10 Copywriting Tips to Rock Your Digital Marketing

When it comes to boosting your online business, choosing the right combination of digital marketing tactics spells the difference between success and failure. There are many options from which you can choose and you only have so many resources you can dedicate to this marketing effort. You can get a custom website designed for your business, hire SEO services to increase your presence, or utilize social media platforms to reach a bigger audience. Whatever your choice, content marketing is king, so you must create valuable content on a consistent basis if you want to succeed. Today, we’ll share our top 10 copywriting tips to get your content efforts up to snuff.

Using copywriting skills for your clients is another way to ensure that your company is achieving the results you want. To get started with the process, it’s helpful to know exactly what copywriting is and why it’s important.

What is copywriting?

Copywriting is the practice of writing text for some purpose. In digital marketing, copywriting should prompt readers to take the desired action, like purchasing a product. However, copywriting has other purposes, such as writing ad copy, creating blog content, and other activities that support organizational goals.

Copywriting is also used in advertisements, headlines, taglines, as well as online and offline landing pages. Because its main aim is to gather leads and close sales in a business context, it usually follows a certain structure achieved by developing content that appeals to customers and utilizing sales strategies that address their pain points. Any copywriting material should also include a Call To Action (CTA) at the end of its structure to drive visitors to take appropriate action.

If you can strategically develop, refine, and publish content that’s able to build brand recognition and direct your customers to convert and purchase, you increase revenue, growth, and ensure survival.

Why is copywriting important?

Copywriting is good for any business as it provides the following:

• Better representation and understanding for the niche it serves
• Creates and builds better a brand image
• Provides a way to communicate with an audience
• Converts and increases sales
• Attracts new customers through improved search rank as content is a heavily weighted factor in SEO

Copywriting tips to create copy that sells

When you write copy, keep these tips in mind so you can improve your content and grow your brand.

1. Write catchy headlines

One of the most valuable copywriting tips that any writer should consider is you only have a few seconds to catch your audience’s attention. This means that you need to work on your headline so there’s a reason for people to click on your content in search to visit and read more related to that content.

To do this, you can follow the 4 U’s of compelling headline writing: Useful, Urgent, Unique, and Ultra-specific. This will attract your audience to read more of your copy’s contents.

There is advice you can use to create a catchy headline. A great start comes from knowing your audience so you can use language that appeals to them. A headline that promises to fill a knowledge vacuum or that which solves a problem is also useful. For digital marketing purposes, it’s also useful to utilize SEO-optimized headlines and numbers so that search engines display your content higher in search results, resulting in more clicks.

In case you run out of ideas when crafting your headline, various websites offer advice and some even rank your chosen headline to help you improve.

2. Use the power of storytelling

Consumers don’t buy products, they buy solutions and their emotions often guide them toward (or away from) a specific purchase. A great story helps with both tasks by embedding the solution within a narrative consumers feel not just read.

By utilizing the power of storytelling in your copywriting materials, you evoke an emotional response from those who are read your content as well as encourage them to read the entire content. This is an excellent way you can assist your audience in identifying with your product and better understand its meaning.

3. Use facts, statistics, and links

This is a time-tested tip to create copy that sells. By adding relevant facts and statistics to your content, you provide a logical explanation and evidence supporting the wisdom of purchasing your product. You also establish yourself as knowledgable, trustworthy, and as someone interested in your market.

Don’t just throw out stats and facts, however. Support these with links to authoritative sites and use images scraped from these sites (with proper acknowledgment, of course). Making up numbers of presenting your own opinion as factual hurt your marketing efforts as these eventually come to light. Moreover, Google uses your links to authoritative sites as a surrogate for better content and gives your search rank a little bump.

Another value of citing your sources with a link is that it encourages other websites to cite your content and providing a backlink, which also helps your rank in search.

Image courtesy of Host Papa

4. Organize your ideas

Organizing your ideas is a key element of communication. Some folks start with an outline for larger content projects while others tend to wing it (I am what’s called a pantser as I write even 300+pages novels without a clear outline). New concepts and ideas are important for effective copywriting, but you need to know how to explain these concepts in terms that the reader understands, organized so they follow a logical progression that doesn’t confuse rather than communicate. That means working from most important to least important or from beginning to end in a logical way.

To do this, we recommend that you focus on the relevant information and avoid bulking your copies with information that has no real meaning. When asked about length, I always refer to something a former teacher said about text length, “Make it long enough to cover the topic and short enough to be interesting”. That about sums up my notion of copy.

