Copywriting- The magic of words.

If your aim is to sell anything with words, it is important to understand the art and science of copywriting.

Copywriting is the technique of crafting words in ways to induce people to take a specific action. Most often, that action is to get someone to purchase a product, hire you for a job, or have you join a list, but it can be used for many different purposes.


Copywriting is not trickery meant to convince people to purchase something they do not want. If this is the case, you will have a lot of unhappy customers and will quickly be out of business. Copywriting is a tool to show people the benefits they will receive from your product and to help get them over the hump of purchasing something that they need or want.  If you do not use copywriting and effective selling to your advantage, even if your product is better than all of the competition, you will have a hard time selling it.



Know Your Audience

The first and most important step to writing copy is to understand your audience. Who are they and what are their needs? How can you fulfill those needs? If you do not know whom you are writing to ahead of time, then you are writing to no one. In addition, if you do not craft your product or service to the needs of your audience, then no amount of copywriting will do the trick. Your time is valuable, and you need to think about these aspects before you begin.

Benefits Over Features

This is the heart of copywriting. People want to be sold on benefits and not specific features. Especially at the top of a sales page, they would rather hear about how the product or service will benefit their lives instead of the specific details about what makes the product great. You can explain these features later on in the page to back up the benefits.

What will the product do for a person, and how will they be better off if they purchase it? If you can paint a picture in a person’s head about how they will be better off, it will help make the sale. An example of the benefits of a piece of art is that it will warm up a room in a home and make it much more interesting, inspiring, and enjoyable to spend time in. It fosters an environment of happiness and fulfillment. It can remind someone of a place or thing that they love. It will become a conversation piece when guests come over. It can be a way to show off someone’s personality, style, and interests. In addition, a good story behind an artwork can be a benefit. It can be a story that a customer can relate to and proudly speak about when friends and family come over and see it. That is one reason why galleries focus so much on telling stories about their art and artists.

How will your service make someone’s life or business better? Will your work help a business stand out and obtain more clients or make more sales? Will it generate income for them? Will your photographs help sell a product or bring eyes to a website? Will your portraits make your subject look attractive, natural, and trustworthy? Will they capture a subject’s personality? Will your wedding photography and albums show the most beautiful and important moments to be saved and cherished? Will you be a fun part of their day in addition to taking good photos? How will the bride and groom’s day be better because you are there to capture it?

Features, on the other hand, are specific aspects of your product or service that make it stand out from the rest. They should be used as a way to backup the benefits and to explain the reasons why your work or service is top quality. A feature of art is that it will last for hundreds of years because the highest quality archival material is used. A benefit of the archival nature of a print is passing down something beautiful and important to your children. A feature is the expert technical qualities of your work because you have been dedicated to your craft for the last 15 years. A benefit is that it will remind someone of his or her favorite place and vacation memories. A feature of your wedding photography is that you have experienced enough weddings that you now carry a small sewing kit for the occasional times that a bride’s dress gets stepped on. A benefit is that the bride will feel more secure and relaxed during the day due to your experience and professionalism.

Elicit Emotion and Tell a Story

Your ultimate goal is to make the customer feel something when you write. A purchase is an emotional experience, and this is particularly true if you are selling art or an artistic service. Tell a story that comes to life every time the person views the work, or create a scenario that will show a vision of the benefits of your work and how the person will feel with it.

If you are selling prints, give a sense of what the photograph is about or why you created it. Some people will not fully understand certain works the first time they experience them.



Thanks.

Road ahead in my Digital Journey.

In the second session of digital marketing internship there were many things discussed but mainly the focus was on creation of customer avatar.

As like in previous sessions, the topics were more marketing focussed and less digital oriented as digital marketing is more about understanding the customer persona, their interests, desires, needs and aspirations and then employing digital strategies to fulfill those needs.

But before going into the details about the topics mentioned in the second session of the internship, I would like to mention the core idea which our mentor shares in his every session that you need to become a good human beings that would be the central tenet of becoming a good marketer because a good human being can only understand the value of serving the customer.

