Tag: marketing

Hackneyed language hacks

Joe McVeigh2 Comments

Medium has an article called “5 language hacks to instantly become a better copywriter”. It’s a rehash of all the tired “advice” that I’ve heard before about copywriting. But let’s go through it and see why articles like this one are usually such hot messes. Screenshots and quotes come from the Medium piece.

What the holy hell is going on here? Words are barriers? Because we can’t communicate telepathically? And how come that comma after reader isn’t a barrier?

Set a course for… MAXIMUM ACCURACY!

“Strike the word ‘get’ from your vocabulary.” lol. Got milk?

“The word ‘get’ means absolutely nothing by itself.” Ok. The dictionary entry for get is PAGES long. It literally means a boatload of things. It means all the things.

Apparently, “You understand the idea” is better than “You get the idea”. Understand it?

“So when you’re tempted to write ‘get’… **CUE FORESHADOWING MUSIC**

2. Avoid the word “very”

[blah blah blah]

The word ‘very’ is also vague.

The word very is intentionally vague, ya dinkus. Case in point, your bonkers example:

o_O…

(Also, the second example sentence – the “better” one – has a passive in it. **MORE FORESHADOWING**)

3. When in doubt, use contractions

[blahbedy blah] The more friction there is in your sentence, the more difficult it is to mentally read, the less likely is a person to want to continue reading.

Friction is a totally legit word to describe reading and writing. And this sentence is totally frictionless, especially the part that says “the less likely is a person to want”. No friction there whatsoever. Feel it slide.

It’s all about the flow, bro. Also, writing and speaking = one and the same. Judge one how you would judge the other.

Did you think I was going to read them out loud?

“nr.” is not how English abbreviates the word number. Quit breaking my flow!

Dun dun DUN. Now is the moment that was foretold! Of course this “advice” is on here. Of course it is. And how do they define “passive voice”? With a definition from Google. Because it’s not like there are dictionaries or grammar books ANYWHERE AT ALL.

In layman’s terms, [passive voice is] when the action is more important than the subject of the sentence.

No, it is not. But good try!

Ok, they correctly identified passive sentences. Credit where credit’s due. This is the first bar to clear when whining about the passive. Did they copy/paste these sentences from somewhere?

1. Your sentences do not show that the active is more convincing. I don’t need to be convinced that an author wrote a book. Spend more than half a second on coming up with examples ffs.

2. Your active sentences have fewer words because you used fewer words. Don’t hang that on the passive. Also, what are “fewers” words?

3. The passive sentences here are just as clear about who is responsible as the active ones. In fact, the second sentence is entirely unclear – unless “research” is responsible.

4. Y U no avoid passive sentences in this article?

 

Advice gem #5 is called “Improvise with punctuation, bolds and italics”. Yes, go ahead and do that. It will seem totally natural. Like. The. Kids. These… Days?

Wait. Placing periods between words isn’t bad for the flow of reading, but placing spaces between words that can be contracted is bad for the flow of reading? Wtf?

Those aren’t hyphens, Mr. Bond.

And the word you want is emphasize. Remove the d.

So very is verboten but really is right on?

If it wasn’t already clear, this article on Medium is nothing more than an info-tisment (adver-tainment? adver-mation?). It’s by a company trying to sell themselves by appealing to copywriters’ insecurities. That’s why they can get away with not knowing what they’re talking about and providing scant, vague and contradictory advice about copywriting. Don’t buy it.

Analyzing language – You’re doing it wrong

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Dan Zarrella, the “social media scientist” at HubSpot, has an infographic on his website called “How to: Get More Clicks on Twitter”. In it he analyzes 200,000 link-containing tweets to find out which ones had the highest clickthrough rates (CTRs), which is another way of saying which tweets got the most people to click on the link in the tweet. Now, you probably already know that infographics are not the best form of advice, but Mr. Zarrella did a bit of linguistic analysis and I want to point out where he went wrong so that you won’t be misled. It may sound like I’m picking on Mr. Zarrella, but I’m really not. He’s not a linguist, so any mistakes he made are simply due to the fact that he doesn’t know how to analyze language. And nor should he be expected to – he’s not a linguist.

But there’s the rub. Since analyzing the language of your tweets, your marketing, your copy, and your emails, is extremely important to know what language works better for you, it is extremely important that you do the analysis right. To use a bad analogy, I could tell you that teams wearing the color red have won six out of the last ten World Series, but that’s probably not information you want if you’re placing your bets in Vegas. You’d probably rather know who the players are, wouldn’t you?

