What It Means to Be Persuasive

It means making someone do something, believe something, or view something in a certain way. Often, a persuasive piece of text or any kind of content caters to the needs and desires of the audience and offers them a solution that “exceeds” expectations.

I put exceeds in quotes because at certain moments the perception is different from reality. Brands are great at convincing people their product is better than their others just by adding bells and whistles and setting off fireworks.

Consequently, to be a persuasive writer, you need to do just that.

In this chapter, let’s understand persuasiveness in written communication, identify the fundamental ingredient that makes a message influential, and go through a few examples you may have encountered in your life.

Persuasiveness in written communication

As mentioned in the first line, persuading someone means making them do or believe something. Let’s dive into both aspects.

1. Making someone do something

The first example that comes to mind is reading a blog post or an ad message and purchasing the promoted product or service. This is unsurprising because it is quite explicit and the corresponding experiences are too memorable.

There are also quite a lot of interesting ones that may have eluded you despite their prevalence in our daily lives:

• Consuming social media content

• Playing mobile games

• Eating junk food

• Cleaning our house and surroundings

• Studying and working hard

I agree that all of the above examples of persuading someone to do something can be chalked up to free will, but that’s the beauty of it.

Social media algorithms don’t give us content that is necessarily useful. They serve cheap dopamine hits via trashy content that ruins your brain. Similarly, personal coaches can inspire people to push further by helping them overcome mental obstacles.

Since they are implicit methods of persuasion, they are less visible. Furthermore, they are more effective because the doer is gaslit into believing it was their idea. A great example of this is killing rats in your house. Mix the poison with the bait, the rat will do the rest.

When we believe that it was our decision to pursue that path, the conviction to follow through strengthens. 

Returning to the social media addiction example, these companies are making you addicted to softcore pornography in a sneaky, subconscious way. We tend to think that it is our desires that take us in that direction. While that may be true to some degree, there is no doubt that social media has played a central role in rewiring our brains for the worse.

This takes us to the next part of the definition.

2. Making someone believe something

If someone believes that a particular action or practice is better for them, they will do it. 

How powerful is it?

Well, just look at religious fanatics. These folks murder civilians in the daylight, loot their homes, and rape their corpses in the name of a God they cannot see or are allowed to imagine for a Heaven that will be after their death.

All you have to do is sell it convincingly. The tactic that religious leaders adopt is shunning others outright and claiming ideological supremacy. This also applies to political ideologies such as communism and socialism.

The core factor driving this phenomenon is the promise of a paradise. In the case of religion, is a spiritual paradise, often called heaven, that you will go to after death and experience pleasure and comfort beyond your wildest dreams. 

For political ideologies, it is an egalitarian utopia that will be achieved if everyone adopts the doctrine to the fullest.

Basically, they are selling the path to paradise, regardless of its nature. (Paradise doesn’t exist. I’d love to talk about it, but this is not the right place for that.)

However, you don’t have to go that far, especially if you have a good product or are selling a useful service. Your product doesn’t even have to be the best in your category as long as your audience believes that it is.

Anyway, now the big question is — how to persuade someone?

The fundamental ingredient for persuasion

Respect.

If you respect someone or something, you will walk the path it points toward. Whether it is a book, a motivational speaker, or even a stop sign, it can convince anyone to do anything after earning their respect.

Now, there are two ways to gain that respect. One, be a person that is worth respecting within the domain or niche. Two, pretend to be a person that is worth respecting within that domain or niche.

In the age of the internet, it has become increasingly easier to pretend to be a person who deserves respect because achievements can be faked. Of course, it used to happen in the pre-internet age and was used by religious leaders or politicians widely.

Here, too, the reward is important. If you convince someone to do something, you better make them believe it is in their best interests. In the case of politics and religion, the benefit of following the autocrat is that you and your family will be granted life.

Marketers, again, don’t need to go that far.

As long as your product does what it says on the tin, you are good to go. The goal is to convince your buyer that your product is the best. It doesn’t matter what the layman thinks. I truly believe that iPhones are crap but it doesn’t matter to Apple because I wasn’t gonna buy one anyway.

While a crucial component of being persuasive is believing in yourself and exhibiting confidence, marketers need to be realistic about the impact. If the product is overrated, the sales will plummet after the initial hype dies out.

Moreover, written communication, be it blog posts or social media captions, encourages deep thinking by default. Blatant lies will be caught instantly. This is less prevalent with well-edited videos or attractive graphics due to their emotional value.

Persuasion looks different for everyone

When a doctor tells me to take a medicine, I do it without second guessing. 

When an engineer recommends changes to an existing design, the edits are made.

A pharmacist or a mechanic can’t have that effect with their advice, regardless of how confident, experienced, or correct they are.

This is because the occupation of a doctor or engineer denotes domain knowledge and specialized expertise. Apart from professional titles and educational qualifications, other elements that affect the degree of persuasion include:

• Appearance: Well-dressed, good-looking, and extroverted people have an edge. The same thing goes for a website, a video, and an image posted on Instagram. Polished quality equates to professionalism and professionals are respected.

• Similarities: People respond well to messages in their language and accent. We also tend to like people who are similar to us in various aspects such as choice of drink and favorite movies.

• Common enemy: A wise man once said, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

• Reciprocity: If you owe someone a favor, you are more likely to say “yes” to one of their requests. Although effective, it can’t be used as a reliable marketing tactic as people will catch up on this.

• Association: You can make an extra sale if you recommend the right product at the right time. For instance, fast food restaurants increase the order value by simply asking “Would you like fries with that?”. The broader objective is to create a circumstance where the target audience is more likely to make a purchase. It reminds me of men revealing the State secrets when seduced by an undercover spy. It also reminds me of Dricus DuPlessis submitting Israel Adesanya in UFC 305.

The point is, that persuasion looks unique in every situation, which depends on the myriad of factors mentioned above. To maximize the persuasive power of your words, try to optimize as many of them as you can.

Have a clean, minimalistic website, make no grammatical errors, fix all the technical issues, and add HD images only. All of it will motivate your readers to return over and over again. It goes without saying that your content needs to be top-notch as well, otherwise you will suffer from poor retention.

Conclusion: Be welcomed first

The key ingredient that will help you influence someone’s beliefs or actions is respect. It doesn’t matter if they love or hate you, as long as there is respect and acknowledgment of your message, you can convince people.

The level at which you do it depends on multiple factors like your appearance, domain knowledge, and immediate surroundings. The goal is to optimize each of them to the best of your ability.

Many marketers and people, in general, choose to lie their way to fake authority and trick their audience into respecting them. It is not sustainable, at least for the long term, making this strategy worthless for businesses looking to make good money.

At the start of all of this, you have to be welcomed.

If your audience drops off from the get-go, then they won’t even read your full message, let alone consider your recommendation or suggestion. Hence, the primary goal of a marketer is to maintain professionalism across all platforms to make the reader at least open to new information.

This is a subset of an element that affects the level of persuasion — association. A well-maintained website or a blog article with a good hook is as critical as the rest of the content.

—

Next Chapter: How to Gain Persuasive Power Over an Audience

Previous Chapter: The Fundamentals of Persuasive Writing

Index (with Prologue): The Fundamentals of Persuasive Writing

Sometimes you need more than words to persuade