Magical Power Words - True or Tale?
Secret Psychological Toolkit
So called power words are words that naturally arouse our interest. These persuasive, powerful pieces of typography or spoken word are said to effectively trigger a positive or negative psychological or emotional response when they are being heard or read.
This is not a novel topic not a quite secret either. Power words have been called emotion words, trigger words, impactful words, persuasive words, and the list just goes on…
But what are they? Where does their magic lie? How I can start to use them?
Emotional Highlighter
The use of power words helps you to convey your message to your audience with greater clarity and precision. Think of it as a invisible highligter that you utilize to bring readers attention to the focal points you have already designed out.
The technique of power words is used every day by successful executives, journalists, politicians, sales men, and every communicatior that knows how to deliver the matter in pin-point accuracy, and channel the listener to favorable direction.
Why Should I Use Them?
The utilization of power words in your communication has value even if you don’t happen to fall into any of the categories in the previous paragraphs. We all have to sell us every day think of it or no.
And this is not for manipulating everyone to choose your way, it is more of expressing yourself in a way that others have easy to understand your point, and this way you’ll find your way may be quite often chosen.
Composing job resume is a great place to shine with powerwords. Highlight the interesting parts to show what you have already accomplished and what areas are you specialties. After that you can reuse the same power words or variations of the theme in your job interview for desirable result.
Use with Imagination
These words can be used to inflict emotions of scaredness, encourament, arousement, anger, greed, curiosity or safety. Due to this fact copywriters on areas of old-fashioned printed ads, televions ads, or website product landing pages use these techniques to compel their audiences to take action, and eventyally purchase their product. However, power words can be utlitilized in every form of communication e.g. creating persuasive speeches.
As you become more familiar with the power terminology you’ll soon find yourself incorporating this kind of vocabuly in your tweets, emails, Instagram posts and all around the social media to influence people your way.
Seven Unique Categories
Some sources categorize power words to seven subcategories based on the effects they are supposed to yield. These are:
| Power Word Category | Description | Example Words |
|---|---|---|
| Anger | If you are looking to agitate your readers for some reason, perhaps against the subjects your product will remove, using anger power words can throw fuel to the flames. | abuse, arrogant, cheat, evil, exploit, weak, SCAM, violate |
| Encouragement | When you readers (customers) are bored and not particularly interested in taking the next step towards your product, it may be helfull to cheer them up a bit with encouraging power words. | amazing, empower, excellent, miracle, perfect, tough, unique, WIN |
| Fear | This is a wildly used emotion in marketing. You may present the situation so, that your product is a solution by bringing safety to the fear you just stimulated. | bomb, danger, fail, hoax, painful, risky, WARNING |
| Forbidden | When something is forbidden from us, it has tendency to create curiosity for that subject. Most widely used power word in this category is probably “secret”. Secret works very well on headlines raising a glimbse of mystery to the reader’s mind. | backdoor, censored, SECRET, classified, illegal, private, unspoken |
| Greed | When we are talking about greed, money is an inevitable matter to leave out. You can catalyze feelings of greed and e.g. have to customers to buy your product with special discount to save more money. | best, big, cash, FREE, exclusive, extra, limited, money, prize, profit, value |
| Lust | Appealing to the most primitive senses of human mind sexuality is oftern incorporated in persuasive settings in many even subtle ways. Lust power words stimulate sub-consious interest towards the topic. | compelling, desire, exotic, lovely, naked, passionate, SEX, wild |
| Safety | When selling it is important to make the customer feel familiar with you and the product. Building confidence to delivery and end result by utilizating safety power words is a rather minor aspect but sometimes it can heal some more major bruises on your brand or reputation. | authentic, automatic, certified, don’t worry, GUARANTEED, official, professional, research |
Placement of Power Words
Power words are universal tool and in the end only your imagination is the limit that sets where or where not there techniques can be used. Here is a list of most common places you’ll find them being used.
| Placement | Description |
|---|---|
| Headlines | One of the most important parts of your marketing copy |
| Subheads | Keep the reader’s interest active with persuasive sub headings |
| Email subjects | You can tremendously increase the reading ratio of your marketing emails |
| Landing pages | Start from the titles and gradually guide your visitor through the material by invoking emotions. |
| Product names | You can even use power words in your product’s name. Pay special attention to pick it up correctly. |
| Names of all sorts | Whether it is your new book or a video on Youtube, ingnite the visitors interest by one or two accurately selected power words from right categories. |
| Your CV | You can use power words to highlight the critical parts on your CV and thus give the achievements more weight. |
Using Power Words On Your CTA
If we leave out the titles and sub-titles, the call to action (CTA) in the end of your presentation is the most crucial place you absolutely must accomplish to generate the motivation and desire for the customer to take the final step.
However, you are not alone, power words are here to help you to pinpoint the crucial command and make sure it sticks.
CTA commonly has even fewer words than the headline. You must really squeeze in the pure gold in terms of inescapable power words infused punch line. It may be easier said than done, but when it works you will notice it by the success it creates.
Here are some sample CTAs:
- Buy Cookie Monster Special Cookie Pack Now!
- Purchase Today, Full Money Back Quarantee
- New Strawberry Gum – Satisfaction guaranteed
- These Features Are As Special As It Gets, Watch Deadpool
Links to Power Word Lists
Here are some links to power word lists from various different perspectives.
- optinmonster.com - 700+ Power Words That Will Boost Your Conversions
- themuse.com - 185 Powerful Action Verbs That Will Make Your Resume Awesome
- Call Centre Helper - The Best Power Words and Phrases to Use in Customer Service
Just search the Web with your preferred search tool (btw. mine is StartPage) and you will find specific lists for any area you are working with. You surely won’t run short of special words, I promise you!
Summing It Up
Using power words is not a tool for a manipulative grease ball trying to enforce their ideas to other’s mind. Instead, it a mechanism, that helps you to pinpoint essential information in the correct light, and help your readers or listeners to follow trough your entiry story inspired, and make a impact that will last.
This article scratched the surface of example words from various categories. The great thing is that Web is full of sites listing power words and demonstrating their example use.
Use them with style and don’t spam them. Duo to vast selections some power words may become overused during some time span. Always try to be creative and sometimes try to cope without using a single special word.
I hope this article was inspiring and instructive for you. If you had not clear idea about power words before, now you should be on your way to reach new heights in your communcation both live, paper, and online. Cheers!
