Want Better Marketing Results? Start Writing Longer Copy
Over the last few months I’ve been reading and studying a bunch of the copywriting/direct response OG’s — David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins, Gary Halbert, Robert Collier, etc.
And one thing they all believed was that longer copy worked better.
Take it from Ogilvy himself:
“There is a universal belief in lay circles that people won’t read long copy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Claude Hopkins once wrote five pages of solid text for Schlitz beer. In a few months, Schlitz moved up from fifth place to first. I once wrote a page of solid text for Good Luck Margarine, with most gratifying results. Every advertisement should be a complete sales pitch for your product. It is unrealistic to assume that consumers will read a series of advertisements for the same product. You should shoot the works in every advertisement, on the assumption that it is the only chance you will ever have to sell your product to the reader — now or never.”
And:
“General advertisers use 30-second commercials. But the direct response fraternity have learned that it is more profitable to use two-minute commercials. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right? General advertisers broadcast their commercials in expensive prime time, when the audience is at its peak. But direct response advertisers have learned that they make more sales late at night. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right? In their magazine advertisements, general advertisers use short copy, but the direct response people invariably use long copy. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right?”
Until really digging in on this old direct marketing stuff, I assumed that because we live in this Twitter, Instragam, Snapchat, super short attention span world, that all of our marketing and sales copy needs to be short and to the point.
People are busy. They don’t have time to read your stuff. So make it short and to the point.
But in reality, I’m actually stating to notice the opposite is true. And this advice goes all the way back to the early and mid 1900’s when those copywriters and direct marketers like Ogilvy and Hopkins were running their playbooks all over the place.
Here are two quick examples of how we’re noticing this right now at Drift:
This is a chart from BuzzSumo of all of the content on the Drift blog — look at the breakdown of shares by article length. Articles we’ve written that are between 2,000 and 3,000 words crush the articles we’ve written that are 1,000 words or less.
And here is what our newsletter signup landing page used to look like — one form, and about two lines of copy. This page was converting 31% of traffic into emails, not too bad.
But then we decided to test out what would happen if we wrote a much longer landing page to try and get people to join our newsletter. Here is the new landing page, which more than doubled the conversion rate — this page converted 67% of traffic into emails:
I’m not saying that long copy is 100% the answer for everyone — it might not always be the right approach — but it’s something that we are going to keep doing, and thought I’d share here if it’s helpful for other marketers too.
Longer copy.
Better results.
PS. This was just a quick post, I know. But I just wanted to share some thoughts in the moment. If you want to read more, here are two posts that you might enjoy:
