Not Everyone Can Produce Good Copy, But Everyone Needs Good Copy

Not everyone can produce good online copy, but everyone needs good copy.  What we mean by this is that too often, folks who are not copywriters are given the task to come up with online text, just because they work with the product or will be in charge of the group selling the product, once it launches, and this all results in business leaders taking the art of ‘good copy’ for granted.  Let’s face it, it is the engaging copy that encourages us to continue to play with a Web property – right?  It’s when a story is laid out, filled with compelling factors that makes you continue to read that news article or blog post, and it is the same way, businesses and marketers need to think about painting a colourful, but true, picture of their brand, through copy.

When building a kick-ass web product there are a few key positions that need to be filled to ensure success, UI, design, developers, search experts, content strategists, and copy writers.  Some of you may be raising an eye brow, because I have listed content strategists and copywriters as two different roles, and that is because I strongly feel that they are.  A content strategist, will do their due diligence research on a brands target demographic, geography, and tools their target audience utilizes on the Web.  They’ll do all of this research to determine what ‘types’ of content sets will work well with a brands audience and of course get them the success quotient (sales, conversion, subscription rates etc…) they desire.  A copywriter, now given all of the pertinent audience data and the content types, begins to go to work by building engaging copy and stringing together behaviour provoking text.  So these two roles are in deed different, but they compliment one and other.

The challenge with the copywriter role being seen as an essential to an effective Web release, is that many businesses don’t see it as such, and effective copy often falls low on the list of priorities and behind off-site marketing efforts that cost money . If you break down the buyer -to- seller relationship there are two age-old consumer factors:  people often buy things based on emotion, and if they could, they would want to touch, feel and test it first.  Knowing at least these two basic consumer principles, we need to ask why then do we not spend the time and money needed to ensure we fulfill these senses, with the descriptive words used on our Web properties, through the use of a trained copywriter?

Based on how human beings interact and subscribe to brands, it is clear the better the picture you paint with words, the better your conversion.  This is primarily why people see such success when they roll up their sleeves and do A/B testing or niche product page redirects.  The average  Web page engagement uplift, when strategic processing is placed behind what your customers see is 40%!  The data around ad effectiveness can also be used as a copy parallel.  Studies show that the higher the quality of an ad, it’s effectiveness increases by 50%.  Knowing all of this should make you wonder how much money you’re leaving on the table, by not investing in good copy.

We’ll close by saying that we just came from attending the Manhattan Cocktail Classic and they did a fabulous job with their copy.  Take a look at some of their copy and know that their pre-event emails were just s engaging, if not more so.

Image courtesy of: MonKeyArtAwards