Persuasive Verses:
How Outreach & Marketing Copy Are Like Poetry

This title might seem just about as strange to you as “How Polar Bears are Like Toucans,” since we tend to see poetry and marketing/outreach writing as utterly different creatures living in different environments. Indeed, I never expected that studying poetry back in college would be the slightest bit useful commercially; I enrolled in poetry classes simply for the pleasure of playing with the written word. Yet, years later when I started professionally writing outreach and sales materials for nonprofits and mission-based businesses, I immediately found myself applying many of the lessons I learned in my college studies of poetry.

The 8 crucial lessons poetry teaches to outreach and copy writers:

1. Be concise
I like to define poetry as “the art of saying as much as possible in as few words as possible.” We all know that people today lead busy lives inundated with too much information, so most aren’t going to read long messages. Above and beyond that, though, if you say as much as you can in as few words as possible, each sentence is more powerful. So never say in two sentences what you can say in one, and never use ten words when you can convey the same meaning in six.

2. Cut out words that don’t add meaning
This is part of being concise, but deserves its own section as a specific technique. In poetry class, I was taught that words like the, an, and, moreover, with, though, is, has been, etc. can take up a lot of space without adding much meaning. If your powerful words are like alcohol, these words are like water – you need some to make your message palatable, but add too many, and your readers will drink it down, but barely taste a thing. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, “But it has been about one hundred years, and now it is still not true that the Negro is free yet”, instead of his real words, “But one hundred years later, still the Negro is not free.” See how the second sentence packs more punch?

3. Write each line so the reader wants to read the next one
In a novel or TV show, you end each chapter or episode in a way that makes the audience eager for the next section. In a short piece like a poem, the journey through it is condensed, so each verse, even each line, must draw the reader on to the next one. There is no room for a weak part; if readers don’t simply lose interest and stop, they will at least be left with a clear memory of the bad spot in the middle. This is even more true of copy and outreach writing, for readers knows that you are not only trying to bring them on a journey with you, but hoping to elicit an action from them in the end. People can be more skeptical when they know you want them to do something, so it is up to you to make each line so compelling that they are carried along for the ride. Don’t assume that they will read the whole piece; instead, make sure that they will want to.

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