Organization also involves structure as well as words. Using headings and subheadings not only keeps your arguments organized, it increases readability as readers can easily determine which sections interest them. White space makes the text more attractive and less onerous to similarly increase readership.

In social media posts, for example, notice that businesses lead with their headline. Then, they further develop their message using easy-to-understand words and shorter sentences. You also need to ensure that your paragraphs are short for readability and easy understanding. You may also use bullet points if you intend to spread your ideas, highlight points, or enumerate important information.

Though these aren’t hard rules, applying this practice to any website, blog, email, ad, and social media posts is one of my favorite copywriting tips.

5. Make copywriting a part of your digital marketing strategy

An ideal outcome of your marketing strategy is to have your website, social media platforms, and other marketing assets speak the same language. This means that you may want to make all your business channels copywriting-friendly. To do this, start by laying out the foundation for your digital marketing plan. From there, you can develop a strategy for your content marketing goals, which includes the use of copywriting tips such as a consistent message, branding, and style to promote your services and products.

With the right content about your business, products, or services, you’re assured that all your marketing channels are promoting your brand and product without losing a great deal of quality content. As a result, you don’t miss out on the chance to market your goods and services while adding value to the lives of your audience and clients.

One thing to bear in mind when writing digital marketing copy is to make a copy that’s effective in representing your brand and delivering value to your audience. Without this strategy, it’s easy for companies to lose sight of their marketing goals and waste time in their content creation and development.

6. Keep it relevant

An experienced copywriter knows that one can’t successfully write copy that sells if they don’t write content that speaks to their audience. Therefore, it’s recommended that you tailor your content to your prospects and existing customers. To achieve this, you can combine your copy then personalize it for where visitors are in the sales funnel or which products they find appealing. For instance, if a visitor was on your page featuring red shoes, offer other options from your inventory of red shoes. And, if the visitor puts a product in their cart during a visit, send an email to remind them about the product remaining in their cart.

This could also mean that you need to focus on your readers when writing a copy. Think about your audience. What are they interested in? What language do they speak? Good copywriting employs SEO practices, but one of my great copywriting tips involves utilizes both SEO practices and user intent when crafting your copy.

7. Use the right words

One of the oldest tips for copywriting is to refrain from using adjectives or adverbs to make an ‘okay’ good enough. Though your copy should cater to your audience, it’s still a good practice to avoid words that indicate uncertainty, such as ‘may,’ ‘maybe,’ or ‘tried.’ Using power words in conjunction with modals like ‘could,’ ‘would,’ and ‘should’ suggest that something must be done, bringing your reader to action.

Great copywriting tips from other writers suggest using active voice as it’s both engaging and suggests movement. And, bring product descriptions to life by using colorful, expressive language rather than sticking to physical descriptions.

8. Study what others are doing

One of the ways to generate ideas for your copy is to look at the leading websites in your industry. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to copy or duplicate their work, but reviewing their copy, helps to generate more ideas when writing your own. You should also take time to learn from professional copywriters to develop much more effective campaigns for your brand. In this way, you get an idea that your copywriting practices are still within industry standards.

9. Proofread your copy

The ability to do simple tasks, such as reading your copy aloud, is one way to give you a competitive edge as mistakes look sloppy and leave a bad impression. By checking your grammar, the readability of your paragraphs, and the overall content of your copy you set your brand up to shine.

Of course, you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Using online tools such as Grammarly takes care of the mundane task of spelling and grammar checking. We all know it’s so easy to overlook these mistakes in the copy you wrote that having someone else check your copy or using a tool like this one really helps give your content polish.

10. Monitor your metrics

It’s nearly impossible to predict exactly what copy resonates with your target audience, especially in the beginning. That’s why you must mind your metrics to see what’s working and what doesn’t. Follow key performance metrics (KPIs), such as visits, bounce rate (folks leaving right away), top pages, and other numbers related to your website, email marketing, and social media to determine what works then work to create similar content.

You can create great copy with these 10 copywriting tips

Copywriting is a must-have tool for all aspects of your digital marketing strategy. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your copywriting skills, such as using stories, facts, and statistics. By including these copywriting tips in your entire digital marketing strategy, you’re guaranteed that your efforts stay relevant to your prospects and existing audience. Organizing your ideas and proofreading your copies before publishing are also great ways that can help achieve your business goals.

Lastly, it’s important to know that the copywriting skills you use for digital marketing should continuously develop. Look at other’s best practices and come up with monitoring mechanisms so that your skills’ quality won’t suffer. By following these tips, you’re assured that your digital marketing efforts would continue to serve their purpose to your business.