Copywriting Academy 4: Immersive writing

In NLP there is an exercise which is all about disassociating yourself from bad stuff and strongly associating yourself with the good, positive stuff.

Watching movies

In it you picture yourself in a cinema watching a movie of a situation that you want to work with. If it is a bad situation you progressively move yourself further and further away from the screen, you turn the movie black and white, make it a little grainy or blurred. For the desired situation you get closer, saturate the colours, turn up the volume.

You get the picture.

Immersive writing

Why am I telling you this? Because it is the same with your copywriting. There are times when you want to immerse your reader in your writing, to wrap them up in your content.

To do so you need to place your reader into the copy. The trick to this (as with so many things) is in the details. It is in the little human truths, the vividness of the pictures you paint, making the tiniest of details as big and bold as you can (without resorting to hype).

Now, of course it is relatively easy to see how you might do this for consumer products such as a holiday or wine or expensive chocolates. But what if you, like me, predominantly write for B2B?

Writing for humans

So much of B2B copywriting dwells on features – speeds and feeds as we call them. Good writing focuses on benefits. Immersive writing takes you into the emotions and humanity of your readers.

Business buyers are first and foremost human. They worry about the same things as you and I. They need the same reassurances. They have the same ambitions.

By tuning in to these aspects and dialling them up in your copy, you'll immerse your reader into what you write.

Image by Osbornb on Flickr