10 useful tips for writing copy for businesses to increase the conversion rate of your website
B2B copywriting is a different ball game to B2C copy, but a lot of the same principles apply. If you're writing to appeal to other businesses, then you need to look into creating a cohesive strategy that really brings in the business. If you're looking to improve your ROI, here 10 tips that will get you started.
1. Review your analytics
Look at what's already on your website. What's the data that people are returning to again and again? What pages aren't being visited? You can get a great idea of what other businesses want by looking at your analytics. From this data, you can create a new strategy to draw them in.
2. Avoid the hard sell
The hard sell may have worked once upon a time, but nowadays it just doesn't fly. No one wants to…
How to Combine Precision and Empathy for an Effective Effort
To successfully engage potential customers during the sweet spot of their buying journey, marketing leaders and teams need precision and empathy more than automation tools and available media.
Programmatic creative — technology that uses data (precision) to automate and accelerate routine, repetitive components of developing an ad — garners plenty of attention these days. The concept enables marketers to quickly create multiple online ads in different formats for different devices targeted to different audiences.
It hasn’t, however, automatically triggered effective customer connections and results. That feat requires a little effort, creativity, and lots of empathy on the part of marketers, with that last component being a possible springboard to turn accumulated data into a story that resonates with customers.
Mix Insights and Emotions to Tell a More Compelling Story
Programmatic creative technology is a vital resource in taking the guesswork out of digital advertising.…
Your website must convey your value proposition. Here's how to do it.
Web design and online marketing have gotten more complicated than ever before – it’s possible now to add all kinds of bells and whistles to your site, and there are lots of buzzwords about what your site needs to do to engage visitors and capture email addresses and generate leads. But too many company websites are losing sight of what is truly most important about their site’s design and content – showing people WHY they should care and “What’s in it for me” from the customer’s perspective. Simply put: too many company websites don’t really illustrate a value proposition.
Next time you redesign your website, take some time to ask yourself some big-picture questions to make sure your website really has a compelling case for why people should buy from you.
Here are a few questions that your website needs…
Analysing your customers behaviour using buyer personas to improve your B2B E-commerce strategy
Is your B2B e-commerce strategy stagnating? If so, your buyer personas may be the weak link. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that’s created by studying demographics, attitudes and buying patterns. Detailed buyer personas guide everything from product development to marketing decisions, improving your business’s ability to identify, cultivate and convert the best leads into loyal customers. However, companies often get lazy about their buyer personas. When demographics steal the spotlight, businesses overlook the complex motivators, attitudes and behaviors that influence how individuals shop online.
The result: Your business wastes valuable resources investing in leads with a low probability for conversion, while missing out on higher utility leads.
The solution: build a smarter e-commerce strategy through an in-depth understanding of how buyer personas influence B2B…
Which Key Features Must Your Persona Include?
Personas are a well-established marketing technique to help produce more customer-focused communications. They can be applied to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. However taking a look at how marketers search for information about personas in Google Trends shows that there are a relatively low volume of searches.
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You can see there is a clear up-tick in interest in personas over the last few years which I think is related to interest in content marketing for which personas are often recommended to generate relevant personas for different audiences.
In this article I will introduce the value of using personas which we’re big fans of using to create more personalised email and web-based conversations with prospects as part of marketing automation.
The benefits of buyer personas for content marketing
To support content marketing initiatives, personas are valuable…
Chart of the day: Qualitative research dominates persona research and such research leads to revenue success
Most businesses are using qualitative research techniques such as interviews to create their personas, according to research by Cintell.
Quantitative techniques such as surveys were found to be the least used whilst conducting qualitative interviews with customers and non-customers was found to be most popular, with more than 8 in 10 using such techniques. Interviewing overall dominated the highest results of the survey, which suggested that qualitative methods exceeded persona research goals.
The research also found that 7 in 10 companies who missed revenue or lead goals did not conduct qualitative persona research.
High performing companies were also more than two times likely to research the motivations of their customers.
Source: Cintell
Sample: 137 respondents. Popular job titles represented were Director, VP of Marketing, Chief Marketing…
Chart of the Day: A conversion funnel example from the loans sector
A different format of chart for today, showing analysis and modelling for digital marketing rather than statistics on adoption or benchmarks.
The recommended Smart Insights approach for creating achievable marketing plans is centred on creating realistic forecasts of leads, sales and revenue in the year ahead based on conversion-funnel model spreadsheets with the contribution of different channels shown in this digital marketing planning spreadsheet.
This example shows how in some types of business, like the financial services sector, it's important to take into account multichannel behaviour as the decision will be influenced by different channels such as web-phone-branch and the customer journey will involve switching between them.
This is a useful visualisation that adds more detail to a ROPO analysis by breaking out different channels in each vertical bar and…
When writing content for your website, blog, or newsletter, should you aim for brevity or go in-depth?
I’d dump Q and maybe J.
Because if attention spans continue shrinking, we’ll need to cut down the alphabet to make words shorter (shrtr).
Given the online ADD epidemic, it surely makes sense to go short if you’re producing articles for a newsletter, blog or website?
Not necessarily.
If short was always the way, this blog would be dead. We just assume people won’t read long articles. The ADD problem has been hammered home so often that we hardly pause to think anymore.
But it’s not that simple.
Like everything online, the “ideal” content length depends on context: the ideal length is the one that says everything you need to say to get the right response.
Not short. Not long. But what suits your needs and the audience you’re targeting.
The…
These productivity and copywriting tools can help you take your content marketing to the next level
In a year in which content will reign supreme, it’s very important to differentiate yourself from tons of the material that is getting uploaded on the Internet every single hour. It’s important, but it is also very difficult. Your content has to shine, it has to entice, and it has to be beautiful.
Now, when we say beautiful we don’t mean it as an invite to go out there and b-dazzle pieces of paper, charts and diagrams. One example of 'beautiful content' is well-researched and organized content that has a structure and a flow. Another example is richly illustrated content that speaks to visual learners; every writer who’s worked on content for an infographic knows that visuals can do wonders in getting the material to really shine. A page of content completely devoid of grammatical and…
How to Easily Cultivate Trust with Button Copy that Puts Your Audience’s Needs First
Marketers are busy and often juggle way too many responsibilities at once. Something’s gotta give, and sometimes it’s the button copy. It’s understandable, but when you skip this one detail, you create a very bad impression with your audience.
By settling on generic button copy, you risk coming off as a lazy marketer who focuses on getting the lead or the sale instead of your customers’ wellbeing. Consequently, conversions suffer.
So it’s time to rid the world of generic button copy.
If Your Button Copy is Good Ole “Sign Up”, “Send” or “Submit”
You’re probably not doing this on purpose, but I’m not gonna lie – it’s bad.
When site visitors scroll through the page, a generic “submit” button doesn’t tell them a thing other than the fact you want something from them. Truth be told, they probably won’t even notice it,…
