Entries Tagged 'copywriting tips' ↓

There appears to be a trend at the moment for landing pages that are “funny”.

I’ve used inverted commas there because they are funny only in the eyes of the writer.

The humour is being used to try and get you to sign up for something or buy a product. Is that really the best way to go about it?

In my view, no.

When someone lands on your web page it’s because they’ve been searching the internet for a solution to solve a problem they’re facing.

The reason why they clicked your link was because your META description persuaded them that the content of your page would give them the answer they were looking for.

The last thing  they want to see is a lame pun trying to extract money or their contact details from them.

All they want is results.

Your product or service should be able to stand on its own two feet without the need for shameless gags.

So what will get your visitors buying?

Here are 4 things that will grab their attention.

1. Unite against the bad guy

Emotive language is a very powerful tool. Use it to show how your product or service will get rid of common niggles such as boring meetings, late paying clients, poorly performing websites etc.

2. Belong together

We like to be part of a gang; no one wants to be the outsider.

Showing you reader they are “one of the 500 smart people…” will make them feel special and part of an elite group; it gives them a sense of belonging.

3. Quick fix

If your product is “…the quickest way to…” they’ll want it. People want instant fixes, they don’t want to wait around. If you can convince them you’ll help them achieve their goals quickly, they’ll be all over you like a rash.

4. Story time

Stories are great sales tools. They are part of our heritage and as such, people are predisposed to listening to them. Weave a story around your products and services, highlighting the benefits they bring and you’ll draw your audience in.

Each of these methods will help push people towards a buying decision. The best way to find out which one(s) work for you is to test them. Once you hit the right recipe your landing pages will work like a dream.

Stories are powerful.

They help you communicate emotions, concepts and the benefits in a depth that traditional sales writing can never achieve.

I could write for pages now desiccating why stories are so powerful, but I think the best way to show you their power is by showing you an example from one of the masters of storytelling.

John Lewis never fail to hit the spot. Every Christmas the marketing world is on their edge of its seat waiting for the retail giant’s latest advert. Their 2014 effort didn’t disappoint. I’m sure you were sat there with a tear in your eye as you watched the little boy and his penguin:

Why are stories so powerful?

Their power comes from the fact that we’ve grown up with them.

We are predisposed to listen to them, so they are a great way to get your personal brand out there.

If you’re not sure where to start, how about at the beginning?

Think about how you started in business. What’s your story?

This is mine:

After leaving school with a fist full of O and A levels, I didn’t have the belief in myself to go to University so I joined a high street bank on their Management Development Programme. I was there for 7 years before leaving to start a family.

Two children later I began to feel as though I needed more from life than just changing nappies and doing pre-school runs, but I still wanted to be a full time mum. Finally, after a lot of searching I found a home-based job for a charity that I could do during term time. For a couple of years it was great, but part of me still felt unfulfilled. The fact that I’d passed up university nagged me and, at the age of 31, I embarked on a 6 year BA(Hons) degree course in English Language and Literature with the Open University.

After a couple of years trying to study, work and care for my family I realised I couldn’t do it all so I gave up my job. I loved the study (although it was incredibly tough) and began to feel as though I was finally achieving something for myself. Then, one evening we went to a friend’s dinner party. I was sat next to a chap who turned to me and asked what I did. When I told him I was a full time mum and studying for a degree, he looked at me and said, “Oh, you don’t work?” and then turned to talk to the person the other side of him.

It was at that point that I vowed I would do something with my degree when I completed it. A couple of years later I graduated with First Class Honours. Still at a loss as to what I wanted to do, my husband suggested I start something up on my own. It wasn’t something I’d contemplated before, but when a local businessman asked me to do some writing for a web project he was working on, I realised that was what I wanted to do. I set up my first website, taught myself internet marketing and began Briar Copywriting.

That was 7 years ago and I haven’t looked back.

Marketing stories

Stories in your marketing great a buzz. They go further than just showing benefits and adding a call to action; a story helps you make a real connection with your customers, generating awareness of your product or service in a context that they can relate to.

