Six tips to improve your website copy and help generate leads and sales

six tips to improve your website copy and help generate leads and sales

six tips to improve your website copy and help generate leads and sales

Words can go a long way towards convincing someone to become a customer, or even put them off.

Many of us research something online before buying it and if we don’t read what we want to read, we’ll look elsewhere.

Good website copy which focuses on how you and your products or services can solve a problem for your customer can help your website generate leads and sales.

Here are six tips to help you improve your websites copy.

 

What’s in it for them?

Too many websites make the mistake of making their copy all about them and not about how they can help their clients or customers.

When you’re writing your websites content you should be thinking about the benefits you can provide your customers with and make sure that’s the main focus of your copy, rather than how wonderful your business is.

 

Keep it succinct

Everyone’s busy and we don’t always have time to read pages upon pages of copy, so it’s important to write succinct copy and remove any unnecessary or uninteresting parts.

As well as keeping it succinct you need to keep it jargon free to avoid confusing visitors.

Don’t be surprised if it takes you much longer to write succinct copy, it’s an issue that’s plagued plenty of writers including experienced ones.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain

 

Formatting

Following the above point, most people skim read copy rather than reading every single word.

While it might frustrate you to know people aren’t reading every single word of the copy you spent hours crafting, there are a few things you can do to make it easier for them to skim.

–         Keep paragraphs short.

–         Break the page up using sub-headers.

–         Use bullet points.

–         Make sure the font, size and colour of the text is easy to read and shows up against your background.

 

Tone of voice

When writing copy make sure it aligns with the tone of voice used on any product packaging, your social media and any marketing materials such as leaflets, brochures and emails.

 

Calls to action

Does your website tell your visitors what you want them to do next? Does it tell them to take a look at your offers, download your brochure or whatever it is you want them to do?

Calls to action are a must and need to be succinct, clear and stand out on the page to help guide visitors through your website and hopefully down the sales funnel.

 

Search engine optimisation

We left this point until last because it’s important to remember that you shouldn’t be writing for search engines. They’re very useful but you should be writing with your audience in mind first.

Search engines are becoming smarter, allowing people to search using natural language and still find high quality relevant results.

If you write your copy with your target audience in mind it’s likely you will naturally include plenty of keywords and keyphrases that they would use when searching.

Once you’ve written your copy, read it through and look at whether any additional keywords can be added in.

Don’t be tempted to ram your copy with keywords and phrases because it won’t read right and search engines may decide to punish your website for ‘keyword stuffing’.

 

Writing great copy, whether it’s for your website or a leaflet, takes time but if it impresses visitors and turns them into leads, sales or even loyal customers it’s worth it.

 

If your website isn’t providing you with leads or sales get in touch with us to find what we can do to help your website benefit your business. Call us on 01543 387 047 or fill in our contact form.

If you want to read more from our website series of blogs, just click here to see what other resources are available.

Why small businesses need marketing

Why small businesses need marketing

Why small businesses need marketing

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes that marketing is the key to a businesses success and we’re inclined to agree!

Speaking at the AppsWorld 2013 conference he said that marketing is the most important thing.

‘Marketing is the most important thing. It’s a lot easier to think of an app and write it than to figure out a way to convince people to buy it. It’s very important to get good publicity in the right places because the right blogs can reach a million people in one shot.’ Wozniak said.

For some businesses word of mouth is enough to keep them gaining new customers and making a profit, but for many others this alone isn’t enough. While word of mouth is technically marketing, it doesn’t require much effort from the business aside from providing a great service or product.

Most businesses need a clear plan and strategy to help them reach their target audience and reach their goals, whether it’s to gain new customers, make x amount of sales, make more profit than last year, beat their competition or something else.

 

Here are three key reasons your business needs marketing.

Identify your target audience & improve products / services.

Perhaps the most important reason you need marketing is so you can identify who your target audience are, what they need or want and what their pain points are.

Once you know all of the above you will be able to target your marketing messages effectively and perhaps even improve your products or services to ensure you’re meeting their demand.

 

Communication and exposure

Without marketing your business has no way to communicate with your target audience and tell them why your product or service can help them and why they should buy it.

A good marketing strategy will help you get your brand in front of your target audience and encourage them act on your marketing messages and move down the sales funnel.

 

Differentiate your business

A good marketing strategy will position your business effectively within your sector to help you grow. It should also differentiate you from your competition to make you stand out and tell customer why they should choose you and not your competition.

If your current marketing efforts aren’t generating sales or leads or even reaching the right audience, get in touch with us to find out how we can benefit your business.

Call us on 01543 387 047 or fill in our online contact form.