Key Takeaways

• Writing persuasive content is a strong selling strategy that most business owners tend to ignore.
• You need to know your audience first and always make sure your content is polished.
• Keep it simple, use stories, focus on benefits and create a sense of urgency in your writing.​

Great persuasive copywriting can make the difference between success and failure in business.

Furthermore, content marketing is also more effective than traditional marketing. It generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, and it costs 62% less.

There is a constant demand for high-quality and effective content that can attract more visitors and convert these visitors into leads and customers. This is the whole purpose of content marketing and copywriting – to help a business grow and increase its revenues.

This is your end goal. Your immediate goal could be to raise brand awareness or improve search engine rankings, but the end goal remains the same through copywriting.

Writing content that persuades a person to do something is difficult. It takes time to hone such skills. As a copywriter, you should communicate meaning and value with your words.

Whether you’re writing a product description, email newsletter or articles to drive organic search traffic to your client’s website, you need to make sure that your content is polished and able to convince your audience.

Here are 6 tips for successful copywriting that will help you increase sales.

1. Keep it simple

Most people today suffer from information overload. We simply don’t have the time to read through every marketing text that we come across within a day. That’s why most people will only skim through your content, if at all.

55% of visitors spend 15 seconds or less reading your content. Therefore, brevity is appreciated in the marketing field. Instead of trying to impress your audience, you should focus on keeping your content simple and easy to read.

Even if it goes against everything you were taught at school.

Using simple and straightforward language makes you seem more trustworthy. It’s a good practice to break up long sentences with full stops. Being succinct and to the point helps get your message across.

It also shows that you value your readers’ time. To make your text easy to read and skim through, you should:

• Use short paragraphs and sentences
• Avoid jargon and favour simple terms
• Utilise headlines and bulleted lists
• Highlight important parts in bold

2. Focus on benefits instead of features

There’s an important difference between describing the features of a product and explaining its benefits. The latter should be your focus.

Benefits resonate with people better than features. After all, your customers want to know how they can benefit from those features. It’s not the features that matter but the end result.

Consumers are increasingly suspicious about offers. This is not without reason, considering the sheer number of promotions we face every day and the number of fake reviews and testimonials are out there.

How do you stand out from the crowd to build trust then?

The best way is to make your offer as risk free as possible. If people are afraid to lose their money, you cannot transform them into customers. Not even effective content can do that.

By offering a risk-free guarantee to convince your risk averse customers, you are addressing your customers’ worries directly and shifting the risk to your business.

3. Analyse your audience

The top 1% of your customers are worth 18 times more than your average customer. These customers want to know that you’re speaking specifically to them.

Try to write in a friendly, conversational manner and tailor your messages to your target audience. This entails that you know who your audiences are and their wants and needs.

Once you have identified your target segments and listed their characteristics, you can create buyer personas. Instead of talking to the masses, you should use these personas to deliver your tailored message to the right audience.

4. Create a sense of urgency

You want to convince people that they need to take action. There needs to be a deadline or expiry date for the offer to encourage people to act now. When people know that the same offer won’t be available later, they’re more likely to act on it.

Your customer has a problem, maybe without even being aware of it, and you’re the one who is offering the solution. Make sure to be direct about what your customers should do and offer an incentive such as a discount or free trial.

5. Use stories to deliver your message

You can catch the attention of your audience by delivering your message in the form of an engaging story. Try to summarise the benefits of your product or service in this compelling story.

What makes your brand unique? Answer this question and use it as a selling point. Build a cohesive brand narrative and make sure that your stories are rooted in the reality of your brand.

6. Polish your content

It’s hard to give a professional impression if your content has plenty of mistakes. It’s even harder to attract visitors and transform them into customers. Therefore, it’s crucial to make sure that your content is always polished and free from grammatical errors. If your content needs editing, you should try the following:

• Grammarly – a proofreading software that you can use for editing your texts. It detects mistakes in spelling, grammar, style, punctuation, and word choice. A detailed explanation is provided for each editing suggestion, which helps you avoid making the same mistake again.
• Handmade Writing – a website that offers a range of writing and editing services tailored to your needs. You just have to fill in the details of your writing or editing assignment, and they will assign a writer for you.
• Hemingway App – an online editor that analyses your content and provides suggestions for how to make it easier to read. It identifies passive voice and other difficult sentence structures that can hinder the readability of your text. You will also receive a readability score for your content.
• WebSpellChecker  – a spell checking software that can edit your content as you type. As an alternative, it can also analyse your content in a separate window so that your original version isn’t changed.

If you want to learn more writing tips, you can check our earlier post about how to make your writing effective.

Content marketing has a key role in attracting more customers and increasing your revenues. We hope that these tips will be helpful to you in your copywriting efforts.