Copywriting Tips for the Creative Copywriter

So many copywriting tips focus on the boring mechanics. The structure of a page, active voice constructions, features vs benefits, blah, blah, snooze.

Yes, those elements are extremely important, but you can read about them elsewhere. I’m going to take you into more exciting territory. Read on for copywriting tips focused on unlocking your creative passion.

Copywriting Tip 1: Explore the Senses

Put readers in the moment with multi-sensory copywriting. Fiction writers take great delight in transporting their readers with sensory images. They make their readers feel the sea breeze, smell the salt in the air, taste the cold popsicle as it melts in a mouth, hear the rustling of the sand, see the shadow of the heron that is cast as it flies overhead.

Copywriters, you can do this too – and to great effect. Don’t forget to work in as many senses as possible (most writers concentrate heavily on visual images and forget that there are other forms of images as well).

Give readers the full feeling of using your product or experiencing your service.

Copywriting Tip 2: Be a Rebel

Break the rules. Grammar? Who needs it? Punctuation? Make your own rules.

Advertising legend David Ogilvy famously said, “I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

Very few people speak in formal grammar. And let’s be honest, we don’t like the people who do. It’s pretentious. It creates distance. It’s just unapproachable. Write as if you’re speaking to a friend.

Use punctuation like commas and dashes to create a rhythm, spacing out your copy with pauses just like you would have in normal, everyday speech. Start sentences with “And” or “But” because, well, real people do. Let your sentences be a phrase. A word. An image.

Copywriting Tip 3: Get Literary

Use literature as inspiration. Poetry. Fiction. Essays. Theatre.

Why not write an ad in the form of a haiku? In fact, it could make a great theme for a campaign.

Or an ad in the form of dialogue, almost as if you pulled a few lines from a play.

Create a story involving your product and use it as the copy for a brochure. You can craft one complete narrative or pepper the brochure with snippets that feel as if they’re images plucked from a number of moments.

Look at the great rhetorical devices that empower strong essays and use them in your own work. Write a ‘brand manifesto’, a heart-felt mission, a personal history of the company founder.

Copywriting, Re-imagined

Copywriting is a science, but it’s also an art. Let artistry elevate your copywriting to the next level. Be sensual. Be rebellious. Be creative.