No matter what kind of business you’re in, marketing will be one of your top priorities. Why? Because even the best business can’t succeed if nobody knows about it.
Marketing is a broad discipline that all channels back to one place. Your website. If potential visitors land on your site but your website copywriting is lacking, they’ll click right back off again, never to return. Copywriting though? Surely pictures, products and prices are all more important?
With the average attention span hovering around 8 seconds, it’s crucial to grab a user’s attention the moment they arrive on your website. Would you like them to feel like they’ve found the right place? Wouldn’t it be great if they clicked around, read your blog and checked out your products?
Impactful and brand-driven copywriting is the best way to grab your visitor’s attention and hold it. By honing your branding and creating an online space visitors enjoy being in, you can generate loyalty that other businesses crave. Copywriting is the voice your visitors hear when they arrive and what they’ll stick around to listen to.
Keep reading to find out how to make your copywriting connect with your visitors and turn them into loyal customers.
What Is Copywriting Anyway?
Okay, you know great copywriting is vital but what do we mean when we talk about copywriting?
There’s isn’t a black and white answer to this question as every marketer has their own definition. For some people, copywriting is text geared for selling. For others, copywriting is an umbrella term for all business writing.
For the purposes of ease, we use the term ‘copywriting’ to mean business writing that is created to pitch your brand, sell an idea or promote your products and services. High-quality, valuable and engaging — copywriting helps you engage with your audiences and create loyal advocates.
The Importance of Outstanding Website Copywriting
Copywriting is one of the most important and overlooked parts of marketing. There’s a simple reason for this.
The best copywriting is often invisible.
When copywriting is on point, it leads the reader through a series of actions. These actions might be viewing products, contacting the business or reading an article on your website. As the copywriting has to lead the visitor smoothly from action to action, the user is barely aware they’re spending so much time on the website.
If the website was the same but the copywriting was bland and confusing, that same user would’ve clicked off within seconds of arriving.
Attention
Great copywriting captures a reader’s attention and makes them want to know more. It causes them to scroll further down the page or to take an action like click a button. Each piece of copywriting the visitor comes into contact with must do the same thing; capture attention and make them want to stay.
In a world where thousands of websites, notifications and messages are competing for our attention, having copy that works is more important than ever.
Trust
Trust is a difficult thing to gain but it’s one of the most important factors for 2021 and beyond. Poorly constructed sentences, typos and incorrect capitalisations all arouse suspicions.
Visitors to your business’ website will always be searching for quality. Tiny mistakes in your copywriting could put a visitor off and make them feel as though your business can’t be trusted.
Visibility and SEO
For your website to appear in search engine results, the search engines will need to know what your business is all about. The easiest way they do this is by automatically trawling your website for keywords. If your copywriting hardly mentions the keywords you want to rank for, search engines won’t know to display you in results.
This is SEO, the area of copywriting many businesses need the most help in. Copywriting needs to appeal to your audience as well as make it clear to search engines what your website is about and how it’s relevant. SEO copywriting can be tricky but, if done properly, can transform your website traffic as you work your way up the rankings. As the first page of Google gets the majority of traffic, that’s where you want to be.
Copywriting Is a Key Part of Your Brand
When you think about branding, you might first consider your logo, your colour scheme and the font you’ll use for your business name. Sure, these things are eye-catching and important, but branding isn’t just a visual exercise.
Copywriting is a core part of your branding as it’s the primary way you’ll be communicating with your audience. Just as you can recognise your friends and family by their voices, you’ll want your audience to recognise your business from its copywriting.
Voice
Imagine if Coca Cola started making adverts that sounded more like an accountancy firm? Or if a funeral director used colloquialisms and street slang? It’d be confusing and off-putting, right?
Your brand’s voice is how you speak to your audience, the words you use and the tone in which you speak. Your brand might start its newsletters with, ‘Hi!’ or ‘What’s Up?’ or ‘Dear…’, for instance. Your brand voice is as unique to your business as your way of speaking is unique to you personally.
Copywriting is the medium by which your brand’s voice is heard. From blog posts and social media to email newsletters and your homepage, this voice should represent your business and its personality.
Consistency
Copywriting consistency is vital if you want to develop your brand into a recognisable and trustworthy entity. Your visitors will be confused and distrustful if your copywriting style and tone change from webpage to webpage.
If your copywriting is cool, modern and colloquial, that voice needs to carry throughout all of your written communications. It helps to keep this voice consistent for internal communications too, as this helps your staff embody the brand’s voice.
Copywriting Tips
Copywriting is difficult to get right but when it works, it can overhaul your business and bring you more success than you ever hoped for. Copywriting allows your brand to connect with your audience on a real, human level. There are a few ways that you can work to achieve this faster and more easily.
1. Talk in Your Audience’s Language
When developing your brand voice, you need to take several things into consideration. You’ll need to work out what your brand stands for, what impression you want to give and who your audience is. Many businesses forget to take their audience into consideration when developing their copywriting.
Your audience is vital because you’ll need to moderate your copywriting for them. Are they young and love slang and pop references? Are they conservative and value respectful, formal and polite language? These are crucial considerations.
2. Offer Real Value
Every piece of copywriting you produce needs to offer real value. This is especially true of blog and social posts. There are so many businesses competing for your audience’s attention that by creating content of real value, you’ll be showing that you respect your audience’s time.
3. Make Your Copywriting Addictive
If your visitors are reading your blog posts and webpages, you’ve captured their attention. Now you must hold onto it. By creating in-depth blog posts that relate to further reading and products on your site, you can maximise the user’s experience and keep them interested.
Only by providing genuine value in a voice that speaks directly to your visitor, can you truly make your copywriting addictive.
Copywriting Trends to Watch
Copywriting best practices change as the audience’s preferences and technology change. While high-quality, original copywriting will always be favourable, there are a few trends to watch.
Conversational Copywriting
Influencers like vloggers and bloggers have changed the face of copywriting for all business. Fans flocked to them because they’re relatable, chatty and fun. Humans buy from humans so when your copywriting reads more like a conversation, it’s instantly more relatable and attractive to your readers.
How do you create conversational copywriting? Think about how you’d talk to a single customer, sat across from you. That’s the way you need your copywriting to read. As if it’s just you and them having a coffee.
Unique Email Newsletters
Email marketing is bigger than ever but most of us are bored of receiving dull newsletters. The emphasis has shifted now from quantity to quality. Successful email newsletters are increasingly becoming very conversational, filled with visuals and GIFS, and less sales-based.
Voice Search-Friendly Keywords
Voice search is growing exponentially and we speak very differently to how we type. We tend to be more concise when we type and SEO keywords have traditionally been driven by typed searches. Now voice search is growing, long-tail keywords will come into their own.
Focusing SEO copywriting around voice search is one of the more proactive things you can do for your copywriting this year and for the future.
Transform Your Website Copywriting and See Strong Results
By improving your website copywriting, you’ll make a giant leap towards better audience retention and building loyalty. Copywriting that makes your audience smile, nod their head and take action across their website, is the most powerful asset a business can have.
Copywriting, and everything that falls within it, continues to be where marketers are placing the majority of their efforts in 2021 and onwards in their strategies. Audiences crave high-quality communication that feels genuine, conversational and helpful. By ensuring your copywriting hits the mark every time, you can watch your traffic soar and your audience come back again and again.
If you need help getting your copywriting up to standard, get in touch with us. We offer a full range of copywriting services so when a visitor lands on your site, they won’t want to leave.
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