The world of copywriting covers a wide variety of disciplines. With one copywriter that is aiming to write from the heart, there is another that has spent years refining their craft purely to convert and get sales. 

Let’s be clear: creating great content is critical to driving engagement, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Copy is something that is omnipresent: it’s on your landing page, it’s in your emails, and it is the foundation of every marketing practice you will ever undertake. 

This is why there are a number of components that we must recognize to craft more effective contact. It’s not just about the words you use, but about so much more: 

Getting to Grips With SEO

The problem with SEO is that a lot of companies think that search engine optimization is a shortcut. Many organizations think that as long as you are using the right keywords in your content, it doesn’t necessarily matter what really lies within. The fact is that this way of thinking makes a grand assumption that the audience is more than happy to read any type of content, regardless of its level of quality, which is ever so slightly condescending. 

Search engine optimization, from the perspective of any writer, needs to act as a foundation and nothing more. Google needs high-quality content to resonate with readers, which is why you need to do some of the following: 

• Linking internally to other pages on your site. There are some simple tricks to ensure that you win the battle of keeping customers on a website. Link building is one of those things that, in terms of SEO, create that reliability. There are many organizations that want to learn how to outsource link building to make life easier, but one of the simplest things to do is just to start linking internally. 

• Integrating keywords naturally. Think about copywriting as starting with those words that you need, and then crafting sentences around those words. Many TV drama writers use the names of characters as a way to “anchor” themselves to the page, and you can use keywords in a very similar way and you can start to weave everything around them. 

• Looking at your competition. You can look at what is engaging customers based on similar content. It’s important not to ape what they are doing but look at the things they are writing about and use this as a foundation to make better content. 

• Understand what consumers are searching for. In many ways, creating copy is about popularity. There are so many businesses that want to know how to be better at this, and if you are in an industry that is geared towards helping others create better content, answering this question is a very simple and effective solution. 

It’s all about transparency, and as you need to solve users’ queries, this is what Google needs at the end of the day. There is no point in creating misleading content, but you should think about solving the problem directly and transparently.

Understanding Your Audience

You’ve got to write for your audience. It sounds incredibly simple, but you’ve got to identify a need and you must meet it. When you determine who your audience is by creating user personas, you can uncover a number of characteristics. When you gain insight into some of the following, you can create content that goes toward those personas:

• Job title. 

• Age. 

• Economic status. 

• Location. 

There are a number of demographics you can use to create content that solves their problem. As simple as this sounds, in order to create better copy, you’ve got to understand your audience. Because you can target them easier, you’ll take a lot of the guesswork and hassle out of the equation.

The Copy of Conflict

You are addressing problems and in order to do this effectively, you’ve got to highlight what a problem is, but show why you can solve it. There are a number of copywriting models, but the AIDA model is something that many use to great effect: 

• Awareness. This involves creating brand awareness or affiliation with the service. 

• Interest. Generating interest in what your service offers and potentially stimulating the buyer to delve deeper. 

• Desire. This involves creating an emotional connection, effectively moving the consumer from liking something to realizing they can’t live without it. 

• Action. This is your call to action (or CTA). A CTA is something that you can put at the bottom of your page. It’s a very simple thing, but it is a fantastic way to end your content on a strong note. What do you want them to do? Get an email, make a phone call, download a brochure- whatever it is, everything is all hinging on that last action that’s all down to them. 

Tone of Voice

There’s a wide variety of ways to speak. We can look at customer service as a fantastic resource in order to learn the basics of communicating with someone. Communication is about mirroring what we see. When it comes to creating copy that converts or is putting across a specific message, this is where we’ve got to understand our audience. But we’ve got to understand the personal approach. 

Copywriting is about “you and I,” and when we depersonalize or we talk about someone in the third person, there are times when this can be an effective tool, but the reality is that when you speak directly to a reader, it’s going to evoke something closer to their hearts. You need to reduce the distance between your reader and yourself. That personal touch is critical and tone of voice is something that can stem directly from your audience. 

Simplicity

There are blogs that can evoke a chattier tone. When we are trying to convince someone on our website that they should stick around, we’ve got to recognize the importance of brevity. The more we write, the less people will read. This is why one of the fundamentals of SEO is about having broken up content. There will be times when you need to create dense content, but on a very logical level, this depends on the subject matter. Whitepapers or books that cover very dense subject matter are two examples. However, when you address your target audience and you are selling a service, you’ve got to think about simple language. 

People talk in simple terms, and the toughest thing from the perspective of a copywriter is to keep it simple. Sometimes, we can put our personality into a piece of prose, thinking that this is the key to connecting with someone, which it certainly can be, but engagement is a numbers game, so we’ve got to water down that attitude. Simple language is far more effective. 

There are hooks that we can use to real people in, and sometimes doing something a little different can make a big difference in bringing in that individual member, but we’ve got to remember that as far as sales copy is concerned, simple is the solution. 

Be Useful

Writing something for our customers is us asking them to stop by and make them listen to what we have to say. You’ve got to give them something to think about, and when we create copy, it’s not necessarily about us forcing a product down their throat, but remembering that we can all benefit from having something to think about, those little pearls of wisdom that cause us to stop and think a little longer about something. When we give useful information, this can feel more personable. 

Creating content that provides some form of value is critical. We can always back things up with facts and there are a variety of fantastic websites out there that provide quantifiable facts. But because it takes 0.05 seconds for someone to form an opinion about your website, we should think about creating content that might add something to their lives. It is harder than ever in the world of copywriting to create copy that is useful, especially when there’s constant content all on the same subject matter, which is why you’ve got to work at creating something that gives facts and provides useful stats, but they must support the main message. 

Copy is about being personable, and facts can easily be sprinkled around a piece of content to support the argument, however, many copywriters fall into the trap of using facts as a way to bulk out contact, and this can run the risk of making the copy very dry. 

The toughest thing about creating copy that converts is not necessarily about creating the right copy in the first place, but about making sure that you are reaching out to the right audience.

When you are using the right services your business needs, you are doing right by your business, but it’s critical that in terms of marketing you spend the time thinking about what copy really can do for its audience. Because there is a wide variety of marketing tactics out there, we can overlook copy or not give it the reverence that it deserves. The fact is that copy is the most fundamental part of your promotions. It’s critical to treat it right, but also understand that it is, arguably, the most fundamental tool to drive engagement to your website.