Creating a compelling piece of written content is no easy task. You could be a professional, experienced writer, but are you an effective copywriter? Do you produce copy that achieves the clients’ goals? If you’re unsure, or if you’d like to enhance your copywriting skills, you’ve come to the right place. Here are six tips for highly effective copywriting that will definitely make a difference in your work.
Make sure it’s relevant to your target audience
Don’t use dull and old fashioned terminology if your reader demographic is are young and hip. Speak their language! Use the kind of wording, expressions, or jargon that will resonate with your target audience. Make your written content relatable! The client’s creative brief should help you with that.
Be consistent
Get to know your client first before writing. Don’t solely rely on the brief with which they provide you. Remember, a major key to being a successful copywriter is knowing how to conduct research. Dig into the brand’s history and background a bit more: identify the target audience, determine the appropriate tone for them, and check out any previous copy associated with similar projects. The copy that you produce needs to be consistent with previous writing in order to preserve a sense of familiarity and continuity for already loyal customers.
Refrain from sounding advertorial
You don’t want your written content to sound like forced selling or clickbait. Make sure there’s a hook in the introduction that grabs your readers’ attention, keeps them intrigued, and motivates them to continue reading along. That being said, you have to keep your copy real, genuine, and relatable to your readers.
Unleash your creativity
Don’t be afraid to unleash the creative beast within. Remember when I mentioned the creative hook? This is your chance to shine! Imagine the introduction and the angle as your creative space. Don’t be afraid to go for a shocking tagline or a jaw-dropping title. Take the risk and you never know what written content you could end up producing.
It has to be SEO-friendly
Again, if your copy is in the form of website content, familiarize yourself with SEO basics first. SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, will push your webpage to a higher ranking on Google or other search engines. With a little background knowledge, you can draft your copy to be SEO-friendly, thus driving up click and view counts.
For instance, make sure to determine suitable keywords for the topic of your written content. Incorporate one of the keywords in your title and scatter them all throughout the articles, especially in your introduction–preferably in the first line if you can. Keep your paragraphs short and your lingo simple, readable, and to the point. Additionally, make your copy useful and informative by including internal and external links; that’s also very good for traffic. Also, don’t forget the meta description, which is a snippet that summarizes what the webpage entails.
Get comfortable with uninteresting topics
By “uninteresting,” I don’t mean boring or mundane. We all have our differences and our own interests, don’t we? Let’s say you’re more inclined to write about sports or tech, but you get hired to write a copy that promotes a fashion brand? Maybe that doesn’t pique your interest, but would you turn it down? Of course not! q
There’s a fine line between a good writer and a great one, and the difference is being flexible enough to write about anything and everything. Get out of your comfort zone and write about topics with which you’re not very familiar. Do some research, read more, dig into others’ works. It might be hard work or even irritating at the beginning, but it only takes time and practice to master it.
Now that you’ve learned these six simple tips, it’s time to implement them. Put your plan into action and start writing. Practice makes perfect and the more you write and the more diversified the topics are, the higher the quality of your written content will be.
Content writing can include, but not limited to, writing blog posts, email marketing campaigns, and website copies.
Decide the topic, do some research, create an outline and structure for your content, select the channel where you’ll convey the message, and start creating content.
A content writer comes up with informative or entertaining content that builds and improves the brand-consumer relationship.