An article in The Guardian looks at the scientific side of story telling. Jennifer Aaker (a marketing professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business) got her students to give a 1-minute pitch. Only 1 in 10 used a story with the others sticking to a more traditional approach with facts and figures. Afterwards, they were asked to write down what they remembered from the pitches:

• 5% cited a statistic
• 63% remembered the story

“Research shows our brains are not hard-wired to understand logic or retain facts for very long. Our brains are wired to understand and retain stories,” Aaker says. “A story is a journey that moves the listener, and when the listener goes on that journey they feel different and the result is persuasion and sometimes action.”

How to use story telling

Here are 5 tips to help you incorporate story telling into your marketing:

1. Understand your audience – Ask them why they bought from you? What made them look for a solution? How they found your brand? What was their experience of working with you like?
2. What are their emotional drivers? – Find out what they really care about
3. Be authentic – Use real life stories from employees, customers and people from your industry
4. Credibility – Data (facts and figures) combined with stories is very powerful
5. User-generated content – A great way to explore different perspectives. Run a competition, create a hashtag or interview someone

When you come to create your next marketing piece try story telling and see what difference it makes.

Author – Sally Ormond, Briar Copywriting Ltd

Do you write your own marketing materials?

How is that going for you?

Is your website converting visitors?

Are your brochures being read or are they used as coffee mats?

Do your emails hit the right spot or are they deleted as soon as they arrive?

Thought so.

Want to know why?

It’s because you have too much knowledge about your business.

Too much knowledge is bad

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking – how can too much knowledge be a bad thing?

The simple answer is because you start to make assumptions.

Your writing takes on a level that your customers don’t understand. You’re writing as though they have the same inside knowledge you do.

Look at it this way, if you have kids you’ve probably been asked for help with their homework. Because you’re older and more educated, you immediately launch into an explanation that’s several layers above them, telling them stuff they haven’t even learnt yet. And when they don’t get it, you start to get frustrated because the answer is obvious to you.

The same thing happens when writing your marketing materials.

Instead of starting at the beginning and building on knowledge, you write in a convoluted high-brow fashion that confuses your reader.

Overcoming the knowledge block

Once you know stuff it’s really difficult to ignore it. It feels as though you’re dumbing it down, but you’re not.

That’s why it’s often easier to outsource your writing.

When I work with clients, during the initial briefing session I always ask them to treat me like a customer. They mustn’t assume I have any knowledge of their industry, so they have to brief me without using any jargon, acronyms or technical terms that I wouldn’t understand.

If any sneak in I just stop them and ask them to explain and keep asking until I completely understand what they’re telling me.

It can get frustrating, but rather that than them putting out marketing materials that their customers can’t understand.

If you don’t have the budget for a copywriter, try out these tips:

1. Write down what you want to say
2. Review it to make sure it is aimed at your customer and not about you and your company, highlighting the benefits
3. Review it again and simplify the language and remove any jargon
4. Get someone not connected with your business to read it to see if they understand what you’re saying and whether it would make them buy/get in touch etc.
5. If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board and start again
6. Keep going until you write something that’s simple, clear, engaging and compelling

I did’t say it would be easy.

Writing effective copy is hard. It takes a lot of though, a lot of time and a lot of determination, but when done well it will bring in more sales, traffic, enquiries and brand loyalty.

Author – Sally Ormond, Briar Copywriting Ltd

Every piece of marketing you write will be aimed at someone.

There are times when that will be one specific person and others when it will be for a large audience.

If you’re writing to one specific person (a rarity, but it can happen), you immediately know their likes and dislikes so it creating persuasive copy should be fairly straightforward.

But happens when you’re writing for a wide audience that could be made up from those who are highly educated, highflying executives, busy mums, or just normal everyday people?

How can you possibly write to a diverse audience like that?

OK, let’s go back a step.

What are you selling?

Burglar alarms.

OK. Think about how your product benefits them.

They don’t seem quite so diverse now, do they?

They all want to keep their families and possessions safe.

None of them want to feel the agony of the loss of sentimental or valuable items.

