Pain agitate is one of the most effective copywriting formulas you can use. It’s been around for decades for one simple reason: It works, and it’s damn excellent at that.
You can use the PAS formula by first addressing the reader’s pain point. Then, agitate it. Talk about the symptoms, feelings, and experiences caused by the initial issue. Finally, offer your product or service as a solution.
You have worked hard to create a fantastic product. It’s so good that you hope it sells itself. But, sadly, it doesn’t. So it’s up to you to connect with your audience. So you put on your marketing cap.
It’s time to write emails, sales pages, blog articles, Facebook ads, heck – anything and reach your target market. Also, it would be best if you had good marketing collateral.
But one problem persists: no one bothers reading it.
Is your Facebook advert relevance score sitting around 5 or 6? You get less than 30% open rates on your emails, and the time-on-page report in Google Analytics shows that people are ditching your sales page in less than 8 seconds!
What are you doing wrong?! You are sinking your money into driving traffic to your sales-oriented webpages, and still, they all bounce, bounce, bounce away.
It sounds impossible to break the noise and reach your audience. And it’s very frustrating because you know your product very well! But, if people gave you just one chance, they did quickly see that it’s worth every cent and can have a significant influence on their lives.
It seems other businesses have no trouble finding customers! Why not you? What is the big conspiracy? Gear up because today, you will learn something that can change your marketing game forever.
One of our copywriting formulas is PAS: Pain, Agitate, Solve. Or problem, Agitate, solution. It is a favorite because it works for all types of marketing, from landing pages to flyers.
Commonly known by the abbreviation PAS, pain-agitate-solution or problem-agitation-solve is a “go-to” formula widely used in copywriting cycles.
Ultimately, the primary goal of UX or consumer research is to identify the problems that consumers are experiencing to provide viable solutions. If you already have an answer, it makes perfect sense to market it by showing that you understand a problem and how annoying it is before offering a final way to solve it.
All of these factors contribute to making the Pain-Agitate-Solution an effective copywriting formula.
Pain or Problem
If readers don’t stick around to read your content, it’s because they haven’t immediately recognized a reason to wait. Instead, they need to see the value directly.
If you can describe a problem your customers have early, you will stop them dead in their tracks. You do not need to overload readers with more information than necessary yet.
You need to approach their problems.
But there’s a catch: You have to hit the nail on the head.
You can’t predict what you think your target audience is struggling with. So you need to know this with absolute certainty.
You should be able to describe their problem better than them.
That’s why the first step in product development is to talk to your target audience and understand what they’re struggling with. How does your audience describe their issues? What words do they use to describe their challenges? The more research you can do, the better.
Agitate
What started as a pain or a minor problem can begin to bother when time or cost becomes a factor. It’s where a copywriter needs to use creative emotions to show just how much you identify with the feelings that your potential consumer is experiencing.
The longer the problem remains unresolved, the more frustrating feelings grow. Build confidence in your reader that you understand how agitating the experience is becoming. Don’t overdo it, though – the last thing you need to do is turn your reader off completely by touching their emotions too profoundly!
Solve
This is the last piece of the puzzle.
But instead of opening your ad/email/sales page/ (or whatever medium you use to present your product), you should first tell your reader what problem you want to solve. And what awful feelings you can make disappear.
Once it’s established, you can submit a solution to that problem (a.k.a. your product).
But you can’t ignore all the work it took to set up your readers for this part. As you now introduce the features/benefits of your product, you can directly address the problems your product solves. After all, your readers are on the same page as you (literally).
How to Create a Blog Post that Your Audience Will Actually Read And Probably Share
- Picture your audience as someone who fits your demographic.
- Write as though you’re talking individually to that person, but always imagine your blog has an audience of millions.
- Write as though you are talking to that person individually.
- Imagine your blog already has millions of visitors.
- See the reader as ‘you and yourself as ‘I.’
- Use sensory style as much as possible (sight, touch, sound, taste, smell)
- Be specific in your headline – then be even more specific in its promise
- Use the Pain, agitate, solve formula to introduce your piece (not every time).
- Write as you talk… if you could edit what you say.
- Use Specific Subheads.
- Limit your paragraphs to a maximum of 3 lines.
- Don’t be afraid of 1 or 2-line paragraphs.
- Delete Your First Paragraph.
- Encourage the reader by sharing your thoughts in a comment.
- Make a Coffee and Read It Aloud.
- Make Sure the piece fulfills your headline promise.
- Delete or edit any line that you have to read twice to understand.
- Delete or edit any words you wouldn’t usually say in real life.
The presentation of the ‘solution’ part will usually be very detailed. Details ultimately add credibility. You will also need a call to action or multiple calls to action if you write a long landing page.
But the PAS (Pain, Agitate, Solve) formula gives you a great way to structure your copywriting so that your power of persuasion is at the top of their game.
Do you have a favorite formula? What about other procedures? Oh yes. There are a ton of copywriting formulas. If you want to know them, you can contact us. Our copywriting experts are here to help you for free. Call now!