Image source: PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
If you're creating video content for your business, video sales copy is likely an essential element of your marketing and monetization strategy.
Whether you want to monetize your video with a paywall or use it as a lead generator for your company, your video sales copy should be compelling and engaging to get people's attention and drive them towards a purchase.
In this article, I'll show how AI technology can assist you in creating high-converting copy that’ll help you generate more revenue from your videos.
What makes sales copy effective?
In order to create sales copy that converts, it’s important to understand what compels people to make purchases in general.
Sales messaging is a little bit about writing and a lot about psychology: once you know how human beings think and act, you can write in such a way that appeals to those thoughts and actions with the right amount of persuasion.
So, how do you get started? By using the tried and true sales and marketing frameworks that form the foundation of persuasive copywriting.
There are three popular frameworks that I’m going to use for this article: AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), PAS (Problem-Agitate-Solution) and BAB (Bridge-After-Bridge).
But before we get into the weeds, you first need to understand the psychology behind purchasing decision making.
1. Know your audience more than you know yourself
Before you can sell to someone, you need to know who they are. But we're not just talking about how old they are, what they look like and how much they earn.
Yes, these demographic data points are important, but they're not sufficient. You also need to know what they think, what they say to others, who they listen to, their dreams, hopes, challenges and fears.
This information makes up the psychographic map of your audience. Why do you need to dig so deep? Because people are constantly bombarded by marketing messaging and advertising, which makes their attention spans really short.
This attack to their senses causes their brains to switch into defense-mode, a state that makes people want to put their “horse-blinders” on.
Yet, this is an intellectual mechanism that while it protects their minds from becoming overstimulated with information, it leaves their emotions exposed.
And this is where the deep psychographic knowledge of your audience comes to the rescue.
If you can write sales copy by putting yourself in their shoes first and understanding viscerally how they feel, you'll be much better able to appeal to their emotions — which is where purchasing decisions are ultimately made.
2. Make sure to tune into WIIFM (hint: it's not a radio station)
Second, once you know who your audience is at a deep level, you have to understand that when it comes to making purchasing decisions, your audience is constantly tuned into WIIFM — What's In It For Me?
If you can't answer this question for them within your sales copy, then they'll ignore it and move on. In addition, every time you pitch something, you have to make sure that you're addressing an audience of one: each prospect reading your copy.
Don’t create copy that centers on you or your product. Don’t use I, we, our, us or them. Always use you and your and make sure that you articulate “what's in it” for your audience.
3. The best sales copy is aspirational, not inspirational
Finally, you don't want to use your sales message as a vehicle for inspiration. If you do, the sales “energy” will be going in the wrong direction: from you to your prospect.
You want this energy, this desire, to emanate from your prospect and be directed toward your product or service.
For example, the sales copy: "The XYZ program will inspire you to lose weight and it'll motivate you to keep it off for good" will never be as effective as "Imagine if you were able to enjoy your favorite foods and still shed pounds like there's no tomorrow?"
If you were looking for a weight loss program, which of the two messages would resonate better? I bet you'd choose the second one because it's aspirational in nature, that is, it clearly paints a state you aspire to achieve.
In other words, you want to explain how much better your audience's life will be if they buy your product or service, rather than telling them how buying your product or service will help them achieve their goals.
What is AI and how does it work in sales copy?
Image source: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Alright, so you might now be wondering: where does artificial intelligence fit into this equation?
You've probably heard about AI computers that can teach themselves to play chess by learning every possible move made by grand masters through tens of thousands of matches until they get so good at detecting winning patterns that they become unbeatable.
So, replace the chess pros with copywriting pros, and now you have an AI computer that can write like the best copywriters in the world, simply because they've been trained by "reading" massive amounts of winning sales copy.
The benefits of using AI in your video monetization strategy
For video creators like you, it's typically difficult to create compelling and persuasive video sales copy in order to monetize your content because you’re not a trained copywriter.
So you either try to do your best, which can be hit and miss at the best of times, or you end up spending some good money hiring a professional copywriter.
