All the marketing and sales material you’ve seen written down is called copywriting and within the marketing industry. This isn’t to be confused with “copyrighting.” The latter is to obtain the legal rights to intellectual property. It’s good for when you finish a book or the design features of a clothing brand and want to be acknowledged for creating it.
“Copywriting,” however, is a different concept altogether.
After a sales funnel is mapped out and is automated, the difference between great conversions, mediocre conversions or none at all is in the copy. This method of writing seeks to first connect with readers and then pull each one through stages of emotional triggers that ultimately get them to buy in the end.
But there are other actions like subscribing, answering questions and social sharing that can be encouraged through copywriting. Marketers at every level of expertise rely on copywriting to close their sales, grab the reader’s attention and get them to behave accordingly. But doing these things with words is more challenging than it sounds. We’re closing the learning gap.
Below are some copywriting tricks to boost your lead generation process.
1. Being Concise and Straight To The Point
Let’s keep it simple before you go off into the world of strategy in copywriting. The techniques and methods are vast, so there’s a lot to get lost within. And what you’re about to learn now isn’t for the beginner only. Veteran copywriters must always remind themselves that simplicity converts the highest and demand the most sales.
2. Keeping Your Writing Simple Is About Being Straight To The Point
It’s best to avoid long explanations when things can be said in a few words. Marketing is one of those areas where you actually get less with the more you have to use. Readers in today’s digital planet make this approach even more important and relevant. The readers you find online don’t care to spend gobs of time reading.
They want to glimpse, monitor or check in and out. To accommodate those new behaviors, marketers have to be concise, short and straight to the point. Grabbing a reader’s attention is challenging enough. Another challenge arises when that reader is faced with 20 pages of Web copy to read through. This doesn’t suggest that long form copywriting is ineffective.
Being short and concise is about improving your conversions and lead generation efforts. There are also specific areas where it’s best to be as simple as possible. Those areas include but are not limited to your headlines, anchor text, the first sentence of your copy and buttons that are formatted to provide a call to action.
3. Like Talking To A Real Person
You may have read up on copywriting and learned about the emotional component it has. You may have also considered how you feel after reading great copy that compels you from deep inside. What you might not know is that creating this emotional flare is done by speaking where your reader already is.
In the privacy of their own minds, where they’ll comprehend your writing, the reader is an average person. No one speaks the way they did during Shakespearean times anymore. And talking like a professor in a calculus class lets you connect with absolutely no one. Writing the in the copywriting form requires that you make yourself – the writer – a real down to Earth person
Do so by seeing your letter, landing page or email as a direct conversation. Marketers need to speak to their prospects at a 5th to 8th grade reading level. Daytime news, in fact, shares information using a fifth grader’s reading level. The intent behind this is to avoid ideas that go beyond the comprehension of viewers. And this doesn’t imply that people are dumb.
Speaking like a real person lets you convey information through the easy methods we have for understanding. The easier it is to comprehend, the more information you can share and the more you convert leads attracted within a funnel.
4. Think Strategy More Than Gimmicks
Have you ever read copy or sales material that you thought was way too gimmicky? Marketers eventually write in this manner if they don’t setup a strategy. Strategy is the real secret behind copywriting. The best writers work on constructing strategies instead of gimmicks. This enables marketers to build the stages of cause and effect that make people buy.
Not having a strategy leads writers and marketers to try harder than necessary. The result is copy that over does itself and uses cheap tricks to compensate for not having a strategy in place. Strategies allows business owners to anticipate the state their consumers are in and then prepare the right messaging suitable for closing a sale.
The more strategic a campaign is, the more sincere the marketer becomes and the better the relationships are during lead generation.
5. Know The Difference Between Features and Benefits
You can’t write effective copy without knowing the variants between benefits and features. There are numerous books written on the topic, but here are the basics. Benefits are what people make purchases for. It can get complicated understanding this because often times, benefits are relative. It’s about what people actually want versus the actual instrument that can deliver it.
In baseball, no one actually wants a bat. What they want instead is to take pitches out the ball park or to hit a few runners in. Figuring out how to get those specific benefits of hitting the ball inevitably leads you to need a bat.
That’s where features come in. For example, this hypothetical bat weights less than 34 ounces, it has a wide barrel and new grip technology on the handle. These things might enable the bat to hit a baseball further or the exact way the consumer wants. But marketers and salespeople don’t sell those features. Features are used for enhancing or supporting claims you made.
Those claims can be a presentation of the benefits. For example, “Hit runners in and connect with more home runs.” When you fell the consumer is suspicious of these results, then you confirm it with the features. You confirm it with the specs of the bat.
[Main Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels]
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.