Copywriting is the art of persuasion. It requires vast knowledge from various areas like marketing, psychology and so on. The purpose of copywriting is to judge the readers into the direction of buying a product or a service. Over the years, experts have found that some techniques work better for this purpose than the others.
Here are some of the best techniques for good copywriting.
Tell a good story
People often don’t care all that much about you selling a product. However, they do care about good stories. If your copy tells a story with all the right elements, you have a chance at grabbing your reader’s attention and retaining it. Remember, the purpose of each sentence is to get the reader to read the next sentence.
Use facts
While telling a good story is really important, what’s even more important is using facts or you could lose your credibility and your reader’s trust. Be honest and transparent, share accurate and detailed information that the reader could find useful.
Be concise and simple
Copywriting is definitely not the best place to use flowery language and write long paragraphs of literary prose. No one is going to read that. However, they might read it if you are concise, direct and simple. Jargon or technical words are not your friends so you should stay away from them as well.
Share the benefits
People want to know about the features of the product but only in terms of how those features could benefit them. So, instead of repeating the long list from the product specifications document, take a few features and show readers how they transform into benefits. For example, a person doesn’t really care about smartphone features but rather what those features give them – large size makes smartphones easier to use, a good processor makes them snappier, a lot of pixels in a camera makes the pictures clear and beautiful and so on.
Adjust your writing to your audience
When writing copy, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that you have to fit your audience. For instance, if you are creating copy for a doll company, a serious, formal language would be a wrong choice. What would work, though, is the informal, friendly language that your audience could relate to. Use the words and sentence structures that can help you build a good relationship with your readers.
Be conversational
This is one of the most commonly heard tips related to copywriting. However, this approach has many pitfalls. For one, you could risk sounding overly intrusive and annoying. But if you stay informal yet respectful, you can’t fail. A real conversational tone is engaging and inviting, not over the top.
Ask questions
Another great tip that carries a lot of pitfalls with it. The right way to go is to ask open questions. What this really means is not to ask question s that could exclude a large part of your audience but rather to ask questions which inspire interest. For instance “Nice is the best Mediterranean destination, right?” is a bad, closed question that could exclude people that like other destinations better. So, “Which of these Mediterranean destinations do you like best?” is a much better question which invites people in.
Copywriting doesn’t have to be hard if you are willing to put in some work. Hopefully, these tips will help you improve writing.