Now its time to have some fun with our copy. In this segment of the Copyrighting Basics series, we’re going to look into how treating your copy like ants can be used to your benefit.
Ants are a very unique species of life, maybe the biggest overlooked as well due to them being easily depicted as a pest. Don’t be confused, having them infesting your living space is no fun, but that is not apart of this discussion. What will be looked at here is their traits, how they interact with one another, and how applying these things will help make better copy.
The Queen Rules
In an ant colony there is one ant that stands above all others, the queen. The queen is responsible for giving life to all other ants, and the ants within a colony will do anything to protect and support their queen. In addition without the presence of the queen, the colony falls apart. This is a great approach to take when working with copy.
In general, there will always be that one paragraph that holds the most important pieces of information. A paragraph like this would be the queen in the situation, every other paragraph would then gain the description of being its supporter. Now don’t go thinking the queen role is automatically associated with the introductory paragraph, that is not the case. The queen is the paragraph with the most CTA to get readers to achieve the desired goal.
Perfect Unison
Ever take the time to really notice a trail of ants marching? They are always in a perfect line, avoiding any struggles in their path to their destination. Even in the event of a roadblock suddenly appearing, a new path will be quickly made to avoid this and regain unison with the rest of the fellow marching ants.
There are going to often be times when the reader will be simply glancing throughout your copy, this creates a roadblock of sorts of what the CTA message is. This means that every paragraph of copy must be strong enough to stand on its own in case of these type of situations, still be connected to the rest, and aiming for the same goal.
Sending Off A Surveyor
The intelligence of ants is something truly ignored. For instance, ants never move to new areas without first having a scouter ant look over the area in consideration. This ant returns with information regarding the area in question, and then the decision is made to weather act or not. This is a very smart strategy, and can be applied to copy.
Out of all the paragraphs, which one would make for the best surveyor? It would be the introduction of course. This should be used as a gauging mechanism for the audience doing the reading. A good way to achieve this is by putting subtle tidbits of things that may invoke some sort of internal conflict. For some reason people tend to respond to copy to one of these few reasons: it invokes an internal conflict with their beliefs, offers an explanation to a burning question they have, and subtle hints of manipulation.