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How to Massively Increase Your Marketing Effectiveness — Without Changing a Word

5 min readRoberto Dal Corso · Published 22 Jan 2026

You can dramatically improve the performance of your marketing without changing a single word of the copy. Formatting alone can determine whether your message gets read or ignored — and most businesses are completely disregarding it.

People Are Skimmers

Your prospects do not read your sales letters, emails, and landing pages carefully. They glance at the page and decide in seconds whether to engage further. They read what is big and bold, avoid large blocks of small text, and skip anything that looks dense or effort-intensive. If your marketing is not formatted for skimmers, most of your copy is going unread regardless of how good it is.

Format for Impact

Bold, underline, capitalise, and increase the size of the words and phrases that carry your key message, main benefit, and call to action. If a prospect skims only the formatted elements, they should still understand your core offer. Bullets, numbered lists, boxes, and shading all create structure that guides the skimmer's eye to your most important points.

The Three-Step Formatting Process

Copy your marketing piece into a plain document. Highlight only the words and phrases that convey your main point, benefit, and offer. Delete the rest and check whether what remains still works on its own. If it does, your formatting is correct. If the highlighted text alone makes no sense, go back and make the key messages clearer before emphasising them.

Who this is for

Is this guide relevant to your situation?

  • Business owners whose marketing copy is well-written but not producing results
  • Owners who send long emails or sales letters that rarely get fully read
  • Marketing teams who produce content with no clear visual hierarchy
  • Anyone who wants a quick, practical improvement to their existing marketing without a full rewrite
How we help with this

EMS coaching helps B2B service businesses make their commercial communications more effective — including the practical craft of writing and formatting messages that get read by busy people who are constantly skimming.

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