The copywriting trap most businesses fall into
Is your business getting clicks but shedding leads? Here’s what you’re doing wrong.
When was the last time you bought something you needed at IKEA?
This isn’t a trick question. Think back to your last trip. Picture the vista of kitchen plenty stretching across the gleaming brushed cement floors as you entered the basement. Like Noah’s ark, but prettier, more varied, and all of it cheap.
Calming, right? So many banners, shelves and buckets of pretty, affordable things?
Actually, you probably weren’t feeling calm at all. If you’re like the rest of us, you were feeling restless and disoriented, your eyes darting here and there, from gorgeous color to holdable shape and back again. Picking up, putting down. Walking somewhere else, walking back. You could use this, right? Right? Right? Right?
In the end, you didn’t buy anything you needed. But don’t worry, that wasn’t the point. IKEA doesn’t know what you need (besides a fuzzy idea of a house that looks nicer than what you already have). You bought plenty of little things you didn’t need though, including those funky summer napkins on sale for €1 on the stairs on your way down.
Ok, now take a deep breath.
This is not how copywriting works.
Your ad, email or website isn’t an IKEA showroom. If you bombard your audience with information, expecting them to piece together a message or click on something just because they’re there, they aren’t going to walk away with a bag of napkins and come back when you’ve got something that better fits their needs. They’re going to browse their way to another business that communicates better, and do their shopping there.
Panicking now? Wondering if your brand copy actually reads like an IKEA basement? Chances are, if you didn’t work with a professional copywriter, it does.
Writing good copy is a specialized craft that requires as much technical skill as designing a good website. To do it right, copywriters need to be expert communicators, professional wordsmiths, and they have to know a lot about how people make decisions on the web. The very best can tell a compelling story. Can you?
And, don’t forget, to make your business stand out, you don’t need good copy, you need dazzling copy. (There are over a billion websites competing for our attention and over 10 million businesses on Facebook.)
Our advice? Don’t fall into this trap. Bite the bullet and hire copywriters. Shutting off your Google ads for a few months isn’t going to kill your business. Communicating unprofessionally at any stage of the marketing funnel can.
If you want to try and assess your own brand communication first, that’s a great idea, too. Start by seeing if you’ve figured out these three copywriting pillars for your business.
1. A clear value proposition
They say figuring out what you want to do in life is tough. Figuring out exactly what your business does better than anyone else is tougher.
It can take weeks of false starts and SWOT lists. It can be pain, pure pain. You might never get there by yourself, and just settle for the fact that, hey, I’m a dentist. Here are my prices, here are my services.
That would be a mistake. Because not only is it possible to get your value proposition right, it’s vital for your company.
Articulating your value proposition, or core message, is the starting point of all your brand communication. If you haven’t done it, you’re not fully a business. At least not a business anyone will listen to or take seriously.
2. A brand voice
Do you know Guy Fieri, the American celebrity chef and self-appointed “Mayor of Flavortown”? Guy has his own outsize personality. If you roll with the Mayor of Flavortown, you’re going to have big, loud, finger-licking, cholesterol-laden, triple-fried fun.
Now imagine a wellness website like, say, Ritual with a voice like Guy Fieri. You see where this is going. But it’s a point worth making because it’s a trap any business can fall into: writing in the wrong voice will alienate readers.
Can I tell you an ever worse trap to fall into? Not having any voice at all. Many, many companies that handle their own copy end up in the latter camp. Not because they’re not passionate about what they do, but because they simply don’t have the right skills to write voices. (Not their fault. Remember, it’s tough, specialized work). And also because they may not have considered our third and final element of solid company copy: target audience.
3. A target audience
The other day I was telling my wife about an article I was writing for a client. It was about VPNs. She said, “What?” I said, “Virtual private networks.” Then I started to tell her about private DNS servers and how they kept our data out of the clutches of ISPs.
The look on her face this time told me everything. I was talking to the wrong audience. If I wanted to actually communicate with the audience before me, I’d have to cut out the industry jargon and do a lot more unpacking. Same points, different way of communicating them.
It doesn’t matter what you do better than anyone else or how you say it, if you don’t know who you’re talking to, you’re going to be drawing a lot of confused looks. In our business — digital marketing — confused looks translate directly into bounces and no new business.
The take-away
I get as giddy as anyone else when I’m in IKEA. In that sense, IKEA has a great business model — they get us to spend — but their showrooms are still sensory blitzkriegs that throw handfuls of styles, colors and textures at the wall and hope one will “connect.” IKEA isn’t Art Deco or Bauhaus or Mid-Century Modern or even Scandinavian. It’s anything that catches our eye.
Good writing works the opposite way. It needs to know precisely what it’s communicating, and it has to communicate that in a consistent style wherever it appears to a specific group (or groups) of listeners. Hitting all three targets is a tricky task for many businesses, no matter what their size, simply because the specialized skills required to do it right are just that: specialized skills.
If you want to try tackling your brand copy on your own, give it a shot. Just make sure you’ve articulated your value proposition, brand voice and target audience before you start writing. If you run into any problems along the way, and want a professional hand, stand-out writing is only an email away.
