You can be excellent at what you do but if you can’t properly market and sell your products or services, then no one will buy. You’ll be a solopreneur without customers. A huge component of great marketing is powerful copywriting. This is the content people read when visiting your website, picking up a leaflet, flicking through a brochure, or downloading a digital guide.
Great copywriting reaches your target audience and digs deep below their natural defenses. It connects with both the logical and emotional centers of the brain, and subtly persuades them, almost on a subconscious level, that they really should trust you.
People are hesitant when making a buying decision and are on the lookout for being tricked or scammed. Powerful copywriting, as used by some of the most successful solopreneurs and business owners, can quickly have prospects desperate to spend money with you. But only when done well.
You can also write powerful copy yourself and it’s worth considering, especially when you want your own personality to shine through the words.
Here are a few very powerful copywriting tactics used by the best professional copywriters and marketers around.
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Understand your reader
Before writing a single word, the first thing you need to do is to understand your core target audience. Who are you writing to? Who will be reading your website or a particular page? Who is it that you need to persuade?
Writing great copy is about getting into the hearts and minds of your ideal customers. You need to identify and understand their primary fears, dreams, desires, and outlooks on life.
Now of course, your customer-base might be diverse in many ways. Yet there are still a select few core reasons why your ideal customers need you. Identify these and then base your entire content around these “pain” or “desire” points.
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Focus on both features and benefits
Where most solopreneurs and small business owners go wrong, when writing their own copy, is focusing exclusively on the features of their products or services. They describe what the product/service is, often in great detail, but offer little in the way of what the benefits are.
Great copywriting is about combining the features with the resulting benefits the customer or client will experience when they make that purchase. Your copy needs to describe what’s in it for them, and paint pictures in your readers’ minds of the wonderful results.
Descriptions of features entice your prospects’ logical minds. Descriptions of benefits flirts with their emotional minds. When you combine the two … magic!
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Use the power of storytelling
For many thousands of years, humans have told stories to one another. Our ancestors passed down hundreds of volumes of information, from one generation to the next, purely through the oral recitation of stories.
Stories get remembered. Our brains are hardwired to retain information delivered in story format. Good stories have the power to change a person’s outlook and beliefs, which in marketing is an incredibly powerful tool to master.
Wherever possible, weave in short and subtle stories into your marketing and sales content, whether in a brochure, blog post, whitepaper, or video. Share stories of what previous happy customers have said, or even what makes you tick as a solopreneur.
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Be succinct and specific
Great copywriting avoids fluff, jargon, and rambling platitudes. It’s direct. It’s specific. It gets to the point like an arrow whizzing through the air. People are busy and want to understand information quickly. They have many different options at their fingertips and if you’re too slow in getting to your benefit statements, then your prospects will go elsewhere.
Being succinct and specific doesn’t necessarily mean writing just a little content. Rather, it means providing everything a prospect needs to make a buying decision, in a way that is quick and easy to digest.
Write your copy so readers will know exactly what you mean, and format it well with plenty of short paragraphs and sub-headers.
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Sound believable
We’ve all read website or marketing content that just reeks of untrustworthiness. The solopreneur makes grand statements that you will achieve such-and-such within 24 hours of buying his product. Blah blah blah. You know it’s nonsense and as such, you look elsewhere for a solution.
When writing copy for your business, make sure you sound realistic with your features and benefits. Basically, be genuine and honest. Write about the actual benefits your customers will receive if they buy your products or services, together with realistic timelines or potential results.
Lose the marketing hype. Cut the false promises. Write to them as intelligent human beings and give them the information they need to make a sound decision, and you’ll automatically come across as trustworthy.
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Always have an answer to their core objections
All potential customers and clients have their defenses up when first reading your marketing copy. They have worries and concerns, and perhaps even previous bad experiences with other businesses similar to yours. Their list of objections as to why they shouldn’t buy from you will be top of their minds.
When writing your marketing copy, try to mention some of these common objections. Provide reassuring answers as to why the prospect really shouldn’t worry. By doing so, you’ll show you understand them, which is very attractive. You’ll also quickly erase their mental list of worries.
This harks back to the importance of really understanding your target market and what makes them tick.
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Don’t forget the call-to-action
A call-to-action (CTA) is a sentence or two asking the reader to take a particular action. The action is usually telling a reader how and where to buy a product or service, or it can be directing people to an email subscription form.
Whatever the action you want them to take, it’s vital the CTA is clear, to the point, and seamlessly connects with the surrounding content. Powerful CTAs are often camouflaged within the text, rather than being loud and colorful buttons.
When your copywriting is of a high standard, and you’ve connected with both the logical and emotional sides of the human reader, then a simple written nudge is often all it takes to get that desired action.
Writing your own marketing copy
Powerful copywriting can make a huge difference to your marketing and sales results. The above tactics and strategies are those used by some of the best copywriters and most successful solopreneurs.
It’s worth investing some time practicing these copywriting tactics and putting them to use in your own marketing materials. With even a few small modifications to how your content is written, you could potentially see some significant improvements in your leads and conversion rates.
