Web copy plays a crucial role in engaging and converting visitors into customers. The goal of an effective web copywriting strategy is to grab people’s attention, trigger a certain emotional response, and lead them into taking a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form. Either way, the gain is yours.
Copy (and content!) writing is a pivotal part of any website. It can engage and turn visitors into leads. The words you choose to use on your website are there to convey your message and leave a specific impression on the visitor, so it’s really important to choose carefully.
Now, keep in mind that the average visitor spends roughly about three minutes on a website. You surely want to find a way to hook them in for the long haul and skyrocket your engagement and conversion rates.
Your website acts as a 24/7 sales representative, so it’s essential to curate it, as well as your web copy, to draw in visitors and make them want to stay longer. When you tailor your copy to your audience’s needs, the chances of securing more customers are much higher.
If you’re ready to explore the world of website copywriting and learn how to boost customer engagement — and consequently also boost your conversion rates — we’ve rounded up eight crucial strategies that will help you on that journey.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is something you need to swear by when it comes to successful copywriting. It’s essential to know who will be reading it, so you can choose the right words that will resonate with them and speak to their needs and interests.
To tackle great copywriting (and benefit your business in general), focus on figuring out what motivates your visitors and what they are looking for. That way, you can adapt your copy to captivate and connect with them. And with that, you can build strong customer relationships, which will effectively help with increasing engagement and conversions.
By being familiar with how your audience lives and breathes, you can create copy that addresses their specific goals, values, and pain points. It’s called tailored messaging. A well-optimized copy will definitely make your website more relevant and appealing to your target audience.
By understanding your audience’s values and needs, you can create copy that elicits an emotional response and strengthens the connection between your brand and your visitors.
Another great tactic to implement in this department is to create buying personas. Here’s a detailed guide about understanding buyer personas and a podcast episode on How to Create a B2B Buyer Persona That Actually Drives Revenue Growth with Stormie Andrews. When your copy is engaging and relevant and resonates with your prospects, they are more likely to spend more time on your website, interact with your content, and then take desired actions.
Create a New Potential Pain Point
Before we submerge into pain points and how to address them in your copy, let’s first understand what a pain point actually is.
A ‘pain point‘ in web copywriting refers to the problems or challenges that your target audience experiences. They are looking for an answer on how to overcome an obstacle they’re facing, and it’s your job to understand their pain and solve it with the product you offer. By identifying and addressing these pain points in your copy, you can nurture a strong connection with your audience and build brand loyalty.
To understand the challenges and frustrations your audience is facing and discover their pain points, you can conduct market research using surveys and focus groups. It will also help to analyze your competitors’ websites. See what type of language and messaging they’re using to address similar problems. The most common customer pain points are financial concerns, productivity needs, support issues, and streamlining processes.
You can always dig deeper and find potential new pain points that your audience may not even be aware of. By subtly making them aware of a risk they might not be actively considering, you’re creating both a valid pain point and a market for one of your products.
Make a note not to overdo it, though, and don’t try to make people paranoid. You don’t want to come off as a bully or scare people into reacting.
Your message needs to be clear and concise, and you need to show that you understand and acknowledge the pain they are experiencing. Assure them that, with you, they’ll find a simple, effective solution that will help them overcome the situation.
Let’s take a look at the ATH Sport website. This sports nutrition brand’s web copy is simple and straightforward, and it gets the job done. By making customers aware of their protein intake, they’re an excellent example of addressing a relatable pain point without buzzwords and fluff.
Make Measurable Claims
Making measurable claims in your web copy can be significant in establishing your brand as an authoritative figure in its field. When making claims, including specific figures, statistics, and research adds credibility and helps prospects understand the benefits of your product or service.
Creating web copy that includes valuable stats and research will help you build trust and loyalty with potential customers. By providing specific, quantitative evidence of the benefits of your product or service, you can demonstrate the value it provides and differentiate yourself from top competitors. A fact-supported copy can go a long way in informing prospects of the impact you may have on their lives, thus multiplying the chances of a sale.
This is especially important for brands operating in the B2B landscape. Prospects need to understand how your services will tangibly affect their business, and vague promises will not carry the same weight.
