Want to know how to write web copy that sells? Whether you’re an established business or a new start-up, excellent web copy is essential. From your website service pages, home page, blog posts, marketing campaigns, ad copy, and social media captions. So how do you create website copy to resonate with your audience and persuade them to sign up or buy?
Establish Your Audience
A critical step in creating web copy that sells is knowing who you’re writing to. You may already know who your perfect customer is; if not, it’s time to create a persona. This persona is a fictional character you create from which you’ll target your copywriting.
Who is this person? What are their demographic, interests, hopes, dreams, fears, and goals? The more detail, the more effective your copy will be. This allows you to resonate with your perfect audience., use the language they use, touch them emotionally, and prompt them to take action. You’ll also be writing as if talking to one person, another crucial ingredient in writing epic web copy that sells.
Know Your Purpose
Now you know who you are writing to, you need to know why you are writing. What is the purpose of the web copy? There is an important distinction between the type of web copy you write. Typically web copy comes in two forms, copy and content.
Copy is writing to make sales on website pages, where you want to persuade and ultimately convince the reader to buy from you. In contrast, content writing, which is blog posts helping and giving value to your audience, requires a more informational tone.
Before writing, establish whether you’re writing copy for a website page or blog content. For web copy here, you’ll either be trying to get someone to sign up for a newsletter or buy a product, so you’ll need to convince them of the value they will receive by buying/signing up.
Sell Benefits, Not Features
No one cares about your product. And I don’t say that to be mean, but people only care about what’s in it for them (WIIFM). People want to know how your product or service will change their lives or help them solve a problem.
When writing about your products, don’t list all feature after feature, but what these features will do for the reader. How will those features help make a difference in their lives? The benefits should help your audience achieve their biggest goal or avoid their greatest fear. If you’re looking for a freelance copywriter in Cornwall or anyone location for that matter, I can help you get the words from your head into type, and onto your website.
Use Emotional Marketing
Tapping into people’s emotions throughout your web copy is incredibly powerful. When you can evoke positive emotions and make people feel happier, sexier, and motivated, increase their status, or increase their value, while simultaneously positioning your product as the facilitator, you have a fabulous recipe for turning readers into customers.
You can also utilize negative emotions; loneliness, sadness, anger, frustration, and fear are all equally powerful emotions. Highlighting a problem your audience is facing, how that explaining why it’s so bad, agitating it, then offering them a bridge to solve it is an amazing copywriting technique.
Utilize The 6 Pillars of Persuasion
When you’re writing a web page to sell your products and services, you can, in addition to emotional marketing, use the six pillars of persuasion. This extremely powerful principle applies to your website copy and accelerate your digital marketing and conversion potential.
The six pillars of persuasion are:
- Likeability
- Reciprocity
- Authority
- Consistency
- Scarcity
- Social Proof
These serve an important purpose in convincing your audience to do something. Likeability is how your present your business to the world and how your interact with your audience. Reciprocity is the feeling of wanting to give back after receiving something for free. For example, this could be a free ebook or product sample, which, because someone has received something for free, will naturally feel more inclined to give back.
Authority, which you can establish throughout your copy, is your chance to show you a reliable go-to industry source. For instance, a genuinely helpful blog post is an incredible way to establish your brand authority. Consistency is how your words and design are created across your digital business aspects. Are they consistent across your website pages, ads, and social media content? People trust consistency!
Scarcity is if there is less of something, people naturally desire it more; for example, gold is valuable because there is not much of it compared to an abundant resource like water; crazy, right? In terms of web copy, this could be stating there’s only a limited number of spots available for a product launch.
Social proof is the art of backing up what you say with testimonials and stats that show how valuable your product is to others. Showing how you have already made a difference in others’ lives is an astonishingly powerful marketing technique!
Use Call To Actions
Having a solid call to action is a crucial aspect of crafting web copy that sells. After all, if you’re not writing for a purpose, why are you writing? A CTA should prompt the reader to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or contact you. CTAs are infinitely more powerful after you’ve used one of the six pillars of persuasion on the page. E.g., directly after a customer testimonial.
Summary
Its no doubt how important copywriting is, and when done right, it is an incredibly useful tool. However, directing time and effort into creating epic web copy can be tricky; after all, you’re trying to run a business here!
Hiring a freelance copywriter could come in handy and alleviate some of those stresses. So whether you’re struggling to get your thoughts into words or don’t have the time, I can help you create copy that resonates with your audience and moves them to action. Please get in touch today and find out how I can help you.
