When you're about to open your doors for business and you need materials to promote it, where do you start? Brochure? Website? Direct marketing package? Postcards?
One of my teachers, Master Copywriter Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero of Red Hot Copy, says the best place to start is to write a sales letter.
Why?
To produce an effective sales letter, you have analyze every aspect of your product or service. This means researching and scrutinizing your target market, getting inside their heads and figuring out what makes them tick, understanding the doubts that might stop them in their tracks and preventing them from hiring you or buying your product. It forces you to nail down every feature, benefit and advantage of your product or service. It means taking a detailed look at exactly what makes your product or service different from those of your competitors. It also makes you come up with the best ever call to action. Not to forget collecting well-crafted, stellar testimonials from your best clients.
Not only that, but you do this all in great detail and depth.
Now you may not use all the information in your letter, but you have to delve into all these aspects in order to cherry pick the parts that will create a persuasive message for you.
The challenging part in writing a sales letter is that you can not sit down face to face with your prospect and answer questions as they pop into her mind and out of her mouth. Instead you have to anticipate every point that might come up in a personal meeting and answer those one by one in your letter.
So an effective sales letter covers every point you need to make in order to move the reader to the next step in your sales process, without having the feedback you get when you're sitting across a table from them. Not an easy task.
That's why it's such a great idea to get started by writing a long and detailed sales letter even if you're not planning to send it.
Sure it takes time to gather all the details, analyze them and organize them in a way that flows persuasively through the sales process. But once you're done, you pretty much have all the information at your fingertips to put together any other piece of promotional material. It's all there in one document. Then wherever you want a brochure, website content, a presentation, a postcard or even a 30-second Round Robin or Elevator Speech, it's ready in next to no time.