Author: Bob McClain, Web Copywriting Expert

Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, there was a big scare about subliminal persuasion in marketing. People were under the impression that movie theaters were flashing “buy popcorn” and “buy cola” during the movies and influencing people to buy products. There were even books published claiming that marketing images in magazines had subliminal messages in them.

Whether any of that is true or not is debatable. However, what isn’t debatable is that while you can’t actually make people do anything, you can use subliminal messages in your copy writing to help guide people to a buying decision. And isn’t that what copywriting is all about? Getting people to buy?

Hint: See the italics? That’s a bit of subliminal persuasion right there. I’ll explain it (and how it works and how you can use it) in a future blog post. Stay tuned.

Many of the most successful copywriters in history have used subliminal persuasion in their copywriting to get people to do what they really want to do. Before you write this off as unethical, remember two thing:

• First, if the person who visits your website wasn’t interested in buying, they wouldn’t be there in the first place.

• Second, you can’t make people do things against their will. Even hypnotists know this. All you can do is use subliminal triggers and guides to get them to do the thing they came here to do anyway.

Now that we’ve overcome that issue, let’s look at what must be done before you even try to put pen to paper. Even if you have no intention of using any subliminal persuasion tricks, you still need to know who your target is.

You need to put yourself in the “shoes” of your reader. To do this, I’m going to give you a series of questions that you need to answer before you write one word of copy. Here are the questions:

1. What is the benefit to the consumer? Dig deep. Don’t give something simplistic and obvious like “when they use chiropractic, their back stops hurting.” Look for answers that tie in with people dreams and desires. What can they achieve when their back stops hurting?
2. Who are we talking to? Men or women? What is their age? What is their income?
3. What do these visitors believe about the product or service? In other words, do they have preconceived notions because of other products or services that are already around? Do they have preconceived notions about your product or service?
4. Who or what is the competition? The more you know about your competition, the better you will be able to set your product or service apart from them.
5. What do people believe about the competition? What are the competition’s positives? What are their perceived negatives?
6. What are people doing now that we’d like to change? Behaviors such as mindlessly going to the competition because they think that’s the best or only option.
7. How would we prefer people to behave? What would you like to see people doing that’s different from what they are doing now?
8. Make a list of the barriers we need to overcome to get the behavior we want. Make sure the list is in order from most important to least.
9. What facts, either real or perceived, can you leverage to get that change?

Once you’ve answered all these questions, you’ll have a very good idea who your customer is, what they really want, and what you’ll need to tell them to get them to buy. Next post, we’ll talk about some of the basics of subliminal persuasion we can use to make that task easier.