By Felicia Yulianti
Senior writer at ALVEO
Copywriting is the art of writing and polishing text to a perfect sheen as a way of drawing in your target audience. A great piece of copywritten work can serve as a call to action that makes your audience respond in the ways you desire, thus potentially boosting your company’s marketing and sales capabilities.
To master the art of copywriting, a copywriter should understand its two-part basic formula consisting of “AIDA” and “KISS”.
“AIDA” stands for “Attention”, “Interest”, “Desire” and “Action”. It is widely used as a strategy to produce appealing copywritten texts. Let’s break “AIDA” down.
Attention
According to research conducted by SilverPop in 2013, the 8-second rule is ideal for grabbing an audience’s attention. It means that beyond eight seconds, your audience is likely to get bored and shift its focus from your work. The good news is that you can steal the spotlight amid the crowd by having an attention-grabbing title, image, and opening sentence in your copy. Be sure to highlight your product or service achievement positively. Also, try to focus on delivering a solution for whatever problem your audience needs help with in the title and opening sentence of your copy.
Interest
After grabbing your audience’s attention, it is critical to do what you can to maintain the audience’s interest in your copywritten work. This serves as a means of ensuring they keep running their eyes through it and perfectly get the message you want to deliver. You can maintain their attention by persuading them that your product or service is what they want the most. In the copy, you can provide information, facts, case studies, statistical data, ideal conditions, and general reasons to want your product.
To further reach your objective, use proper tone in your copy. Engaging, simple yet sophisticated, and informative language is mostly preferred for a copy. Keep in mind that the sentences and paragraphs should be short. Lengthy and vague sentences will confuse audiences, increasing the probability that they dispose of your copy.
Desire
The “desire” aspect of a copy is similar to its “interest” aspect. You must be able to make potential customers really want the product or service in the copy. To achieve this objective, you should mention and briefly explain some of the benefits of the product or service. Examples include: “These shirataki noodles contain high fiber and low carbs, are mostly suitable for people on diets, and can help boost your digestive system”.
Alternatively, you need to provoke certain emotions from your audience before you provide them with solutions through the product or service that you are promoting in the copy. An example of this that follows up on the aforementioned shirataki noodles example is: “Strict diets with many limitations on what you can eat is the annoying way to go about things. Change your usual carbs with shirataki noodles. It’s low in calories, high in fiber, and more friendly to your lovely body”.
Action
After successfully persuading your audience, you need a certain “call to action” that ensures they do what you want them to do. The actions vary from calling a hotline, booking a service, buying a product, creating an account, downloading handouts, or filling out a questionnaire. This is what is referred to as a “CTA” or a “Call to Action”. An effective copywritten text requires a clear CTA. State clearly what the audiences should do to get the product or service you are offering.
KISS
Above all, remember that great content should concise. Long copies will bore audiences and make them more likely to skip out on what you want them to do. So aside from applying “AIDA” to your day-to-day copywriting efforts, a copywriter should remember another important formula for creating great copywritten texts: “KISS”. It stands for “Keep It Short and Simple”.
