How to Improve Your Copywriting Skills: Part 2

Welcome to part two of the “How to Improve Your Copywriting Skills” series. In the last part, we discuss headlines, mental triggers for selling, and more. If you have not read that section yet, we recommend doing so. This way, you can build off of that knowledge and have better insight for this blog post.

In this section, we are discussing your sales message. Your sales message is a vital component when setting out to improve your copywriting. Without an amazing sales message, you will have a challenging time converting leads into customers. However, it is possible to easily design your sales message, you just need to understand your marketing funnel.

What is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is can be conveyed through a chart that demonstrates how consumers go through the process of becoming a customer. Typically, a consumer will start their relationship with a business first by gaining awareness. This is where they find out the company exists and what they do. Then, they move into interest, and then consideration as they learn about your business and offerings. Next, they move into intent, where they show they’re interested in purchasing from you. Finally, they make their final decisions in the evaluation stage. All of this is done with the intention of funneling them into the purchase stage, where you land a new customer.

Of course, you will lose some people along the way. Perhaps they decide purchasing your services isn’t in the budget. Or, you don’t sell the product they need. This is completely normal. However, with your sales message, the goal is to hold onto the right consumers and have them go all the way down your marketing funnel and end up making a purchase. To do this best, you must create a great sales message for the different stages of your funnels.

How to Design Your Sales Message

Every business has an audience who is in all different areas of their marketing funnel. Your different traffic sources require different sales messages to ensure optimal sales. So, you need to have a different message for each level of your marketing funnel. This way, you can communicate your offerings effectively, rather than communicating the same thing to people in the awareness stage and the intent stage.

Think of Your Message as a Conversation

The best way to understand how to properly communicate your sales message to your readers is by thinking of your sales message as a conversation. When you think about it, your sales message is you communicating why someone should buy your product. In all of your sales messages, you should explain what your product does and how it will help your customers. The viewers of your ad or website visitors should not be left confused about what your business does or what your product is. They should have a clear understanding and want to know more information about it.

Your sales message should have a great headline and information body text. The headline, as mentioned in part one, should capture the reader’s attention and never let go of it. Well, maybe it should let go of it at some point, but only after the customer completes the purchase. After the headline, the reader should be intrigued by your body text and want to click to your website or product information page to learn more.

But remember, as mentioned above, you will need to have different sales messages at the various levels of your marketing funnel. In most cases, you don’t want to just use one sales message for all your marketing. That typically isn’t the most effective way to drive conversions.

Create Different Sales Messages

Jim Edwards, author of “Copywriting Secrets” explains the need for different sales messages through a great example. He tells readers to pretend they sell anti-virus software. For the consumers who have no idea that they have a virus, it makes no sense to say, “We have a five-star review and we are the best anti-virus product in the country!” This is because they don’t know they have a virus, so they won’t have a need for your product. Instead, it makes more sense to say, “Is your computer running slow? Have your settings randomly changed? You may have a computer virus. Here is how we can help you.” This informs them they could have a problem, and then gives them a solution.

This same scenario works both ways. For someone who is familiar with your company and knows they have a virus, you shouldn’t use that last sales message. Instead, it makes more sense to go with the first message.

Some marketers instruct their audience to think of their potential customers as cold, warm, and hot traffic. This is another way to look at your audience through different levels. Cold traffic would be someone well before the awareness stage, warm would be someone just before the awareness stage, and hot would be someone in the awareness stage. You can design your sales message around whichever concept you prefer. Either way, when you change your sales message around a consumer’s knowledge of your services, you will improve your copywriting. To further segment your customers, you should consider creating a customer persona.

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Set Up a Customer Persona

For many marketing experts, they heavily associate their marketing funnel with their customer personas. This is for a very good reason. Creating a customer persona for your company can help you get into the heads of your prospective and current customers. Then, you can improve your copywriting and your sales message. You can also create different sales messages for each customer to receive. Once you have created that sales message, you use the customer persona’s demographics to target them.

How to Set Up a Customer Persona

Without going into too much detail, as this topic is deserving of its own blog post, you set up a customer persona by thinking about your ideal customer. Consider their age, gender, marital status, job status, life stage, and other demographics. Then, consider their likes and dislikes. Think about their goals in life and some frustrations they may have. The more specific you get, the better, because every detail will help you get into the customer’s mind.

A helpful trick when creating a customer persona is to look at one of the customers you enjoy working with. Then, pull the information you know about them and create a persona. If you need to estimate certain aspects of the persona such as age or income level, that is completely fine. As long as you can narrow down the persona to be specific enough to shape a sales message, it will be helpful.

Improve Your Copywriting For Your Sales Message

To conclude this blog post, it is important to create different sales messages depending on the consumer’s position in your marketing funnel and demographics. Doing this will help your sales message be as effective as possible.

We hope this blog post was helpful for you as you try to improve your copywriting skills. Stay tuned for the other parts of this series so you can learn more helpful copywriting tips!

And, if you don’t have time to write your own copy, let us know! We would be happy to explore the idea of ghost writing on your behalf. Just shoot us a message via the contact form below, if you’d like to have a conversation about this.