What Makes Good Copy?
It’s simpler than you think.
The internet is full of top ten lists, golden rules, even commandments for writing good copy. As an instinctive writer, I have never agreed with heavy-handed, prescriptive instructions for how to write. At the end of the day, the best direction to give for creating effective marketing content is this: good copy has a clear purpose.
Broken into bare essentials, creating good copy requires you to do three things: 1) understand what you’re writing, 2) why you are writing it, and 3), who you are writing it for.
Get these right, and you will generate copy that has a Voice, clear Narrative, and appeals to its Audience.
These elements represent the key factors that influence the way your reader behaves, and of these, the most crucial is 3), know who you are writing for - your audience.
Know Your Audience
Copy is not for the author, it’s for the reader. To write good copy you need to understand your websites’ Buyer Persona, or customer, and appreciate the medium through which you are working – the internet.
The internet is user-orientated, and for your content to thrive in an already busy marketplace, it must be too. Your content should acknowledge why your audience needs what you have, and satisfy that need with a clear Call to Action that directs patrons to your solution. In this way, your copy acts as a calm but powerful tide, guiding your readers on their journey from being a visitor to becoming a conversion.
Make Your Copy User-Centric
People do not engage with things because they want someone else to make money. Your content should answer a question your reader didn’t realise they were asking. To do this, you have to leap from your own perspective to another. Some people are very good at doing this from an operational standpoint – it’s why they require copy in the first place; they identified a gap in the market and developed a capacity to fill it. Manipulating this understanding of your audience into your marketing copy can be a whole other matter.
Building a Buyer Persona
You cannot write user-centric copy if you do not understand your target market with laser-like intensity. As a copywriter for hire, there have been many occasions where I have onboarded a new client and asked them this simple question – who is your customer? – and been met with a vague statement that encompasses an extraordinarily large demographic.
Get to know and understand your client by asking as many questions as you can, to define and refine who your audience is. This is called building a Buyer Persona, and is essentially identifying the behaviours, needs and concerns of your audience. There is a lot said online and in various marketing circles about building Buyer Personas, but in simplest terms, the best way to do this is by researching your customers, identify patterns that arise, and using those patterns to develop a profile.
The best kind of customer research involves analysing what is already working. Leverage your own data on those successful leads within your business by:
Analysing product or service reviews
Reviewing established customer databases to identify trends regarding how customer find your and consume your content
Examining the competition – how do your competitors engage with the same or similar audience?
Searching social media for business mentions
Analysing customer service and sales team feedback on common complaints, issues habits, and positive feedback to determine what makes successful leads
Engaging with existing customers for feedback via surveys, request for product or service review, or schedule personal phone calls.
Don’t have the existing traction just yet? Make the most of form fields on your website, and prompt visitors for extra information to capture specific data – location, occupation, etc. Don’t have the traffic? You may need to re-think your SEO Strategy.
User-Centric Content Gets More Traffic
As businesses and individuals become more savvy to the power of good SEO strategy, Google is also becoming more stringent in applying their own Search Quality Rating Guidelines, which includes a heavier weighting for content that is developed for humans, not traffic. An element of this criteria involves ensuring content is developed for a site’s target audience, and isn’t just farming high value keywords. For example, if a florist started spouting articles about crypto currency, or a defence contractor started pushing a guide on the latest trend diet, Googlebot crawlers would be appropriately suspicious and this content likely be penalised with poor page ranking.
Knowing your audience is not only good business, but will see your content rewarded in search results.
Good Copy Gets Conversions
It may not seem like rocket-science, but it’s easy to make early assumptions on who your customers are and remain led by a false, or poorly formed concept that bleeds into your copy, and subsequently, your conversions (or lack of). Your customers must be able to find you and good copy, along with an SEO strategy, is the trail of breadcrumbs leading to your online marketplace.
The internet is changing, and so is the nature of SEO. Google is not acutely focused on backlinks or keyword density, they care about the user experience, and how well your content fits in with its drive to become a knowledge engine. A powerful example of this strategy being used effectively is Procter and Gamble’s Olay campaign in 2019. Olay developed well-researched, factual information on varying skin conditions that provided concise, helpful answers to users’ queries, offering detailed information with solutions. This content is inherently attuned to the needs of the user, and as result, developed organic brand trust and generated a 100% increase in site conversions.
Don’t let your hardwork get lost in the digital landscape. Make sure your customers can find you by engaging a skilled writer to generate energetic, informative copy that leverages Google Search Quality Ratings, and speaks directly to your audience.