Here’s a section of Mr. Zarrella’s infographic called “Use action words: more verbs, fewer nouns”:

Copyright Dan Zarrella
Copyright Dan Zarrella

That’s it? Just adverbs, verbs, nouns, and adjectives? That’s only four parts of speech. Your average linguistic analysis is going to be able to differentiate between at least 60 parts of speech. But there’s another reason why this analysis really tells us nothing. The word less is an adjective, adverb, noun, and preposition; run is a verb, noun, and adjective; and check, a word which Mr. Zarrella found to be correlated with higher CTRs, is a verb and a noun.

I don’t really know what to draw from his oversimplified picture. He says, “I found that tweets that contained more adverbs and verbs had higher CTRs than noun and adjective heavy tweets”. The image seems to show that tweets that “contained more adverbs” had 4% higher CTRs than noun heavy tweets and 5-6% higher CTRs than adjective heavy tweets. Tweets that “contained more verbs” seem to have slightly lower CTRs in comparison. But what does this mean? How did the tweets contain more adverbs? More adverbs than what? More than tweets which contained no adverbs? This doesn’t make any sense.

The thing is that it’s impossible to write a tweet that has more adverbs and verbs than adjectives and nouns. I mean that. Go ahead and try to write a complete sentence that has more verbs in it than nouns. You can’t do it because that’s not how language works. You just can’t have more verbs than nouns in a sentence (with the exception of some one- and two-word-phrases). In any type of writing – academic articles, fiction novels, whatever – about 37% of the words are going to be nouns (Hudson 1994). Some percentage (about 5-10%) of the words you say and write are going to be adjectives and adverbs. Think about it. If you try to remove adjectives from your language, you will sound like a Martian. You will also not be able to tell people how many more clickthroughs you’re getting from Twitter or the color of all the money you’re making.

I know it’s easy to think of Twitter as one entity, but we all know it’s not. Twitter is made up of all kinds of people, who tweet about all kinds of things. While anyone is able to follow anyone else, people of similar backgrounds and/or professions tend to group together. Take a look at the people you follow and the people who follow you. How many of them do you know on personally and how many are in a similar business as you? These people probably make up the majority of your Twitter world. So what we need to know from Mr. Zarrella is which Twitter accounts he analyzed. Who are these people? Are they on Twitter for professional or personal reasons? What were they tweeting about and where did the links in their tweets go – to news stories or to dancing cat videos? And who are their followers (the people who clicked on the links)? This is essential information to put the analysis of language in context.

Finally, What Mr. Zarrella’s analysis should be telling us is which kinds of verbs and adverbs equal higher CTRs. As I mentioned in a previous post, marketers would presumably favor some verbs over others. They want to say that their product “produces results” and not that it “produced results”. What we need is a type of analysis can tell shit (noun and verb) from Shinola (just a noun). And this is what I can do – it’s what I invented Econolinguistics for. Marketers need to be able to empirically study the language that they are using, whether it be in their blog posts, their tweets, or their copy. That’s what Econolinguistics can do. With my analysis, you can forget about meaningless phrases like “use action words”. Econolinguistics will allow you to rely on a comprehensive linguistic analysis of your copy to know what works with your audience. If this sounds interesting, get in touch and let’s do some real language analysis (joseph.mcveigh (at) gmail.com).

 

Other posts on marketing and linguistics

How Linguistics can Improve your Marketing by Joe McVeigh

Adjectives just can’t get a break by Joe McVeigh

Adjectives just can’t get a break

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Everyone loves verbs, or so you would be led to believe by writing guides. Zack Rutherford, a professional freelance copywriter, posted an article on .eduGuru about how to write better marketing copy. In it he says:

Verbs work better than adjectives. A product can be quick, easy, and powerful. But it’s a bit more impressive if the product speeds through tasks, relieves stress, and produces results. Adjectives describe, while verbs do. People want a product or service that does. So make sure you provide them with one. [Emphasis his – JM]

If you’re a copy writer or marketer, chances are that you’ve heard this piece of advice. It sort of makes sense, right? Well as a linguist who studies marketing (and a former copy writer who was given this advice), I want to explain to you why it is misleading at best and flat out wrong at worst. These days it is very easy to check whether verbs actually work better than adjectives in copy. You simply take many pieces of copy (texts) and use computer programs to tag each word for the part of speech it is. Then you can see whether the better, i.e. more successful, pieces of copy use more verbs than adjectives. This type of analysis is what I’m writing my PhD on (marketers and copy writers, you should get in touch).

