4 principles to help you write copy that can leverage user cognition!

"Hey, this should work."

Xiao Zhang was looking forward to sending the 18th draft to his boss. The thick nose hair that had not been trimmed for two weeks swayed up and down with his deep breathing, as if it had a soul. Xiao Zhang pressed the enter key with his trembling old hands, but he did not dare to open his eyes for a long time, as if he had returned to the summer when he was seventeen, as if he was checking his college entrance examination scores. "Revise it again, I still think the first version is more grand," said the boss, attaching a rose and a smile. "Oh no, this feels like a heart attack." The only few stubborn hairs on his head broke off.

Copywriters are definitely at the bottom of the contempt chain in the Internet circle. It's just writing a slogan or two, why do they get paid so much? Therefore, the craft of copywriting was passed on to our operations colleagues for no reason, and the burial time of us, who were already short, was reduced by 50%.

Is copywriting important?

Four or five years ago, the traffic bonus period did not seem that important, and there were always various ways to harvest users. However, in an era where attention is becoming increasingly scarce and the cost of acquiring users has increased dozens of times, it is becoming more and more important. Under the dominance of time killers such as short videos , live broadcasts , and games , how to compete for the little remaining attention of users and how to keep users' eyes on them has become one of the key factors in operations .

So, how do you write copy that can leverage user cognition and question their souls?

1. Create a familiar yet strange feeling

The massive amount of information bombardment every day has caused users to develop aesthetic fatigue with text. Especially under the dominance of clickbait headlines , many users have established automatic information filtering mechanisms. Information that is well known to the public is difficult for users to focus on, and this is when we have to rely on the familiar yet unfamiliar power of metaphysics.

So what is that feeling that is both familiar and unfamiliar?

Simply put, it is to rearrange the inherent concepts and cognitions in people's impressions, use these words to build a new scene, and make it interesting. To give a simple example, if you can think of a name that is poetic yet innovative, it is actually very simple. Just randomly choose a noun and add an adjective, such as: Wandering Pen, Sad Mouse, Haggard Chicken Eater, etc.

One of the favorite things for trendsetters in our Internet circle is to play with concepts, such as ecological counter-attack, empowerment, tropical rainforest brain hole, decentralization, and the recently popular Pulse 4T Rule (What, you haven’t heard of it? That’s normal, I just made it up after drinking). When we first come into contact with this kind of information, our attention is often focused on these unfamiliar combinations, and this sense of strangeness and freshness in the text can awaken the user's attention.

For example, here are some brain-opening questions on Zhihu:

• Can we eat "aliens" like chicken, duck, fish and meat?
• Does Pikachu use direct current or alternating current?
• What would happen if you ate a spoonful of white dwarf?

So, creating a familiar yet unfamiliar feeling = familiar elements + unfamiliar combinations + a little bit of fun.

2. Dramatize Your Copy

People who have read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " know that humans like stories, and an important element of a story is dramatic conflict, which is also true for copywriting. In order to hit your users in just a few words, it is important to set up a dramatic concept.

In 2015, Smartisan Technology , a well-known marketing and communication company in the advertising circle, launched the Nut smartphone. The line "She's not beautiful enough to be talented" is a model of dramatic conflict. If this line is replaced with "She's beautiful enough to be talented", it is also a good copy, but it lacks drama. After reading it, users don't have any interesting points to ponder, let alone communication based on fun.

However, after adding the conflict, not only the message that the copy intended to express was not lost, but the interest and spreadability of the entire sentence were greatly improved.

In addition to Mr. Luo, Xiaohongshu 's copywriters also like drama, and at the same time, they use rhymes and re-creations of classics, which has a very good communication effect and is more in line with the brand 's tone, for example:

Redefine the lyrics category:

• You have her perfume on you, but it's not as expensive as mine.
• The sky is blue and waiting for the rain, and I am waiting for the express delivery
• I love you so much, I will only feel at ease if you are in the shopping cart

Deep processing of famous quotes:

• Food tester is Junjie
• If you don't work hard when you're young, you'll blame Mercury when you're old.
• If you want to get involved in this business, you'll have to change your bag sooner or later.

Study hard:

• Odd numbers change but even numbers don’t change, no shopping limit
• I know all the exams and I buy all the right things
• Children who are well-read all start by reading the Little Red Book.

So, every time before you start writing, think about how to create drama in the copy and how to make the user smile.

3. Use words to create a sense of scene

Old literary youths (yes, I’m talking about you), in those years of poetry and distant places, must have been often poisoned by such words:

"When you are writing a PPT, cod in Alaska are jumping out of the water. When you are looking at a report, golden monkeys in Meili Snow Mountain are climbing to the top of the tree. When you are squeezing into the subway, mountain eagles in Tibet are circling in the clouds. When you are arguing in a meeting, backpackers in Nepal are sitting by the fire with glasses in hand. There are roads that you cannot walk in high heels, air that you cannot smell with perfume, and people you will never meet in an office building."

