Copywriting is so much more than writing well—it’s more about writing strategically. Any successful marketing or advertising strategy must include thoughtful copywriting. It’s what captures the attention of your audience, makes them remember your brand and eventually convinces them to give your business a chance. Copy also helps your audience better understand who you are as a business, including your history, mission, goals and beliefs. Most importantly, it shares how your business can help your readers.
In business writing, it’s important to plan out how to make your writing more direct and effective. If you’re one of the many people in business for whom writing has never been a major concern, you probably know that a lack of writing skills is a greater and greater handicap with every passing year. That’s why it’s smart to ask for help from writing experts.
If done well, copywriting will increase brand awareness and customer loyalty. It helps potential customers slide their way through the sales funnel and into your shopping car (or equivalent depending on your business). Well-written copy will not only increase traffic to your website, it’ll convert potential customers into leads and finally into actual customers.
Copywriting is obviously extremely important to business’s success. But how does one become a master wordsmith? We asked 18 copywriting gurus to share their tips. These are their answers.
Think back about what YouTube videos you’ve liked the most recently. The chances are that at least one of them was a mixture of both information that made you feel like you learned something, and entertainment: the information was laid out in a catchy way and exciting to watch.
That’s precisely how we’re writing our copy for all our email and social media marketing campaigns: telling a relatable story that happened to your team this week or one of your clients, sharing interesting insight, and so on, all filled with a good dose of humor. What happened once we’ve started to use this approach is that our customers look forward to our emails and posts every week, although we add a sales-related call to action in each one of them.
Last year I started doing more long form and comprehensive articles. My tip is to do, what I call casual research, but start early. For instance in industry guides like this 6.000+ words one on ecommerce email marketing.
I started research months even before writing, every time I “ran into” something I saved it in a google doc. So…
This will allow you to go much deeper into a topic, make it more interesting, and it will be way more original than any other. Additionally you know who to mail to have a look during promotion phase. It also works very well if you aren’t expert in the subtopic, for instance I knew a lot about ecommerce, but not that much on email for restaurants, so keep an eye out – and you will end up with some gems.
Of course, there will be a lot of additional ideas “you can’t use”, but these will serve perfect for later updates and other pieces.
The thing that elevates good copy into great copy is a deep understanding of your audience. If you’re trying to convert your audience into product users make use of your audience research.
Who are they? What are their main problems? How can your product fix those problems? The more specific, the better. Too often copywriters get fixated on selling their product by listing the specifics; instead they should take a step back and ask themselves “what does my audience actually want to know?”
Most of the time the answer is “how this product can help me” and not “what this product can do”.
One of my biggest copywriting tips is to create content that is relevant and topical to catch the immediate surge of traffic and interest. The crucial thing that we’re trying to do more of in 2020 is that when the surge of interest in that subject passes, not to give up on the content, but look at how we can repurpose it for a different audience.
For example, while working for a company in the Nordics, there was a lot of interest at the end of 2018 when Amazon announced their plans to move AWS into Sweden. We published an article about that, which attracted a spike in traffic that had peaked by Q1 of 2019. Instead of abandoning the article, we re-wrote and re-formatted it as a step-by-step guide for Amazon sellers now looking to get established in the Nordics.
Be current and be topical by all means, but remember to be adaptive too!
All my favorite tips are about neuro copywriting, its headline and intro strategies in particular. And though most copywriters have mastered the secrets of headline creation (use numbers and beneficial adjectives, appeal to FOMO, etc.), the introduction is what can sink all writing endeavors with a single strike.
We know it needs to be short (no more than eight sentences), include a hook, and keep people reading. For a long time, my favorite formula for writing intros was APP method by Brian Dean:
This year, I’m going to test his other method: PPB, where P is for a preview (what you have for readers), the second P is for a proof (why they need this), and B is for a bridge (a call to action, inviting to keep on reading and learn more).
As a big fan of storytelling, I would recommend this trick to create a correlation between your product/service and events that benefit it, and stir readers into a desired action through their perception of this correlation. In plain English, your content piece follows this scheme:
You start your writing with a conclusion. In a preview, you already share the message you want to communicate. After that, you share a story (a proof that your message is right); and finally, you answer WIIFM (what’s in it for me?) in your content, turning it into a story with facts.
This is old but definitely still gold. After completing your text or an important part, read it out aloud. It may sound silly but this helped me a lot in the past.
You’ll get a better connection to your writing and find out how your words really sound. On top of that, it helps to spot grammar and style mistakes that Grammarly might have missed.
It’s definitely not a new technique but for me, it works like a charm (although you shouldn’t apply this method when working in a Starbucks).
