Copywriting is the practice of crafting text to inspire, inform, or persuade. It is aimed to increase sales and conversions. In simple words copywriting is writing copy that sells your services or products and convinces potential customers to take action. It’s like someone reaching all the customers at one time. Like a salesman interacting with one person at a time, a copywriter gets all of them at once through web pages, blog posts, magazine ads, billboards, etc.
However, there’s a lot of confusion when we hear about copywriting. Some people think it’s about the right to publish a book or a photo etc. It’s not copywriting but Copyright. Copywriting might be found on :
- Brochures
- Paid ads
- Website Pages
- Product Pages
- Landing Pages
You might be wondering how copywriting differs from Content Marketing?
Copywriting is done in a way to increase sales. Whereas content marketing may have different goals like informing, educating, creating band awareness, etc.
In simple words, Copywriting is more precise, direct, and clearly aimed to sell the product or service.
Now that you know what copywriting is and what a Copywriter does let’s see how you can do it yourself. Here’s a definitive guide on how to write an excellent copy that will reach your target audience and drive sales.
Step by Step guide on Copywriting
Know your Audience
You can’t write a description without knowing what your audience wants, right? Before you start writing, you should know what exactly are you writing for? Your text should be understandable and useful to readers. The best practice is to write in your target audience’s language so you can give as much information as possible.
Start by creating a buyer persona and once you have got it outlined, ask yourself the following questions :
- Who is your target audience?
- Who would you want to sell to?
- What do your existing customers want?
- What struggles might your customers face while shopping, and how can you solve them?
Once you get answers to all these questions, you’ll be ready to Copywrite
While you know your audience, it’s crucial to know their awareness level. Every target customer might not be fully aware of your product or service, or some may not even hear of it. To take the situation in your favor, you have to approach your audience according to their awareness level. There are many variations to the sales model funnel, but AIDA is the most popular copywriting model.
According to AIIDA, there are four stages:
- Awareness – This is stage one where your customer doesn’t know about your product or brand, or they don’t care much. At this stage, you should focus on conveying the benefits of your products and how they will be useful to your customer.
- Interest – Here, we come to the second stage. At this stage, your target audience is aware of your product and is interested in what you have to offer. Since your audience has knowledge about your product, you just have to give a slight push to their emotions.
- Desire – At this stage, your audience is considering your product or service and comparing it to a similar brand in the market.
- Action – This is the last stage of the funnel. Here, your customers are ready to buy your product. All you need to do is give them a call to action, and they’ll take it.
Use the right tone for copywriting
Writing a great copy is a lot more than choosing the right words. The tone you’re using, the way you’re writing have a far more impact than the words you choose. It tells your audience whether you’re serious, fun-loving, or uber professional.
You must adjust your tone according to your target audience. This makes your audience feels they are in the right place and your product or service is just right for them. If you’re facing any issue in getting the right tone, you can also use some tools for the same. For instance, Grammarly has an in-built tool that helps you adjust your writing tone according to your target audience.
Grammarly works by telling you exactly what tone you should be using for your audience. Suppose you choose “general audience,” the tool will indicate all the complex sentences you might want to remove or change in order to make your copy more understandable to the audience.
Write a persuasive Copy
When compared to other kinds of writing, copywriting is very different. It’s not just about writing well; it’s a whole lot about writing persuasively. Whether you’re a literary genius or not, your focus should be on moving the readers through the proper sequence of steps and ultimately convince them to buy your product or services.
For this, you can try the following tips :
Start simple to grab your customer’s attention –
According to data, you have very little time to grab your customer’s attention before they leave the page. To be precise, you just have 20 seconds. You can go several ways to start your copy, but the best way is to keep everything simple.
If you start with complex sentences, your audience may get confused, and the message may get diluted. Keeping it simple, short, and sweet is the most effective way. The goal is to make your audience crystal clear about your product. Don’t make them guess what you have to offer.
Slightly move to the benefits –
After hearing your value proposition, your customer starts to think about what’s in there for them? While some people prefer features over benefits but benefits are usually valued over features. Before elaborating on how your product works and how to use it, emphasize the benefits one will get after buying your product.
Explain how your product fulfills a desire or need and how your customers’ lives will be better after using your product.
Explain the features –
Now comes the time to explain all the features your product has. Your audience already knows what you’re offering and what the benefits are; now, it’s time to briefly break down the features of your product.
