Marketing

You may have the gift of the gab in person but when it comes to promoting your business on the internet you can’t simply rely on your dashing good looks and suave charm to make a sale. Writing online marketing copy is both an art and a science, requiring a website’s content to explain, reason, persuade and direct your readers to take the action you want, be that signing up to a webinar, buying your new iPhone app., clicking ‘like’ on Facebook or booking a consultation with you and your company.

Be Careful With Your Copy

When your readers come to your website they need treating with care and respect. Would you trust a company who cannot even be bothered to check that their page titles are spelt* correctly, or that has product descriptions so convoluted that you’ve forgotten why you started reading in the first place? I wouldn’t, and I bet you’re also turned off by such a lack of professionalism.

* It is also important to check your audience; had I been hired to write this article by an American client there would be a whole raft of altered spellings.

Your Product’s Great, So Why Doesn’t Anyone Care?

You have your strengths, sure. Maybe you invented something wonderful and want to tell the world about it. Perhaps you really know how to turn a golfing amateur into a hotshot in just ten easy lessons. You might even be launching a new store selling the best vegan and gluten-free cupcakes in town, but can you get anyone interested if you’ve misspelt ‘spelt’ or teed off your readers by forgetting to iron out the wrinkles in your copy?

What Can A Copy Writer Do For You?

Hiring a freelance writer is an investment that can pay off for years to come. Working with an experienced marketing copy writer means that you can create short, punchy prose to use across a variety of channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest. More extended copy can be created for email marketing campaigns, squeeze pages and sales letters, each targeted to a specific audience to let them know that your product or service meets their needs.

Practical Steps for Producing Great Marketing Copy

You may have something great to sell but if you just list its properties and haphazardly throw in a customer testimonial here and there you can easily undo all your good work and lose readers, clients and customers. When producing marketing copy pay heed to these five key tenets of creating great online content to get sign-ups and conversions on your site:

1) Start bold, but not too bold – Your headline needs to sum up the ethos of your company, your passion and enthusiasm for what you’re marketing and let your readers know what it’s all about. Can you do that in just a sentence, or even in just two or three words? Copy writers can. It’s important to be brazen but not to oversell. The line between the two is fine, which is why a good copy writer works with a business to understand the maximum benefit of the product or service and to squeeze every last morsel of goodness into your headline.

2) Stay interesting – Did you promise the world in your headline only to immediately jump into boring salesy drivel? Momentum is vital in any marketing copy, be that fifteen words long, a hundred words or a thousand words leading to your call to action. No word is superfluous in perfectly written marketing copy and your readers should never feel like turning away. Identify with your reader, let them know that the reason you’re offering your service is because you had the same problem they had. Next, let slip that you’re now in a position to help them overcome the situation the same way you did.

3) Get detailed – Hints and vague promises are fine for snake oil salesmen but to really keep a reader interested you need to offer them something concrete and alluring. How are you going to solve their golfing problems? How can you cure their skin issue when no one else has succeeded? Why is your red velvet cupcake worthy of their hard-earned cash? Details of your product’s benefits do not have to be dry and should be directly linked with the problem they help your customer overcome. Then help them see the added advantages of their purchase that they hadn’t even considered. Everyone likes to have their expectations exceeded so really bring it home by pushing some emotional buttons and avoiding lacklustre logic which, while accurate, leaves them unengaged.

4) Direct your readers – Great marketing copy always has a point, usually just one call to action that everything feeds into. This can be as straightforward as getting a reader to share the page on Facebook and can be as complex as getting them to sign up for a weekend conference that costs thousands of dollars. Whatever your desire for the outcome of your copy, work it out first and pile up the incentives to get your reader in the position where to not take that action appears foolish and regrettable. Is it a limited time offer? Are there only a few spaces left on your seminar? Is your service a once in a lifetime opportunity? If you use these as prompts then make sure they’re true because a conned customer does not a repeat customer make.

5) Stay professional – You have your beautifully concise headline, your phenomenally engrossing detailed description, a call to action that is impossible to resist and then… you sign off with a ‘thanks for reading, click here’ and your customer loses all of their excitement and motivation you worked so hard to build. Your final sentence is as important as every other sentence in your marketing copy so don’t just think all the work’s been done already and you can just say thanks and drop in a ‘sign up’ button.

Maintain Marketing Momentum and Get That Sale!

Maintain the momentum of your copy all the way through and make sure to proofread and edit and edit and proofread before you even contemplate sending out that email, posting that Facebook update or tweeting about your exciting new product line. If you’ve been working flat out on a piece and can no longer see straight then take a break, come back to it the next day with fresh eyes or, better still, have a professional copy writer look over it to catch any errors before you show your clients that you just couldn’t quite be bothered to go that extra step for them.

If In Doubt… Hire a Writer

When you are confident in the marketing copy you send out into the world means your readers are likely to have confidence in you and your product. If you’re at all worried that you’re missing out on sales because of typos, grammatical errors or simply bad copy then hire a freelance copy writer and see how you suddenly have time to pour your energies into the things you love and at which you are amazing.

Whatever your product, whichever demographic you’re going for, a great copy writer can make the difference between no one knowing about it and everyone talking about it. I’d love to help you share your brilliance with the world so get in touch, tell me your story and let’s hammer out some copy you’ll be proud to send out to your readership!