Why Online Copywriting Services Are Essential For Your Marketing Success
For any business to continue to exist, it needs customers. In order to become a paying customer, an individual needs to have been persuaded in some way that the product or service is the one they need, that the price is good value, and that the company they are about to do business with is one which is reputable.
That persuasion can take many forms, but in the online arena, the vast majority of it comes from online copywriting. Online copywriting is the words that have been written and often used to create various forms of media, that are designed to compel or persuade the person seeing, reading, or hearing them, to take some kind of action.
In effect, copywriting is what makes every single individual who enters your online marketing and sales funnels move to the next stage of it, and as such it is one of the most important elements of any business’s online marketing strategy.
Copywriting – A Skill That Generates Trillions Of Dollars
Writing of any type is a skill, and for those who master it, the rewards can be enormous…just ask J.K. Rowling. Whilst the writing of novels, plays, poetry, and screenplays can be lucrative for the individual writer, it is copywriting which generates trillions of dollars in sales every year, and has been doing so ever since the first printed advert was written.
Writing sales copy is a skill which is much sought after in the business world, simply because, if a business cannot persuade anyone to buy from them, there is no business. Not only are copywriters highly regarded, but they are also highly paid. They can often be the difference between a business hitting its sales targets and not.
Copywriting Has Many Forms
One simple piece of written sales copy can generate thousands of new customers, and the forms that may take are hugely diverse. Sales copy can appear in word counts from as few as two or three for a slogan to the tens of thousands of words which might appear within a large brochure.
If you think of all the places and mediums where you might see copywriting, it could take you a whole day to list them all. Bear in mind, that we are not just talking about the written word either. Sales copy is used for scripts for audio and video too.
Even if we restrict ourselves to thinking about all the online places where you might find copywriting, there are many to consider, but here are four which are particularly relevant:
- Social Media
- PPC Advertising
- Email Marketing
- Websites
No doubt you can think of many more, but these are likely to be the ones that most local businesses might be looking at in terms of their marketing activities. So, let’s now look at some of these in more detail, and what specific online copywriting services you might need for them.
Social Media Copywriting
Given that many social media platforms consist of contributions that often have no more than half a dozen words, some might think that the services of a copywriter are not needed. In fact, it is for the very reason that you have limitations on word counts, that online copywriters are even more essential.
That is especially true if you want your social media campaigns to be more than just posts for post’s sake, and actually wish them to generate proper leads, and ultimately customers.
The art of persuading someone to do something in as few words as possible is a true skill and one which a copywriter can use to make your social media campaigns successful.
PPC Advertising Copywriting
This is probably where online copywriting comes closest to traditional advertising copy whereby it is the words within an advertisement that create the magic in terms of getting someone to take the next step.
The earliest copywriters and many of those that have followed are seen as pioneers, simply because many of the strategies and techniques they used to write a full-page advertisement in newspapers, are still studied and used as examples of how to write sales copy today.
Why that is the case, is simply due to the fact that human psychology has not changed, and so the process of persuasion, is much the same today, as it was 100 years ago.
The mediums may have changed but when a highly skilled copywriter sits down to write a PPC advertisement, they are calling upon writing skills that have been tried and tested by many others.
The main difference is that most PPC adverts do not have long pages of sales copy, so the art is to write the most persuasive copy, with very few words.
They can also employ something known as A/B testing. This is where two almost identical versions of an advert are written, with the only difference being a specific word or phrase. Each advert is presented an equal number of times, and the one which is the most successful is considered the winner.
However, it doesn’t end there. Each winner is tested further against other adverts in turn so that there is a continuous effort to improve the sales copy.
Copywriting in Email Marketing
if you read many of our other pages you will see that we regard email marketing as one of the most effective online marketing strategies any business can use, be they a huge corporation, or a small, local, one-person operation.
We’ve explained the reasons why we believe they are effective elsewhere, but one important aspect of the email we may not have gone into too much detail on is the importance of how emails are written. Crafting an email that persuades your email subscribers to take action is a huge skill, and it begins before the email is even sent.
The spam folder is where millions of emails end up every day, and whilst many of them, such as those selling blue pills or phishing for personal information certainly should be sent there, yours shouldn’t. That is where the knowledge that online copywriters have in relation to what words and phrases can trigger spam alerts, is vital.
Even if emails get to the inbox, millions of them do not even get opened simply because the subject line is not effective enough at persuading the person seeing it, to open the email. Again, one skill online copywriters have is crafting subject lines that almost force people to open the email, either because it was so compelling or sparked their curiosity.
We now come to the body of the email, and because there are so many different types of email you could send, and even with those types there are differences, it is another area where a skilled copywriter is required.
If you want to promote something, they will know how to write a letter that sells that product, and if you want to survey your subscribers, they will write in a way that ensures you get responses. Even if you merely want to provide some useful advice or updates, they can write an email that delivers the information in the most effective way.
Website Copywriting
It is likely that the hub of your online presence is your website, and as this is often where many prospects interact with your business for the first time, a great first impression is essential. Beyond that, you want your visitors to have a great experience, and if everything else falls into place, they will hopefully become paying customers or clients.
That final piece in the jigsaw can only happen if the written texts or the words displayed or spoken on any media such as infographics or videos, do their job.
For that to happen they all need to be written in certain ways, and the person that is going to know what those ways are will be the online copywriter. One point to note here is that there are many fantastic copywriters who specialise in offline copy such as for magazines and brochures. However, copywriting for websites is somewhat different.
The reason it is different is that even within a single page of a website there are going to be different elements and they may each require copy which is written differently.
For example, your page could have the main text, there could be an embedded video, an opt-in box for collecting email subscribers, and a promotional offer in the sidebar. Each of those individual elements has a different purpose and some look for the visitor to take some kind of action and some do not.
The main text might be to reassure the visitors of your company’s credentials and reputation, so that needs to be written in a certain way. The video might be you talking about a new product, so the words used in that script will seek to spark interest in that.
With the opt-in box, it may only have a couple of lines giving the person a reason to opt-in, and the sidebar promotion might be a limited offer, that is closing soon.
Each requires a different tone of writing in order to be effective and so knowing exactly what to write is what an online copywriter will be able to do for you and your business.