Speaker 1: Website copy is one of the most important elements in digital marketing. Whenever a business is building or designing a website, typically the copy, i.e. the words on the page, are left as a bit of an afterthought. The tendency is to jump in and play with layout and play with the images on the page and think about all that type of stuff and then really leave the copy, the text, till the end and not treat it with much importance at all. Well the trouble is, if you've ever hired a salesperson you'll know that what that salesperson says is really important and it's exactly the same with your website. The words are how you communicate messages with your customer and actually how you persuade them to buy from you versus somebody else. In this video we're going to be talking about how to write copy for your website, we're going to be giving you some tips based on the work that we do here at Exposure Ninja with our clients and we're also going to give you a quick six-point checklist at the end to make sure that your copy is on point and you include everything that you need to. Now you might be watching this thinking, oh I can't really write copy, I'm not really much of a writer, but they might be perfectly happy talking to customers, writing emails to clients and actually some of the most persuasive copy doesn't need to sound like some kind of professional artistry thing, it can just be how you talk to your customers in a very plain English way. In a lot of markets actually the majority of the businesses in the space are talking in this overly commercial corporate kind of boring language that people think they need to go in when they're writing copy, so you can be a complete alternative to that by just talking in a plain English natural way and you might find that you resonate really well with your perfect customers. Now there is a four-step process that you can use that we use here at Exposure Ninja to write great copy for your website. Step one is to get organized. It's really important that you get everything in place before just opening a doc and trying to write. Actually the writing part only comes in step three. Now as part of step one, getting organized, we like to organize things in Exposure Ninja in spreadsheets. So here you can see an example of the sort of spreadsheet that we would use when we're organizing copy and feel free to use something like this when you're doing it for your business. So first thing that we'll do is we'll write down all of the names of the pages that we're going to be writing. If we have a wireframe in place already then we'll link to them here. This is really important and we'll come back to this later. We'll then collect the target keywords. So these are the phrases that we want this page to rank for. We have other videos about keyword research and if you're working with Exposure Ninja then we will have given you some target keywords to write your page copy for. We also jot down the word count, we give ourselves a due date if we're working to a project and then we include a link to that copy as well. We'll organize all of the copy in Google Drive or whatever platform that you're using and we'll make sure that everything is nicely organized in folders because this is really important when we give it to the editor. Nothing worse than being sent over a whole bunch of different word docs. Homepage copy final. Homepage copy final two. Homepage copy final two. Final final. Last copy ever. Total disaster. That's why we like to use something cloud-based so that when we collaborate with different members of the team and editors everyone is working from the same thing we don't have any version issues. The second stage in the process is research. Now we're still not writing any copy but what we want to start doing is figuring out the sorts of things that we need to include in our copy. The first thing to do here is to open Google and take a look at what your competitors are doing. Typically we'll just open the search results and we'll start typing in some of the keywords that we want our pages to rank for. We'll go through each of the pages that's ranking and we'll just do some reading. Now at this stage you're not adding any pressure to yourself, you're just getting calibrated with what's out there. This is a really important step because remember that your customers are never going to read a single page of copy on your website in total isolation. The likelihood is they might have been doing some research beforehand, they might have been on some of your competitors' sites. So it's a good idea to understand where your page of copy sits in the context of the internet rather than just expecting someone to be sat in an isolated sound booth and handed your page of copy with no other background information. For example, here I've done a search for medical animation company and I just wanted to talk through the sort of process that we might take when we're doing some competitor analysis here. We're going to open some of the organic results, we're not tending towards the paid results when we're looking at typical page copy unless we're writing for a specific landing page in mind. So the first thing that we notice about this site, and this is fairly common with any kind of design focused business, is that they're letting their images and their video do the talking, i.e. there is no copy above the fold here. It looks like this is a menu system and then we scroll down and this is very much features based. There's almost no information about the business, there's certainly no benefit statements, there's no compelling reasons why