Can’t find the right word to say on your message in your real estate postcard marketing campaign? Are you thinking with a blank word processing screen opened right now?
Your may feel very nervous. (Of course that would be my reaction too!) But relax, because you’re almost to read how to break your competitors’ ideas and text to get you. And you can learn the art of carving a sales letter which is known as “copy” writing.
No doubt you’ve got a stack of postcards that you’ve sent out in the past or from your competitors’ mailings. Now is the time to go through them. Go, ahead. Gather them in one place and start reading through these. This, you’re about to learn, is more than an exercise in idle reading.
Pick out the words, phrases, ideas that strike you as particularly good. Use these as your inspiration. Recreate a headline idea. Grab a good idea for a lead paragraph. What you don’t want to do, though, is to plagiarize. Don’t grab any sentence, paragraph or all the copy from another mailing wholesale and try to pass it off as your own.
But you can – and should – get some really good ideas for your own mailing. Soon, you’ll discover that blank computer screen you’re staring at is taking shape as a sure-fire direct-mail campaign.
I learned this trick many years ago when I first started working for a direct mail firm. The owner told me about his very first mailing. It was several pages long. He had never written copy before, but he didn’t have the money to hire a professional copywriter. He wasn’t about to let the lack of funds stop him.
He gathered up all the direct sales material he had been collecting, pulled out his trusty portable typewriter (yes, it was that long ago!) and started assimilating ideas, phrases and other inspirational copy from these various other sources.
Like what I suggested you do, he went through all the real estate direct marketing materials sent by his competitors and began synthesizing ideas, and drawing inspiration for them. He started writing and produced his own real estate direct mail that talked about his own message and used his own voice, but was given more life because he had creative momentum.
And do you know what? It produced very good results for him. And some 30 years later, he’s still enjoying outstanding success in the business. And just for your information, he still has a hand in writing all his copy. And he still gets some of his best inspiration from the advertising material that lands in his mail box.
So the next abstraction when you are in front of the computer, foregather up all the marketing substance you can maturate. You will get refreshing ideas to beat up your competitors.
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