Copywriting is
one of the most fundamental marketing skills when it comes to driving lead
generation and conversions on your website.
Website copywriting
has grown in significance because of the ever growing urgency for businesses to
develop a strong online presence.
Who is a copywriter?
You are probably wondering, ‘what does a copywriter do?’
This is a nimble professional whose specialty involves
researching, learning, writing, and editing a promotional or marketing copy.
By applying these copywriting tenets, a copywriter does more
than writing. They sell your brand through creative words.
What is a marketing copy?
A marketing copy in this case doesn’t refer to ‘duplicate’
but rather to the actual text created by a copywriter that ends up in your
landing page and other promotional scripts like newsletters, blog posts, and
social media posts.
In other words, your marketing copy is what sells your
solutions to prospects out there and persuades them to buy from you.
Want to hook more prospects through a compelling sales copy?
All you need is a few copywriting
tricks to get started with captivating adverts.
Remember, copywriting
is more than just being a good writer. Additional skills are needed to give you
an edge in the creation of brand awareness.
Read on to discover more about the copywriting skills and tricks that will turn your website into a
powerhouse of traffic conversions.
·
Excellent research and interpretation skills
Who are you targeting in your promotional copy? Your
customers, of course. But how well do you know them?
You cannot persuade your customers to buy from you if you
don’t understand them. The journey to understanding your customers or target
audience has to begin from in-depth research.
This customer research will lay the groundwork for writing a
compelling sales copy. In other words, you will be writing from a place of
understanding.
Therefore, you need to develop extensive research skills to
conduct in-person interviews, qualitative surveys, and focus group discussions.
Combining that with excellent interpretation skills will be an added advantage
in grasping your customer needs.
·
An understanding of industry topical issues
Understanding you customers is great. Absolutely. But an
exceptional copywriter goes beyond that. How well do you understand your brand
message, product, or service offering?
You cannot market something you don’t understand. To avoid
creating a marketing copy blindly, broadly researching topical issues related
to your service industry is paramount. This research will reveal to you some of
the best and most relevant issues to talk about. Issues that touch directly on
your customers’ pain points.
A good place to start the research is on your competitors’ sites,
qoura, ‘people also ask section’ on
Google, as well as Wikipedia table of contents. Seek to make such preexisting
content better and more valuable to your audience.
·
Grammar and language mastery
Poor grammar, sentence structures, language, and vocabulary
can be a great plague to your copywriting efforts. They all end up hurting not
only the credibility of your copy, but also your brand.
Some customers associate your grammatical errors to a lack
of professionalism and trustworthiness even in your actual service delivery.
Strong writing therefore rides mostly on audience
perception. To avoid easily putting off your target audience, ensure you
possess a firm grounding in grammar and your primary writing language.
Master the basics of appropriate industry vocabulary and
sentence structures to communicate clearly and effectively. Your vocabulary is
what links your business to your audience. A sales copy with a great sentence
structure is easily readable as it systematically guides your readers
throughout the copy.
You can begin at Grammarly
to check the clarity of your copy.
·
Ability to communicate clearly and simply
Your sales copy should at the very least be relevant and
valuable to your target audience. To test that, ask yourself, ‘Is it clear,
concise, compelling, and credible?’ If it passes the test then you can rest
assured your audience will love it too.
Always strive to avoid as much jargon, generalizations, fluff,
and redundancy in your copy as possible.
For example, a copy that sates ‘get same day maintenance
response’ is clearer than ‘get a quick maintenance response’ because it
provides a definite service timeline.
Interpret complex concepts for your audience by showing them
how your product or service is going to transform their lives, not just the
amazing features it has. The benefits should take precedence over the features
in your copy.
Moreover, make the copy conversational enough to aid the
reader’s understanding and translation. It’s easier for them to relate with the
copy when they treat it as an everyday conversation.
·
Headline master
Your headline is the first attraction point of your sales
copy. It is also your very first chance to make a luring impression on your
reader.
The average reader spends very minimal time on your content.
If your headline is not compelling enough, chances are, they may never read the
rest of the text.
In every 10 online consumers, 8 will only read your copy’s
headline. The other 2 will proceed to read the rest of the copy. Clearly,
that’s a very poor readership fraction. It may be frustrating when you remember
how much time and effort you invested in producing the copy.
Well, the problem is that you might have forgotten to invest
equally much time, effort, and creativity in crafting your headline copy.
Therefore, it is important to keep varying and testing your
headlines for visibility and conversions. You may vary the tone or the number
of words forming the headline. You may also occasionally use headlines with
numbers, questions, or how-to guides.
·
Writing persuasively
As a website copywriter, you are writing to compel your
audience to take a certain action in favor of your brand. Therefore, your copy
may be grammatically correct, vocabulary sound, and well-structured but still
not hit the intended mark.
That tells you being persuasive is more than just writing
well. You need to present your opinion powerfully enough for the reader to
agree. This is where your word choice and customer research comes into play.
Can your copy affect the reader’s emotions to the extent of downloading and
sharing it or signing up for your newsletter?
To remain persuasive in your copywriting, always ensure your
copy is about your audience, not you. Be specific enough by addressing one pain
point at a time.
For example, a specific static tagline or headline like
72.23% is more likely to convince a reader than a generic one like 72%.
Furthermore, you can leverage customer testimonials, reviews,
and attractive offers to back your claims and persuade your audience towards a
certain direction.
·
Possess SEO foundational knowledge
While you don’t necessarily have to be an SEO specialist to
become a great copywriter, grasping basic SEO understanding is crucial in enhancing
your website copywriting skills.
