5 Proven Tips for copywriting
An essential part of any type of marketing, copywriting is persuasive writing with the intention of motivating people to take action (usually a purchase). While anyone who has ever written a persuasive essay can declare it an easy task, the reality may differ. As a copywriter, you must convince people to be interested in the product, check out a website, or make a purchase, all of which are things the average person would rather not do because they might feel it is wasting their time. Therefore, copywriting is a skill that must be allowed to grow, so we’ve compiled five tips to elevate your copywriting.
1. Be Clear and Concise
When your part of your job is capturing people’s attention, you don’t want to have long sentences that drag on. Being clear and concise is key to maintaining the reader’s attention. Working in marketing, this is especially true and your audience shouldn’t have to feel that you’re trying to reach a word count quota instead of trying to inform them. Additionally, keep the language you’re using in mind, eloquent vocabulary doesn’t always have a place in what you are writing and could make you potentially lose readers if the words don’t fit the context.
2. Start with a strong hook
If you’ve ever been in a Writing, Reading, or English class your teachers surely drilled in the importance of a good hook. Now years later, it seems they had a point because in copywriting having a strong first sentence is crucial. However, capturing readers with a single sentence can be tricky, which is why shorter sentences are often the first since they have an appeal to potential readers, who don’t want to stick around longer than they have to. Even with this tip, you still have to find what to say for that perfect sentence. This is where your creative juices come in and have the freedom to grab that audience the way you know how.
3. Have a voice with personality
You might be wondering, what does a voice has to do with writing? Everything in fact. When you write you are carefully choosing your vocabulary, tone, structure, and point of view, this creates a unique voice of how everything is being told. Every piece of writing has a voice even if the author didn’t realize it. With this in mind, the voice you create while you write should have personality. You shouldn’t make a voice that you wouldn’t like hearing yourself. The best way to avoid having a dull voice is writing as if you’re writing a character; give them interesting dialogue and imagine what they would say to your audience to get the point you want to make across.
4. Put yourself in the customer's shoes
An interesting tip I don’t hear often used but every copywriter and advertiser should hear, putting yourself in their shoes. You want to sell something to strangers you’ve never met and you generalize them as potential customers when really they’re people like you. If you’ve ever been scrolling on the internet and rolled your eyes at an ad, you were just a (failed) potential customer. Think to yourself, what that ad you have done differently to get your attention and have you purchase whatever they’re selling. Ask yourself these questions and before you know it, you’ll be hitting every mark a potential customer might be wondering.
5. Make the rest interesting
Now that you applied the last four tips, you might be ready to clock out because those were the most important tips to keep in mind, right? You’d be wrong. Aside from writing, you need to add interest to your product in other ways. Once you confirm your writing is solid, now you have to ask, is it enough? Your readers will see chunks of paragraphs, that’s not appealing. Working to make a captivating format could help be what sells it. Using visual aspects like images, colors, varying fonts, paragraph spacing, bulleted/numbered lists, etc. These are ways both big and small to make your work pop.
Those were our five tips to heighten your copywriting skills. We hope both new and experienced copywriters enjoy these techniques. If there are some things we missed that you believe are important to do before marketing or if you agree and want to tell us your experience, let us know on our instagram (@jpramedia_)!! We will see you next time!