Let’s face it. We live in a very visual world. We’re bombarded by images all damn day, whether it be advertising or content we actually want to see. Especially when it comes to social media and internet marketing, we’ve embraced the fact that a picture says a thousand words. We’ve learned that image posts on Facebook are much more engaging that plain text posts, and CTR’s are much higher on image ads versus text ads.
Being young, though, I think many of us may not realize how much power and influence text still has. Yes, we know that headlines and call to action’s are very important, but I think most of us are still under the general assumption that ads and content still rely mainly on their visual appeal. And rightly so, we do live in a very image-centric world right now.
However, my appreciation for great copy has been steadily growing lately. I’m just beginning to learn the importance of ad copy and headlines, and text in general for things like sales copy, on page copy, and product descriptions (especially product descriptions as I’ve been writing a shit ton of them for the hundreds of new products we’ve been adding to RaverSwag.com in the past couple of months).
At a recent copywriting conference I went to I learned about old school advertising from ad gurus like Joe Sugarman and John Carlton. The picture below is from an old magazine ad written by Joe Sugarman that sold millions of BluBlocker sunglasses. Although these ads don’t fly anymore, because our ADD attention spans, it really exemplifies the power that copy can have if an ad like this could sell millions of sunglasses.
As far as copywriting goes today, there are some cool techniques I’ve been learning. For our new Adwords and retargeting campaigns, our company did research on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram to find hashtags, slang, and phrases that our target market uses a lot and identifies with. We then stuck those keywords and phrases straight into the headlines and copy for our ads. Although it requires constant tweaking and adjustments, we’ve found it to be working fairly well so far.
Overall, I’m not at all discounting the value in graphic design, pictures, or images. All I’m saying is that I’ve already been sold on the power of images, but it wasn’t until now that I really understood the power and value in really good copy, something that the old school marketers before us are very aware of.
While We're Young 