Tag Archive for: website content

How to Improve Your Website Copy

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High quality website copy is one of the most effective ways to improve user experience, sell your company and drive more conversions online. If you can create copy that’s engaging and makes you stand out from competitors, you’ll likely see success. 

Here are 5 simple tips to help you improve your website copy. 

1. Utilize the Voice of the Customer

Voice of the Customer is a way to describe your customer’s experiences with and expectations for your products or services in their own language. When trying to persuade your customers, it’s extremely effective to utilize VOC. This focuses on consumers’ needs and wants and prioritizes them into a hierarchical structure of importance and satisfaction. 

You can find examples of your customers’ language in a variety of ways, but reading reviews or conducting surveys are two simple tactics. These provide the consumer with ample opportunity to express problems and experiences in their own words. You can then identify common pain points, wants and needs of your consumers, which will allow you to craft your copy to perfectly solve those issues. This ultimately helps to improve your website copy by showing visitors you understand them and their problems, as well as provide a proper solution. 

2. Conduct A/B Tests 

You will never truly know what elements perform best if you don’t test different variations. While it’s probably not necessary to test every element of your website copy, you might consider testing: 

  • Different FAQs 
  • Statement vs questions in headlines 
  • Short vs long form copy 
  • Point of view (first person vs third person)

To determine which copy performs best, you have to present users with an ask as well. This could be a download, sign up, subscribe, etc. If you don’t have a true call to action, it will be harder to determine which variant actually resonates better with potential customers. 

3. Write from the User’s Perspective 

Different from the voice of the customer, user intent refers to what a given person intends to do when they reach your site. Sometimes this may lead to a clearly defined action, such as making a purchase, but sometimes it may not. While underlying problems users are looking to solve are likely very different, the reasons people visit a website are usually similar. Users are either looking to: 

  • Learn about the your industry 
  • Find out about your services 
  • Compare products, services or prices 
  • To make an actual purchase 

When writing your copy, think from the users’ perspective and ask these 4 crucial questions: 

  1. Is it obvious to see what this company’s product or service is? 
  2. Are the benefits clear? 
  3. Is this knowledge necessary? 
  4. Does every sentence of this copy provide useful information about your products, services or give insight on what you do?

Putting yourself in the shoes of the average consumer and not an industry expert can be difficult. Which is why it can be helpful to also conduct qualitative market research and ask people who are unfamiliar with your business to use your website and provide feedback. The bottom line is that your website caters to what customers want and not what you want.

4. Be Clear and Concise 

When it comes to searching for things online, no one wants to have to work to figure out what you’re offering them or to find information on your product or service. Treat your website copy as if it were the packaging of your product and explain exactly how the product/service would solve a consumer’s problem. 

5. Include Data 

Statistics, quotes from industry experts and original data can be extremely effective in strengthening additional points you’ve made in your website copy. Using third-party data is one of the most effective ways to make your brand more trustworthy and dependable. 

Final Thoughts 

Creating successful website copy isn’t easy, but there are a variety of ways you can work to improve it. By making minor adjustments to how you view and approach the process can provide your target audience with an overall better experience, which ultimately benefits you. 

More from Onimod Global 

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Audience Context: Why It Matters

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Your content is most likely catered to audience personas, as it should be. All marketers rely on an outlined demographic of the audience you have targeted as potential customers. However, there is no way for a persona to account for your audience context – what is a real person experiencing at the exact moment they see your content?

In a perfect world, 100% of your content would be catered specifically to every potential customer. Thankfully, there are tools we can use to get a better idea of the customer’s headspace to match up with the audience context.

Keyword Planners

Often times keyword planners are used as a crutch to plug in a few key topics and phrases, and overload on content to increase your organic traffic. We advise to rather think of keyword planners as tools to help understand the specific language your readers are using. Focus on the phrases that pose as questions, and answer those questions in your content to give immediate value to your readers.

Google Trends

Once you have your group of keywords and key phrases, enter them into Google Trends to see what else you can learn about people using those search terms. This step will help you to match up your content to fit your audience context. Look into geographic locations, and the time of day, month, or year people access information and searches increase.

Popular Content

Try googling the question you are trying to answer in your content, and see what else is currently out there. Use this to see if you can do a better job explaining the question at hand or fill in missing gaps of information.

 

Now step one is complete. You know what challenges your potential customers are facing. Now for step 2, which is understanding how your customers feel about their challenges and utilize effective emotional writing to strike a chord with this audience.

Show Audience Context, Don’t Tell

The most simple mistake to make when writing emotional content to engage your audience is telling them that you’re doing it. Don’t tell the reader how they feel. Instead, imagine how they would prefer to feel and give them that. Audience context is all about resonating with the reader without exposing your intention.

Resonate, Don’t Exploit

When it comes to audience context, you should evoke, not exploit, emotion in people. It’s quite simple to exploit intense emotions of fear, anger, agitation in our audiences in order to sell. We advise against this strategy and encourage you to instead show the reader you understand their emotions and maybe even share them.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.