A Checklist for Writing Compelling Content

Introduction

Creating bullets is not merely a verbal exercise, of course, so it’s important to set up checks and balances to catch instances where you allowed your ideas to go overboard. Set your freshly written copy aside for at least a day and then coldly apply these criteria to it as if someone else had penned your effort. Remember your overall goal – to persuade and bring about leads, sales, donations, memberships and such, without prompting any sort of backlash.

1. Have you promised anything you can’t deliver?

Be mindful that all marketing copy functions as a sort of promise. Through lack of communication among your team, because of last-minute changes or by making inaccurate assumptions, it’s possible to describe something that is no longer or not usually part of the product. Keep in mind that someone may buy because of one or two bullet points that caught their eye. I once highlighted a couple of points in a seminar description and then asked for (and received) my money back because those items turned out not to be on the agenda after all. From this point of view, underpromising is best.

2. Are all the facts in your copy accurate?

The first draft of this chapter included a made-up example referring to “Rapid City, SD.” When I reread what I’d written, a little voice in the back of my head whispered, “Is it really in South Dakota?” From decades of demanding journalistic work, I’ve learned to be over-cautious about facts and check everything that I could conceivably get wrong. In this case, I quickly learned from my atlas that Rapid City is not in South Dakota but in Iowa.

Check the spelling of proper names like psychologist Abraham Maslow (not Mazlo), Martha’s Vineyard (not Marthas Vinyard) and Paris’ Champs Elyseés, rather than some fractured version of that famous boulevard. If you refer to a warehouse that is five miles from downtown on Route 135, are you certain it’s five miles and not on a side street off of 135? Think of how silly you’ll look to your target market if you wrote “Sony” when you meant “Nintendo” or vice versa (I saw this happen once) or if you mentioned Nazis in connection with World War I rather than World War II.

3. Is your copy consistent?

If at the top of the page you refer to the “three biggest mistakes” used car buyers make and at the bottom of the page promise to explain the “four biggest mistakes” of used car buyers, something jangles in the reader’s head. (Even worse – and pretty common – is to announce the “three biggest mistakes” and then actually list four!) Likewise, you may tell people on page 2 to avoid buying Camaros, the greatest losers in resale value, and on page 3 ascribe that status to Volkswagens. You lose credibility when you say things that don’t line up with one another.

4. Have you repeated yourself?

The longer your marketing piece, the greater the odds that unintentionally, you’ve made the same point twice. Sometimes repetition drives home a point. But other times it merely makes you look careless. For instance, while compiling my list of ways to add oomph with bullets, I was continually checking to make sure I didn’t list the same idea twice, worded slightly differently. Look for repetition and strike it out if it was inadvertent and doesn’t add persuasive power.

Your All-Important Tone

Several times I’ve seen experienced marketers debate whether bullet-filled copy really works and holds lessons for traditional companies that tend to produce boring, low-key sales pieces. The consensus is that using bullets works, even for audiences that appear to be accustomed to marketing pitches without them – so long as the tone doesn’t totally defy readers’ expectations. Marketers who tried these techniques and were afraid that they had “hyped” their product or service too obviously or offensively discovered that sales increased without any apparent backlash. What they feared was over-the-top copy on the contrary whetted appetites and helped close the sale.

Even so, it’s vital to understand how word choice, punctuation and phrasing affect reader perception, so that you can maintain control of the impact of your words and consistency with your desired image. What could work for a car dealership would not be appropriate for a financial services company, and what fits to sell high-priced fragrance might not suit a promotion of mobile homes.

Before getting to specific elements that influence readers’ perceptions, let me present a range of similar bullet points, showing how you can modify them for different audiences and to be consistent with different business images. I think of this in terms of personalities.

See if you too can conjure up very different types of people or institutions for these statements.


1. The most overlooked and easily remedied reason why inventory doesn’t move off your lot.

2. Did you realize that the biggest reason your cars don’t sell is also the easiest thing to fix in your used-car business? So are you going to do something about it – now?

3. As one of our cherished franchisees, you’ll appreciate learning how to quicken desire for your slow-moving inventory.

4. You’ll have the marvelous good fortune to learn how to eliminate the most dastardly enemy of cash flow. Shhh, though... we’ll swear you to secrecy about it!

5. Nearly 57% of the business owners tutored by the WTNSBDC improve their stock turnover by at least 50%, with one change that takes less than 2 weeks to implement.

