Copywriting is an essential part of being a small business owner. You can’t share information about products or services, advertise, develop relationships with customers via social media, and so on without crafting clear, compelling messaging.
Great communication from a small business can increase sales and turn one-time customers into loyal customers. There’s simply no getting around the important role copywriting plays in the success of a business. But writing, even for many writers, is scary. That’s why it’s so important to have a few fundamentals to fall back on. The following copywriting basics will help you strengthen your overall messaging and create more effective marketing materials:
Don’t overthink it. You know your audience and you know your business. Don’t let a fear of writing the wrong thing stop you from getting your message across. No one wants or needs you to be churning out Shakespearean-esque blog posts, emails, or sales copy.
Set a clear intention for your content and let that be your guide. Are you writing to inform your customers about a new product? Are you writing to demonstrate your expertise around a certain service? Are you promoting an upcoming sale, discount, or coupon?
Stick to nailing your messaging goal, and remember, copywriting is a trial and error process. If one messaging approach doesn’t lead to the results you were wanting or expecting, you can always test a new approach. It’s all about finding the kinds of content and messaging that are most effective and compelling for your target audience.
Outline, outline, outline. There are a few benefits to creating a solid outline for whatever you’re writing. First, there’s nothing more intimidating (or off-putting) than the blank page, especially if writing isn’t exactly your favorite practice just yet. By cranking out an outline, you can reduce the fear that builds up when watching that blinking cursor in a sea of white.
An outline will also help you organize what you want to say. Even jotting down a very rough structure for your piece can be a huge help when it’s time to flesh it out. It’s also a helpful method for folks who don’t have long blocks of time to write. If you have an outline, you can tackle your piece in 30-minute blocks or whatever time you have available without forgetting what you wanted to write or losing the focus of your piece.
Use story. There is no more compelling form of messaging than story. Stories are how we relate to one another. They’re how we learn about experiences outside of our own. And in fact as the following video from the Future of Storytelling shows, stories actually change our brain chemistry, which in turn motivates the actions we take.
In the video, Paul Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and author of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, explains how showing a short film about a little boy with brain cancer and his father elicits distress and empathy responses from viewers and how those viewers are then more likely to give to charity.
It’s a great and interesting watch if you have five or so minutes, but the key takeaway is that story taps into how we relate to each other and has the power to strengthen those connections.
As the video also notes, for a story to be effective, it must follow a certain structure. Most commonly that structure is the pyramid structure developed by Gustav Freytag. This post from Reedsy has a great roller coaster illustration of the pyramid, but essentially, it consists of five narrative steps – Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denouement.
So, how might the pyramid work for a small business owner creating copy for their website or marketing materials? One way they might use it is to tell the story of how their service benefited a customer in need. Let’s say the small business owner is a plumber. Their story might go something like this:
- Exposition – An alarmed customer calls our plumber because gross-looking water is backing up in their sinks, bathtub(s), toilet(s), etc!
- Rising Action – For our intrepid plumber, this call comes in as they’re heading home after an already long day. But they answer despite all this, and assure the customer they’ll be over in a jiffy.
- Climax – The plumber arrives to a real mess. They jump to action, toiling for hours, doing all the plumbery things necessary so that the gross-looking water flows out of the customer’s home instead of into it.
- Falling Action – The plumber calls in a favor to their favorite cleaning crew so that the customer’s home can get cleaned up ASAP.
- Denouement – The grateful customer shakes the plumber’s hand. The plumber drives off into the sunset.
The plumber might share this story in a blog post or on social to show their dedication to their customers. Of course, keep in mind, you don’t always have to be the one doing the storytelling. An even better outcome for our plumber is if the customer provides the narrative in the form of a glowing review, which brings us to the next tip.
Include a call to action (CTA). Regardless of the purpose of the content you’re writing, the overall goal is that you want the reader to take a certain action. It might be, as in the case of our brave plumber, that you want them to leave a review after a service. Or it could be something else, such as asking them to schedule an appointment for a service, to follow you on social media, or to tell five of their family members or friends about your business. You can increase your chances of a customer taking that desired action when you give them a nudge in your content by including a clear CTA.
So, to call on our plumber example once again, if they want their customer to leave a review telling all about the above-and-beyond service they provided, they might send the customer a follow up email thanking them for their business and asking them to please leave a review on Yelp, Google, or Facebook.
There are, of course, many other CTAs. In fact, there’s probably a CTA for everything you might ever dream of writing for your customers. Here are a couple more examples: Let’s say you’re writing an email to your customer list with information about an upcoming special. Your CTA might be for the recipient to click a link or button in the email that will take them to a page where they can schedule a service or grab a coupon code to take advantage of that special. Or maybe you’re writing a blog post. If so, you might include a CTA asking your readers to subscribe to your newsletter or encouraging them to leave a comment or question.
The list of CTA options really does go on and on. For more, check out this awesome piece from Hubspot that includes 39 call-to-action examples from well-known companies, including Dropbox, Netflix, and Spotify.
Encourage clicks with a great headline. Let’s kick this one off with a caveat: Always strive to avoid click-baity headlines. What I mean by that is, make sure the content of the overall piece delivers on the promise of the headline.
Clicks are great, but ultimately, your goal is to get people to stick with you — to read (or if we’re being honest, at least skim) your content to the very end. Folks these days are very adept at quickly processing web content. It won’t take them long to figure out they’ve been duped by clickbait if they land on content that doesn’t live up to the headline.
Great headlines make a promise that is backed up by the content of the piece. Encourage clicks by making sure your headline clearly and crisply states how the content can help or serve the reader. For some helpful headline hacks, check out this step-by step guide from Neil Patel.
Becoming a great copywriter takes time and practice. If you’d like to learn more about copywriting, as mentioned in my post on essential writing resources for non-writers, I highly recommend starting with Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
The best online resource around (in my humble opinion) is Copyhackers. The site has an exhaustive library of posts on a wide variety of copywriting and digital marketing topics and also offers courses for those looking to improve their copywriting, increase conversions, build customer loyalty through great copy, and more. Its Tutorial Tuesdays, a free copywriting training video series divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, could be an especially great resource for small business owners, allowing you to strengthen your copywriting skills whenever you’ve got time for a 20-minute break.
When it comes to writing, I don’t know that practice will ever lead to perfection, but it will certainly make you better. The more you learn, the more you write, the more confident you’ll become and your business, your customers, and your bottom line will be all the better for it.