To explain all the features, you can write them in bullet points or craft small sections. Keep it simple but don’t forget to mention all the key aspects.
Include a strong call to action –
At this point, your audience knows everything about your product and how it will prove useful to them. All you need to do is just ask them to take the next step. In simple words, you need to include a CTA.
This might be the most complicated part of the process, but simplicity is the key here again. There’s no need to add complexity to your CTA; keep it as simple as possible.
Focus on Pain Points in your copy
We understand it could be quite compelling to write all the good things about your product and how awesome it is or how your customers are loving the experience. But here’s a thing, every customer isn’t looking for features or benefits before buying a product. Some buy things to get a solution to their problem. These problems are pain points, and your focus should be on writing more about them. For instance, an SEO company that offers services on getting more traffic to a website or any other aspect related to SEO may start their copy with – Want to drive more traffic to your website? Or Want to rank on top on SERP?
This way, you’ll indicate the problem the customer wants to solve. Copywriter Rose Crompton says there are six main issues customers face :
- Risk and Trust
- Ease and convenience
- Financial
- Productivity and time
- Communication and support
- Processes and journey
Think about the problems your customers might be facing and try to solve them through your copy.
Put the most important information on top
As you know, copywriting is structured in a different way than other forms of writing. For instance, in content writing, we give a slight introduction about the topic at the beginning and a conclusion at the end. In copywriting, one has to give the most crucial information in the beginning.
Users come to your web page to get some information or learn about your product. Unfortunately, not every user is patient enough to read the whole copy to know about something they are looking for. That’s why make all of your points strong, but start with your core message and your most important points after that.
Your customers are looking for some specific information, and if they don’t get it, they’ll move somewhere else. There’s a concept called “information scent” where you write in such a way that the user gets sure that their desired information is near. This way, the users read all of your text, knowing that their information is very near.
To retain your audience on your web page, give them certain clues that they have what they’re looking for.
Write catchy headlines
Believe it or not, headlines can make or break your perfect copy. Whether you’re writing for landing pages, Facebook posts, or advertisements, headlines convince the readers to go through your copy.
You can follow these tips to write attention-grabbing headlines:Write unique headlines –
the Internet and advertising world are full of people who copy other people’s content. You definitely want to stay out of such practices. In order to stand out from the crowd and sell your products, your headlines must be original and unique.
Use specific headlines –
Being specific is far better than being vague. As soon as your audience reads your headline, they should be aware of what you’re offering. Describe what your potential customers will get very specific.
Make proper use of each headline –
Your headlines should guide the reader about what they’ll read further—stress the benefits of reading on, rather than complex and less popular words.
Try to create a sense of urgency –
Though this step is not always applicable, it is a great way to engage the users.
You can also use numbers on your headlines –
Numbers make things more legitimate and real. Most users open a post that uses a number in its headlines.
Use Social Proof
Now that’s a big point. Incorporating social proof in your copy is like icing on the cake. This is actually one of the six principles of persuasion given by Robert Cialdini, that says, “People are especially likely to perform certain actions if they can relate to the people who performed the same actions before them.”
Social proof has a great impact on your marketing efforts. When a customer sees others are having a good experience with your product, they also want to enjoy the same. It’s because as a customer we always consider what other customers say about the product. According to the data, 70 % of customers believe in review sites, while only 30 % trust advertisements they see.
Social proof can help to make your copywriting more effective by increasing the trust factor. You can use social proof in your copywriting in the following two ways :
Use social proof to enhance your copywriting –
This is for your own benefit. Surveys or customer reviews will help you understand what customers love about your product. You can study social proof to understand what main things to highlight in your copywriting.
Add social proof near copy –
You can also add reviews and testimonials to your website landing pages and homepages to strengthen your copy and show what other users think about your brand or product.
Write a compelling copy
If you’re writing blog posts, emails, ad copies, sales letters etc, this point is for you. Here are a few things you can try to write a compelling copy of:
Write as if you’re talking –
Believe it, this is an insane copywriting super hack. You have to write as naturally as possible. If you aren’t sure whether your copy is natural or not, read it out loud. If anything seems awkward, write it again, and if you feel it sounds fine, it is good to go.
Use short sentences –
Using short sentences is a key to get a better copy. And this fact is also backed up by strong research.
