4 Copywriting Hacks That Will Improve Your Online Marketing

What’s better than improving your online marketing? Improving your online marketing quickly. There are a lot of ways to get more customers. Copywriting is one of the fastest ones. It’s a small investment that has a huge payoff. And isn’t that what every business owner is looking for.

Without further ado, here are 4 copywriting hacks that upgrade your online marketing strategy. They are all simple, but their effectiveness will astonish you.

1) Ditch the Superfluous Big Words

Overly technical language will make your prospects eyes glaze over. Effective copywriting isn’t necessarily about using big words that will impress your prospects. It’s about getting your prospects to read your whole email and hopefully take action.

The phrase “propose we engage on some other occasion” is not a bad phrase in itself. Grammatically it works. But “How about we meet later” is usually the better tone for an email.

2) Don’t Be Boring

Many businesses are afraid of presenting themselves unprofessionally. That’s a legitimate concern. Your brand name is essential and there is no reason to tarnish it by being tasteless or insensitive. But that doesn’t mean you have to boring either. Dale Carnegie, the author who wrote many famous books, said that you can win friends and influence people by talking about stuff the other person is interested in.

It’s a valuable lesson for online marketers. The website Entrepreneur says this about the subject:

“Bob likes football, telling dirty jokes and drinking beer. However, when a salesperson tries to cold email Bob, he or she ends up sound like a boring robot. This leads to unread or deleted emails.”

The problem is a lot of salespeople tend to formalize their emails to look professional. Neville tells me that he actually tested this in many industries (including banking and business-to-business sales), and found that a “casual tone” always outperforms boring emails.

In order to have success online, you need to capture your prospect’s attention quickly. If you’re boring, you’re not going to do that. The conversation has to be centered around them. Their interests. What your product can do to make their life better. Once you start talking about yourself too much it’s over.

3) Trim Down Your Copy

Strunk and White, the authors of Elements of Style, said to “omit needless words.” That advice is very useful in copywriting. That doesn’t mean your copy should shorter, but that it can be shorter. In other words, there isn’t a word count. Why? It all goes back to point number two. People are interested in themselves. If you are padding out your word counts, then you are probably including content they don’t want to read. Only give them useful information. Only give them the best you have to offer.

4) Write Better Headlines

The point of a headline is for the reader to read the first sentence of the body copy. If people aren’t interested in your headline, they won’t read the body copy, no matter how interesting it is. The logic extends past the headline. Your first sentence should be interesting, so prospects will read your second sentence. Your second sentence should be interesting, so prospects will read your third sentence.

How much does this matter?

A copywriting firm performed an interesting experiment with a bank that wanted to improve their copy. Long story short, they wrote boring copy. A boring headline. Boring body copy that talked about them and wasn’t focused on the customer at all. They used complicated words and wrote very long paragraphs. The last sentence offered $10 to anyone who had received the letter. But nobody took up the offer. They made it very easy to claim the money. Thing is, nobody read the offer.