Remember when consumers checked the phone book when they wanted to know about a business? Remember when they checked newspapers for the ads? Remember direct mail?
Time marches on. At times these components may make sense for a percentage of your advertising budget, but you need to reach customers where they are—and for 99 percent of businesses in today’s day and age, that means finding them online.
Businesses are starting to recognize the importance in their web site, and set aside money for an advertising budget. Now, you have web sites beautifully designed with a message that begins with “Welcome to my new web site!!!” or something to that effect. If you don’t see anything wrong with this, or have done it yourself, you need to hire a copywriter to help with commercial writing.
As a business owner, you may love to write. You may think you’re good at it, and you may see doing it yourself as a way to cut costs. This is such a crucial part of bringing business in, that you don’t want to leave it to yourself anymore.
When someone wants to know about a type of business they don’t reach for a huge thick book. They take their phone out, or go to their tablet or laptop. They Google it, and receive the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision. If they don’t find information about your business in this process, you lose.
An experienced copywriter will make sure that all the pieces are in place for your business to rank well in the search engines. This is the equivalent of a big expensive ad buy. It’s the way that mom and pops can compete with big boxes.
Ranking in the search engines alone is no longer enough, either. People can’t go to your web site and see grammatical or spelling mistakes. They can’t see a whole bunch of half-cooked thoughts. They need a story. They need a message.
While “Welcome to my new web site!!!” may get you an “A” for manners, it does little to pull people in. You have only a few seconds to grab someone’s attention. You need to tell them why they need what you sell, and you need to do it in a way that’s not overtly pushy. It’s a tall task, and a copywriter can help.
A good copywriter should know how to make sure your copy will help the site rank higher in the search engine. They should be able to recommend keywords, and why they will help you. They should be able to dance along the line between writing for readers and writing for the search engines, landing on the appropriate side at the appropriate times.
A good copywriter can make suggestions for your web site that will make it better. Say you sell cheese. A good copywriter may suggest a page on your web site devoted to cheese and wine pairings. Bonus points if he suggests QR codes on the bottle so that people may find those pairings from the dinner table.
Simply put, a good copywriter will help you reach your audience, and bring you business—something as a small business owner you can no longer afford to overlook.
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