Don’t bury the lede
Often the best lines in your copy are actually a subheader or random sentence. Don’t bury that gem halfway through the page. Find a way to pull that juicy line—the part that grabs people by the throat and pulls them into the story— and lead with that as an angle.
Tips
- When writing copy for a sales page or landing page, you will often find that a certain section headline or other line of copy is actually stronger than the headline itself. That is a good sign to lift it out from its place of relative obscurity, and bring it front and centre.
- It is often easier to first produce a volume of ideas and concepts, and then sift through them and see what sticks out. Which ideas have the most potential to capture the attention, and the reader’s imagination?
- Many of history’s best copywriters have, in various ways, have sworn by extensive research processes other ways to ingesting massive amounts of raw data, and then filtering for gems from there.
- A great way to find interesting fodder to work with, is to scavenge Amazon reviews or Twitter discussions for gold nuggets. For example: even for a growth agency like ours, a lot of copy ideas can be found by filtering through what people write about books on the topic of marketing and growth.
- Another way to find interesting angles, is to transcribe 1:1 interviews with customers, and use that to find golden nuggets.
In Practice
Steve Jobs was an undisputed master of bringing the strongest concept front and center. Nothing captures the revolutionary idea of the original iPod — the product that would completely disrupt the market of walkmans before it — with the famous promise that it would hold “1.000 songs in your pocket”. Every other piece of communications about the product thereafter had to merely answer practical details in support of this bold idea.
A million other examples of savvy angles and ledes can be found on the most click-baity corners of the internet. Clickbait content is all about finding the strongest lede (and then often failing to deliver the substance... but that’s another story).
Pair with
- Pyramid Principle
