How to write quality, engaging and varied copy about tea towels
6 Techniques for Writing About Challenging Products
To begin with I’m going to have to admit that I can’t really answer this question. But I do at least claim some experience in attempting to it.
For the last three years I’ve been regularly writing product descriptions for the website Heart to Home in an effort to achieve three main goals:
- Improving search engine positioning
- Converting visitors into buyers
- Establishing the brand values
All of which is just internet business jargon for saying we’re trying to make the website good and somehow set ourselves apart from the many others out there who are doing similar things.
With Great Towels Comes Great Responsibility
To a very large extent, although I am a mere hired hand, I’ve personally been the voice of the company since the autumn of 2011, which is of course a great honour and responsibility.
It’s an honour because I’m effectively controlling the company’s public image and it’s very flattering that the lovely owners, Margaret and Sandra, would trust me to do so. And it’s a responsibility both to them - to live up to their trust - as well as to the customers, because I want my product descriptions to be as accurate and helpful as possible as well as creative and interesting.
Same Difference
That’s all well and good when I’m faced with something unique. But at any given time there are more than 30 different tea towels on the Heart to Home website and whilst of course they all have different designs, they are the same in most other ways — they’re all selected for quality, they’re all roughly the same size and they’re almost all made from 100% cotton, although a few manufacturers still make kitchen linens that really are made from linen and I’ve obtained some mileage by explaining the difference between cotton and linen in my product descriptions as well as a few titbits about the history of linen — did you know, it was used to make the bandages for Egyptian mummies? A fun fact for you.
In some cases, the designs don’t even differ all that greatly. The work of Sophie Allport, for instance, all tends to be quite minimalistic and uses muted tones. You’ll find charming little painted animals — say a row of chickens or Labradors — set on a tasteful, neutral background, which I’ll describe as blue merle or steel blue. They’re different, yes, but not so different that I’m overflowing with inspiration.
The biggest problem with writing unique content is when you have a range of products all made from the same fabric. So I might begin feeling quite inspired as I write about a Labrador tea towel and that inspiration gets gradually diluted as I work my way through the Labrador tea cosy, Labrador oven gloves, Labrador Aga cover and so on.
The Pursuit of the Unique
Achieving good search engine optimisation means writing copy that’s unique as much as possible. Repeating the product dimensions and washing instructions already published on the manufacturer’s website just won’t do. If there are 10, 20 or a 1,000 other websites all doing the same, why would Google bother to rank your page above any other? Especially if you’re competing against the likes of John Lewis, Not on the High Street, Amazon and Argos, whose websites have many thousands of pages and huge SEO collateral in terms of longevity, traffic, inbound links and low bounce rates. Sorry, I lapsed into more internet business jargon there —let’s move on.
Heart to Home recently started selling a Chickens Metal Biscuit Tin and that gave me something to sink my teeth into. They’d never stocked any storage tins before, so I did some Googling and started learning about the process of galvanisation. It’s quite interesting - in a Discovery Channel sort of way — and so it legitimately makes the website informative as well as unique.
Writing the Brand
The job of writing copy for tea towel descriptions becomes a pursuit of that same sense of uniqueness, even when commenting on something that is far from unique. And to add to the difficulty, the enemy of uniqueness in copywriting is, to some extent, the definition of the brand you’re writing about.
It’s important that our customers leave the site feeling like it was a special, but that means, ideally, every sentence of every product description ought to have a flavour of the brand, to make sure people understand that Heart to Home does things differently.
I could sum up Heart to Home as:
“A collection of quality, hard-wearing kitchen and dining room linens and accessories made by British designers and hand-picked for their style, originality and sense of humour”.
Or, to be a bit more pithy:
“Lovely things that are a joy to own”.
I think it’s vitally important that every product description contributes to helping the customer understand those values. After all, the product description might be the first and only time they read anything on the website, so it’s my best chance to get through to them. I want you to leave the site with a sense of belonging, thinking: “That site was made for people like me”.
But that rule means I have to write in a certain way. Having identified my audience, I have to communicate with them in their language and assuming a predisposition to some traditional values: an understanding of British culture, a love of the countryside, a sense that you get what you pay for and a tendency away from the vulgar and disposable. It doesn’t by any means imply an abhorrence for all things modern and newfangled — they are quite likely to be browsing on an iPad, after all. But we can safely assume that they will have similar tastes to the proprietors, Sandra and Margaret, who would not sell anything unless it met their own high standards.
Six Techniques for Writing About Tea Towels
So, in an effort to actually answer the question posed at the top of this page, these are six of the creative techniques I’ve used to come up with copy for very similar products. But I’m going to need more as time goes on - the more tea towels you have to write about, the harder it gets to be fun and informative without repeating yourself or diverting from the appropriate style.
- Be Practical
Don’t think of the product as just an item in a virtual catalogue. Think about how people might really use it in their own homes. I wonder to myself what sort of person would purchase this thing. How will it complement other objects or the décor in their kitchen or dining room? Will they see it every day and use it over and over for years to come or perhaps keep it aside for a special and meaningful occasion?
2. Read All About It
Research is time consuming but always leads you to something you can write about. Heart to Home has lots of products which feature chickens in the design. I didn’t know much about chickens when I started, but I’ve learned a lot. When you’ve already written three pieces of prose about the same fabric formed into different kitchen accessories and you’ve still got two more to go, it doesn’t hurt to throw in a few fun facts.
3. Go Into Detail
Photography is extremely important on a shopping website but it doesn’t hurt to spell things out in words of one syllable, just in case people don’t notice useful things in the image that are authentic selling points. So if the tea towel has a handy little loop to make it easy to hang it up, there’s nothing wrong with saying so. The trick is to find 50 different ways to rephrase that sentence.
4. Lateral Thinking
Take a step to the side. When stuck writing about mugs, try thinking about coffee — its history, its colour, its role in different cultures and its use in different recipes. Or find a quotation about the importance of tea to the British way of life. On a more mind-bending note, I have in the past counted the number of cartoon sheep on a tea towel and imagined that the four sides of the tea towel are the boundaries of a paddock. When writing about the Chickens tea towel, I pondered on why the chickens might really be lined up with such military precision, imagining that it might in fact be chicken army on parade.
5. A Bit of Fun
I gave the name Ferdinand to a colourful cartoon dachshund on an apron made by Ulster Weavers and turned him into a character. And I managed to deliver some brand values along with the description by signing off with: “unlike a regular dachshund, this one goes in the washing machine and comes out good as new”.
6. Flights of Fancy
If all else fails, I paint a romantic picture in my mind and put myself into it along with the product I’m writing about. For a mug, I’ve imagined myself in a country cottage in winter, huddled by an open fire and warming my hands on a steaming mug of hot chocolate. For a table cloth I conjure up a family picnic on a beautiful summer day surrounded by butterflies and flowers in bloom. I don’t usually drink hot chocolate and I can’t remember the last time I had a picnic, but that’s not really the point. This isn’t about reality, it’s about an aspiration or an ideal.
