Copywriting 101: How to Create Converting Content for your Audience
“Don’t ever diminish the power of words. Words move hearts, and hearts move limbs.”-Hamza Yusuf
You can’t avoid words in marketing, so you might as well get them working for you! Your written content is a cornerstone of your marketing and here, we will show you how to use it to connect with your audience.
Your marketing copy is like an escalator that takes readers on a journey, except they can get off it very quickly (tough gig, we know!). If the escalator is bumpy, slow, and the surroundings are bleak, they’ll jump off in a heartbeat.
Great copy is easy on the eye, moves the heart, and educates the mind. Here, we’ll show you how to craft the kind of copy that does this for your audience.
There are three key parts to creating converting marketing copy:
1) Know your Audience to Persuade your Audience
2) Contextualise Your Copy
3) Write Persuasively
1. Know Your Audience to Persuade Your Audience
Get clear on your audience, your brand voice, and use a benefits-first approach to your copywriting.
Define Your Audience
A key mistake in marketing is the ‘spray and pray’ approach; a company has a product, outlines some benefits, and then tries to market it to anyone within earshot.
However, your audience is made up of customer avatars, or personas. They each have different tastes, situations, needs, and values. They also use different words, relate to differing kinds of language and metaphors, and feel differently about various kinds of messages.
Knowing your audience inside-out gives you a great foundation for connecting with them and helping them out. Here’s some methods you can use to better define your target audience:
- Current customers: who interacts with you? What are their most frequent pain points? What are their day-to-day lives like? What do they care about? What do they love most about your service and hate most about their problems?
- Data: Tools like Google Analytics and the Meta Business Suite offer insights into your audience – does it square with the customers that actually buy from you? What could be missing to deepen engagement with existing and potential customers alike?
- Competitors: See which brands are working well with different segments in your target market, to see who to prioritise and how to do it.
- Market research: The web is your friend for finding the key demographics that are in your sector, and can give you insights to help with breaking them down.
- Use Imagination and Empathy: Alongside this data, you can visualise and feel into each segment’s lives and the problems you’re looking to solve. By doing this, you can find the right words that get a ‘Yes! You get it!’ reaction.
Your audience wants you to know them and care about them before they can open up to you helping them; this is all about trust.
Define Your brand voice
Your brand voice is a bridge between your brand and your customer avatars. You may have an overall brand voice, and a specific brand voice for each group, with each striking the right words, style and tone based on context.
With your audiences in mind, list out some words, tones, images and values that you’ve seen and feel will appeal to these audiences. Viola! You now have a simple but effective brand voice strategy.
This said, authenticity can improve your sales; we can’t win them all. Audiences are attracted to defined brands, like bees are to honey. Striking a balance between serving a sizable market, whilst honouring your brand, and values, is a key ingredient to creating a business that is dearly loved and recommended by its customers.
Focus on Benefits
Now that you’ve defined your audience and brand voice, you can tailor your messaging to truly speak to their needs. Avoid talking about what you do, talk about what can be helpful to them.
Start with being clear on the problems of your customer avatars to know which benefits are of the highest value to them and how this fits into the wider picture of their lives. Then, start bringing it into your copy on your content.
For instance, if you sell DIY tools for housework, then Doris, a 70 year old retiree is likely to be uninterested – but she’ll likely prefer to hire a trustworthy handyman who can use these tools for her. Doris values simplicity and ease here, whereas Dave, a DIY fanatic, likes to invest his time into housework.
This also has implications for your marketing strategy. Doris will be less interested in detailed DIY content and prefer to verify an external contractor’s trustworthiness based on clear info, reviews and factors like cost. Whereas Dave will be more inclined to read the content and trust you for solutions, after seeing that your brand knows its stuff and can solve problems even for people like him.
Find out the types of benefits your audience wants to get, and speak to those benefits in a way that is helpful, clear, and convenient for them.
Put Words In Your Service: Make A Shift With Us
Looking to make content with a chef’s touch? Need a guide and safe pair of hands to bring it to life and make headway with your audience? We can help! Get in touch with us and let’s talk about your goals. We’ll help you to transform your content from placeholder to shift maker. It all starts with a conversation!
