This is the third part of the series whereby I am turning the wonderful talks into actionable takeaways you can implement in your business. Yesterday’s article was about Data Driven Design. This article is looking at How to Write Customer-Driven Copy That Converts by Joel Klettke and how it can lead to more sales and conversions.
As I covered in yesterday’s article, content was never really an issue. It was keyword stuffed to help boost rankings and following on from the article about How to get Big links where I talked about it was a numbers game, it didn’t matter if you didn’t convert every customer because it was so easy to rank and there was a lot of traffic, but again because getting visitors from Google is getting harder you know need to write content to convert them, but also Google has got smarter and keyword stuffing is no longer acceptable and will get you penalised.
Writing good content is know not what the top sites and brands do but what is a requirement. Bad copy doesn’t work any work, you will lose rankings and customers won’t convert.
Joel starts by saying before we dive into the how you need to write, you need to be willing to accept you have been writing content wrong this whole time. He says good landing page by having a Headline, sub headline, Hero images, benefits, Calls to action and a bit of social proof. He then says just because you have all these elements you can still produce something totally useless.
Something that doesn’t convert, doesn’t have an impact and doesn’t do what it needs you to do.
How to write Customer drive Copy that converts
You need to start thinking like a customer and answering the questions they are asking. Sounds simple – but even when I am looking around the web today I can still see websites which don’t manage to get this right.
If you can answer the user’s questions and take the doubts away then they are more likely to click buy or complete the action you want them to do.
Questions?
Joel says there are six questions someone would have when they land on your page.
- What is it?
- Who is it for?
- Why should I care?
- How does it work?
- Why trust you?
- What’s next?
If you were to analyse your page with open eyes would you honestly answer all the 6? Most sites don’t and only answer a few.
Joel says you then need to think in what order you answer these, poor landing pages at the moment sometimes answers the right questions but in the wrong order.
If you want to write content which works, you need to figure out what motivates your customers. The why behind all the queries. To truly get to the heart of motivation there are 4 areas which need to be looked at:
- Pain Points
- Anxieties
- Priorities
- Outcomes
Cliche Content
Stop using cliche content, use content which is more specific, interesting and human – content that speaks to actual visitors not what is full of marketing jargon that people don’t understand.
You aren’t your customer so stop trying to think for them and start talking to them.
Talking to Customers
Joel covers three methods of contacting customers, to help you speak with them. Customer interviews, Emails Surveys, reviews and testimonials but there are many more ways. The important thing is speaking with them. For clients, we have used other methods, but these three are by far the easiest to set up, especially if you’re trying to convince the client / your boss that you need to trial this. Talking of reviews just don’t look at your own reviews but look at your competitor’s bad reviews – can you solve this issue or problem.
The most important question is why, why did you purchase and I can guess their answer won’t be “keyword volume” or what other metric SEOs look at. It will be a personal reason.
If someone is trying to buy a new car, is it because their old car doesn’t work anymore, they have a new job and have to travel more mile, their family is growing and need more space etc. None of these is really keyword volume etc these are they why they are buying.
Then if you look at your landing pages are you answering these questions or answering search volume questions.
Pain Points
Going back to the four pain points here are the four questions you should be asking to gather this information:
- What was going on in your life that sent you looking for a solution
- What else did you try and what didn’t you love about it?
- Plus if you can find what your competitors are doing wrong
- What almost kept you from buying from us
- If you able to identify people who maybe started the checkout process but didn’t convert ask them why they didn’t convert
- Or What made you confident enough to give us a try?
- What can you do now or do better than you could before? And follow it up with and what has meant for you
- Give me an example of when XXXXXX made a difference for you?
Analysing the data
Know you have all this data you need to analyse it and the results here are only going to be as good as your data analysis skills.
If this is a weak point for you, out source it. Bad data or bad analysis can lead you to do the wrong things, investing in great data analysis can lead to your business growing much quicker.
What to look for
- Frequently used words
- If your customers use these words, you better use these words in the content
- Recurring themes
- Thing which are well said
- If you like it and your customers are using it, add it to your pages
- Insightful quotes
- Stuff what tells you something about your customers that you can use to convert to similar audiences
Getting creepy
Joel didn’t mention this, this is purely my own take on the great presentation he did.
We as marketers spend a lot of time and resources remarketing to “look a like” lists but just think if these look a like list saw content from the original group had spoken about why they like the product or service, used their language, their terminology their reasons for converting. I am guessing the conversion rate would be far higher.
Conclusion:
Customers care about different things to you. You may think you’re in the niche and that’s why you got into the market, but you have multiple customers so even if it’s a niche you enjoy you still gotta find out what other actual customers think.
Getting the right data from speaking to the customers and analysing correctly will allow you to re-write content on your site which converts at a much higher rate as you are speaking and answering their questions.
Please remember these are my takings from the conference and not those of Joel, while I have used his presentation as inspiration and quoted him a few times the words are my own.
Please check back tomorrow to see What We Learned From Reddit & How It Can Help Your Brand Take Content Marketing to the Next Level by Daniel Russell or check out the full series here.
In the previous article, we talked about Data driven Design can lead to more conversion.
I am the Managing Director of Coreter Media and have been in Digital Marketing since 2009. Initially in-house working for some of the UK’s biggest brands, but now I run my own agency helping small businesses grow.