BecomingWhoYouWantToBe

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a way to tell people what to do in your copy without setting off any red flags in their mind.

Have you noticed that many marketing pieces these days contain the words, “by now”? While that’s a pretty obvious attempt at doing it, it’s sometimes effective done that way.

Maybe you’re wondering what “it” is.

They’re called embedded commands. In a nutshell, you can go place a command inside your normal conversational message so that it doesn’t stand out to the person as such.

When speaking, “by now” sounds the same as “buy now.” The one book on copywriting that mentions embedded commands specifically mentions “by now” as the example.

Hopefully it doesn’t come as any big surprise that for embedded commands to be effective, they actually have to be embedded. Starting a paragraph with “by now” isn’t very embedded. There’s a chance it could work for your market. The only way to tell is to try it.

In print, you’ll want to be more careful about it. If you take smaller steps you’ll get a better response out of it. Sure, tell them to buy. But tell them things before you get to that point too.

You may have noticed I used a couple of examples to get your imagination going. I put them in bold font so you can go back and look.