A simple tip to help you evaluate your marketing copy

I was recently working on updating some of my marketing material. I typed out a few paragraphs of new copy and then put it all into an e-mail to send to someone for feedback.

Looking at the text in the e-mail, I realized a sentence in one paragraph might be a candidate for getting chopped.

So just to make things easier to analyze, I separated all paragraphs into single-sentence paragraphs. I figured that might make it easier for the other person to either comment on the copy or to line-out any weak sentences.

Wow! What a difference that made in evaluating the effectiveness of each and every sentence. Suddenly I had a much better sense of whether each sentence was pulling its own weight because it was isolated from every other sentence. That made it easier to see any waste.

When it comes to your marketing copy, wasted words or sentences should be avoided.

Sometimes, within a paragraph surrounded by other sentences, a weak sentence can hide or “blend in with the crowd,” if you know what I mean.

So this tip might be something to try with the copy on your website or your printed material. Copy and paste it into a blank Word or text document, then break paragraphs into single sentences.

Looking at those sentences by themselves will give you another method of determining if they have any value to your overall message.