we should choose them rather than anybody else. There's no sign of any call to action at all. This is what we'd call a very poor page of copy and yet it's ranking at the top of Google. So if you're competing with this, happy days. Here's another competitor in the space. Now they do have a decent headline here, high end 3D animations, although this is medical animation so they could say high end 3D medical animations, that would be preferable. Then we have a bit of subtext here which is reasonably good and we've got some features and then we've got a little bit more copy. You'll notice on this page that there's not really a kind of logical structure, things are just placed around in fairly random ways and there's various different readership paths that you could take through this page. But this isn't really intentional, this is just because the design hasn't really been designed with a single user flow in mind. The next thing that you want to do, classic salesmanship, features and benefits. For your business or the particular product or service that you're writing about, it's a good idea to jot down a list of the features of that product, particularly anything that distinguishes it against competition and then the related benefit to that as well. This is something that people often miss out, they talk about their product in detail because that's what they know, whereas they miss out on the fact that actually the customer, they might not have as much knowledge about this, they don't know why a particular thing is important, so we need to explain things in terms that mean something to them. So for example, your business might work entirely remotely, that would be a feature. Now what's the benefit to the client? Well the client might not really care whether you work remotely or in an office, they don't really have a preference either way. So it's important that we sell that feature by explaining the benefits to the client. For example, Exposure Ninja works 100% remotely and we have done for the history of the company. Now this is a feature of our business, it's not a benefit. The benefit to the client is that they don't have to spend time driving to an office to talk to our team. It means that we can set up video calls with various team members at relatively short notice, certainly much quicker than we would be able to arrange physical meetings. It means that they get the best people working on their digital marketing rather than the best people we could find in the specific town that we're in. So this is about how you present the different features of your business. If we take a look at Gusto, the recipe box, we see that they've taken one of their features which is precise ingredients. Now precise ingredients is really just a feature and actually it's something that benefits Gusto because it means they don't have to send out any more products than they need to. It lowers their cost, increases their profit margin and reduces their delivery spend. But actually they've very cleverly found the benefit which is that there is no food waste. Now this is important for eco-conscious consumers. So for each of the products and services that you offer, think through the features and the related benefits, particularly anything that sets you apart from alternatives in the market. The next thing to do is think about having a conversation with your perfect customer. Imagine talking to just one of your target customer and think about the sort of language that they're going to be using to describe both their problem and the solution that they're looking for, i.e. the thing that you do for people. This is really important. We want to be talking our customer's language in our copy. Too often businesses can go towards industry jargon or meaningless terms that actually the customer doesn't really understand. We want to meet our customers where they are. We basically want to have an extension of the conversation they're having in their head. If they're scared about paying too much tax, for example, and they're looking for an accountant, that accountant could just write, scared of paying too much tax. That's exactly what the customer is thinking. We're going to get that, ah, this is for me reaction, which is exactly what we want from our copy. If you find that you're too far away from the customer, maybe you're in a marketing manager role and you don't spend your time talking to the customer on a daily basis, it's a good idea to rope in one of the sales team because your sales team, particularly your best salespeople, will be used to talking the native language of your customers. If you can run your copy past them, or better still, ask them what phrases they would use to talk to your customers through your website copy, you'll find that you get a really good match for exactly what your customer's thinking. The final thing that you want to do before you start writing any copy is to think about the goal of each page on your website. Every single page on your site has a goal. It should be to either generate a lead, have someone get in contact with you, make a sale. There has to be a purpose to the page. None of our pages just exist for our customers' entertainment. They're all here to do something. If you're a business, that is. So we want to make sure that whenever we're writing, we're writing with this goal in mind. It's important to get that goal decided in your mind before you write any copy. Much more difficult to insert the persuasive elements that will funnel someone towards that goal after the fact than if you're very clear about that before you start writing. So you