However, whether the content is exaggerated or not, when you scan this text, you should have imagined yourself traveling around the world in your mind. Of course, the bank card with a four-digit deposit will remind you what it feels like to be poor.

The word "scene" originally refers to scenes in artistic works such as dramas and movies . Specifically, it refers to a series of actions that take place within a certain time and space, or a specific picture of life formed by the relationships between characters. Through a certain scene, the audience can recall a certain sentence in the past, or achieve a connection in their understanding of the entire story.

For copywriters, sense of scene is an important component of reflecting the appeal of text. How to accurately grasp the reader's psychology, inject the product into the user's body with emotion through delicate text, and drive the user's emotions and senses is indeed a technical job.

Then, it’s time for some exciting examples of mixed word counts:

A brand that hadn't advertised for 11 years launched its first advertisement in 2016.

Douban

Douban, our spiritual corner

"After watching this short film, I felt like my constipation that I had suffered for years was cured. It made me express everything I wanted to say but didn't know how to express."

——Senior Douban user

IKEA

IKEA's brand of humanistic care is vividly displayed in the product copy, from the imagination of the usage scenario to the real experience of using the items. Every paragraph of the copy shows people's attachment to home.

Stockholm coffee cup

"The days of herding are the busiest and most leisurely time for the Sami people. As long as the weather is not bad, they can sit together with three or two people beside a group of quietly herding reindeer, boil a pot of hot coffee, and chat about the mountains and rivers. What outsiders see as a life of wandering, in their eyes, is like the rich aroma of coffee lingering in the vast land, and they feel at home everywhere."

A few lines of melodious and casual words can make you imagine the grassland, pastoral songs, and hometown. Is this still a coffee cup? This is my lost youth.

Xiangpiaopiao

Drink Xiangpiaopiao when you feel a little sleepy or hungry. Through precise insights into office scenes, we let everyone know that when you are at work, you are either sleepy or hungry, and you may feel a little sleepy or hungry.

So how do you find a sense of scene?

Understand who you’re doing Inception for.

Scenario-based, as the name implies, is to realize the usage scenarios of the product. So first you need to know for whom you want to create the sense of scenario and what are the attributes of the user itself?

• Associate related scenarios: To associate scenarios, you can use the exhaustive method to enumerate all possible things that may happen in the scenarios, and then filter out scenarios that may be related to the product.
• Uncover the real inner connection: The inner connection requires a precise grasp of the combination of user pain points and scenarios. The pain points here cannot be seen at a glance, but you need to treat yourself as a user and experience the subtle but difficult to describe feeling. The most common ones are often the most mediocre.

4. Learn to change your posture to follow the hot spots

Following hot topics is one of the culprits for thinning hair, but today I want to use a different term to seduce your hair: taking advantage of the trend.

As the name suggests, leveraging potential means using external potential to achieve the purpose of promoting one's own brand or product. There are many purposes for leveraging momentum, including promoting sales, expanding brand influence, or reflecting the values ​​of products or brands.

Why take advantage of the situation?

Many people don’t think clearly

Durex should be the king of hot topic chasing in many people’s minds. No matter what kind of hot topic event it is, it can be linked to its own products and generate good dissemination. Durex can take advantage of the trend so frequently because its products are simple and direct in function. At the same time, it also needs to maintain constant popularity in the public eye so that it can be the first thing that comes to mind when there is a need to buy condoms.

Although we don't want to miss every hot topic, not all brands or products chasing hot topics are effective. Many of them just take advantage of the momentum for the sake of taking advantage of the momentum, but fail to leverage the potential energy of hot events in public sentiment, and use this potential energy to empower your copy and achieve a deeper internal connection.

So how can we take advantage of the situation?

Think clearly about your purpose in leveraging the momentum. Is it to attract new users? Increase brand influence? Or should we highlight the brand’s values?

Different purposes will affect the effectiveness of your leveraging of momentum. If you simply copy Durex's approach, it will be difficult to achieve good results.

Looking for the intrinsic connection between hot events and your own products?

"The most obvious is the most mediocre." As people who wait for hot spots in their dreams every day in the middle of the night, we may not have enough time to deeply analyze the true intrinsic connection between hot spots and products, and we hurriedly find a seemingly related combination point, but the effect is not satisfactory.

Often at this time, we should think carefully: What are the spiritual attributes and culture of our brand? What does the public want to express behind hot events? Can the product itself and hot events express the same voice?

This is what we need to consider carefully when chasing hot topics.

Summarize

1. Create a familiar yet unfamiliar feeling
2. Bring drama to your copy
3. Use words to create a sense of scene
4. Learn to change your posture and follow the hot spots

Finally, for content practitioners, this is the worst era. User attention is very scarce, traffic is very expensive, and the simple and crude traditional promotion model has become less and less effective.

But for you who like innovation, like to explore the rules behind trends, and like to study the behavioral patterns behind users, this is a good era. With the rise of a new generation of user groups and the diversification of communication channels , if your content is interesting enough, users will help you spread word of mouth. I wish everyone can write copy that touches people’s hearts and tests their souls.

Source: falcon