In the following example, we can examine the Hootsuite homepage. They clearly showcase figures supported by research, stating that over 25 million people use their services. They emphasize that they are helping small business owners as well as large organizations save time and grow their businesses.
That way, this social media management and marketing tool demonstrates the need to make measurable claims that will assist you in reinforcing relationships and increasing engagement for your brand.
Address Conversion Obstacles Clearly (and Concisely)
Customers always come from a point of concern. To clear obstacles in conversion and increase sales, you need to be clear and concise in addressing your customers’ concerns.
To achieve this, it’s essential to provide quick answers to common questions and address any potential pain points or objections your customers may have. Additionally, providing guarantees and assurances can help you build trust and reduce customer reluctance to convert.
Addressing conversion obstacles can be quite easy by including a frequently asked questions section on your website that provides quick and concise answers to common customer concerns. You can also offer a money-back guarantee to provide customers with some peace of mind and show that you vouch for the product or service you’re providing.
Customers want to know exactly what they are getting for their money, so it’s important to clearly communicate the features, benefits, and value of what you’re selling. Providing a comprehensive but brief understanding of how a product or service works can help overcome objections and increase conversion rates.
ShopSolarKits are clearly experts at clearing out the obstacles to conversion. This solar power supplier does what we’ve talked about in their header by informing visitors of the biggest benefits they’ll enjoy when using their product. They state that they offer:
- lifetime customer support
- the best and lowest online prices
- fast and safe shipping
- 100% guaranteed satisfaction
To summarize, addressing conversion obstacles is a crucial aspect of selling your product or service. You need to identify and mitigate your customer’s concerns by stating only the most important information, providing quick answers to common questions, and offering guarantees to ensure your customers are motivated to engage further.
Find the Right Balance Between Product Detail and Brevity
Finding the right balance between product detail and brevity in copywriting bears great significance in creating effective web copy that engages and informs potential customers.
Your homepage is often a customer’s first impression of your brand, so you need to make it clear, concise, and easy to understand. Providing too much information can result in a poor user experience. However, you also shouldn’t be too vague about what your product or service does. You need to provide enough detail to help customers understand the benefits of your product and how it can meet their needs. That is important regarding building trust and encouraging conversions.
On the one hand, it’s important to provide enough detail about the features and benefits of the product or service you provide — to help customers understand what it does and how it can solve their problems. On the other hand, info-dumping on a large scale can lead to confusion, contribute to crippling engagement, and overwhelm visitors. And that can easily lead to losing prospects.
To find the perfect balance, you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you’re thinking of buying something, you want to know about that product/service’s features, benefits, and how it can make your life easier. Start there, provide enough detail to clear the air, but always keep in mind not to overpopulate your copy with too much unnecessary information, because that can do more harm than good.
As a great example, we’ll turn our attention to the Dropbox homepage. The famous cloud storage platform boasts short but engaging copy on the process of using their service and how everything works. It’s brief, but it effectively communicates the core value of the product/service they offer and provides a clear understanding of how it works. This makes it more likely that visitors will turn into customers.
Differentiate Your Brand with Humor
In today’s crowded market, it can be very difficult for brands to stand out and make a lasting impression on their target audience. One effective way that can help you differentiate your brand is to incorporate a friendly voice and humor in your copy.
Humor can be a powerful tool that can help in humanizing your brand and make you more relatable to your prospects. When customers feel a connection to your brand, it’s more likely they’ll engage with your content and remember your message.
It’s always helpful to set a friendly and humorous tone, a well-placed joke, or a witty remark in your copy. It can make your brand more memorable and definitely help in increasing the chances that people will share it and recommend it to their friends. Humor is a great driver when establishing a connection with your audience, so it can help you get your point across much easier.
Incorporating humor into your web copy can also help to break down the barrier between you and your customers. You can create a more relaxed and inviting atmosphere and attract more people. It makes your brand more approachable, easier for customers to engage with, and more comfortable for making a purchase. Humor is great for building stronger relationships with your customers and helps your brand stand out.
With all that being said, make sure to leverage it well. Going over the top can have a negative impact. Humor in web copy is like sweets — they taste great, but eating too much can make you sick. By striking the right balance and always maintaining a professional attitude, you can make your copy memorable, relatable, and engaging.