In the end, video marketers always need high-quality video sales copy, because without it they will not have conversions from visitors into customers — which means no profit potential.
But now, for the first time, AI has come to save the day (and a lot of your hard-earned money) by automating and accelerating some of the tedious tasks associated with creating quality sales copy.
One caveat to bear in mind: Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say you should avoid "automatically generated content intended to manipulate search rankings” and Google’s John Mueller recently reiterated that they consider content generated by AI writing tools to be spam.
So AI generated content shouldn’t be just copied in wholesale. It is super useful for generating ideas, and as a first go at content which you can then improve and modify, also using your own expertise.
How to use AI to write high-converting sales copy for your videos
For this article, I’ll use a leading AI copywriting tool and walk you through some examples to create fully AI-driven AIDA, PAS and BAB high-persuasion frameworks so you can produce awesome sales copy for your video monetization strategy in no time at all.
I’m using Jasper.ai, but there are plenty of excellent tools out there. My blog post has a full review of the 16 top rated AI writing software tools on the market, so do take a look and see which would suit your needs best.
You can apply the above three frameworks to create highly effective call-to-action messaging for your videos, sales copy for your landing pages, a compelling headline and button text for your email capture popup or the messaging needed to create a highly-converting paywall.
Example 1: Using an AI-driven AIDA framework to generate video sales copy
Great, let’s put AI to the test. As your input, you’ll need to come up with a general description of your product or service.
For example, say you’re in the business of broadcasting live sports via a subscription paywall. So your product description could be written as follows:
“SportsEverywhere is the leading online sports broadcaster for teams at the high school, collegiate or professional level. We deliver your favorite teams straight to your laptop, tablet or smart devices on demand and in real time via subscription.”
As it relates to your audience, this text may be to the point but it’s not very sexy and not likely to convert well if used “as is” for your sales copy.
So, let’s see what an AI assist can do for you:
First, you’ll enter your company name in the “Company/Product name” field in the AIDA copy generator. Next, you’ll type the above product statement into the “Product Description field.” Lastly, you’ll choose your preferred tone of voice (say, casual).
Let’s see what AI can do with the above information:
Not bad at all for something that literally takes 5 seconds. Now, all you have to do is clean it up a bit, customize any placeholder text (like “by clicking this ad”) and take the best elements from the above AIDA framework for your video sales copy!
Example 2: Using an AI-driven PAS framework to generate video sales copy
Let’s now use the same fictitious online sports broadcaster, but this time let’s use the PAS persuasion framework (Problem, Agitate, Solution).
Your inputs will be identical to example 1 above.
Company/Product name: SportsEverywhere
Product description: SportsEverywhere is the leading online sports broadcaster for teams at the high school, collegiate or professional level. We deliver your favorite teams straight to your laptop, tablet or smart devices on demand and in real time via subscription.
Tone of voice: Casual
Let’s give AI a new spin:
Awesome, right?
Let’s now have a look at the output from the third and final framework.
Example 3: Using an AI-driven BAB framework to generate video sales copy:
Here, we’re going to use the same inputs, with a slightly different heading:
Company/Product name: SportsEverywhere
Content description: SportsEverywhere is the leading online sports broadcaster for teams at the high school, collegiate or professional level. We deliver your favorite teams straight to your laptop, tablet or smart devices on demand and in real time via subscription.
Tone of voice: Casual
Let’s make AI do its thing one final time:
Perfect! I couldn't have written this better myself.
Or put another way, it probably would have taken me the best part of an hour or more with plenty of failed tries, spending lots of time on the internet and consulting my copywriting books to come up with something that took this AI bot about 5 seconds of “thinking” time per attempt.
Wrapping up
There you have it: a source of high-converting AI-driven sales copy that you can use to come up with compelling messaging for your video CTAs, landing pages, email captures and paywalls.
Now, it’s time to give one of these AI tools a try and start creating different versions of video sales copy that you can easily iterate using A/B testing until you come up with your ultimate video conversion machine.
Just like all marketing automation methods, it’s a smart move that will save your business time, money and energy while still getting high-value results.