Don’t heed your own advice

So being the corpus linguist that I am, I decided to check whether Mr. Rutherford follows his own advice. His article has the following frequencies of usage for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs:

Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs Word count
Total 275 208 135 90 1195
% of all words 23.01% 17.41% 11.30% 7.53%

Hooray! He uses more verbs than adjectives. The only thing is that those frequencies don’t tell the whole story. They would if all verbs are equal, but those of us who study language know that some verbs are more equal than others. Look at Mr. Rutherford’s advice again. He singles out the verbs speeds through, relieves, and produces as being better than the adjectives quick, easy, and powerful. Disregarding the fact that the first verb in there is a phrasal verb, what his examples have in common is that the verbs are all -s forms of lexical verbs (gives, takes, etc.) and the adjectives are all general adjectives (according to CLAWS, the part-of-speech tagger I used). This is important because a good copy writer would obviously want to say that their product produces results and not that it produced results. Or as Mr. Rutherford says “People want a product or service that does” and not presumably one that did. So what do the numbers look like if we compare his use of -s form lexical verbs to general adjectives?

-s form of lexical verbs General adjectives
Total 24 135
% of all words 2.01% 11.30%

Uh oh. Things aren’t looking so good. Those frequencies exclude all forms of the verbs BE, HAVE, and DO, as well as modals and past tense verbs. So maybe this is being a bit unfair. What would happen if we included the base forms of lexical verbs (relieve, produce), the -ing participles (relieving, producing) and verbs in the infinitive (to relieve, it will produce)? The idea is that there would be positive ways for marketers to write their copy using these forms of the verbs. Here are the frequencies:

Verbs (base, -ing part.,
Infin., and -s forms)		 General adjectives
Total 127 135
% of all words 10.63% 11.30%

Again, things don’t look so good. The verbs are still less frequent than the general adjectives. So is there something to writing good copy other than just “use verbs instead of adjectives”? I thought you’d never ask.

Some good advice on copy writing

I wrote this post because the empirical research of marketing copy is exactly what I study. I call it Econolinguistics. Using this type of analysis, I have found that using more verbs or more adjectives does not relate to selling more products. Take a look at these numbers.

Copy text Performance Verbs – Adjectives
1 42.04 3.94%
2 11.82 0.63%
3 11.81 6.22%
4 10.75 -0.40%
5 2.39 3.21%
6 2.23 -0.78%
7 2.23 4.01%
8 1.88 1.14%
9 5.46%

These are the frequencies of verbs and adjectives in marketing texts ordered by how well they performed. The ninth text is the worst and the rest are ranked based on how much better they performed than this ninth text. The third column shows the difference between the verb frequency and adjective frequency for each text (verb % minus adjective %). If it looks like a mess, that’s because it is. There is not much to say about using more verbs than adjectives in your copy. You shouldn’t worry about it.

There is, however, something to say about the combination of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, etc., etc. in your copy. The ways that these kinds of words come together (and the frequencies at which they are used) will spell success or failure for your copy. Trust me. It’s what Econolinguistics was invented for. If you want to know more, I suggest you get in touch with me, especially if you’d like to check your copy before you send it out (email: joseph.mcveigh(at)gmail.com).

In order to really drive the point home, think about this: if you couldn’t use adjectives to describe your product, how would you tell people what color it is? Or how big it is? Or how long it lasts? You need adjectives. Don’t give up on them. They really do matter. And so do all the other words.

 

Other posts on marketing and linguistics

How Linguistics can Improve your Marketing by Joe McVeigh

How Linguistics Can Improve Your Marketing

Joe McVeigh6 Comments

This post is intended to show what linguistics can offer marketing. I’ll be using corpus linguistics tools to analyze a few pieces of advice about how to write better marketing copy. The idea is to empirically test the ideas of what makes for more profitable marketing. But first, a quick note to the marketers. Linguists, please leave the room.

Note to marketers: Corpus linguistics works by annotating texts according to the linguistic features that one wishes to study. One of the most common ways is to tag each word for its part of speech (noun, verb, etc.) and that is what I’ve done here. Corpus linguistics generally works better on longer texts or larger banks of texts, since the results of the analysis become more accurate with more data. In this post I’m going to do a surface analysis of email marketing texts, which are each 250-300 words long, using corpus linguistic methods. If you’re interested in knowing more, please feel free to contact me (joseph.mcveigh@gmail.com). In fact, I really hope you’ll get in touch because I’ve tried again and again to get email marketers to work with me and come up with bupkis. I’m writing this post to show you exactly what I have to offer, which is something you won’t find anywhere else.

Welcome back, linguists. So what I’ve done is gathered ten email marketing texts and ranked them based on how well they performed. That means I divided the number of units sold by the number of emails sent. I then ran each text through a part-of-speech tagger (CLAWS7). Now we’re ready for action.

Let’s start with a few pieces of advice about how to write good marketing copy. I want to see if the successful and unsuccessful marketing texts show whether the advice really translates into better sales.

