SIX TIPS ON HOW TO CREATE QUALITY COPY CONTENT

It’s the latest buzzword – “quality copy content.”  It starts with the copy on your website – company description, leadership bios, product descriptions, and your corporate blog.  It also includes the white papers you publish and the social media postings on your company pages. Plus, any other information you share online about what you do and how do it including videos, infographics and PowerPoint presentations. But just producing copy isn’t a guarantee that it will get read – let alone remembered.  Below are six tips to help you write the kind of copy content that will attract attention, enhance your brand and create a loyal customer following. We hope these guidelines will increase your success with all of your digital communications.

1. Know your audience

What do they do? Are they businesses or individual consumers? How can you help them solve the problems they’re concerned about? Are they seeking technical information that’s hard to find? Or struggling with professional or personal issues you can advise them on? Whatever business you’re in, solving problems for your customers is always the ultimate path to your own success. And good copy content is an ideal way to prove that you can provide the answers they’re looking for.  Once you do that, customers will not only seek out your products and services themselves, they’re also likely to direct others to your site, expanding your customer base without any extra effort on your part.

2.  Know your product

All too many business people – including sales staff and, worse yet, even marketing people – limit product copy to a list of physical features and specifications.  They describe what the product looks like, how much it weighs, how much it costs, etc, but neglect to tell customers what they really want to know – how does it make their lives better.

For example, here’s what bad and good copy might look like for a washing machine:

“Our washer agitates faster yet more gently than our competitors.”

Faster agitation may be a good thing but it is meaningless to the person doing a wash. Instead, quality copy content would spell out the benefits it provides to the user, like this:

“Our advanced agitation cycle draws more dirt and grime out of your clothes without damaging even the most delicate fabrics. Clothes come out cleaner, in less time and they last longer.”

3. Communicate in your native tongue

Using industry jargon and abbreviations is always tempting especially if you’re writing against a deadline. But not everyone speaks what I refer to as “industryese.” On the other hand, most Americans, including you, understand conversational English.  That makes it the perfect vehicle for digital communications. If you must use acronyms, spell them out followed by initial letters the first time you use them. Break up paragraphs so they are no longer than 10 lines deep. Make sure your grammar and spelling are correct. And acknowledge the ownership of phrases that were uttered by other people first with quote marks and their name!

4. Embed keywords correctly

When a search engine looks for quality copy content to satisfy a user’s search for information it does so by way of individual words or phrases referred to as keywords. To successfully prompt a search engine to pick your content as the answer to a search you must use keywords often enough and in a way recognizable to human readers and Google search spiders. At the same time, the copy can’t be just a string of keywords arbitrarily included in the copy. Knowing how to find, incorporate and feature keywords is one of the signs of a true digital communications professional.

5. Refresh your copy frequently

Google and other search engines are rather like teenagers. They get bored easily and seem to prefer the new to the familiar. This means you should add, change and revamp your site on a frequent basis. You can do this by blogging at least once a week, reworking copy content on a quarterly basis by adding case histories or even make an effort to rework the entire site at least once a year.  Just make sure that you maintain your brand whatever other changes you may make.

6. Put relationships first

Never forget that Quality Copy Content is never about “selling” product. That’s a short term goal and while it’s appropriate on an ecommerce site, the real purpose of copy content is to build long term, productive – and eventually profitable – relationships with site users. To this end, copy should have a positive, altruistic and conversational tone – whatever it’s about. It should always be created with the mission of serving and helping others and take a long view of achieving your business agenda.

Of course, there’s a lot more to learn about this important topic, but these six guidelines should get you off to a good start.

If you’d like to learn more about our copy content services just call us at the number below. We can function as your communications partner to create copy content, blogs, social media posts and more for your company on a regular basis. Or we can develop digital communications templates to help you produce quality copy content on your own.

Call us anytime at (262) 885-6408 or click HERE to learn more about our services.