Captivate Your Audience
If you want somebody to purchase what you are selling - a product, service, idea or candidate - you've first got to engage them in your message.
That's why the 'creative' part of message execution is so important. Don't get confused here with traditional ad agency use of 'creative', which usually means nothing more than trying to achieve 'recall'. Creative is the skill of using the communication tools at your disposal to craft a message in such a way that will engage your audience to consider your call to action.
Creative communication gets attention, communicates clearly and enhances credibility. Your audience will understand your points quicker, enjoy receiving your information and remember it longer.
Here's three quick tips to help you think like a trained 'creative':
Go to extremes for your message
Ninety-nine percent of the time, your message is boring because it is living somewhere 'in the middle' of the extremes. That's where most of us live most of our lives, so your message becomes ho-hum.
You do what you do because you believe in the product or service you are delivering. You know it's not boring, but your audience doesn't.
Try scaling your idea ... take it (believably) to the extremes.
Say your service is consulting to local government on saving water. One extreme would be to cite how the available water on planet earth is reducing. The other extreme would be an example of how one of your clients has taken your advice, developed and implemented water saving schemes, and now leads the way in their industry.
Scaling your communication to the extremes gives you the opportunity to use concrete and compelling details like engaging quotes, startling statistics, descriptive passages, meaningful metaphors, anecdotes, testimonials, examples and human interest illustrations.
The best communications climb up and down the ladder, from abstract to actual, from micro to macro, and everywhere in between.
Go beyond a turn of phrase
The book ' Speeches that Changed the World' highlights speechwriting that moved people to action across the centuries. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," Winston Churchill said in his first speech to the House of Commons after his appointment as British Prime Minister in 1940. It's clear in this phrase that wordplay is a powerful way to make your message instantly eloquent.
"The more rhetorical devices you master, the more sophisticated and satisfying your copy will be," offers US writing coach Ann Wylie.
"One of my favorite literary gadgets is 'compression of details'. Like squeezing together a lump of coal to make a diamond, compression of details condenses fascinating facts into a passage that's more than the sum of its parts. That's how a writer for Omni magazine created this passage:
Since Erasistratus starved a sparrow to 'note the decrease in weight,' billions of animals have been starved, suffocated, shocked, shot, boiled, baked, frozen, thawed, refrozen, force-fed, crucified, crashed, crushed, asphyxiated, irradiated, poisoned and laser-beamed - all in the name of science.
You've probably already noted some of the other rhetorical devices - alliteration, repetition, rhythm and rhyme among them - that make this passage so powerful."
Go past numbing numbers
Endless statistics groan under their own weight and squeeze the life out of your message. There are occasions when only numbers can sufficiently demonstrate the immensity of an issue. This is when it's time to go past the numbing number and make it more meaningful by comparing it to something tangible.
Select the number you will jolt back to life with care. This technique is so powerful, it's likely to be the one factoid from your message that is remembered and repeated.
Now ask yourself, "What is this like?". Find a story you can put around your number.
Jeff Miller, Director - Strategy and Development at Image 7 Group, recently compared the number of people a not-for-profit client 'touched' each week to, "Four Subiaco Ovals full of screaming fans." For a Western Australian going to the Perth home of Australian Rules Football, that's a powerful picture of nearly 175,000 people.
Before you reach for the top row of the keyboard, stop and ask "What is this like?"
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