1. Don’t BE yourself

The first piece of advice goes like this: Don’t use BE verbs in your writing. This means copywriters should avoid is, are, was, were, etc. because it apparently promotes insanity (test results pending) and because “we never can reduce ourselves to single concepts”. If it sounds crazy, that’s because it is. And even the people who promote this advice can’t follow it (three guesses as to what the fourth word in the section on that page introducing this advice is). But let’s see what the marketing texts tell us. Who knows, maybe “to be or not to be” is actually the most memorable literary phrase in English because it’s actually really, really bad writing.

In the chart below, the percentage of BE verbs used in each texts are listed (1 = most successful text). The differences seem pretty staggering, right?

Chart showing the percentage of be verbs in the marketing texts

Well, they would be staggering if I didn’t tell you that each horizontal axis line represents a half of a percentage point, or 0.5%. Now we can see that the differences between the texts, and especially between the best and worst texts, is practically non-existent. So much for being BE-free.

2. You can’t keep a good part of speech down

The second piece of advice is about the misuse of adjectives. According to some marketing/writing experts, copywriters should avoid using adjectives at all because “They are, in fact one of the worst [sic] elements of speech and even make a listener or reader lose trust”. Sounds serious. Except for the fact that linguists have long known that avoiding adjectives is not only bad advice but impossible to do, especially in marketing. How’s that? Well, first, this is another piece of advice which is given by people who can’t seem to follow it. But let’s say you’re trying to sell a t-shirt (or a car or a sofa or whatever). Now try to tell me what color it is without using an adjective. The fact is that different writing styles (sometimes called genres or text types), such as academic writing, fiction, or journalism, use adjectives to a different extent. Some styles use more adjectives, some use less, but all of them use adjectives because (and I can’t stress this enough) adjectives are a natural and necessary part of language. So writers should use neither too many or too few adjectives, depending on the style they are writing in.

But we’re here to run some tests. Let’s take the advice at face value and see if using less (or no) adjectives really means sales will increase.

Chart showing the percentage of adjectives in the marketing texts

Again, the differences in the results look drastic and again looks can be deceiving. In this case, the horizontal axis lines represents two percentage points (2%). The percentage of adjectives used in the three most successful and three least successful marketing texts are nearly identical. In fact, they are within two percentage points of each other. Another one bites the dust.

UPDATE August 22, 2013 – I’d like to mention that the use of modifiers, such as adjectives, is a good way of showing the depth of my research and what it can really offer marketers. While we saw that adjectives in general, or as a class, do not tell us much about which marketing texts will perform better, there are other ways to look into this. For example, there may be certain types of adjectives common to the successful marketing texts, but not found in the unsuccessful ones. Likewise, the placement of an adjective and whether it is preceded by, say, a determiner (the, an, etc.), may also be indicitave of more successful texts. And in a similar fashion, texts which use nouns as modifiers instead of adjectives may be more successful than those that do not. The important thing for marketers reading this to know is that I can research all of these aspects and more. It’s what I do.

3. It’s not all about you, you, you

The final piece of advice concerns the use of the word you, which is apparently one of the most persuasive words in the English language (see #24 on that page). Forget about the details on this one because I don’t feel like getting into why this is shady advice. Let’s just get right to the results.

Chart showing the percentage of the word you in the marketing texts

Does this chart look familiar? This time the horizontal axis lines once again represent a half of a percentage point. And once again, less than two percentage points separate the best and the worst marketing texts. In fact, the largest difference in the use of you between texts is 1.5%. That means that each one of the marketing texts I looked at – the good, the bad, and the in between – uses the word you practically the same as the others. It would behoove you to disregard this piece of advice.

So what?

I’ll admit that I picked some low hanging fruit for this post. But the point was not to shoot down marketing tips. The point was to show email marketers what corpus linguists (like me!) have to offer. Looking for specific words or adjectives is not the only thing that corpus linguistics can do. What if I could analyze your marketing and find a pattern among your more successful texts? Wouldn’t you like to know what it was so you could apply when creating copy in the future? On the other hand, what if there wasn’t any specific pattern among the more successful (or less successful) texts? What if something besides your copy predicted your sales? Wouldn’t you like to know that as well so you could save time poring over your copy in the future?

Really, if you’re an email marketer, I think you should get in touch with me (joseph.mcveigh@gmail.com). I’m about to start my PhD studies, which means that all my knowledge and all that corpus linguistics has to offer could be yours.

How about letting me analyze – and probably finding an innovative way to improve – your marketing? Sound like a good deal? If so, contact me here: joseph.mcveigh@gmail.com.