Tag: marketing
Tell website visitors what you do up front…
…Or they’ll get bored and go away!
Online, everyone’s short of time. They expect to find key information instantly.
Copywriting for online projects is about getting your message across clearly, quickly, simply and elegantly. It isn’t about being mysterious or enigmatic.
Make it clear what you do in the main header of your website’s index page. Then repeat yourself in the first sentence to make sure your message is driven home.
Here’s an example.
Freelance copywriting
I’m Kate Naylor. I’m a freelance copywriter and editor with twenty years’ experience in direct marketing. My work is commercially powerful as well as entertaining and informative. And I have a keen appreciation of writing for SEO.
There’s a second advantage to structuring your index page copy like this. It means you give search engines lots of good, relevant key words and terms to grab hold of early in your page. Which will help them classify and rank your site accurately.
What is marketing?
1. Marketing is… THE CREATIVE APPLICATION OF LOGIC
Marketing can be tricky. Get too creative and you alienate and confuse people. Apply logic at creativity’s expense and you bore them into a coma. Remembering this simple definition will help you stay on the right side of both tracks.
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the logic bit is a clear, simple sales message or proposition
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the creative bit is the successful expression, and communication, of that message
2. Marketing is… SELLING STUFF
This might sound obvious but you’d be surprised how often businesses forget that marketing is all about selling stuff. Stay focused on commerce and avoid dangerous things like ego and aesthetic over-sensitivity!
18 steps to marketing perfection: recession-proofing for businesses
A wobbly economy isn’t always bad news. The strong always survive.
So prepare yourself. If things are slowing down a bit, review your marketing to gain a good, muscular competitive edge. Are you:
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doing enough marketing? A slow-down means you might have to work harder to get new customers and keep
existing ones -
spending money in the right places? Test new media to establish response & conversion rates
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stuck in a rut? Review your existing media and campaigns, check ROI then act on your findings
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spending more than necessary on print? Check in case you can buy it for less
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posting profligately?! An A5 brochure, newsletter or catalogue can cost much less to post than A4
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sending out stuff by snail mail when you could easily email it?
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thinking creatively: reacting to current affairs swiftly and eloquently to raise your profile?
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up to date with your market: who they are and what they want from you?
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maximising the marketing potential of new products or services?
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releasing regular press releases to beef up your visibility?
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making the most of up to date SEO techniques?
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integrating your campaigns intelligently across multiple media?
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happy with your pre-sales, sales and post-sales materials? Could they work harder for you?
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grabbing every opportunity along the customer journey to communicate positively with people?
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updating your website often enough to keep search engines and repeat visitors keen?
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certain your website content is doing the best possible job of attracting, keeping and persuading visitors to buy?
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comfortable with your brand and what it projects to your target market?
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satisfied that your marketing plans still accurately reflect what your business is trying to achieve?
Get this lot right and you should be fit enough to fight a blip, a slow down or even a full blown recession!
A picture’s only worth a thousand words if it’s relevant
If you want to sell stuff, don’t waste time being arty.
Are you planning to use images in your advert?
Key US research proved twenty years ago that the most successful campaigns – with the biggest returns on investment – contain images that:
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attract the right target audience
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help describe the product or service in visual terms
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boost the sales message’s strength and heighten its impact
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enable key extra details to be communicated without words
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support the marketing messages, giving extra commercial power
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get the message across instantly, saving people time and effort
OK, the research was carried out two decades ago. But think how less crowded communications were then. No internet. No mobile ‘phones… Today, people are busier than ever. These days you really can’t afford to play hide and seek or do a Damien Hurst with your direct response marketing.
Being mysterious and ‘creative’ doesn’t improve response and conversion rates. Quite the opposite. The advert pictured is a good example of a bad offender. Take away the words and this strange lady could be advertising flash mobbing, contemporary dance, tights, vitamin pills… I doubt your first instinctive thought was ’processors’!
If you want to make proper money from your marketing, stick to images that really do speak louder than the words you need to say. Exercise restraint, my friends.
If you really MUST use long copy…
Make sure it’s formatted properly so people can read it easily.
Don’t get me started on long copy. I turn down long copy projects regularly because I know it just doesn’t work the way all those get rich quick schemes promise it does.
If you’re hell bent on using long copy – online or offline - make the best of a bad job by formatting it so people can read it easily. Why? Because people find it hard to read onscreen,
they tend to scan. They’ll ignore dense chunks of copy and you’ll risk not getting your main messages across. Unsatisfied, your visitors will soon leave.
When people read web copy they unconsciously search for visual clues, or ‘landmarks’, that tell them whether they’re in the right place. In much the same way as we scan newspaper headlines to decide which articles to read. We like to avoid having to read the detail until we’re sure it contains stuff we want to know.
So, what do you to do to maximise the effectiveness of long (or short!) web page layout? The trick is to make it easy for your readers to scan, understand and read your text, taking all the hard work out of it.
Four top tips:
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Keep your copy to a single column in a vertical block like a book – no need to reinvent the wheel, books are very comfortable to read
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Keep an eye on your column width. It should be reasonably narrow… again, book page width is ideal. Wide columns make it hard for our eyes to track from the end of one the line to beginning of another, giving us a lumpy ride. On the other hand, too-thin columns make your copy feel jerky and restless
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Make sure you use plenty of subheads so visitors can easily scan a page before they commit to reading it
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Craft the subheads so they give a clear outline of what you’re talking about in each section. Subheads should guide the reader through your story’s key points, emphasising the benefits of buying your stuff
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Indent important bits of copy. Or use bullet points and lists. This lets you emphasise key points and break up what might otherwise be a fat, unfriendly block of text. The longer your copy on a page, the more important it is to use subheads and indents. This way you convey visually that your content is going to be easy to read and understand
before they even start reading
