When I started out as a copywriter, the best advice I got was – “Picture a real person and write to them.”
I always pictured my mum. I remember one of the first jobs I had was to write about microwaves.
Now I was very young, I knew very little about microwaves – I used them to re-heat cold cups of tea and to make popcorn. That hardly made me an expert.
Of course, I had product specs, brochures and a knowledgeable client, so I had facts. If I started to write then, I would have been the robot, spewing out information that would never get read.
It made it much easier to write believable and persuasive copy when I imagined myself sitting across the kitchen table, explaining to my mum why she’d like to have this microwave in her kitchen.
It made it real, and it gave the copy a voice that the reader could relate to. It had personality. It also sold a lot of microwaves.