SomniFix is a great example of this marketing tactic. This sleeping aid brand strikes a good balance between funny and serious, which is necessary since their product is technically in the medical niche. But by not being overly sterile and not taking themselves too seriously, they are certain to stand out from their competitors.
Focus on Your Audience, Not Your Brand
Although your ultimate goal is selling your product or service, when it comes to web copywriting, your main focus should be your audience.
It’s simple: the reason your business exists is because of your audience. Your customers are the ones that, at the end of the day, determine the success or failure of your business. So, when writing your copy, you need to consider your audience’s wants and needs. You want to make the writing relatable to the benefits they’ll receive from using your product or service.
Don’t talk about how great your product is, how it’s better than your competitor’s, and so on. Instead, talk about what you and your product can bring to your audience and how it can benefit them. Curate a message that will communicate the value you can bring to the table.
Instead of just listing countless features of your product or service, highlight the specific benefits these features will bring to your customers. How will they make their lives easier, solve a problem they have, or save them time and money?
Everything on your homepage needs to somehow relate to benefits for the audience. Talk to them. Address their pain points even when you’re talking about yourself, and make sure all of your web elements communicate your customer-focused benefits.
Check out the Anytime Baseball Supply homepage as an excellent example of putting your audience first. This baseball gear and apparel brand tells a very compelling story about its values under the “Why Anytime Baseball Supply?” section. This could easily have been overdone with a lengthy, self-indulgent rant about what makes them great. But what they do right here is serve copy that is straight to the point. The focus always shifts to why these values are great for the customer.
Let Your Customers Write Copy for You
Testimonials and customer reviews are one of the most influential forms of marketing, so incorporating these tools into your copy is a powerful way to ensure your audience continues engaging with your brand.
By curating well-written and compelling testimonials from your satisfied customers, you can highlight the key benefits and the value that your product or service provides. This is a great way to reinforce your brand’s message and position your business as a trusted and reliable solution for your potential customers.
Apart from showcasing your product or service and establishing trust with your customers, testimonials can serve as a source for your web copy’s narrative. You can pore over them to search for common words or phrases they used, which pain points were mostly mentioned, and their overall experience with your product or service. Then, you can use all of that information and write web copy that’s relatable, specific, and indelible.
By letting your customers write copy for you, you can create a gripping and authentic narrative that will help drive conversions, boost engagement, and improve your overall customer experience.
Here’s an example where Mannequin Mall, an online mannequin retailer, incorporates some great customer reviews into its home page. They choose the reviews that point out a wide variety of their best values and features.
Highlight What Makes You Different
Differentiating your brand from your competitors is something you need to do clearly and early in the visitor’s time on your site.
Many of your first-time visitors will bounce from your site. In fact, it usually takes up to 8 “touches” with a lead before they become a customer. So it’s fair to assume that many people who may become future customers won’t interact with the majority of the content and copy on your site.
Given that you have such a limited time to make an impression, you need to ask yourself what the most important message is that you want to convey. These messages might differ considerably from brand to brand and product to product, but one that should remain a constant is “what sets this brand apart from the other similar offerings on the market right now”.
What does this mean from a copywriting perspective? It means that your value proposition needs to contain at least one descriptive term that accurately describes an aspect of your product or service that’s sufficiently unique in your industry.
Common differentiators include cost, trustworthiness, quality, customer service, and a commitment to an ethical or sustainable supply chain.
Let’s take a look at an example of a brand that manages to elegantly convey two critical differentiators in the space of a single sentence.
The Vivion value proposition promises their visitors that their products are “safe” and “ethically sourced”. Regardless of where these claims feature on a potential customer’s list of priorities, at the very least they’ll set the brand apart from other suppliers as the person hops from one site to another in search of the ideal product.
Bear this in mind when writing copy for your value proposition. Descriptors are incredibly important not only because they’re meant to make your product attractive, but they’re also critical to make your brand stand out in a potentially crowded field.
Final Thoughts
Writing compelling web copy is a vital part of launching your brand into success, so paying attention to how you curate it is something you don’t want to leave out.
In this article, we covered eight proven strategies of web copywriting that will help you boost engagement and skyrocket conversion rates.
We talked about many different tips and tricks, so depending on your business, we advise you to take it one step at a time. Implementing everything all at once doesn’t always result in the desired outcome. Baby steps all the way!