In Circulation magazine
7 July 2007
We publishers are very lucky to have In Circulation magazine. The Editor, James Evelegh has managed to bring the whole circulation marketing and management community together. This must be one of the toughest tasks in business publishing: a national newspaper circulation manager, for example, would appear to have little in common with the owner of a direct marketing agency.
In Circulation magazine is a wonderful inside look at those cluttered, frantic offices where launches, folds and circulation-growth are the daily concern. Among articles on newspapers, Online marketing, controlled circulation and subscriptions are some gems. Here is an extract from a piece titled What some famous copywriters taught me by Drayton Bird, chairman of the Drayton Bird partnership:
“Your copy should do what a good salesman does. A salesman gives every good reason for buying: a salesman forestalls objections; a salesman is not brief. Yet little copy does a complete selling job, and many still imagine brevity works best. It doesn’t. Time after time, I have seen long copy work better than short, on everything from politics to loans to self improvement.“
That last point about politics is very true. To see how a long letter sold us all on going to war, go here:
While this is all obvious to me, I have learned it’s not a widely held view. A ‘top tip’ from the recent Specialized Information Publishers Association conference in London was: ‘Use sales techniques in your marketing copy’. It appears the speaker, as do many publishers and marketers, wrongly regards copy as ‘marketing’, when of course it is ‘selling’, a very different thing.
Previous: Creating classified ads
Next: Drayton Bird on UK publishers