Get yourself a coffee, sit back, and discover a technique that’ll help you on your way to getting better conversions.

You’ll see how to use the 7 sins to connect with your audience.

This also helps kick things off when you’re facing a blank page or a stuttering campaign.

7 sins in copywriting: Transcript

Hi everyone. This is a video where we’re going to go through a technique you can use when you have to write some copy to an audience where your goal is to persuade them or convert them in some way.

And often you might be facing what I call blankpage-itis. Where you’ve got a blank page and you’re not sure where to start. You can also use this technique if you’ve already got a page up and running and it’s not really getting results that you want.

It’s a technique that taps into the human emotions – which you need to do if you do want to convert. If you don’t tap into someone’s emotions you’re not going to connect with them. If you’re not going to connect with them you’re not going to convert them. So your copy must allow some sort of emotions in your audience.

Given us humans are pretty complicated, you might be wondering where to start, what emotions should I go with. That’s when you can use this technique which borrows from the famous 7 sins.

You’ll find that a lot of the ads – successful ones anyway – that have been running do use at least one or more of the 7 sins. So as you start noticing these sins in ads, you’ll see how often they’re used, and the fact that they’re often used means that they do work.

So again this is just something that you can use when you’re maybe struggling for ideas or when you’re facing that dreaded blank page.

I’m just going to go through some examples of ads that I’ve either seen and adapted or ads that have already actually been used and we’ll then through how they do tap into the 7 sins.

If we go to the first one, you’ll see there this is the kind of ad that you often see for educational institutions. Maybe universities, that type of thing.

There’s someone there who looks like they graduated or qualified, so if you imagine you’re the audience you’ll look at that and think, “Yes she looks pretty pretty proud and I’d like to to feel pride in something that i’ve achieved.”

So the sin is in this case pride. It’s not a real university by the way, not yet, it’s something I mocked up. Here’s another ad that is based on one that is running – or was running – from a digital bank.

If you’ve ever had to go through the hassle of applying for a mortgage or dealing with bank managers, giving statements explaining how much money you spend at the pub every month, that kind of thing, then an ad like this promising that you can get a mortgage in your pants is going to appeal to one of the sins here. Sloth. Pretty lazy. Look at these two. They’re in bed, they’re getting their mortgage without having to do any of the usual leg work.

Here’s another one, you might have seen this. For anyone who isn’t aware, this relates to the 2016 Brexit campaign and it was pretty successful in that the Leave campaign won. This bus was cited quite often as one of the reasons, because it taps into one of the 7 sins.

If you look at that – “We send the EU 350 million a week.” If that’s something that you don’t agree with, that’s likely to make you quite angry. So the sin there that this is tapping into is wrath. Let’s move swiftly on from that one.

Here’s another example that you see a lot for perfume or deodorant or aftershave.

It’s usually where you’ve got a glamorous couple and the emotion or sin that they’re tapping into is based around the fact that, “If you wear our aroma then you too can attract one of these delightful people here.”

So that’s tapping into the sin – whether you call it sin or not – lust.

The next one here, you see these ads a lot on dodgy websites – not that i visit dodgy websites – or in the back of the newspapers, that kind of thing. Where there’s an appeal to earn a huge amount of money with pretty minimum effort really. Part-time and from home. The sin they’re tapping into there is the fact that they’ve got that amount.

It’s actually from a real ad – that’s why I’ve chosen greed for this one. There’s an argument that you could say sloth, laziness, but like i say it’s the sheer amount that would attract people for this particular ad.

Another one based on the kind of ads that you often see often on tube trains. So imagine if your target audience is someone who’s been travelling on tube trains for maybe years. They’re in rush hour, they’ve got an armpit stuck to their face, and they’re pretty tired. And then they see this ad of someone who looks relatively young and it looks like they’ve chosen a particular investment fund and they put their money into it and the result is that they’ve ended up being able to retire.

So the emotion there you the person or that poor commuter will be looking at them and feeling pretty envious really.

Here’s another one. It pretty much says what it does. All you can eat buffet, just five pounds all day and night. There’s a picture there of relatively healthy, pretty glamorous people there. But the fact you can eat all of that for five pounds taps into the sin of gluttony. So I don’t want this to just be all about how you just tap into sins and that’s how you convert, because I think humans are better than that. So there is another – not a sin – but another emotion that I recommend that you think about using as well.

You see a lot of that in ads for safeguarding the future, or things like that. So the emotion that these type of ads would tap into is just about peace of mind.

You’ve got the 7 sins and this extra bonus emotion that you could try tapping into: peace of mind.

That’s just a quick round-up of a technique that I really recommend using. Like I said, if you’re facing the dreaded blank page, the blankpage-itis, or you’ve got a campaign that isn’t working very well, think about the emotions that your ad is trying to tap into, and whether it’s the right one. And then see how you get on. Thanks for watching – all the best with your conversions.