Science of Copywriting Newsletter Issue 7

November 23, 2019
/ Newsletters Category Page
/ By Quentin Pain

I wrote my first sales copy in 1979. It was for the first business I started, QPL Express Couriers.

I knew the target audience – anyone who wanted something delivered immediately to anywhere in the UK.

I also knew the problem they had – how to get confidential, secret, or valuable documents from A to B in the shortest possible time with proof they’d been delivered.

So the copy was easy: “Do you need to get confidential, secret or valuable documents delivered within hours to anywhere in the UK?”.

But it didn’t stop people asking us to deliver all sorts of crazy stuff, including live human organs, orchid seeds (to Scotland) and luxury sausages from Harrods to Cambridge (in time for a VIP’s birthday).

When you niche down, it doesn’t mean you lose other opportunities. But it does mean you get more traction than your competition who has not focused on specific areas.

We used motorcycles so we had an edge on the traditional way of same day delivery which was by van or taxi. That was our USP (although we were far too green in business to know it had a name).

And in terms of FAB (see the link below) we had one HUGE advantage. We weren’t just faster, if there was a traffic jam, we could slice right through it unlike cars and vans.

If ads aren’t specific, they fail. The same with landing pages. The simple concept of picking a specific audience with a specific problem will out-perform everything else (the only exception is large well known brands who rely on brand repetition to keep their vendors happy).

Last week’s posts cover aspects of all the above, they’re worth a read if you haven’t seen them yet – especially ACID and FAB. Here are the links:

Focus

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofcopywriting/permalink/1023389417991996/

ACID

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofcopywriting/permalink/1024403941223877/

Alignment

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofcopywriting/permalink/1025217447809193/

FAB

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofcopywriting/permalink/1026216691042602/

Empathy

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofcopywriting/permalink/1027176734279931/

Future

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofcopywriting/permalink/1028011957529742/

With my love,

Quentin Pain

Science of Copywriting

PS. QPL Express Couriers grew to two offices and 19 couriers before I sold the business in 1983. I bought a house from the proceeds and went on to start a bunch more businesses. From all the things I learned about business, without copywriting, none of it would have happened. So in my humble opinion you could not have picked a better profession.

About the Author Quentin Pain

I've spent my working life starting and running a whole variety of businesses, from my first QPL Express Couriers where I travelled over 100,000 miles every year delivering packages on a motorcycle (along with a whole bunch of colleagues) to Accountz.com which made a major in-road in the UK, to ProofMEDIA my current business that focuses on Copywriting and the International Copywriters Association, which showcases copywriting and copywriters to the world.

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