To thrive in a competitive digital market, you need to devise strategies to attract more customers and improve sales. These strategies should revolve around reaching more customers, providing excellent service, expediting market expansion, and more.
However, online copywriting is seldom on this list of strategies, even though there’s no doubt that it’s essential to your success.
This article sheds light on the importance of online copywriting and the five best copywriting tips to help you succeed.
What is Online Copywriting?
Copy is ubiquitous. It’s the text that brands use in various marketing materials such as blog posts, websites, emails, ebooks, and social media posts.
Since copywriting is a primary medium of interacting with your customers and prospects, it should be compelling enough to generate engagement and subsequent sales.
Why does copywriting matter a lot to your business?
- It informs and educates your target audience
- It increases brand awareness
- It boosts organic traffic through SEO
- It improves conversion rate
- It helps in nurturing customer relationships
Copywriting is not a one-and-done strategy. Your business needs consistent production of online marketing materials, which means that copywriting is a continuous process.
Smart Copywriting Tips to Engage Your Audience
Here comes the part you’ve been eagerly waiting for. You might have a fantastic product or service, but you need a great copy to promote it.
If you’re concerned about your sales flatlining and nothing seems to be working out, try these online copywriting tips.
Study your target audience
The more you understand your target audience, the more you can write an effective copy. The best way to analyse your prospects is to create a buyer persona.
What is a buyer persona?
It’s a fictionalised representation of your ideal customers. After thorough research, you can create multiple personas and give them clever names like Stylish Sam or Discount Danny.
For each persona, you should have the following information:
- Demographics: Includes education, income level, age, and gender.
- Psychographics: Includes personality, beliefs, behaviour, and attitude.
- Purpose: The reason (or reasons) why they purchased your product/service or why they may be interested in it.
- Solution: How your product changes or enhances their lives.
- Objections: The reasons why they might hesitate to buy your solution.
- Communication preferences: It’s how they communicate. It could be phone, email, social media, etc.
- Frequency of purchase: It defines how often they need your product or service.
Using this knowledge, your message can be made more relevant and appealing to the target audience.
Follow the AIDA Model
The AIDA model is one of the most popular models used in marketing to hook people’s attention from the beginning and eventually convert them. It consists of cognitive stages that people go through while purchasing a product or service.
Based on these cognitive stages, copywriters devise messaging with the ultimate goal of converting them into paying customers.
These are the different stages:
- Awareness: Your copy at this stage should create brand awareness among your target audience.
- Interest: The copy aims at generating interest in your product or service.
- Desire: This is where the ‘want’ should become a ‘need’ for the audience. Through web copywriting, create an emotional connection with them and show them why their life wouldn’t be the same if they started using your product/service.
- Action: The copy should encourage readers to take action at the final cognitive stage. It could be joining subscribing to your newsletter, joining a webinar, dialling a number, downloading an eBook, etc.
An additional stage called ‘Retention’ aims at generating sales through referrals, cross-sell, and upsell. This extended model is called the AIDAR model which tells prospects everything they need to know to go through the purchase. Follow this model in your next copy and see the magic happen.
Invest in online courses
Sometimes, you may get intimidated by the fact that professional copywriters have a degree in journalism, English, or another related major. But as a business owner, you may not have the luxury of time to obtain a degree now.
However, that shouldn’t stop you from writing a captivating copy to grow your business. You can sign up and take online courses in copywriting and learn straight from the experts. Plus, they’re not time restrictive and you can complete the courses at your own pace. There are lots of platforms that offer this like Udemy and Skillshare.
Don’t slack on your headlines
According to Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 readers will only read the headline copy. If the headline successfully grabs their attention, they will read the rest of the content. You probably do the same as a reader.
You may have valuable information in the body text, but an unappealing title would mean losing prospective customers because they never went beyond the headline.
The secret to writing a riveting title is this: generate enough curiosity to hook the audience but don’t spill all the beans in the headline itself.
You should, however, avoid sounding like clickbait or overpromising. Otherwise, you’ll risk losing the trust of your prospects before even earning it.
Write SEO-friendly copy
To generate traffic and increase sales, one must know how to write SEO-friendly copies. Most online courses in copywriting cover this aspect in detail.
Online copywriting cannot be accomplished without SEO or search engine optimisation. You have to incorporate relevant keywords in your copy, understand user intent, and create meta titles, meta descriptions, image tags, etc.
You should, however, steer clear of black hat tactics like buying links and stuffing keywords.
RELATED: How Many Keywords You Should Target for Your Website
Craft Marketing Copies That Sell!
Online copywriting is a staple marketing element of businesses today. One cannot garner engagement and drive sales without a sharp copy.
Use these proven online copywriting tips that let you get onboard customers from the beginning until the bottom of your sales funnel. And integrate the right SEO practices to make sure your copy gets maximum online exposure.
Check out our domain sales here to start creating a website and copy that sell.
