Monthly Archives: May 2015

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5 Key Factors That Make Good Webcopy Great

 

The start of the month in internet marketing land should be called copytime. Every website out there is looking for brand new copy, from blogs to social media posts to web copy. Of these three important types of copy, only one is going to represent your website day in and day out. While none should be ignored or written off with any type of nonchalance, I personally believe that webcopy should be the most scrutinized of the three.

After all, many blogs are informal. Social posts aren’t meant to serve as your doctorate. But web copy, this is what the people are looking at when they get to your site. And not only that, it’s what the search engines are looking at when they rank your site. So, it’s easy to see why webcopy should be carefully crafted, but it’s not always so simple to see how it should be crafted.

Five Points to Keep in Mind When Creating Copy for Your Website

Here are five things that you want to keep in mind as you sit down to write your web copy:

1. Capture. The first thing your copy needs to do is capture the attention of your viewers. If you have some bland, boring headline followed by copy that drones on and on, you’re going to bore visitors right off your site (if not to sleep!). Be a little provactive, a little funny, stir it up. The average person browses dozens of websites each and every day, what is going to make them stay on yours?

2. Portray. Your webcopy should be very clear in conveying your value proposition. Visitors need to know exactly what makes you different from your competition. Why should they spend their money with you when there are 50 million other sites selling the exact same product or service? If you can’t answer this, then how can you expect your customers to understand it?

3. Stand Out. People don’t really have time to read everything you write. Even if you’re the most interesting writer in the world, eating a nice juicy steak is more interesting. You aren’t going to compete with reality, so make your content easily accommodating in that you have all key points standing out for quick scanning. Headings and subheadings are a must. Numbered and bullet lists help people get the information they need, do what they have to do and then get on with their life. You aren’t inviting them over for tea, you’re inviting them to learn what you have to offer them and then convincing them to take it and leave.

4. Describe. Description is vital for many products and services, yet so many marketers buy into the “picture is worth a thousand words” ideaology of content creation. Pictures are amazing, yes (videos are even better), but you need the details, features and benefits of your products and services in writing. Why? If nothing else, for the search engines and to rank for keywords, but trust me, there are still people out there enjoy reading everything they can about a product before making a purchase. Remember, an informed consumer buys more.

5. Perfection. Finally, it’s vital that your webcopy be absolutely free and clear of errors. No spelling mistakes, no grammatical errors, no txt spk. You want to convey authority on your site and nothing will lose it faster than mspelling a werd or too or making grammer errors or having poor punctuashun?

Overall, webcopy is to a website what a salesperson is to a brick-and-mortar location. You wouldn’t hire just anybody and send them out there uninformed and unpresentable, don’t do that with your webcopy.

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Are Your Marketing Tools Helping You Reach the Right People?

Marketing is all about reaching the right people at the right time. Unfortunately that can turn into a guessing game if you don’t have the right tools. The marketing tools that we use are essential to our success so if you’ve just been “winging it” or going on intuition, you’re only selling yourself short.

Use Marketing Tools to Reach Your Audience

Here are some of my personal favorite marketing tools that will help you find the right people to get your message, product or service in front of. Of course, you will need to know your target demographic first, but after you do, these tools will help you engage with the right influencers in your industry, the most active fans and most of all, your motivated buyers.

1. Lead Social. While you will have to pay to use this social media tool, it’s one of the best in the game for anyone marketing on Facebook. What it does is it measures your Return on Investment (ROI). Your Facebook ROI is crucial for your budget so if you aren’t reaching the right people, then you’re just throwing money out the window. Lead Social works by assigning a monetary value to each of your Facebook ads and regular posts. In addition, Lead Social highlights users that are engaging with your content the most, giving you an opportunity to reach out to them, follow up with them, thank them, whatever. What you get is real time statistics on how much value you are getting out of each of your posts and ads. Then, just replicate your most valuable posts and ads (and boost them) so you reach people in the places it does the most good.

2. Tactics Cloud. This is one of my favorite Twitter tools of all time because it lets you target any person you want on Twitter. Find relevant users and follow them for follow backs. You can search for groups of users by location, keywords, who they’re following, who is following them, etc. Essentially, this is the ultimate search tool for Twitter marketers, giving you a direct route to the people you need to reach.

3. Little Bird. If you are trying to build relationships with influencers in your industry, Little Bird is the tool you need to find them. This shows you who you should be following as well as people that should be following you. Basically, you can think of this tool as a matchmaker, all you have to do is reach out and build the relationship.

4. GroupHigh. My final tool for reaching the right audience that I keep in my belt is GroupHigh. While this is another paid tool, it’s a valuable one. This gives you an enormous database of bloggers from which to search and the ultimate search tool to do it with. You can find the bloggers that you need to get in contact with, get their contact info and keep up with all of their latest posts. GroupHigh also lets you track your outreach efforts and relationship building.

All in all, I highly recommend all of these tools if you’re really trying to reach the right people in your industry and your target demographic. Of course, if you’re not on Twitter, it doesn’t make sense to get a Twitter tool and the same goes for Facebook tools with Facebook. But it serves your best interest to check out the tools that are out there for each social media platform you are on and beyond.