The wisdom of serving  has been mentioned countless times in various religious text in almost every religion. In Christianity, it has been said, Serve and thy shall rise. And you can only serve when you have decided whom to serve and what to offer as your service because then only you can think beyond profits and personal benefits.

The one of the best methods of learning is Learn- Do-Teach which is also known as the Golden Triangle. The best way to learn is to teach something which you have learnt to someone who is willing to learn and in the process you would realise the loopholes in our understanding and then we can work more religiously in filling those loopholes. The more we teach, more we get better at the subject in hand and more specialised and professional we become at it.

The best part about this strategy is that you do not need to be a perfectionist to teach what you have learnt. Also, perfectionism is a trap as at no point one can conclude that he is s perfectionist at doing something. There is always a room for improvement.

Also, teaching something pushes you to exit your comfort zone and face new challenges from new people outside your immediate social circle..

The customer avatar is something , from a marketers perspective, is an ideal customer base or ideal set of customers whom the marketer wants to sell his services. For figuring out your ideal customer avatar , one has to believe that you cannot serve everyone . As it has been said that if you are trying to help everyone then you are helping no one. Profiling your customers or stratifying them or segregating them as per their needs, desires, age, income and other differentiating criteria which could ease the marketers job would be the ideal customer avatar for that business.

Now, since I am a media research student and photography professional for past few years , I would be selling my  photography services  to people between 18-35 years .

Domain- professional photography services as these people are at different stages in their professional career like college, job, marriage, changing jobs, PR needs etc.

Target audience - Students, Young Professionals, Mid level Professionals, Eligible bachelor's.

Income - They must be anywhere in respectable income bracket to afford my services which starts at 1500 rupee for a shoot.

The story of Sulabh: How Bindeshwar Pathak is challenging social evils through social entreprenuership

Bindeshwar Pathak is the man behind Sulabh International Toilets and the force determined to change the plight of manual scavengers in the country. He is also one of the few social reformers who adopted Mahatma Gandhi's ideology to fight these social evils. His organization boasts of having 50,000 volunteers and claims to be the largest NGO in the country.

According to Bindeshwar Pathak, two life events had forced him to think about the way our society has been structured since ancient times. During his childhood days, he was made to drink cow urine and rinse with Ganges water when he touched a woman from lower cast. Another event which radicalized his thought was when he was on assignment for his Ph.D.and saw a newly married woman being forced to clean the toilets of her in-laws. These events shook him to the core and he decided to work for the upliftment of weaker sections of the society who get oppressed just because they are born in a particular caste and that caste is associated with a particular work.

Bindeshwari Pathak with a family in Haryana

The decisive shift in his life came in 1967 when a Sarvodaya Member Rajendra Lal Das convinced him to fulfill Gandhi's social concerns and look for ways towards the liberation of the scavenger castes He joined the Bhangi-Mukti (scavengers' liberation) cell of the Bihar Gandhi centenary celebrations committee in 1968. Soon after that, he traveled throughout India.

In 1970, he established the Sulabh International Social Service Organization. The business model was more than profited oriented, it was aimed at upliftment of the waste carrying caste. The western style of toilet system was not feasible and could not be replicated at the mass level so he developed his own technology of twin-pit mechanism. While one pit is operational, other is covered. When other gets filled in around two years, second is made operational.
His organization has also perfected excreta based biogas plant that generates biogas for use in heating, cooking, and electricity. 

He has refused to patent his twin pit technology which has been adopted countrywide. 

stop cuting trees

In modern era we are living  a very fast paced life.This has led to exploiting of natural resources in a careless way.Are we doing justice with our forth coming generations?
 Lets us pledge to save our nature.not for our selves but for our coming generations because we have inherited from our forefathers or ancestors to lend it off to the upcoming ones.
If every human being start giving his/her share then our environmental problem would come down to much extent.
So start doing what you can,even if it is very small,one day it will bring a big change