Copywriters are great, but they don’t know your business. When you are developing a business website, it needs to speak your customer’s language. It needs to be an extension of who you are offline. I don’t know of a better person to articulate that than you.
A business website is there to sell your products or services when you can’t be. Sure a copywriter can be briefed, they know the right words to use to get great search results, they can say the same thing a dozen different ways; but are they the right people to be selling your business?
If you were to engage a copywriter you would need to brief them on the ‘who, what, why’ of ‘you, your business and your customer’. Sounds to me you are doing a lot of the writing already.
What do you need to do instead?
– Know your customer. How old are they? Are they a particular gender? Are they educated? What do they do for work? What problem are they coming to you to fix? How do they like to shop?
– Know your product or service. What is it? How will it help your customer? How does it solve their problems? Why is it different?
– Know your competition. How do they solve customer problems? How do they do things differently?
– Know yourself. What image do you want to portray?
In my years of e-business project management I learnt to talk to the business first. They hold the knowledge and the vision, not the person building the widget.
From here all I can advise is to plan, write & review. If you will be maintaining your own website don’t be afraid to try different writing styles or tone; by experimenting you will soon see what appeals to your customers. Please plan your writing. Plan what website pages you will have, how your customers will use them (not just read them) & what you want to gain from the page. Put your customer first when you are writing.
– Put your customer first when you are writing. – (Tweet it!)
Remember that people want to know “What’s in it for me?” so tell them how they will benefit. You are the one who knows best how they will benefit. Plan the content. Write the most important benefits at the top of the page. Use visual cues, like bold or italic font, to keep their eye active and moving down the page. Plan these cues when you are planning your page.
Draft your pages in a word processing program. You can copy & paste from most and keep the formatting. You can move paragraphs around and remove any duplicated information.
Check your pages against your plan. Does it meet the customer’s needs? Will it adequately sell your business when you aren’t physically online? Leave it overnight and check it again tomorrow. Have it proofread (you knew I would mention it somewhere). After you have uploaded it to your site, give it a few weeks, a few months and review the page. Does it still help your business? Repeat the cycle.
– Plan, write, check, repeat – (Tweet it!)
Write to Right offer a range of proofreading and editing services for documents and specialised packages for websites. If you choose to write your own content, it’s prudent to have someone else check your work. Let Write to Right make your business communication its best.
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