In Hypnotic Writing, How to Seduce and Persuade Customers with Only Your Words, author Joe Vitale writes that virtually ALL great writing–novels, web copy and content, emails, direct response pieces, and so on–creates intimacy. Exactly!
All great copy builds an environment where readers get the chance to know, like, and trust you. And unless you make this happen, you will never create sufficient top-of-mind impact on your target audience to get them to want to stay and play.
Intimacy can only be earned; it can’t be assigned.
Vitale goes to great pains to dispel the myth that hypnotic/intimacy-based writing is in any way under-handed or subversive (unless you’re a sociopath charlatan selling useless nostrums or dangerous/toxic products to the unwitting; if you are, shame on you!). Anything that holds your undivided attention is intimate and hypnotic, whether it’s a movie, a TV show, a story, a sporting event, or an advertisement.
The only thing you want to avoid is violating your target audience’s sense of fair play. If they ever catch you in a lie or intentional misrepresentation about your product or service, you’ll never get them back.
So go ahead and rivet them in place with intimacy–just be sure you’re in business to be faithful to your promise. Don’t ever promise something you can’t deliver. Like a jilted lover, if you violate your customers’, clients’ or patients’ sense of fair play, you’ll never hear the end of it because they’ll never stop telling everyone they know about how you did them wrong. In the age of Social Media, where everyone can publish across the globe their opinions about your business with a few flicks of their fingertips, you’d better be on the up-and-up or you won’t last very long.
If you’re in business for the right reasons, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the people who come to you with their pain, problem or predicament–the one you can help solve. So listen carefully to everything they tell you; show your passion for solving their problem. Let them know you’re a trustworthy partner. Use your words. And get a wordsmith who knows how to tap into what’s in your head and heart and get it on paper (virtual or otherwise).
Become a soft place to fall. Let people know you care. Under-promise and over-deliver. (Don’t get that one backward!)
