Text: Keryn Brews. Article from the February/March 2012 issue of Your Business Magazine.
How to grab their attention and keep them reading…
The copy on your website is one way in which you communicate with customers and potential customers. A well-placed image or design element can convey a strong portion of the message, but it is often the copy that directs the user and encourages action.
One brand, one voice
Your online communication should have a unified voice, build credibility and help you to manage your brand identity. You may even want to develop specific digital brand voice guidelines to ensure uniformity. Here you would detail conventions, tone and digital copy considerations that all writers or contributors must adhere to when writing for or on behalf of your brand. This notion of brand tone and personality should follow through to even the smallest of copy considerations.
Consumers must feel as though they’re communicating with one person when interacting with your brand online – whether via your website, social media channels or email newsletters.
People read differently online
People read differently when they’re online. The internet is crammed with interesting content, but there is a lot of rubbish in-between. Savvy users will scan pages first to determine if they’re relevant and then decide whether or not to engage with the content. They will read your beautifully-crafted copy, but only if they can see straight away that it is relevant to them. To make your copy easy to scan:
- Use meaningful headings and sub-headings, optimised with key phrases – this will help guide your readers and assist with your SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts.
- Highlight or bold important benefits or key points to lead the reader’s eye down the page.
- Use bulleted lists to break up the copy.
- Write using the inverted pyramid style – this means placing the most important information up front, then including more detail in the middle and ending off with the least important bits.
- Use paragraphs to break up the copy, with one central point in each paragraph.
- Write concisely and eliminate all the fluff.
The art of mobile writing
When it comes to writing for mobile sites, your copy will be affected by the fact that screen sizes are small, scrolling and navigating on mobile devices can be difficult and takes time, and data is expensive. All of this means that you must whittle down your content and remove any excess words to make it more accessible.
When writing for mobile:
- All the most important information must be included in your first paragraph.
- The most important bits of each paragraph must be included in the first sentence of that paragraph.
- The important bits must be in the first words of these first sentences.
Importantly, writing for mobile does not mean using text or SMS speak. This is often viewed as unprofessional. As always, consider your brand personality, and if SMS speak is not in line with your communication style; then don’t use it.
Optimise, optimise, optimise
Another major difference between digital and traditional copy is that when writing for online, you have to take the search engines into account. Without getting overly technical, you need to optimise your content so that it ranks well on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines scour the web for content using search engine spiders or bots. These digital spiders look for signals of relevance, importance, popularity, trust and authority.
A good ranking on the search engines means people will be able to find your content easily i.e. it will come up on the first page of results when users search using related terms. And there isn’t much point in writing an article if no one is going to benefit from it. Your article should, therefore, contain relevant and well-researched key phrases that your readers will use when searching for content.
For example, if your blog includes a delicious chocolate cake recipe that was passed down from your grandmother, people will probably find it by searching under “chocolate cake recipe”. This is what we call a key phrase.
If you need some help finding good keywords or key phrases, you can use Google AdWords keyword tool: www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You should then use these phrases in your copy and meta data (information that provides context and relevancy information to search engines).
But be careful of overusing key phrases. If your copy is crammed full of them, it may be written off as spam by those digital spiders, and will get a poor search engine ranking as a result.
Remember, you are still writing for people first and foremost. If people don’t find your copy relevant, credible and important; no amount of SEO is going to get you good rankings.
Don’t forget to test and optimise
Once you’ve written your online copy, the digital space also provides an ideal opportunity for you to test it. You can vary copy length, style, headings, calls to action and more to see what your readers like best. Tools like Google’s Website Optimiser (www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) allow users to engage with the various options. By viewing the results, you can gain a great sense of what is working and what isn’t and change elements of your copy to improve its performance.
Digital copy is a powerful item in your online marketing toolbox. It expresses brand tone and personality. It must be beautifully crafted to appeal to online readers and optimised with key phrases to achieve good rankings on search engines. After all, people must find your content to be able to engage with it.
Tips for other online channels
Email newsletter copy should be aimed at customer retention and relationship building. Use well-crafted subject lines to increase the likelihood of your email being opened. Make sure this subject line accurately represents what is inside the newsletter – thereby building your readers’ trust.- When crafting online articles for PR consider the audience, target them appropriately and remember to optimise them with relevant key phrases.
- Microblogging posts such as tweets on Twitter or status updates on Facebook should be short, communicate one point and use the active voice. Digital agency Quirk’s project playground is a great example of this. Read more about it here: http://ow.ly/8s5il #QuirkEd #Givingback!
- When writing for online display adverts, find a need, then offer a solution and remember to use a strong call to action.
Remember that no matter what channel you are writing for, you must always consider your audience, their needs and what you aim to achieve. Now adapt your copy for maximum effect.
Related Content
