Head over to your website and start reading your copy. Is it about you? Or is it about your customer?
There’s an easy way to tell. Start reading your homepage. How is your website copy written? Now head over to your blog. What does your blog post content say?
If your copy is focused on you, you’ll see the word “we” used a lot more than the word “you.”
Most companies break this rule all the time. It’s easy to do.
Your business cards are all about you. You create them to identify who you are. Brochures are used to identify your products and services, and to offer a little insight as to who you are as a company. Of course, they’re written from your perspective. So you use a lot of “we” in the copy.
For many business owners, they transfer that same mentality over to their websites. After all, a website is just another form of marketing for their businesses. Why not use “brochure” mentality when writing your website copy and blog post content?
Take another look at your website. Do you see statements like:
- We’re professionals that care about your needs.
- We’ve served customers throughout Portland and Vancouver for fifty years.
- Our technicians are licensed professionals.
- We offer high-quality service.
It may sound good to you, but your customers don’t care. They see the same verbiage over and over again on every website they visit. They’ve learned to ignore the “we” and search out companies that speak more directly to their needs. They have issues. They have concerns. And they’re looking for solutions to their problems.
They only care about you in the context of how you can help them get to where they want to go.
If you convey that in your content and copy, you’re more likely to attract visitors that convert better, and have a greater chance of moving into raving fans.
And really, it’s not that difficult to do. In fact, if you’re still reading this, you see the power in writing your content and copy in this exact way. It’s more personal. It’s friendly. It’s conversational. And it makes you feel more comfortable, and more willing to continue reading down the page.
Conversation Sells
Think about what brings in sales. Chances are it’s your sales process. Your sales team has a special way of talking to prospects and potential customers. They aren’t there to “sell, sell, sell,”
even if that is their ultimate goal. They talk with their customers. They get to know them. They learn their needs, goals, and desires. They find ways to match your products and services up with what the prospect really needs.
Great website copy and blog post content take that same approach, only it’s written instead of face to face. This of your website as your salesperson. How can you make them even better at their job? How can you improve the process and make them “speak” more closely to suit the visitors’ needs?
Questions are a great thing to add into your copy. Why? Because it makes the reader think. Internally, they think about the question, then answer it in the back of their minds. It also prods them to want to read further, to find out if they knew the answer.
The other thing you’ll find with more conversational copy is that it avoids clinical, technical language. Unless you’re a doctor selling to another doctor, leave the big words for another place. Unless your clientele expects graduate level conversations, always write at a tenth, ninth, or even eighth-grade level. It’s easier to read. It’s easier to follow along. You don’t want your customers to stumble over the words. You want their heads nodding as they easily read along.
Creating Divisions and Whitespace
If you’ve ever visited a website where the copy goes on and on and on and on … Yeah, you get the picture. Kind of makes you feel like you’re back in school pouring over a textbook, doesn’t it?
That’s the feeling your visitors get when they see paragraph after paragraph of copy. It’s intimidating. It’s overwhelming.
Visitors won’t ease. They want entertainment. They want quick bits of information that will tell them they are on the right track.
How do you do that? With divisions and whitespace.
Don’t just write; divide your content into different parts. Give each section different titles or headings to split things up. That gives you ways to create differences in the way the copy presents. It also encourages your reader to keep going. (Kind of like you’re doing right now. You’re still reading, right?)
You’ll also notice paragraphs are shorter. Sentences have fewer words. And pictures and graphics are splashed here and there just to help keep your interest up. Humans are visual. That’s why it works.
Understand Who Is Reading
Once upon a time, in the land of the internet, companies knew they had to rank well in Google in order to create more traffic to their sites. One way was to use content specifically written for search engine traction. The problem was this content didn’t make a lot of sense. If you read it, you find a strange sentence structure that makes the average reader go “huh?” over and over again.
Google caught on. It changed its algorithms. It’s getting more sophisticated every day.
That’s why good marketers now know they should be writing content that pleases the reader, and Google will fall in line behind that.
Would you trust a Portland Website Copy Service Company who wrote about Portland Website Copy Service Company over and over again inside every sentence they wrote about Portland Website Copy Service Companies?
That last sentence is a little crazy. But you get the picture. And I’m sure you’ve seen enough articles like that to know exactly what we mean.
Know your customer. Write specifically to them. Be sure the article is written well. Have an editor go over it and make sure the verbiage is written properly. Make sure your customer will LOVE what you have to say.
If it has all of that, then it’s ready for your site.
That’s what will make your prospects and customers stay and read page after page, and eventually connect with you.
