Copywriting is nothing more than telling a story, a good story. I recently talked about how discovering your audience’s worldview is the most effective way to market to them, how to tell your story. Any questions you might have on where to begin or what your audience will respond to are already answered once you already know how they will respond to an ad. All questions… save for one. How will you tell that story? Or in other words, how will you appeal to their beliefs once you know them? The key is to be unique. Here is how to make your message unique.

How to Make Your Message Unique

Remember that your audience (along with most any audience) is constantly barraged by advertisements daily. The more people see, the greater the tolerance they build up to them, becoming more desensitized with each viewing and thereby making the message less potent each time it reaches them. For this reason, copywriters have to go where no message has gone before to get and maintain their attention.

By giving them something they have never seen before, you’ll break through that barrier they have built up and capture their attention. So how do you be unique in copywriting?

The first thing to do is to take a look at your competition. How are other businesses in your field appealing to yours and their audience? How is their story being conveying? You can learn a great deal on the ground floor with both what to do as well as what not to do from your competitors, but above all else you’ll learn what’s already been done.

Of course if you find yourself in the happy position of not having any competition, then congratulations, you’ve stumbled upon an untapped niche which comes with its own set of potential and hurdles, but that’s another discussion.

It’s all a matter of catching your audience off guard, and taking your marketing plan to a place which has never been attempted with your audience is a great way to do just that. Granted it’s seemingly more difficult to do that today than it’s ever been. But there’s always room to be original, and anyone who tells you the contrary doesn’t have the imagination or chops to be a great copywriter.

Remember a few copywriting constants are always in place.

Credibility will still go a very long way, regardless of the specifics of your story, there is no substitute to building trust with your audience, so if you can do that early on, your message will be better received.

Simplified messages always perform better.

The key to writing good copy isn’t to write for the business who you’re writing for or even specifically the product or service they are trying to push. It isn’t even writing for the customer that business/product/service is wanting to target. You’re appealing to that person’s outlook on things.

Consider the best commercials you can think of. These are the ones which appeal to the things which you react to emotionally whether that’s in the form of pathos or simply making you laugh. Even if you don’t need the product they are promoting, those are the commercials which resonate with you the most, and thus they are the most effective commercials.

Like with everything, however, the devil is in the details, but if you can pull this off, you’ll have a message which will have everyone paying attention no matter how jaded they may be.