Cubism, Slaughterhouse Five, and Persuasive Sales Copy

Creating persuasive sales copy is important to capturing the attention of prospective clients. Learn how to develop messages that improve your outcomes.
Reading Time: 4 minutes

What do these three things have in common? Famous cubists like Picasso and Weber, along with Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians in his famous work, Slaughterhouse 5, all saw the universe in the 4th dimension.

When writing your persuasive sales copy, you should be considering the 4th dimension too.

But what the does that mean?

Without getting TOO heady, let’s define the dimensions up to the 4th–and if you don’t want a science lesson, skip to the section below.

  •  0 Dimension is just a point on a plane.
  • 1st Dimension means you can move forward and backward on the plane.
  • 2nd Dimension means you can move forward, backward, and side to side on the plane.
  • 3rd Dimension means you can move forward, backward, left, right, up, and down on the plane.

4 dimensional shapes

The 4th dimension is tough to describe, but is another direction on the plane, giving the observer the ability to view 3-dimensional objects from various angles. Moving on.

So you might be thinking, “Ok, enough science, genius, how does this tie into writing a more persuasive sales copy and getting people to sign on the line which is dotted?”

Seeing Your Business in the 4th Dimension

It ties in because so many organizations only know how to talk about and demonstrate their services one way, or maybe a handful more. And that’s it. They’re stuck on a single script or a small set of elevator pitches that passed compliance, cracked up the marketing team, or won some contest.

And it’s not enough.

How many buyer personas have you developed? How many customers with different challenges, experiences, fears, goals, etc., make up your audience?

Is that number in the thousands? Millions? Do you think that every single one of them wants the same information, care about the same things, or even understand, internalize, and make decisions the same way?

If you’re only explaining what you do in a handful of ways in your marketing copy, you’re denying potential customers the opportunity to see what you offer from unexplored, compelling perspectives.

Viewing what you do from your audience’s perspective is paramount, and the more vantage points you have, the more effective the outcome will be.

Seeing Your Customers in the 4th Dimension

And with all of the incredible marketing tools we have at our disposal, it’s becoming increasingly possible to see your customers, truly, in the 4th dimension. Here’s how.

Let’s bring back the graph to be helpful:

4 dimensional shapes

  • Dimension 0: A customer’s individual data points live in your database.
  • Dimension 1: Your data points are related in some way to one another, and you’re able to form correlations (lines), i.e. customer journeys, purchase history, activity, etc.
  • Dimension 2: Other data sources run parallel to your main efforts (social, web, behavior analytics, third party purchasing activity, etc).
  • Dimension 3: All of your data sources integrate and aggregate into powerful reporting and analytics tools, giving you another, higher level dimension to view all of your information.
  • Dimension 4: Leveraging tools like AI and machine learning to identify disparate events as patterns, leads you to new discoveries from previously unknown, and unobservable vantage points.

By leveraging your new viewpoints within your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to build and test new channels, campaigns, and messages, making your touch-points more meaningful, timely, and more likely to convert.

A quick example:

A recent blog post created a spike in your web traffic. You dig deeper, realizing that all your posts around this that time caused similar spikes. You adjust your outreach schedule to reflect this new time.

You navigate to your event and conversion metrics, find this blog post, and see a dip (it’s great the post is performing well, but if it’s not helping your funnel, it’s no good). You review the article and realize the title and first paragraph are fine, but the copy loses steam and the call to action is weak.

You jump to an article where event and conversion metrics are strong and pull inspiration from there, making a weak part of a well-performing, low-converting article more likely to work.

Bottom Line

These 4-Dimensional approaches exist everywhere in your business, with the data to apply your insights across marketing channels, and improve your workflow in ways you couldn’t have imagined.

With this copywriting tip, we hope you channel your inner Picasso and consistently challenge yourself to see your audience, and your world, from new, advantageous perspectives.

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If you liked this article, you’d enjoy “Mind Your Marketing Copy, Win More Business”

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About Sapper Consulting

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