Good copywriters know how to put words on a page. Master copywriters know when to take them off.
And not necessarily wrong words, either. Just the ones you don’t need.
“But I need all the words,” some clients say. “People need to know about EVERYTHING we do!”
But do they? Or, more importantly, will they?
Yes, “less is more” has become this decade’s overtired trope. It ranks just slightly above “Eat, pray, love.” But I can tell you that one of the most critical aspects of my job as a strategic copywriter has become deciding what to cut from the copy.
It’s one of the most critical aspects of marketing in general.
“I just love how we explained this key value,” says a client. “Are you sure we can’t fit that blurb in somewhere?”
To put keenly: You can say anything. But you can’t say everything. There isn’t enough space on your website, or in your brochure, and definitely not on your billboard, nor in your customers’ heads.
That last point is the important one. Sure, you could cram every company detail into your next ad campaign. But will it
- help people make the right decision?
- give your audience the right impression of your brand?
- be processed visually and mentally?
I’m not implying anything negative about people in general, only that mental processing power is finite. Human brains can only hold sequences of 7 to 11 bits of information in short-term memory, whether that’s a phone number or words in a book title. That’s why it takes between 7 and 11 exposures to an advertisement before a person feels like they’ve heard about a particular brand and start thinking about making a purchase.
The issue at play is best illustrated by the terrible billboards that plague U.S. interstates. Billboards typically come with a logo…and a tagline…and an image…and a phone number or URL. Oh, and they’re also in color. Some of them are illuminated from behind because they’re digital. And if it’s a digital billboard, it might change two or three times while in view. All of these factors impact the viewer’s processing. Sunlight can wash the color out of a digital billboard. A busy image or logo takes more time to process. Small fonts might as well be printed with invisible ink.
To top it off, the viewer is often traveling 65 mph through heavy traffic while listening to the radio, drinking coffee, talking on the phone, or arguing with a small child in the backseat—maybe even all those things at once! They aren’t going to be reading or recalling paragraphs of information. So you have to make tough decisions about what’s going to stay on the board and what’s going to go.
The smaller your window for transmitting a message, the more you have to cut.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Mark Twain
That’s why developing a shorter message takes more time, more creativity, and more ruthless editing.
No one likes this part.
Did I mention that’s going to be hard? Yeah, it’s gonna be hard. Especially when you’ve fallen in love with a particular line of copy—or several lines of copy. “I just love how we explained this key value,” says a client. “Are you sure we can’t fit that blurb in somewhere?”
I get it. I have lines of copy in my drafts that make me weep with pride when I see them. But I’m the only one who sees them because they never made it into the final draft. In the evolving context of the client’s project, they ceased to fit. So I cut them and wrote something better. It’s better because it served the audience better. Maybe the new copy was punchier, or more instructive, or just made the dang piece more readable. At any rate, I thought about what the audience needed and produced it.
Marketable copy isn’t about what I love or you love or what other clients might love. It’s about what the audience will love. That’s the art of letting go.
The audience’s response is brain science.
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