When I got started as an online marketer, I would design a sales funnel and make them look great but they weren’t converting very well. So I thought, what's the other piece to success? It’s the words. It’s the copy you use to capture and maintain your audience’s attention, you need to be able to communicate what it is that you’re selling to the right person and do it well.
Most sales funnels revolve around the business’ goals rather than those of the customer. From ad to landing page to checkout to confirmation email, too many marketers are making the online experience all about what’s easiest for them, instead of what’s easiest for the people actually doing the buying.
Which leaves potential customers frustrated, annoyed, and way less likely to convert. Your online sales funnel should be a conversion-friendly journey where your customers take action based on messaging that informs and inspires — not a money-hungry turbine that sucks them in and spits them out.
Inform and Inspire
Compelling sales funnel copywriting will use language that sparks a response in the reader, based on their position in the funnel, to keep them moving toward the next step. I am challenging you to take a real strong look at copy because typically it’s overlooked.
Turn Prospects into Customers with Better Copy
Here are some tips and strategies to help you start writing amazing website/funnel copy:
- Focus on the problems your target buyer is having. Your customer’s awareness level of their problem, the solutions available, and your brand all play into what information they need as they move from top to bottom of the funnel. If you know a certain industry has trouble generating leads then you can start your Facebook ads or other advertising content with “Calling all solar consultants, do you struggle to generate leads?” Now you’ve pulled them in and you can start delivering your objective to them. It doesn’t even need to be that transparent. The best copy delivers the problem without explicitly pointing it out. For example, “solar consultants, learn the one thing 98% of you are not doing to generate leads.” It’s more of a curiosity poke to get your audience interested in what it is you have to offer.
- Focus on your tone. In case you didn’t realize this, you’re not really selling that widget, piece of software, or solar panels. You’re actually selling the promise of how much better, easier, and more exciting your customer’s life will be once your product is in it. How you want your content to be contextualized and interpreted all comes down to the tone you choose to take. If you’re developing a highly technical product catered to business professionals, then your tone should be professional and informative. However, if you’re trying to connect with your audience on a personal, informal level - then it’s important to tone down your voice and focus on more conversational copy. It’s important to keep your tone consistent across every piece of copy you create.
- Always proofread. It seems self-explanatory, or you may believe your spell checker or Grammarly will catch every mistake. Regardless of how perfect you believe your copy is, always, always proofread at least twice. Those simple typos or formatting errors you would have caught if you gave your copy one more read could be contributing to your conversion rate. I know I’ve clicked away from articles that have clear typography errors.
- Never forget about SEO. Search Engine Optimization is definitely a frequently used phrase in marketing - and for good reason. You could have the best design and great copy that solves a problem, but without strategically used SEO, no one is going to be able to find and read it. Every piece of copy, from your About page to your blogs, needs to use keywords and other SEO techniques to tell Google’s algorithms what it is you’re selling.
Not sure where to begin with your copy? Start by asking yourself these 4 questions:
- What is the state of awareness of my customer?
- What problems does my product or solution fix?
- What are the desires/needs driving my customer’s decision-making?
- What are my customer’s hesitations and concerns?
You need to know the problem and then offer the solution - that’s what will sell your product. Busting hesitations and alleviating concerns with copy is where the funnel really shines.
This is just scratching the surface, there is so much more involved in copy. But just knowing the tips above, talk to the people who have the problems your product or service will solve and then go to the selling and tell them why your product is so great - people will spend money to solve a problem, and if you can create exceptional copy, they’ll buy your product or service because they need it - regardless of the cost. So go ahead and solve that problem. The bigger problem you solve, the bigger paycheck you’re probably going to get.
Interested in learning more about how to generate the maximum number of leads for your business? Follow us on Youtube !
Joe
