Great Web Copy is All About You
Friday, October 6th, 2006(This is Part 1 in a 7 part series on great copywriting for the web and beyond)
What defines great web content? How do you engage the reader, hold their attention and get them to really fall in love with your company, your service or you, with mere words on a website?
The secret, dear friends, lies within you. I know what you might be thinking: “Oh Gaaawd, is he serious?”
Yes. Yes I am. But I don’t mean to insinuate that somewhere in the deep recesses of your grey matter lies some magical formula that will cause your site visitors to salivate, add multiple items to their shopping cart and fork over their billing information with nary a question asked. Actually, the concept that I’m referring is surprisingly simple, and just might produce the results you’ve been hoping for.
(Photo by flickr user zoghal, tagged: iloveyou)
Just use the word “you” a lot. Do you understand what I mean by that? Is this a concept that you can put to good use in your own marketing ? Do you think I used “you” or “your” enough in the last few sentences to drive an otherwise healthy Alberta beef cow completely mad? Maybe you’re right. Ha! Snuck another one in there.
It’s All About Your Customers
One of the most common mistakes that companies make on their sites (There’s a lot, this just happens to be the most common. We’ll cover some more in a later post) is in focussing too much on themselves. It’s as if they believe that the same information that has wasted paper on their brochures for years is suitable for their website. And that’s just simply not the case, I’m afraid. (Notice ‘they’ and ‘their’ in this instance? I wouldn’t dare beat up on you)
I use the comparison of a salesperson, from both then and now. Back then, a sales person could use hard-selling tactics, smoke-and-mirrors and any other number of tricks to sell their snake-oil from town-to-town. Now, any professional salesperson can tell you that to sell anything, anywhere, you first have to establish a relationship with your customer. You’ve got to ask plenty of questions to find out a lot about them, and eventually build a rapport that will make the customer confident they are making a wise buying decision, long before they ever will. After all, in this day and age the customer has an infinite number of choices, and if they smell a rat, your competition will make a sale, and not you.
Well, the same is true for great copywriting on your website. In this case, you don’t have the benefit of asking questions, but you’d better know what questions or needs your customer has, and provide easy access to all of the answers. And although you’ve got to let them know what you’re all about, resist the urge to make it all about you, and instead focus on the benefits to them.
A Tool to Keep You on Track
The guys over at FutureNowInc.com have developed a cool tool called the “We We Monitor.” No, it doesn’t emit alarming beepy noises when your little ones wet their diapers. Sorry. But it is very cool, and could tell you whether you’re copywriting is to much about “We” and not enough about “You” (the customer).
Here’s how to do it. Visit the We We Monitor by clicking here. Enter the address of the page you want to measure. Be sure to add the names of your company, your CEO, and anyone else in your organization that appears on the page, in order to get an accurate reading. The results you receive will look something like this:
These are the Customer Focus Calculator results:
For the url: www.telltenfriends.com
Your Customer Focus Rate: 62.79%
You have 27 instances of customer-focused words.
Your Self Focus Rate: 37.21%
You have 10 instances of self-focused words.
You have 6 instances of the Company Name.
You speak about yourself almost as often as you speak about your customers.
Might you improve that?
Original length of Page (including all HTML)= 12,826 bytes
Content length after stripping HTML = 3,300 bytes
Total word count: 451
Now admittedly, your score might not be as brilliant as the one for our home page, (yay me!) but it will give you a clear indication about where changes need to be made. That’s a great little start, doncha think? If your formula is right, you may even be able to keep them around for a while. Next step will be to generate real interest and desire in what you’re offering, but we’ll cover that another time.
There’s another great rule in copywriting that we’ll cover later, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it now, and that’s to always have a call to action. I hint at this because here’s one now:
Leave a comment below to tell me what you think of this article or add your two cents, and if you have any questions about copywriting or anything else, as always you can Contact Me directly. I look forward to hearing from you.
