‘What’s in it for me?’ and hot prospects
David Rosam on May 10 2007 at 6:04 pm | Filed under: SEO copywriting
If you’re writing online or offline marketing copy and have worked out the answer to the question, What’s in it for me? (WIIFM, in some quarters), you’re a significant way to producing effective communications.
Away from the SEO arena, more often than I’d like, WIIFM isn’t as obvious as it should be - clients haven’t done their homework, typically, and horrifyingly have little idea why people do or should buy from them.
But one thing that hit home very quickly once I started writing optimized copy was how often WIIFM is answered by key phrase research. Now, you are doing key phrase research before writing SEO copy, aren’t you?
I like to think of most searches as being questions - for example, how many of your searches can be extended to say ‘can you tell me about ……?’, ‘where can I find …..?’, ‘what will help my …..?’? The knack is to start looking through the potential key phrases from the searcher’s point of view. See how many of them fit with a WIIFM mindset. The ones that do are often the ones from the really hot prospects, and they’ll be the key phrases you’ should end up selecting (as long as they satisfy the rest of your criteria, of course).
[...] other day I wrote about ‘What’s in it for me?’ and hot prospects. It led to an interesting conversation, which in turn, led me to realising I should have spun the [...]