6. Squash your competition like a bug after learning – and fixing – the biggest profit killer of them all.



Bullet #1 conveys a solid, no-nonsense, business-like image.
This would work well for a business consultant trying to help business owners increase their profitability.


Bullet #2 conjures up a bullying speaker who’s doing the equivalent of poking the reader in the chest, taunting him to action.
It’s an intimate, informal, challenging approach that would fit a pitch to enroll in a “Car Dealer Boot Camp Seminar.”


Bullet #3 has a much more feminine flavor, and comes across as soft and warm, while still in the realm of business.
It makes me imagine an audience of home-based cosmetics dealers who are ambitious about making money while raising a family.


Bullet #4 evokes someone fond of air kisses and endearments, like an antiques dealer or a swishy bar hostess.
It could sell a seminar at a cushy resort in Georgia or South Carolina—certainly not in New Hampshire!


Bullet #5, with its abundance of numbers, has a governmental air and fits a federally funded program that keeps one eye on political realities and the other on the local businesses it serves.


Bullet #6 uses macho metaphors and works better for a predominantly male audience of top-gun executives who work hard, play hard and expect to earn big doing so. The readers matching this appeal are mighty busy, but could spare an hour for a Web-based seminar on this theme.


As you do your best to craft bullet points that fit the impression you hope to make, consider these ingredients, which have a definite impact on how the message comes across:

Exclamation points:
A classic sign of hype. If you’re going after a dignified image, forget the exclamation marks. I
f you want a hurried, breathless and excited effect, use lots of them.

Parenthetical comments:
Evoke informality, folksiness.

Ellipses (...) and dashes:
Ditto.

Numbers:
When sprinkled densely into text, numbers add coolness, precision and authority.

Longer words:
Using, for instance, “construct” rather than “build,” “purchase” rather than “buy,” “monetize” rather than “cash in” promotes distance and thoughtfulness, instead of urgency and a need for immediate action.


Slang:
Effect depends on where the slang term comes from.
“Dude,” of course, sounds young and urban while “gosh-darned” sounds elderly and rural.



Short sentences:
A younger, less refined effect than longer sentences.


Questions:
Produce greater reader involvement than statements, so they promote a feeling of accessibility, unless the questions are hostile or confrontational.


Sentence fragments:
Convey energy. Driving force. Resolution and determination.


Quotation marks:
Low-class when overused.


Capitalized words or sentences:
Like shouting.


Made-up hyphenated expressions: S
mart-alecky.


Repetition of key words:
Smooth, soothing impression.


Emphasis through italics or bold:
In-your-face salesmanship.

Formatting Options

Bullets aren’t just bullets. For one thing, you can use many other symbols besides the traditional blackened circle to signal the start of each item. Arrows and checkboxes are popular alternatives, and if cuteness is part of your image, you can use a thematic graphic, like a tee for golf-related material or a clown face for a birthday party business. Here are some options built into Microsoft Word (look under “Bullets” on the “Format” menu, then click “Customize” and look especially at the Wingding fonts):
...

In addition, sometimes with a bulleted list you can start the items with numbers instead of with a symbol. This works especially well where you want to emphasize how many points you’re making, either because there are a great number of them or because you’ve emphasized the number of items in the text just preceding the list. It helps keep the reader moving along when each item in the list consists of several sentences rather than just a brief phrase. Numbers also work better with multi-paragraph bullet points. And when I have several groups of bullets within a page or two, I will sometimes alternate bullet symbols and numbers for the sake of variety and to keep the lists distinct from one another. For the same purpose, you can sometimes do away with an initial symbol altogether.

For long lists of bullets, you can also break up the monotony by alternating items in bold face and in regular type. I don’t recommend italics for bullets, either on the Web or on paper, because italics are not anywhere as readable as regular or bold.

Remember that while your word processing or Web layout program may automatically position and space the bullets in a certain fashion, you can usually override those defaults, adding more space between bullets or indenting them less or more. A good rule of thumb is that with longer bullet points –three lines or longer – you may be better off with a double rather than single space between bullets.

Probably the most creative, advanced effects come with providing headings and subheads for bulleted lists.
See the next page for a multi-leveled illustration of this technique.
Note that I’ve concentrated on illustrating formatting possibilities for an imaginary product.







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