Page 137 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

62 YOUR QUESTIONS
ANSWERED

I’ve already talked about using questions to build rapport with
your reader. There’s another way you can use them in your copy
and that’s to create a Q&A section. Websites often have an FAQs
(Frequently Asked Questions) page but they often miss the point,
I think, in being unimaginative directories of actual problems and
their solutions.

As you plan a brochure, let’s say (but it could be a web page, sales
letter, or ad), you may well have written a list of all your prospect’s
objections to buying from you. These are what I call the “what ifs.”
You can answer them in the body copy, sure. But you can also address
them separately in a panel or box-out. This draws the reader’s eye
and the interview-style format feels comfortingly familiar.

The idea

From a small organizational growth consultancy
Because this one-man-band consultancy was working in a very new
area, there were bound to be skeptics. Suggesting that business
managers meditate at work, do breathing exercises and creative
visualization exercises was definitely on the flaky end of the
management consultancy spectrum, even in the boom years when
this client of mine was flourishing.

So, we decided to create a set of typical questions—objections—that
the prospect might have, in order to deal with them one at a time.
In response to a question asking whether this was all a bit
new-age, we referred to scientific evidence that the techniques
being espoused worked.

128 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS