Long Copy vs. Short Copy: The Answer
Nov 11th, 2006 by jean
These enlightening comments from Perry Marshall (the “Adwords” man – Definitive Guide to Google Adwords).
“All the marketers of the world have been arguing about this for… oh, about a hundred years now: Is it better to write big long sales pages and spend 10 or 20 or 30 pages telling your story, or is it better to be brief and to the point?Guys who charge fifteen grand to write 46 page direct mail packages say their results undoubtedly prove long copy is better. Madison Avenue people who work for (obviously successful) Fortune 500 companies would remind you that Coke’s “The Real Thing” and Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop plop fizz fizz” slogans stuck in hundreds of millions of peoples’ heads.
They would also remind you that even Apple’s iPod was sold not with long copy, but with U2 and shots of hip dancers wearing those white headphones on buses and trains and billboards.
Well they’re both right. And I know the answer to this ‘long copy-short copy’ question, because I’ve seen enough things and tested enough things to know what the real answer is.
The real answer is:
*The right amount of copy is just the amount that gets a person to take the next step that you want them to take.*
No more, no less.
What I’ve found from using live chat to watch visitors come into my website and look around, you need two paths:-One that conveys the highlights quickly
-One that tells the whole story
Traditional copywriters (myself included) accomplish this partly by building a “dual readership path” with headlines, sub-heads and font changes, so a skimmer quickly gets what he wants. And more than any other media, the web gives you unlimited ability to build multiple paths so a person can stick around and look as long as they want and keep learning more.”
To read more of Perry’s articles and tutorials, you can check out http://www.acceleratedsolutions.com.au/perrymarshall.htm.
Stay tuned for more!
