Are you about to re-write the content for your website? If you want to write for results, talk benefits and see the difference.
How to write for results
Sit down, relax and clear your mind. Let’s re-focus your web page on your customer’s perspective.
Imagine you are one of your customers (or soon-to-be customer) reading your website.
What was your impression? How did you react?
Did you feel as though you wanted to do business with that company?
Either way, yes or no, why?
Keep those thoughts in mind as you continue the review.
Write about benefits to inform, persuade and sell
Your website is there to earn revenue, to reduce cost and to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. It helps you to build and nurture your relationship with your prospective customers until they are ready to buy.
Achieving a profitable website means understanding needs – and wants. Write for results and your messages will have a positive effect on their buying decision.
Think like an advertiser
Rely on the advice of renowned advertising professionals and their tried and tested tips and techniques: David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising) and Drayton Bird (Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing).
Focus all your attention on your customer
When you created your website you identified your target prospective customers and their needs. What questions did you ask? What were their replies? Understanding customers’ underlying need for your services will satisfy will give you a source of compelling content for your website.
Avoid the mistakes rookie writers make
Some beginner writers make the mistake of writing a web page that’s for ’everyone’. “Anyone can benefit from my services,” they’ll say. Yet without focus on the target customers in your niche, your content will be unspecific and the message unclear.
Be your customers’ problem solver
How will your offering help resolve a specific problem? What is their current situation?
Now, use your insights and write for results
With these deeper insights, take your pen and get into the zone: start writing some notes about your customers, their problems, their situation and how your offering will help improve it.
Describe how much better their lives will be when they are using your products or services.
This will convince them of the need to buy your product or service.
People don’t buy products
People buy benefits. They buy solutions to problems. They buy ways to satisfy their needs and wants.
As Brian Tracy says in “Psychology of Selling” people are not interested in computers, servers, wi-fi or mobile phones – or the way things are done. They are interested in the way those gadgets will improve their lives. They want to know how they will save time and money.
Uncover the key benefit
If you are stuck for words to write, try some more questions. Here are 3 which will help:
- Why should somebody buy your product or service at all?
- Why should somebody buy from you?
- Why should somebody buy your product from you?
Out of your answers will come yet more persuasive messages, making your content all the more compelling.
Describe what your service or product does – as opposed to what it is
What your product is, how it is made, the features of its design and construction are some writers’ main focus.
Yet the prospect does not care what the product is.
She cares only about what the service or product will do for her.
What solar panel buyers really wanted
When writing about solar panel installations for my client, there was a wealth of information about the type of panels, how they are made and the way they work. And while we must include these facts, they are not the primary reason why people bought those installations.
The clients were looking to invest in these energy producing and long-term cost-reducing panels to help them plan for and enjoy a financially worry-free retirement. What’s more, in the years ahead they had the peace of mind in being protected from unpredictable hikes in energy costs.
When we think of our products in this way, it opens up a new way of thinking into what our customers are actually buying – and what we are actually selling. What appears to be a panel that converts sunshine into power to heat your home turns out to be one route to freedom from money worries.
Only by thoroughly understanding customers’ worries and lifestyles could we write this copy for the desired results. We were able to write in a way that appeals to the people who are interested in what we offer.
Try these techniques to describe your product or service. Let me know how you get on, I’d love to hear your views.
Get In Touch
If you would like to ask for help with your web content writing project, just pick up the phone. I would be happy to talk to you.
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