might be thinking, hold on, Tim, you've just given me a whole bunch of things I need to do before I start even writing any copy. Yeah, well, here's the thing. We might spend as much time getting calibrated and doing this sort of research as actually writing the page, but it's going to lead to a much better outcome. Too often, people go straight for a blank page and they've kind of freeze. They get this writer's block thing. Whereas if you spend time before you write, getting aligned with where your customer is going to be at, thinking about where they're at in their buying journey, thinking about the language that they're talking about, this is going to help you so that when you open that page to start writing, it flows and it makes a lot more sense. Okay, so now it's time to start writing your copy. You always want to write with the layout of your page in mind. It's very easy to just start writing a page of content as if it's an article or something like that. But then when you put it on a page, on a webpage, it looks really long. It doesn't really work. The headings are all too mishmash and it really doesn't work at all. So it's important that if you're going to be writing a page, for example, which has a nice clear heading and then a little subheading of a couple lines, that you're writing with that goal in mind, right? You're writing for a one-line heading and a two-line subheading with a few bullet points. The main thing to consider here is that when you put information on a page, it often looks a lot longer than it does when it's just in a Google Doc or a Word doc. So be conscious of writing too much. Now, every page on your site should contain the following elements. Firstly, an H1 heading. This is like the main heading at the top of the page. The thing that the customer or visitor is going to see first. This should be a description of what's on the page or the service or product that is being covered on that page. Lots of people get this wrong. They imagine, and I'm going to use an example that we often use here as Exposure Ninja. Let's say that we're an accountancy firm, okay? Now, the homepage of your accountancy firm website is going to talk about the different types of accountancy that you offer and something about the business. Then there'll be a separate page on your site for something like VAT. And the H1 on this page will be VAT. So you're expecting the customer to have come through the homepage, understand that you're an accountant, and then go to this other page and see the heading VAT and know that this refers to VAT accountancy. Well, actually the heading VAT is completely wrong. This isn't a page that's about VAT. This is a page about VAT accountancy. So it's really important that our H1 headings require no prior knowledge from the customer. We want to very concisely explain what this page is actually about. Here's a fantastic example. Make good screen recordings, instantly transcribed, painless to edit, easy to share. Everybody knows what that is about. There is no question what this thing does. Here's an example which falls into the accountancy problem area, property and real estate. This page isn't about property and real estate. This page is about property and real estate solicitors, okay, or property and real estate commercial law. That's actually what this page is about. We're not trying to rank this page for property. We're not trying to rank this page for real estate. And anybody who is looking for property, if they type property into Google, this is not the page for them. So it's really important that this H1 heading accurately describes what's actually on this page and doesn't assume prior knowledge having had someone come through your homepage or anything like that. People will find your website from all sorts of directions. They'll be coming in from all sorts of entry points. So we need to be very, very clear. The next thing that you want to do is write some subheadings. So you've got your main H1 heading at the top of the page, and then you want to have some H2 headings down the page. The main purpose of your H2 headings is to help people that are scanning the page to find the information that is most relevant for them. For example, notice how on teamwork.com, we've got this H1 heading, which is pretty good, the project management software loved by all these different business types. By the way, these bullet points are great as well. Then we've got H2 headings, simple to use, powerful when you need it. So this is kind of helping me find the different pieces of information that I might need. Manage multiple complex projects with ease. They're very straightforward in plain English. They're not using technical jargon. Integrate with the tools you already use. And as I'm flowing down the page, it's helping me, firstly, get an idea for what this thing does, even without reading the underneath copy. But also it's helping me if I do want to find out more about integrations. I know exactly where I need to land because there's an H2 heading to guide me there. What makes teamwork different? Another possible question that I might have. So you can start to list all of the questions or the things that you want to get across to the visitor as your H2 headings. Now it's time to start writing the body copy, i.e. the main copy on your page, underneath these H1 and these H2 headings. So if you've done your research and you've spent time aligning yourself, you should find that actually the copy is fairly easy to write. If in doubt, just imagine your best salesperson talking to your best customer. What does that conversation look like? What