Each time you see a press release, invitation to a company event, or other form of marketing collateral that starts with the words, “It gives us great pleasure to announce…”, you should cringe. These seven words have a proper time and place to be used – marekting and sales copy is not that place.
Here are three reasons why you should avoid using these words in your marketing.
1. Your Headline Must Capture the Reader’s Attention
You only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention. In mere seconds, a person will decide if they are going to read your marketing piece or not.
You may think the words, “It gives us great pleasure to announce…”, capture attention, but they are in fact not a catchy headline or opening statement.
Your headline must touch on a hot button your prospect needs pushed. It must cause them to stop in their tracks and say, “I need to know more about how this solves my problem”.
2. What’s In It For Me
That brings us to the next problem with using the words, “It gives us great pleasure to announce…”, as an opening statement. No one cares about the great pleasure you have in announcing the latest thing you’ve accomplished, created, built, or done. They care about what that latest thing can do for their life.
Instead of wasting the reader’s time using seven words about how you feel, find seven words that tell the reader how your new solution, product, or service will make them feel.
3. Avoid Triteness At All Costs
One of the reasons you may feel compelled to use the words, “It gives us great pleasure to announce…”, in your opening line of a marketing piece is because everyone else is doing it. You may assume since they’re doing it, they’re getting results. While in reality, just like you, they’re doing it because they saw someone else do it.
The problem with copying the marketing strategy (in this case headlines) from others and using it as your own is two fold.
First, you don’t know their big picture strategy. Marketing strategies should be comprised of well thought out, tied together, multi-campaign pieces. Picking out just one thing someone has used and hoping to achieve the same results they achieved will oftentimes leave you empty handed.
Second, copying words others use on a regular basis doesn’t allow you to stick out in the crowd. In the case of the words, “It gives us great pleasure to announce…”, you have a combination of 32 letters once strategically combined that are now so overused in today’s world of words that they are trite. They don’t allow you to cut through the clutter of an overly crowded marketplace and capture someone’s attention.
If you absolutely must use these words in your creative pieces, there is one time when it is okay to use them:
1. When you’re announcing personal news, like a birth announcement, impending nuptials, graduation, or other life celebration.
In these cases, the center of attention is the person in the announcement and society allow us to be semi-selfish in these moments. Outside of these two cases, however, your marketing should never be selfish. It should always focus on answering the question the reader has, “What’s in it for me?”
So the next time someone hands you a creative piece that starts with the words, “It gives us great pleasure to announce…”, roll it up into a ball, throw it across the room, and say, “Strike One!” Then share this article with them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tina Bell is the founder of TipsOfWisdom.com. She developed her marketing experience serving a variety of industries, mostly in smaller sized companies, where she was hired to build their marketing programs. These experiences provided her the opportunity to wear many hats and learn multiple facets of marketing. She spent over six years in medical marketing, helping build an urgent care business from two urgent care clinics to over 13 clinics in four states. In addition to being well versed in copywriting, grassroots and community marketing initiatives, Tina is a sought after speaker and regularly presents educational webinars. She was ranked the top speaker at the Urgent Care Association of America Conference and spearheaded the development of an online medical training newsletter before she left that industry to start her own consulting business.