Website copy can make or break the user experience. In the world of digital marketing, it’s pretty widely acknowledged that creating interesting, relevant and useful content for your website is essential from not only a search engine’s perspective, but also from a customer experience perspective. “Good Copy” will explain what your website is about, what you’re offering to your audience, and communicates authority, trustworthiness and quality without being boring or stale. “Good Copy” shows creative flare and personality, but is devoid of marketing fluff and sales-y jargon. “Good Copy” helps greet the visitors to your website while guiding them into achieving the purpose of their visit. “Good Copy” is an art form.
Website copy and your brand’s story
A brand story is more than the contents of your website. It’s how you present yourself to your audience in any form of communication or marketing collateral, but it goes beyond just the facts. It’s how you want your audience to feel about your business. Developing a brand story is the first step in creating “Good Copy” and so it’s the first step in creating copy that converts.
Five quick tips for writing your brand story
1. Honesty is the best policy: Of course there’s room for poetic license, but being upfront with your customers is paramount.
2. Make your mark: Injecting personality into your brand story will make for more interesting communication. One-dimensional, fact-based stories often don’t make for great reading.
3. Meet the team: Build an emotional connection with your audience by writing about your business from several perspectives. This could be a friend, an employee, or a customer.
4. Don’t be afraid to tease: “Cliff hanger” might be a bit extreme, and your brand story should have a beginning, middle and end, but a hook here and a teaser there will leave your audience wanting more.
5. Remember: it’s not about you Rather than trying to talk about you and your business, talk about what you and your business can do for your audience.
Choose a language that resonates with your audience
As difficult as it sounds, when you’re creating your copy, don’t write what you want to write. Instead, you need to write what your audience wants to read. Makes perfect sense, right? Right. Easier said than done, right? Wrong. Get to know your audience by asking them about themselves. Gather feedback using online surveys, requesting reviews and tapping up your email list. You can use social media to find out how your business (and your competitors) are being talked about and you can simply approach your staff to find out why it is they work for you. This sort of research will uncover words and phrasing you can incorporate into your copy, and it will help show what truly matters to your target audience.
No need to trust your instincts
Test your copy. It doesn’t matter how much research you put into the creation of copy, there is always a chance that when you hit “publish” it might not perform as you’d hoped. It’s obviously valuable to identify whether or not your copy’s working, but quite another to understand why it’s not working.
When testing copy for its conversion power, I ask myself two things:
What is my goal? Which bits of copy are trying to achieve it?
A goal could be something obvious like selling a product or generating a lead, but instead of thinking just about that one golden moment, think about the journey toward it:
Why is the bounce rate for this landing page so high? Why are leads from the landing page such poor quality? Why are there no leads generated from this landing page?
Now we’re starting to get to the bottom of things! At each step in that journey toward the goal, there is likely to be copy present designed to encourage that conversion:
Headlines introduce the purpose of a page, and keep visitors reading
Introductory copy gives deeper context to that page’s purpose
Calls to action and persuasive buttons invite interaction
So, if poor quality leads is the problem, then the culprit could be the introductory copy. It’s not just what the copy says, it’s what it says in relation to the headline. There’s your test right there.
If creating copy is an artform, then perfecting it is a science. Let the creative juices flow when writing your brand story, but test it to find out what really works for your target audience.
By Libby Bearman, CRO Manager at Browser Media
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