Have you ever opened a book, glanced at the first page and decided in that very moment whether the content was worth investing time and potentially money into?
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but what if the content didn’t jump out the page and speak to you directly as a reader?
This is the power of writing compelling copy. If your readers aren’t captured within the first sentence, they’re likely not going to buy into what you’re selling.
Marketing is ineffective if you can’t sell.
So how do you tell a compelling story that educates your audience?
Planning through passion.
Your audience can tell when you’ve put AI slop onto their plates. They know when you’ve wrote something without any conviction and soul. Despite written content often feeling like a one sided conversation, you still want to write it in a way that your audience feels connected to the words you put on the page. And you want to keep their trust banks filled up.
Kendrick Lamar handles this perfectly in his album, Good Kid; MAAD City. When he wrote and produced the record, this wasn’t his first rodeo and he wasn’t a complete newbie. But he was young and hungry. He had an ear for the scene around him and due to his lived experience, it resonated with his peers.
But due to the masterclass in storytelling, his message and narrative was sold to people all over the world. It was interactive, thought provoking and entertaining. The subject matter was raw and real. And it was effective because Kendrick wrote from a lived experience.
Now if we look at how the album roll out was handled, Kendrick had the backing of Dr Dre and the city of Compton, CA. However by building a loyal fanbase online and tackling real issues and being a leader for the unspoken, he’s still relevant today. He was the headliner at the most recent Superbowl this year.
So what can we learn from Kendrick Lamar?
When you’re authentic, people trust you. People respect you. And people buy from you.
As business owners, we have this fear that we need to copy and do the same strategies as our competitors. But like Kendrick, if we’re confident in our abilities to sell our services and change the world in a positive manner, people will always support us. And sometimes by not following those trends, we gain more respect since we don’t just feel like a corporate brand run by robots.
You just have to give it 100% and never slow down. You need to show your industry that you’re not a weak entity to take advantage of. But you also need to show them, that you have their back when they need it.
Kendrick’s authenticity allowed his own media agency, pgLang to put on the entire Superbowl half-time show; a feat never achieve by anyone else.
When we write creative, compelling and authentic copy, our message will sell itself. You just need to put it out there.
Everyday we hear about AI this and AI that, but we tend to forget about the humans running these companies. Humans that have a heart, soul and passion for the work they do. We never want to lose the realness of being human. We never want to give up our authenticity in a MA.A.D. City.