The research was conducted by The American Press Institute, where they gave research subjects two articles to read.
Article 1 had an average sentence length of 54 words, whereas Article 2 had an average sentence length of 12 words. People who read Article 2 had 711% better comprehension than those who had Article 1.
The bottom line – Use short sentences in your copy.Write as if you’re talking to one person –
Let’s understand it with examples :
Avoid writing like this.“Many users struggle to get more traffic to their website. They have tried all the tricks, but nothing seems to work for them.”
Instead, you can write to one person:
If you’re here, that means you, too, are struggling to drive traffic to your website. You might have tried every trick, but at last, nothing seems to work.”The same thing applies to B2B also. Write specifically to one person.
Use Active Voice –
Active voice sounds much better than passive voice. If you’re not sure about how to do it, you can try some tools.
Avoid complex words –
You might be knowing all the great literary words, but not everyone is familiar with them. In fact, these complex words can make your copy hard to read. And as you know, if users find your copy hard to read, they may not read it at all. The best practice is to use words that are easy to understand.
Keep Testing
As you know, copywriting is a process. All the mentioned steps are part of the process, and no matter how well you know your audience or how much you have researched, you have to test your copy. When you test it, you’ll be surprised at what works and what doesn’t works for your copy. Sometimes, you’ll find your headlines wrong, sometimes the lead may have a bit of a problem, or sometimes the tone may not sound correct.
But here’s the catch. By testing, we don’t mean to test different versions of your copy. Instead, test some element changes and stick to something that brings more conversions. After picking the most successful version, test again.
Here are a few changes you can test :
Point of View – “Get more Followers now” instead of “You can get more followers.”
Button Copy – Sign up, Subscribe now, Click to get more recipes, etc.
Headlines – Try with numbers or indicating a solution.
Formatting – You can try bullet points instead of numbering or vice versa.
Calls to Action – This is the most important part. Try different and strong CTAs until you find which one is bringing more conversion.There are several tools to make your copy testing easier, like Google Optimize or Optimizely.
Optimize your Copy for Voice Search
According to the data, 50 % of all the searches will be made by voice. Though not everyone does that, why take a chance? People are changing their searching methods and prefer voice search instead of writing everything on tiny keyboards. Users are drastically turning towards voice commands over smartphones, PCs, tablets, and smart assistants.
Here are a few SEO tips to make your voice search more successful :
- Write as you speak — use everyday language that is understandable.
- Answer the questions that people ask — the answer should appear on the 1st page (keys should be in the first paragraph / the first 30 words).
- Use subheadings and titles.
- Low-frequency queries are longer.
- Write down the description and use trigger wording that is 166-215 characters long.
- The page should not take more than 4 seconds to load.
- Use micro-markup and structure the data so that the search tool knows what content is on each page.
To conclude the Guide
Once you’ve read this guide, you’ll know a lot about copywriting. To help keep everything together, you can see the checklist below. This will remind you what you’ve learned and what you might be missing out on.
Here’s the list :#1 The first step is to know your audience. Ask yourself the following questions before you begin :
- Who is your target audience?
- Who would you want to sell to?
- What do your existing customers want?
- What struggles might your customers face while shopping, and how can you solve them?
Also, consider the awareness level of your audience by using the AIDA model.
#2 The next step is to choose the right tone for copywriting.
#3 Write a persuasive copy.- Start simple to grab your customer’s attention
- Slightly move to the benefits
- Explain features
- Include a strong call to action
#4 Focus on Pain Points in your copy.
#5 Put the most important information on top.
#6 Write catchy headlines.
#7 Use Social Proof
#8 Write a compelling copy- Write as if you’re talking.
- Use short sentences.
- Write as if you’re talking to one person.
- Use Active Voice.
- Avoid complex words.
#9 Keep Testing Your Copy
#10 Optimize your copy for voice search.
Be practical and use social proof in whatever form you think will persuade your potential buyers to take action.
Here we end up with the list. The copywriting tips mentioned above will help you to know your audience better and make a successful marketing strategy. The key to a great copy is knowing what your audience wants and writing it in a way that persuades them to take action.
We hope this guide and checklist will empower you to write a copy that helps bring more conversions and grow your business overall. Following all the tips mentioned, you’ll definitely notice an increase in response rates and conversions.