does the language look like? In that conversation, the language probably doesn't sound super hardcore closey. It probably sounds very information led, benefits driven, and always with the clear goal, which is this next step, the call to action. Your copy is going to be slightly different whether you're writing, say, a homepage or a product or service page. With a homepage, you usually want to introduce the business, talk a little bit about the different services or products that you offer, include some of those benefits that we spoke about earlier, and also include credibility. So things like testimonials. On a product or a service page, so product page, if you're an e-commerce business, obviously you're going to be selling the product on that page. You want to talk about the different use cases. You want to answer any objections that the potential customer might have before purchasing. Similar thing with a service, if you're a business that sells services. On a service page, you want to be talking about who this service is best for, what sort of businesses or customers that you tend to work with, how the process works, and answering any objections that they might have. If you're struggling to write enough information on your page, just imagine going back to that perfect salesperson with the perfect customer. What questions would that perfect customer have before they were ready to take the next step with that salesperson? If in doubt, just write out those questions and then answer them with the copy on your page. You really can't go too far wrong. Okay, so you've written out your copy. The final step in our process is editing. Ideally, you want to get someone else to read your work and give you feedback. The main lesson I learned from the first edition of my very first book that I published is it turns out you can't edit your own work. Or at least I can't anyway. Maybe you're better than me, but it's always good to get someone else in the business to proofread your copy. You can also put your copy in a text-to-speech reader. It's a good benchmark of decent copy that you can read it out as it's written and it sounds natural. So you can even read it out to yourself or read it out to someone else in your family or in your office. Don't forget to spell and grammar check. We use things like Grammarly and the Hemingway app to make sure that readability is right and the spelling and grammar is on point. We tend to find that Grammarly is a bit more accurate than the Google Docs or the Microsoft Word spell and grammar check. It goes into a bit more detail and Hemingway is great to make your writing nice and concise and simple to read. So that's it. That's your guide to writing copy. Now, if you're thinking, oh, this is loads of information and you haven't yet started, I want to give you a six-item checklist that you can run through after you've written your copy to make sure you've got everything in place. Checklist item number one. Is there a clear heading that describes exactly what that page is about in a single sentence? Item number two. Are there clear subheadings that help someone scanning down that page to find the information that they're looking for and answer their top questions? Item number three. Does this page of copy describe the product or service in enough detail that your perfect customer would actually want to buy it? Number four. Does it give compelling reasons for that customer to buy from you? Number five. Does it include the keywords or the language that they would use to describe the problems they have or the solution that they're looking for? And then finally, number six. Does it repeatedly nudge them towards your call to action? Not in an overly salesy way, but in a way that shows there is one very clear goal to this page and there is no doubt in the customer's mind what they are supposed to do next in order to move forward and buy from you or become a lead. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you do and you love digital marketing type stuff, then consider subscribing to the channel. We run Exposure Ninja, a digital marketing agency. We build hundreds of websites for clients in every imaginable market and we do digital marketing like SEO, content marketing, PPC, social media, email marketing, video for clients all around the world. We share everything that we learn on this YouTube channel and in the Exposure Ninja podcast. Don't forget if you want some help with your digital marketing, i.e. you want to increase the volume of leads and sales that your website generates for you, then head over to ExposureNinja.com, click that big button and request the free website and marketing review. This is an amazing service. If you want more leads and sales from your website, what you'll do is you'll answer a few questions about your business and about your digital marketing. This will then go to our super team of Ninja consultants. They will begin researching your business, your competitors, how you're driving your traffic and what your website is doing. They'll put together some recommendations in a 15-minute video which they'll email over to you usually within two or three working days which explains what your top priorities should be over the next 12 months to generate the leads and sales that you've told us you're looking for. It's an amazing service. It's completely free of charge. We have a team that spend their entire lives doing these reviews and they're amazing. So request your free website and marketing review from ExposureNinja.com. Subscribe to this channel and I'll see you soon. Transcribed by https://otter.ai