Copywriting: How the Right Words Can Make You More Money
The importance of effective copywriting is too often overlooked by business owners who are focused on other things. It makes sense that as a business owner you may have other things on your mind, but the fact is that in today’s world creating high-quality content and persuasive copy is essential if you want to engage your target audience and stay competitive in the marketplace. In this article, we’ll go over what exactly copywriting is, why it’s important, and how it can help your business make more money.
What is Copywriting?
Copywriting is basically any sort of writing that you do in order to market your business and drive sales. A copywriter is a professional writer who creates marketing content designed to get people to take action and purchase a product or service. They are skilled at crafting messages that are entertaining, clear, informative, and fit with the tone of a brand.
Copywriters are an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Content marketing is a strategy where companies create content — like videos and blogs — that doesn’t necessarily directly advertise their products, but instead provides value to their target audience and indirectly stimulates interest in whatever it is that the company offers. Take, for example, Intuit ProSeries, which integrates explainer videos on its website to help accountants use the ProSeries software with ease.
More and more organizations are now devoting their time and energy to coming up with an effective content marketing strategy. In fact, according to a survey conducted last year of professional marketers from around the world, 91% of respondents reported that they were using content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. Content marketing has become so popular because it’s less costly than traditional marketing tactics and, if done right, can produce astonishing results.
Copywriters play into a content marketing strategy by creating blog posts, social media posts, guides, articles, landing pages, website content, and more. Copywriters working in digital marketing usually possess knowledge about search engine optimization (SEO) strategies as well. This means that they’ll consider what the search engine algorithm looks for in a webpage or piece of content, and do research to find the terms and keywords that will make the content they create appear higher up in search engine results.
How Can Copywriting Help Your Business?
There are a variety of ways in which a copywriter can help your business, increase customer engagement, and boost sales. Let’s take a deeper look at how well-crafted copy can prove to be an asset for your business.
Create engaging content
When you create engaging, high-quality content, you provide value to current and potential customers alike. This content could take the form of the text on your website, blog posts, product packaging, and more. When considering your content marketing strategy, your goal should be to create content that is relevant to the needs or interests of your target audience.
For example, the company ShareAble for Hires offers background checks, credit checks, and identity check services to employers who are looking to do pre-employment screenings of potential new hires. One of the posts on their blog is titled “How to Conduct a Phone Interview (Plus Questions to Ask Potential Employees)”. The article goes over the benefits of phone interviews, the best practices for conducting one, questions to ask, things to watch out for, and other aspects of the phone interview process. When you take into account that the target audience for this company is business owners and employers, you can see how this blog post is providing relevant, informative content that could potentially convert its readers into paying customers.
You should always be fairly subtle about promoting yourself in the article, though, as you don’t want it to read like an advertisement. The most important part is that the article is informative and solves the reader’s problem; maybe they’ll find the article so useful that they’ll share it with friends, which will direct more traffic to your website; or maybe after they’re finished reading the article they’ll take a look at your website or explore other articles posted on your blog.
A professional copywriter should be able to craft pieces with your target audience in mind in order to create content that’s appealing to them and relevant to their needs. And when you create relevant, engaging content, you can draw in more customers and potentially increase sales.
Connect with customers
By creating content that connects with your target audience, you’ll be able to cultivate a loyal customer base, build trust, and engage with people on an emotional level. In some cases, your content may be able to demonstrate the values and beliefs of your company or pull back the curtain a bit, humanize yourself, and show people that you’re more than just a company trying to sell them something.
Social media is a great place for brands to connect with customers and build a relationship. Creating social media posts and commenting on the posts of others can be an effective way of directly interacting with your customers and target audience. Clever social media content can often dramatically boost engagement with your brand and, in turn, increase sales.
If you want an example of clever social media marketing, look at the Twitter account of the fast-food chain Wendy’s. The funny, irreverent tone they use on their Twitter page generates attention for their brand and encourages people to interact with them.
As you can see, this tweet received close to a million favorites and was retweeted over 150,000 times! This tweet got Wendy’s a huge amount of engagement and visibility, and all they had to do was make a lighthearted joke.
Increase online visibility
Copy that’s written with SEO principles in mind can help increase the visibility of your business online. Most professional copywriters should know at least a little bit about SEO and how to create content that has a better chance of ranking highly in search engines. They can optimize the text on your website, create blogs and other pieces of written content for you, and do keyword research to find out which particular words will make a piece rank higher with search engines.
When your website ranks highly in search results, it’s a massive competitive advantage. Ranking higher in the search results means that you’ll be getting in front of the exact people who are seeking out your products or services online.
You could potentially lose out on a lot of potential business if you get buried in the search results — because how often do you look up something online and click on page after page in the search results to find what you’re looking for? Probably not very often because, in most cases, the majority of people just click whatever pops up on the first page. That’s why SEO is incredibly important so that you can be found by people who are looking for what you have to offer.
You don’t need to be the most eloquent writer in the world in order to be a good copywriter. With a grasp on the basic principles of copywriting, you could potentially do it yourself. That being said, writing can be time-consuming and, if it’s not your strong suit or you have more pressing priorities, then it might be a good idea to hire a full-time professional copywriter or a freelancer to help you out.
Samantha Rupp
Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and is the managing editor for 365businesstips.com. She lives in San Diego, California, and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and traveling.
