INTRODUCTION TO COPYWRITING
Hi, I'm Beck Robertson, I'm an NCTJ qualified journalist and copywriter with over 10 years’
experience and I've also got over 7 years sales and marketing hands on experience. I've been
asked to sum up everything I know about the art of creating great content for this guide to
mastering copywriting, so you can use it to quickly start winning more sign ups and sales.
I know many marketers wonder if copywriting is still relevant, as we live in an age where video,
visual and podcast content are the most shared mediums.
Yet copywriting is still so vital, as it has the power to improve nearly every aspect of your
marketing.
If you know how to write content that grabs people from the start you can raise your game and
boost customer engagement massively.
SO, HOW CAN MASTERING THE ART OF COPYWRITING BENEFIT YOU?
From your sales pages to your press releases, video scripts, blog post headlines meta
descriptions, and email campaigns to your Facebook posts and Press releases, knowing how to
create great copy will help your marketing efforts enormously.
When you learn how to do it right, you'll be able to get higher conversion rates on key pages,
improve the structure of your blogs, get more engagement on social media, and have many
more people share your content.
Most importantly of all, you'll be able to understand your customer’s needs, which will help you
connect with your target audience much better.
To create truly great copy, you first need to know your audience. You must understand what
drives them, their hopes, dreams, thoughts, fears and desires.
Once you have this knowledge, you'll be able to write copy that immediately connects with the
people you're trying to reach, because you'll be speaking their language. This will make all your
content 100% more effective, and you'll find it easier to be able to get people to take the action
you want.
Knowing how to write good copy is an essential marketing skill, that will help you boost your
reach, sell more, and get more customer engagement.
It will also make you much more employable, according to the National Association of Colleges
and Employers, 73% of employers want to hire people with strong writing skills.
To become a master at the art of creating copy, you need to nail down some fundamentals.
I'm going to go into more detail on the magic formula you can use to guarantee great copy for all
your content in a bit, but first I want to give you my top tips to optimise your copy. I'll be
covering some of these points in a little more depth later.
TOP 10 TIPS TO BECOMING A MASTER COPYWRITER
1) Know your market. To sell more you need to understand what your customer wants,
and to do this you need to conduct customer research into your target market. I'll outline
two excellent techniques you can use to do this later.
2) Be clear. People have to be able to understand you, or you will lose them quickly, so
good sentence structure is vital. Be brief and don't waffle on endlessly or use long and
complicated words when shorter ones would do. The American Press Institute
conducted a survey which found people had 711% better comprehension when reading
shorter sentences.
3) Get seen. To do this you must get found either on search, or through social media.
That means you must know how to use SEO correctly so you can optimise all your
content for search engines. You must also understand the importance of hashtags and
how to use the most relevant tags to boost all your content on social and on the web.
4) Be understandable. Make sure your grammar and spelling are top notch, which is easy
to do these days as there are many great tools out there that can assist you with this
aspect.
5) Be persuasive, never pushy. You must learn how to write in a persuasive but not pushy
way, as if you come on too strong you will look desperate. Desperation is the ultimate
turn off if you are trying to sell something.
6) Don't be boring. People have limited attention spans, especially online, so you need to grab their attention from the get-go with punchy sentences that make them want to keep
reading. Use a mix of short and long sentences, ask questions, and drop fun facts.
7) Be original. There is far too much choice out there and an ocean of content, so you need
to make yours stand out, in a good way. A great way of doing this is by adding value,
and you can do this by telling people something they didn't know or making them think
about things in a different way.
8) Structure your content. Content structure is also key, no one wants to read through a
jumbled, disorganised mess. Use engaging headers and sub headers to divide your
content into bite sized sections that are easy on the eye, and easy to understand. Make
use of numbered lists where possible as these are a superb way of adding structure to
your copy.
9) Learn what works and what doesn't. You can do this by observing your competitors, so
look at successful brands to assess where they are going right in their content
marketing, then see how you can incorporate their approach into your own content, or
even improve on it.
10) Stay relevant. It's no good using ad techniques that might have been effective in 2016
but aren't working so well anymore. You need to know what makes customers click
through or sign up now, so make sure your approach is fresh and current, and that
you’re not just relying on old, out of date strategies.
