“In my experience, there are basically three types of salesmen: the bully, the charismatic, and the invisible man.”
— Mark Ford
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing a lot of copy for a client in the ecommerce space.
Their typical funnel goes like this:
Facebook ad -> advertorial -> product page
I’ve been handling the FB ads and the advertorials for a bunch of this client’s products. And it’s been going well. But I recently got some feedback.
It seems some of our FB ads have been getting rejected. In the client’s own words:
“We’re getting a few disapprovals here and there for calling out the user. I don’t agree with it but seems everytime we mention the word ‘you’ even if it’s not a direct call out some reviewers will disapprove.”
So what’s going on?
In a nutshell, it seems Facebook is trying to prevent copy that acts like the “bully salesman” in Mark Ford’s quote above.
By Mark’s definition, that’s the salesman who “succeeds by pressing you so hard that you make a purchase just to make him go away.”
One trivial way that Facebook seems to be reigning in this type of copy is by singling out the word “you,” like in the ads I’ve been writing.
But according to million-dollar copywriter Justin Goff, Facebook also seems to be rejecting clickbaity, fear-laden, “punch-em-in-the-gut” sales letters.
So is this the end of direct response marketing on Facebook?
Not necessarily.
As Mark Ford says above, there are still two other ways to make sales through a combination of personality (charismatic type), stories (both charismatic and invisible types), and indirect claims (invisible type).
So for example, Justin also told the story of one marketer he knows.
She had a long-running VSL that Facebook had started rejecting.
So she wrote a new VSL.
And instead of the usual doom and gloom, she made it softer, kinder, and gentler — like a friend giving you advice.
Facebook approved, to the extent where the new sales page was performing better than the old one.
Promising.
In my personal case, I’ve done something similar:
I’ve simply focused on that old standby, pure story telling, with little or no obvious selling.
In other words, I’ve removed that offensive word “you” by focusing on the harmless word “I”…
And then telling people to click through if they want to learn more.
It’s working at the moment. Which might interest you in case you’re planning on running offers on cold Facebook traffic.
And if you are running such offers, and you want help with the copy, get in touch with me here and we can talk.