As you produce your marketing copies you should optimize
them not only for readability and persuasion, but also for high rankings and
maximum visibility on search engines. Your sales copy may be a compelling one
but without getting noticed it may not reach the intended audience.
Therefore, just implementing the very elementary SEO copywriting tricks is sufficient. For
example, understanding the right keywords for your particular content niche and
updating them frequently might give you an edge in website copywriting.
Other foundational SEO tricks you may include are
incorporating keyword-infused headings, frequently asked questions, external,
and internal links in your copy. All these infusions only serve to enhance your
copy for readability by providing additional valuable information.
·
Writing flexibly
An exceptional copywriter appreciates the importance of writing
flexibility in turning readers into listeners. As a copywriter, you will be
expected to write a compelling marketing copy for wide-ranging products and
services. Therefore, knowledge of how to write in different formats and styles
is imperative.
From time to time you may interact with content for landing
pages, blog posts, social media ads, as well as email newsletters. That special
ability to trigger different emotional responses from your audience is what
defines a successful copy at the end of the day.
For example, if you are creating a sales copy for a pay-per-click
ad and fail to align it to the right emotional context or the appropriate
emotional trigger, you may never hit your target of clicks on the advert.
Therefore, understanding the copywriting nuances of
different promotional channels is paramount.
·
Ability to accept feedback
Copywriting is a
highly evolving craft. As content begins to rule the world, a prudent
copywriter should remain dynamic.
One effective way to do that is through feedback management.
Because no copywriter is an island, feedback from editors, clients, and peers
can enhance your copywriting skills a lot faster than months or even years of
training can.
Since feedback is part of the copywriter’s learning curve,
there should be no room for discouragement. Only learning, learning, learning!
Each time you create a copy subject it to multiple critiques and see how fast
you grow in the craft.
·
Brand management
A great copywriter is also a great brand ambassador. Therefore,
understanding your brand is a critical factor in producing an excellent sales
copy.
A good marketing copy is built upon a deeper understanding
of what your brand stands for, your company values, and ethos. From such a
foundation you can determine the unique style and tone of the marketing copy.
In other words, it’s your job as the copywriter to clearly
articulate the personality of the business in a way that builds rapport and
trust with your target audience.
·
Be creative
You can’t afford to grow complacent in your copywriting if
you want to get into the heads of your audience and convince them to buy from
you. Frequently producing fresh and engaging content is important for your
survival as an effective copywriter.
When you feel dull in your writing, think quickly,
critically, and creatively. Start sourcing for new inspiration. You can analyze
your competition and seek new angles, ideas, and philosophies from them.
Further, use your instincts to fit into your customers’
shoes. Imagine what they would love to hear or derive from your marketing copy
to prompt them into a desirable action.
·
Know your niche
You can become a great asset to your business when you
discover your copywriting niche. As opposed to writing generally, focusing on a
specific niche earns you more copywriting mileage. Especially in a focus area
that you have significant practical background in.
For example, if you have been a plumber all your life producing
a construction copy may not come out as naturally as a plumbing copy would. Even
though you may use third party research tools, you may still end upon
struggling to produce a masterpiece or finishing within a set deadline.
Finding your copywriting niche easily turns into your
stronghold and will always ignite your inspiration for fresh content. It is also
a great way of building rapport with your audience because they perceive you as
an established thought leader.
·
Understanding your customers’ journey
Do you understand the journey that your prospects go through
before finally deciding to buy from you?
Without such knowledge your web copy may not tick as much as
you would want. A typical
customer journey happens in stages. During each stage, the customer
expectations are different from the last. Their emotions change, their
relationship with your business evolves, and their motivations also shift.
Therefore, as an effective copywriter you must journey with
the customer every step of the way. Your copy’s language must trigger a
favorable response from them in every stage of the journey to ensure they are
constantly approaching the final purchase.
This all calls for you to understand the type of copy
required for each stage of the customer journey. That will help you tailor the
message to your readers’ intents and emotions at that particular point in time.
·
Performance analytical skills
After successfully producing an excellent sales copy, what
next? In fact, how do you even tell it’s actually excellent? How can you
measure your own website copywriting
success?
To do that, you need some basic data analytical skills. As
soon as you publish your copy online, you can begin monitoring its performance
almost right away. Effective analytical tools like Google
Analytics are free and easy to use. You can begin there.
This tool will help you gauge the overall response rate and
engagement level of your audience. More specific metrics like bounce rate,
click-through rate, conversion rate, and content share rate can tell you the
impact of your copy and also reveal to you the areas that may need continuous
improvement.
Therefore, you should never qualify your copy as successful
based on creativity alone. Credit it with success because it boosted your
revenue by 25% or because of how it augmented the performance of your email
newsletter by growing your subscribers’ list from 800 to 1200 subscribers.
·
Learn to communicate value
Instead of using friction words like sign up, book an
appointment, create account, or submit to tell your audience what they have to
do all the time, show them what they will get.
This way, each time they click on your call-to-action
prompts they will be reaching for a reward and won’t perceive the action as extra
work or an inconvenience.
For example, instead of saying ‘create an account to get a
bonus’, simply phrase it as ‘get a bonus’ to trigger the audience to claim the
bonus.
Make your web copy tick!
Website copywriting
is an essential marketing skill that largely shapes your site’s traffic pattern
and behavior. You can pick a few copywriting
tricks from this exhaustive list and implement them on your website to
witness firsthand the power of words.
However, if copywriting
is not your primary skill, you can focus on raking in more service calls while
a professional copywriter does the creative website articulation for you.
To partner with a reliable copywriter contact us today!
