Bad writing holds back businesses.
And it can be expensive.
Brad Hoover, the CEO of Grammarly – an AI-assisted writing assistant – recently said poor written communication costs organisations $400 billion in lost productivity.
That feels like a massive number. But think about how much of your job involves writing.
Emails, social media posts, marketing material, briefing documents, pitches, website content and internal communication articles are just some parts of a comms professional’s role.
Get them wrong, and they can cause confusion, lost opportunities, and reputational damage.
So, how can we tackle this and improve business writing?
Well, members of The Media Team Academy, were recently joined by professional copywriter Jackie Barrie for a business writing skills masterclass where she shared some secrets behind good writing and persuasive copy.
Jackie has spent her career writing sales and marketing copy. And her skills and techniques transfer to other forms of writing, whether it is website copy, social media posts, internal communications, marketing material, or press releases.
She began by sharing a four-step model for compelling content. It is called AIDA, and it stands for:
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
Let’s look at it in more detail.
Grabbing attention
“We get bombarded with more information in a day than our grandparents did in a lifetime,” Jackie said.
“And the brain can’t cope with that amount of input. So, it filters out anything that isn’t directly relevant - this is why it is crucial to grab attention.
“Your headline and subject line have to be relevant to the reader otherwise they will filter it out with all the noise our overloaded brains can’t cope with.”
How do you do it?
“One technique for doing this is to be brave and different and to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.”
But Jackie admits headline writing is not always easy. Technology, however, can help, through tools such as Portent Idea Generator, Tweak Your Biz and Coschedule’s headline analyser.
“Artificial intelligence is creeping into copywriting,” she said.
“It hasn’t yet replaced humans, but we can harness it to help us.
“There are tools that can help us generate headlines and grab attention. You will still need to use your brain to edit or adapt it, but it could save you time.”
“Some of the suggestions they come up with are clickbait ones. We know clickbait works in terms of grabbing attention. But it leads to disappointment.
“To avoid this, you must make sure whatever you promise in your headline is lived up to by the rest of your content.”
Maintain interest
The second part of the AIDA model is ‘interest’.
How do you make sure your content is interesting enough for people to keep reading?
Jackie has two main techniques for this. The first is what she describes as bottom-up language.
“People are always thinking ‘what’s in it for me?’,” she said. “And the only two words that answer that question are ‘you’ and ‘your’.
“If you are doing a one-to-one communication, you can use their name, which is even more powerful than ‘you’ and ‘your’.
“But, if you are doing a one-to-many communication, the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ communicate directly with their brain. It is almost impossible to overuse them.
“I call ‘you’ and ‘your’ bottom-up writing. Whereas the company focused language is top-down writing.
“To improve the level of interest in your reader, you have to write from their point of view. And that’s where these words come in. The more you cross out the top-down words and replace them with bottom-up words, the more interesting it will be.”
What does this mean for top-down language? Should you avoid using it?
Jackie said: “You will still use it. But it belongs in the bottom third or bottom half of your communication in most cases.
“To assess this, you can colour code your writing. Anything you recognise as top-down, put in red or underline it.
“Anything that is ‘you’ or ‘your’ language, put in green. Then you can see, at a glance, how much of each you have got and where it appears.
“You want most of the green at the top and most of the red at the bottom. Once you have hooked them in with the ‘you’ language at the beginning, they are more likely to read until the end because they will be interested enough to find out more.”
The other technique for maintaining interest is the inverted pyramid model, which will be familiar to those of you from a journalistic background.
Jackie said: “This is one of the first things I learned at journalism college. You start with the most newsworthy information – the who, what, why, when, where and how.
“And then you go on to the next most important information until you finish with the general background information.
“Journalists structure stories like this for two reasons. Firstly, so sub-editors can cut the stories from the bottom to fit in different slots without losing the crucial details.
“The other reason is because people consume news quickly. They turn the page or click away as soon as they have got the point of what you are saying. There is a risk they won’t reach the end, so you must put the most interesting information at the top.”
Where could you use the inverted pyramid?
“You can apply this to things like press releases, but also LinkedIn profiles, company histories, team biographies, and marketing material,” Jackie said.
“If you think about company histories, people tend to start by saying ‘we were formed in this year, then we recruited this chief executive, then we bought this machine’. It is in chronological order.
“But you need to turn that upside down - using this model - and start with where you are today and end up with how you got there. No one cares who you are until they know what you can do for them.”
Generating desire
So, you’ve made your product or service sound interesting? How can you get beyond this and make it desirable?
How do you get readers to recognise they want what you are writing about?
Jackie has another acronym for this: FAB, which stands for Features Advantages Benefits.
“With this technique, your start by listing in a grid the features of what you are writing about,” Jackie said.
“It is normally pretty easy to think about this and come up with a list.
“Then you need to start thinking about the advantages of those features.
“And the more you use this method, the more quickly you will jump on to the next stage, which is the benefits of those advantages.”
To illustrate the model during the masterclass, Jackie used a new coffee cup. One of its features is it is made from cardboard. The advantage of that is it is recyclable. And the benefit of that is it is environmentally friendly.
“The more writing of this style you do, the more instantly your brain will jump to benefits,” Jackie said.
Prompting action
The final part of the AIDA model is action. How do you persuade people to do what you want them to do?
Jackie said: “With every piece you write, there will be a most-wanted reaction. And that turns into your call to action.
“So, you need to work back from there. Start with the end in mind.”
Simplicity with calls to action is pivotal.
Jackie said: “It needs to be no more complicated than the scissors symbol and the words ‘cut here’ that you used to see on coupons in newspapers. So, your call to action may be for someone to click on a link, download a document of donate some money.”
During the masterclass, Jackie also looked at how the AIDA model has recently evolved to include a new section and explained three tests you can use to turn features into benefits and generate desire in your readers. And we have covered this and more in an exclusive blog for members of The Media Team Academy.
If you would like access to more masterclasses like this, tacking the communication and personal development topics that matter to you – sign up now and join the next cohort of The Media Team Academy.
Media First are media and communications training specialists with more than 35 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers.
Click here to find out more about our writing skills training.
Subscribe here to be among the first to receive our blogs.