2. Contextualise Your Copy
Know your goal, how and when your copy is likely to be seen, and tailor your copy to the format.
Focus on the goal
Your main goal is to add value and create trust with your audience. Every. Single. Time!
Get in the habit of asking yourself with each word: ‘does this help me to help my audience?’ Here’s a checklist of key things to focus on:
- Does this teach the audience something new and resolve a problem for them?
- Is the copy well-suited to the reader’s context and the formats it’ll be read on?
- Is there a tailored, inviting call to action to take this audience to the next step?
- Does the text endear the audience to your brand?
- Can this be shorter, clearer, and deliver the same amount of value?
Who Will Read, When, and How?
Alongside the preferences we discussed earlier, your audience will have tendencies around when and how they read your content.
If your content is for busy executives in the financial services industry, then it can be good to show that you precisely get their context and problems (creating that ‘you get it!’ moment) , and then give value quickly. Likewise, in this example, we’re talking about busy, goal-oriented people; give them a reason to invest in consuming your content by promising a solution, and then deliver on that promise consistently with your content.
Likewise, if you’re writing on desktop and your readers are on mobile, then you should check that your content is not too long for that format. Mobile text is often read in a distracting setting! What times and moods will your audience be reading this content in?
Where Is Your Copy Going to be?
Write the copy for the format to avoid disappointment with the results! It can be frustrating to change the writing after finding out it was too much, too little, or simply unreadable.
If it’s for a website or a graphic, take care to align the copy’s size, layout and the format with the channels they are going on. Website builders like Wix and graphic softwares like Canva can make this easier for copywriters. Use appealing and true-to-audience fonts and colours to make the copy easier on the eye. If the marketing content is in a digital format (e.g your website), make sure it looks good responsively for different devices.
3. Use Persuasive Writing Methods
Use writing techniques that make your copy more simple, compelling, relatable, and enjoyable!
Now that you’re aligned with your audience and have contextualised your copy, now it’s time to take them on that silky-smooth escalator journey with your copywriting. You don’t need to be a poet to do this (Shakespeare’s pretty confusing anyway, right?).
Here’s our Top Tips for Writing Persuasively:
1) Keep it simple: Avoid long, loquacious (ugh) words and sentences; try to simplify your writing. Normally, it’s best to write relatably.
2) Use literary methods: like alluring alliteration, metaphors, and rhymes
to make your copy engaging and memorable.
3) Engage your audience’s senses: Use words that help your audience to experience the content. That is, to taste, smell, see and feel your words. This is a powerful technique and a cornerstone of great writing.
4) Tell a story: they are everywhere because they are so powerful; in movies, novels, pitch decks, games, videos and so much more. Tell a story to engage the hearts and minds of your audience. Take them on a journey.
5) Benefits-first: make the benefits you are offering explicit somewhere and cleverly imply them too (such as in a story), to link the audience’s problems with your solutions in an engaging way. You’re positioning yourself as a guide in their story from a problem to a solution that makes their life better.
6) Avoid long paragraphs: Amidst many modern distractions, readers’ attention spans are going down. Make reading easier for them with shorter text blocks.
7) Use Readable Fonts: A part of persuasion is fluency. Some fonts are easier the eye than others; some of the most readable are Lato, Helvetica, and Arial.
8) Get Feedback: As they say, 2 minds are greater than one! Getting feedback on your writing can help you to improve and craft your copy for more conversions.
9) Proofread: If you don’t check your writing, your audience will check it for you. Check your SPAG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) before hitting publish – you can also use tools like Grammerly to do it for you!
Are you Ready for Awesome Copy?
We hope you’ve found this guide useful. If you have any questions, reach out to us on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Need some expert insight or pair of hands for your marketing journey? We’d love to help you make a shift. You can reach out to us at hello@storyshift.co.uk and we’ll get back to you soon. Alternatively, get a marketing fireside chat booked in with us here. We look forward to meeting you!