Believability and finding the ‘tone’ of your marketing

Well, here I am in my office, it’s particularly early this morning and I’m in between books, so I looked over some old copies of Gary Halbert’s ‘Boron Letters’ as I had my coffee.

If you’ve never seen these, you can get ‘em straight from the internet, and they’re a series of letters the late copywriter Gary Halbert wrote to his son Bond, from the Boron Penitentiary.

If you’re into writing, or copywriting, my guess is you’ll learn more from studying the Halbert Letters than almost any book about how to actually do copywriting!

Anyway, in one of the final letters, (I think it was around letter 25, I’m not sure because the top was cut off of the last few when I printed them), he talks a little bit about believability in copy.

The other day I was watching a video from a guy that owns a gym.

He was showing this acrobatic flying kick, and saying how anyone could do this acrobatic trick, if they just followed these ‘three steps’. What’s the problem with that kind of message? Exactly! It might be true in some sense, but it ain’t believable. A lot of people know they couldn’t even do step one (which was a basic jump).

So ‘believability’ isn’t just about the results of your service (we’ve talked about setting up a success story the ‘right’ way before), but also the general receptiveness to your message.

And when you are more ‘believable’, people can understand how you help them, and find it easier to work with you.

Well, in letter 25 (I think it was 25), Halbert talks about one way to create believability, is to give exact details.

For example, if your service is with car owners, instead of saying “most car owners”, you say “77.6% of car owners.” Instead of “you can lose lots of weight” write “and the average reported weight loss over a 31-day period was 37.5 pounds for men and 26.3 pounds for women.”

Of course you need to know the subject at a much deeper level, but it’s more believable.

Also, did you notice when I talked about which letter he wrote this I was specific to letter 25 in the brackets? Hopefully you didn’t notice at the time, because that’s part of the writing style. But that’s a little detail that makes it more specific, and if you don’t know me, this can help create a connection.

So one way to create believability is to use specifics.

Another way to create believability is to not use broad claims. There’s a coffee shop outside of town I go past sometimes when I drive north to go spearfishing. There’s a big, haggard sign out the front, with the words “the best coffee in town”. It’s a pretty ghetto looking shop, and I could be wrong, but I highly doubt it’s the best coffee in town, or else I would have heard about it, having lived here for four years! 

It’s the same with luxury goods. One time I was with Ruby in a Hermés shop in Sydney. You have to line up to go in there. And you know what? There’s no claims anywhere in a Hermés shop. Imagine if they had a big sign up saying something like “the highest quality belts”, or “luxury goods”! That would be a sure way to signal that it ain’t luxury.

So avoiding claims is a great way to increase believability (for a service business? Use success stories instead).

Now the one I really wanted to cover today, is ‘tone’.

Have you noticed since the start of this article, there’s a certain tone to it? It’s easy to read, right? Hopefully you didn’t notice as you went, because again, that’s part of the style. But what I do is I match the ‘tone’ that I would have when I’m talking to you at the dinner table. Or the breakfast table in this case because it was so early. Or we’re training together at the gym. Whatever. 

The idea here is that I want to have a ‘tone’ that meets you where you’re at.

Imagine you walk into a café, and you grab a seat next to someone because the rest of the seats are taken, and you decide to talk to them, so you start yelling, or talking really fast all of a sudden. Well, they won’t be able to handle you, will they? Because they’re relaxed having a flat white. And you’re coming in like a freight train.

Same thing with the ‘coach speak’ you see everywhere now. That kind of enlightened advice giving ain’t a normal way of talking to people, so it often fails in social media videos, or email marketing or whatever.

Of course, sometimes you want to change the tone, or ramp things up. If you’re naturally getting excited about something you have or whatever, you can let that come through. But if you have a tone that they can’t handle, or can’t hear because it’s incompatible with whatever they’re doing right now (sitting on the train, on the couch, or whatever), a lot of times you’re just going to lose people. Because you’re forcing yourself onto them.

And the other thing is your tone will attract or repel. For example, I’m not the best person to work with if you’re brand new in business, and don’t have a service. And the brand new people tend to froth on the motivation and cheerleading style a lot more. So, I don’t do that in my writing. Plus it’s not really who I am as a person.

The final thing I’d say is tone is a particularly big thing right now, because there’s a lot of negative tone in the culture over the last few years. And hype or anxiety. So if you meet people with more hype or a lot of hard ‘advice’, they tend to block it out. But if you meet them with a more relaxed tone, they’re more receptive.

Given that you know what you’re talking about.

Now, here’s a way you can practice a few of these things. This will seem a bit random, but it’s all about practice. If you look around you, you’ll have a desk, or a table, or something. Don’t look too closely! Now, try to describe what is around you in detail, without studying it. Write that out if you can.

Then allow yourself a few minutes to look around closely at whatever is there. Pens, rulers, a window, whatever. And again, write a few words describing your setting. 

If you compare the two, you’ll see how much you’re naturally picking up on details. If there’s a huge gap with this exercise, it means you’re ‘off’ a little. And you want to pay more attention. Of course when you actually write something we don’t need all the details. Just enough to create an image in the mind. But most people generalise so much that they need some more details or specifics, to make it believable. 

The other thing you can do with the tone, is, after you write out your next email, or record your next podcast, listen back to it. And notice the tone. Does it feel like you’re being invited in? Like someone’s welcomed you into their home, to sit down for a tea or coffee? Or, does it feel like you’re being pushed away?

That’s the tone. And if you get the tone right, alongside the specifics, it’s much more believable. 

This is one of the ways I check myself. If it feels like it’s been ‘written’ or if it feels like ‘copywriting’, then I’m ‘off’. Because that pushes people away. And my goal is to invite people in. So then I’ve got to look at it a little more.

You know what got me thinking about all this? Well, what kicked it off was I was having a coffee and nobody else was around, so I thought I’d invite you in!

John Marsh