problem, but also get more curious about it and wants to go deeper with that particular topic. Internal links allow you to do so: you don’t need to be direct, all you have to do is leading your readers to another post.
However, internal links matter a lot, but this is up to you and your style: if you are good at blogging and place internal links at the right place, rest assured your reader will stay on your blog for long time!
Update old posts
The flexibility offered by a blog is immesurable: once you published a post, you can change it unlimited times, therefore, a good idea could be placing internal links to new posts into old ones. It is a popular practice and Google finds nothing wrong with it.
Even when writing a new post, take note of anything that could be written in details in another post, so that you can insert it in your editorial calendar later. Obviously, do not forget to link the post you just published.
Create an internal links network
Using these techniques, on the long run you will realise you created some kind of spider web in which each link is a knot, and thanks to them, your visitors walks from a wire to another.
