7 Copywriting Tips to Improve Your Website

02/07/2019 | Share:

Is your web content failing to grab the reader’s attention? Do you have reason to believe that conversion rates are being affected by poor sales copy and bad content marketing? We have a few quick copywriting techniques that can help you to remedy your call to action and webpage copy efforts.

1. Understanding your target audience

First thing’s first, before you start you need to have an understanding of who your copy is targeted at. Much like how your business and it’s products or services are targeted for specific people, your copywriting needs to have an ideal customer in mind. This is so you can better address the ideal customer more directly and effectively. Otherwise, you risk sounding vague or irrelevant.

2. Provoke an emotional response

Your website copy must appeal to the emotions of the reader. This doesn’t mean that you have to bring them to tears on every page. It’s more about the emotional wants and needs of the intended reader.

People tend to buy with their emotions first and then use logic to justify it afterwards. Whilst it’s great to have facts and figures to back up your product for justification, it’s the emotional side of your copy that will grab the initial attention. This emotional attention grab should appeal to the customer’s pride, fear, envy, laziness, desire for approval or need for comfort or convenience.

For example, if you’re selling cleaning products, you’re more likely to get a sale if you focus on resolving common cleaning frustrations. One frustration could be someone who is tired of endless scrubbing. You are appealing to their need for a convenient, frustration-free solution. They’ll look at the details later whilst they’re justifying their intent either to themselves or any others involved in the purchase (such as a buyer for a business).

3. Use more verbs rather than adjectives

When you write content, verbs are normally better than adjectives. Verbs are words that can show and prove action and are less passive than adjectives. If you can describe your product through what it does and what it enables the customer to do, it is more likely to keep your reader engaged than a long list of adjectives that don’t solve customer problems.

4. Benefits, not features

Features and benefits are words that are often used together when talking about products. But when comparing the performance of the two, credit is heavily weighted in favour of the benefits.

In general, customers want to know how the features of your product will benefit them. So it’s important that these benefits are mentioned and really capitalised on.

For example, an umbrella has a handle and an opening canopy but people don’t make the purchase because they’re big fans of handles and canopies. People buy umbrellas for the benefit that these two features provide in combination: they shelter people from the rain. Here are two examples of ways you could write copy for the umbrella.

“Our new umbrella has a wooden curved handle, a steel frame and a clear PVC canopy.”

This is good, but it could do better:

“Curved handle to guarantee comfort. Wind-resistant and transparent to ensure stability and visibility in bad weather conditions.”

Since we all know what an umbrella does, it’s not hard for us to work out the benefits from the first example. However, in the second example, the benefits are much clearer and there’s less effort involved on the customers part. When it comes to your product, spelling out the benefits makes the customer journey quicker and easier. The trick is doing this in a catchy, concise way.

5. Be selective about which benefits you highlight

Now that we’ve established your copy should focus on its benefits, it’s time to edit them down. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and you should let it do so!

It’s not necessary to list every feature in your main copy. You can let your great images do some of the work. And you can save some of the less important and obvious features of your product for the details section. Be more selective about what you choose to highlight with a short, catchy product description that will encourage the reader to find out more.

6. Put focus into headlines

Your headlines may only be several words but they are the most important words on your page. Just like a newspaper draws readers in with their headline text, your titles and headlines will determine whether the customer is going to continue reading or not. So you can see why it’s important. It needs to be interesting to your target audience.

You should spend extra time on forming the best headlines/titles for your pages – really think them through. Use a couple of well-thought-out words to create your title and don’t be afraid to re-draft more than once. Remember, this text will contribute heavily towards a conversion.

And don’t forget – just like with your product’s benefits, you can use an image to add more to complement your headline, if used correctly.

7. FOMO

Fear of missing out (commonly shortened to FOMO) is a tactic used in copywriting, marketing, social media and sales to give people the feeling that if they do not act with some degree of urgency, they will miss out. This can play to the customers need to fit in, by persuading them this is the latest trend. It could also take the form of a limited-time price reduction or special offer, allowing the customer to more easily justify the wants and needs that they’ve established with your product.