Tag: website copywriting
Website content: it’s OK to get personal and emotional!
Plain language and clarity are essential. But clear content needn’t be dull and unemotional. You’re a human, you’re communicating with other humans and it’s cool to show verve.
People respond well to enthusiasm whether you’re selling B2B or business to consumer. It’s catching. It’s personal. It fosters trust. And it gives your sales message a refreshing boost.
Here’s a few tips about letting your enthusiasm shine through without taking things too far:
- keep exclamation marks to a minimum. It’s great to sound excited and inspired but you can come across hysterical when you over cook the !!!s
- choose three key benefits or features to ‘big up’ rather than sounding excited about everything. It’ll have more impact that way
- use quotations to help you make an emotional connection with readers. For example place a quote on each page of your holiday site waxing lyrical about the sheer beauty of the destination
- use emboldening and italics so your audience experiences your copy with exactly the emphases you intended
- DIY testimonials – write a short 100 word segment of copy for each page or section in first person, describing in your own words why you feel your products and services are so good
- enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily mean a hard sell. Damp down overtly salesy messaging and focus on being transparent, genuine and straightforward instead
Website copywriting Case Study: target your copy effectively
Here’s a classic example of copywriting with a distinct target audience in mind.
The Brief: re-write a Pelvic Toner website to encourage more visitors and sales.
As a rule pelvic toners are bought by women who suffer from pelvic floor weakness. But the copy for the original pelvictoner.biz site had been written by a bloke. The product helps women exercise their pelvic floor muscles back to fitness. A side effect is that it enhances your sex life.
The copywriter had majored on the sex angle and used a lot of serious medical-sounding content. A factual approach that, while it works very well for most men, can seem slightly disturbing (and creepy!) to women. So I recommended rewriting the copy with a female focus:
Bringing forward the benefits that most women would focus on: stress incontinence, ageing and post-childbirth weakness.
Putting forward the sales message using a lifestyle angle: feel good, get close to your partner again, release the real you…
The result? Here’s a link to the new site: www.pelvictoner.biz.
Since launch the site owner has seen a significant increase in average orders per day. The moral of the tale? If your target audience is male, write for men. If it’s female, write for women. If it’s both, write for both. If it’s kids, write for kids. Think about who your target audience is. Establish what they want to hear and how they want to hear it. Then give them what they want.
