5 Essential Copywriting Tips to Move Your Audience to Action
Cut the manipulation out of marketing and guide your audience where they want to be with people-focused copy.
Marketers ruin everything — except when they don’t.
One of the biggest barriers I come up against when I start working with a new client is their aversion to coming across as a stereotypical salesperson to their community.
And I get it.
We’ve all been burned by underhanded marketing tactics, and we don’t want to do the same to the people we’re trying to serve.
But just because marketing can be manipulative doesn’t mean it has to be.
Today, I’m sharing five essential tips for writing manipulation-free copy that puts your audience first.
(Keep reading for a free checklist!)
For impact-driven founders, manipulation-free marketing is one of the foundations of a sustainable business.
And one of the keys to avoiding manipulation in your marketing is to use clear, honest copy that answers this question for your audience:
How can you help them get to where they want to be?
Whether you’ve hired a copywriter, are writing the copy yourself, or using a combination of the two, these five tips are essential to crafting compelling, manipulation-free copy.
Tip #1: Write for the internet, not your high school classroom.
Clear, straightforward copy is one of the easiest ways to avoid manipulation in marketing.
When it comes to online content, most people are not reading word-for-word. In fact, most of the people reading this article won’t read this entire sentence.
With all there is to consume in the digital space, most of us skim headlines and articles, looking for content that is most relevant to us.
So, you have to craft your copy that is easily scannable and clear on its relevance.
This means using…
- Small blocks of text, with paragraphs containing only 1–3 sentences,
- Bullet points or numbered lists,
- Lots of white space, and
- Headlines and bolded lines that guide the reader down the page.
Of course, it’s not all about getting your audience’s attention.
Cute or creative copy may get your audience to pause, but it doesn’t necessarily get them to take the action you want them to take.
That’s why it’s important to be upfront and clear about the value your product or service provides your audience.
Maybe high school did teach us one thing — always have a thesis statement. Just don’t waste your time getting there.
Tip #2: Use accessible language that makes your content easy to consume.
Most Americans read at a 7th or 8th-grade reading level. This could be caused by a number of reasons, including lack of access to education or the presence of a disability that affects reading comprehension.
To get your message across to your audience, you must match your language to what they will easily comprehend.
Even for the college or post-graduate crowd, simpler language means quick comprehension that keeps your audience engaged and moving down the page.
Manipulation-free marketing doesn’t gate-keep or alienate. It treats the customer like a friend with an issue that you’re uniquely qualified to address.
At Realign Consulting, we use the Hemingway App, named for the writer famous for his simple, clear, and direct writing style.
This free app gives your content a readability score based on grade level and suggestions for improving it. And our copywriting checklist includes details about the ideal score depending on the audience.
Tip #3: Write for your audience, not your brand.
If you could sit down to have coffee — or something stronger — with your ideal customer, what would you say?
Would you use up air time making a sales pitch?
Or would you listen to their dreams, challenges, and desires before offering specific help?
Copy that moves an audience to action doesn’t stand on a pedestal and announce a brand’s greatness to the world. It acknowledges what a person needs and offers a path to a solution.
If you want to avoid manipulation in marketing, remember that you’re there to help, not to impress.
Tip #4: Use a checklist to make best practices a habit.
The key to creating a sustainable habit is to do the same thing over and over and over again.
But when you’re busy leading your business, you don’t always have time to remember every detail you’ve learned about writing compelling copy.
I’m a big fan of Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto. His work has influenced my team to create and use various checklists to ensure we are consistent with our standards. My coaching clients probably get tired of hearing me repeat one of my favorite mantras:
“Lack of consistency is a compounding problem.” — Renia Carsillo
To create consistency, my team uses a checklist to review every piece of copy that we put out.
We have found that our copywriting checklist helps us to…
- Be consistent in our brand voice and overall “feel” of our copy,
- Use best practices every time, no matter what, and
- Quickly bring new copywriters up to speed as they adapt to writing for our brand.
Just like veteran and new pilots alike use a checklist every time they take off, we use a checklist to help our copy soar instead of crash.
Tip #5: Run your copy by a fresh set of eyes every time, even if it’s an AI grammar checker.
We’ve all done it.
We write something amazing about our brand, put it out into the digital world — and realize after it’s published that we’ve misspelled or even completely left out a word.
Of course, a mistake in your copy isn’t the end of the world.
But copy that has frequent spelling errors or grammar mistakes can create two issues for your brand:
- Our brains have been trained to see sloppy writing in marketing as a scam. We tend not to trust websites with a lot of grammar and spelling errors. It’s difficult to view the brand as professional and trustworthy — and at its worst, poor writing can just be confusing.
- If a search engine algorithm can’t figure out what your page is about, it won’t rank well in search results. While Google isn’t going to dock you for a split infinitive, excessive grammar and spelling issues could be a problem when it comes to getting your content in front of your audience.
You may not notice little mistakes when you’ve been focused on finding the right words to get your message across. Our brains tend to autocorrect to what we expect to see.
To increase our chances of finding these errors, our editing process is two-fold:
- First, the person who has written the copy runs it through Grammarly. This is another free app that saves valuable time by catching those little mistakes that our exhausted eyes skip right over. It can also give you a fresh perspective on your words that might inspire you to make changes for an even more compelling message.
- Second, someone else on our team reviews the copy using our copywriting checklist. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. Even when a writer knows the checklist backward and forward, they could miss something that a fresher pair of eyes could catch.
Our editing process isn’t about perfection. It’s about giving our copy the best chance at success to be clear, compelling, and manipulation-free.
When marketers and founders resolve to Do Better Digital™, we commit to taking the manipulation out of marketing.
Choosing our words wisely is a good place to start.
Next week, I’ll share some tips about formatting your copy to support your message instead of hiding it.
This week, why not choose one ad, headline, or landing page and ask yourself this question:
Is this copy compelling, accessible, and manipulation-free?
Do you want to learn more about the advantages of a copy-first marketing strategy? Check out my previous post here.
Check out my Complete Guide to a Copy-First Marketing Strategy here.