None of them want to experience the violation of having someone break into their home.

Now you have identified the pain points you have something to work with.

So what language should you use?

My view is, regardless of the level of someone’s education, they are still a person who experiences real emotions.

That means one thing – simple language.

I don’t care how many degrees they have or whether or not they passed their 11+, by keeping your language simple and to the point, your persuasiveness will be heightened.

Talk to them (yes, that means using a conversational tone) about their problems and fears and tell them you have the answer that will help them sleep soundly at night, or be able to enjoy their holiday without worrying about whether everything is hunky-dory at home.

Even if you’re addressing an audience of 1000s, each of them are listening to only one person – you.

As far as they’re concerned your writing is aimed directly at them.

So, for every piece of writing create a persona for your ideal reader. Think about who they are, what they do, what keeps them awake at night, that sort of thing. Then convince them yours is the company that’s going to make everything better.

Author – Sally Ormond, Briar Copywriting Ltd

The tone of voice you use across your marketing will dictate how your customers view you.

Too stiff and formal and you’ll come across aloof and unfriendly; too casual and street and you’ll be seen as a bit flaky, a company that can’t be taken seriously.

That’s why it’s important to work out who you are from the outset.

Factors that will affect your tone of voice

Before I get into that, there’s something you must remember.

It doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, or whom you do it for, never ever use jargon or industry speak in your writing.

There’s a tendency for many businesses to create random sentences formulated from impressive sounding words because they want to appear aspirational or intelligent. Well, your readers aren’t stupid. After reading your lofty prose they’ll realise it has no meaning or substance and is just there for fluff because you couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Right, back to those factors.

For starters you must know:

• Who you are and what you stand for
• Who your customers are
• What you’re selling
• Why they would buy from you
• The benefits you offer them

You can’t develop a tone of voice without that information because if you don’t know who you are as a company how will you know the personality you want to convey? If you don’t know what you’re selling or whom you’re selling to you won’t know the language you’ll need to sell it. And if you don’t know what your product is, or the benefits it offers, you’ll just be wasting your time creating content that’s meaningless.

Your tone of voice

If you’re a B2B business selling professional services of some sort or another, your language will be more formal than if you sold bespoke surfboards.

For starters, your audiences will be poles apart, but that doesn’t mean as a B2B business you have to be starchy and corporate just because you’re not selling a cool product.

On the contrary, even though you’re pitching to businesses, it’s real people that will be doing the buying. Whenever real people are involved (and that would be in every sales scenario) their buying decision will be mainly emotionally driven.

That means your content must evoke an emotional response. If your product or service saves them time that means they get to spend more time with their friends and family. If it saves money it means their business will run leaner, generating more profit that ultimately, means more earning potential.

See what I mean?

Getting back to the actual language, in the surfboard scenario it would be perfectly reasonable to see the odd “dude” in the copy. Try that as a B2B and you’ll be laughed at, but that doesn’t mean your language has to be staid and boring.

Remember, a real person will read your writing. It doesn’t matter how educated they are, it’s important to keep your language simple, unambiguous and conversational.

Why conversational?

Because that drives engagement, has personality and is better received than formal writing.

Many people shy away from writing with personality (i.e. conversationally) because goes against everything they’ve ever learned. That’s a real shame because it works.

Look at this post. I’ve written it as though you were sat in front of me and we were talking about tone of voice. By the way, that’s a great tip for nailing conversational writing – imagine you’re sat opposite a customer and talk to them about your product, writing as you do so. You’ll be amazed at how engaging your writing becomes.

Summary

What’s the moral of this blog post?

• It doesn’t matter who you are or whom you’re trying to sell to, your writing must have personality if you want it to work
• Use language that’s appropriate to your market
• Stay away from jargon and industry speak
• Keep your vocabulary simple
• Remember you are writing for a real person
• Write conversationally to boost engagement
• You can only achieve the right tone of voice if you know who you are, what you’re selling, who your customers are the benefits your product or service offer

Author – Sally Ormond, Briar Copywriting Ltd