How to Write Great Sales Copy for Your Website & Other Marketing Materials To Sell Your Services

 

First Stop: Mistakes Often Made

1. Write about themselves all the time  i.e. they write about what the product or services features are but not what it does to help their customer

2. Fail to appeal to their customers emotions – what emotions they’ll feel when the buy your product / service – what emotions they’ll feel if they don’t buy your product/service. Fear factors are more valuable e.g. if they don’t get tiling done by you they risk delayed service, higher costs etc.

You should focus on the negatives emotions – scientific fact people will spend more when they see the pain they’ll avoid more than the pleasure it will bring them.

Fear, scarcity, shame, embarrasement, loss, uncertainty

Another example – electrician – dangerous late cowboy electricians that will overcharge you.

3. Create offers that lack urgency – to do – create a reason for them to act now. give them something they will value for free or create scarcity to avoid them putting off their decision until a later date.

 

Writing Sales Copy

This is an effective step-by-step strategy for any type of copy and should be used as the basis for writing all your copy no matter how big or small the advertising space will be. The full course should be completed and then you will just need to cut down the end output to suit your needs for the particular space you are going to advertise in. The full process works particularly well to write great website copy to sell your services.

1. Starting Point

The best place to start writing copy is by to work out what you’re actually going to be selling.

side note: Keep in mind to write effective copy you need to work through this course focussing on one product or service at a time for the writing to be effective. It is likely that similar products and services will have similar answers to sections of this course and that’s ok as long as they relate to both. Make sure to think this through carefully.

Features

Start by listing every feature about your product or service. Write down as many as you can possibly think of. You may find you can think of hundreds and that’s ok.

Think along the lines of what your customers current biggest challengers are and what features your products have to fix them.

This is a good exercise to see for the first time, a list “things” that people want to buy “inside” your product or service.

Example:

If you’re selling hammers, a feature of one of your hammers might be that it has an oversized head, rubber grip etc. etc.

Benefits

The next step is to work out what is special about each one of these “things” – or what the benefit is of each of these features.

Example:

Using the example feature of the hammer with an oversized head, the benefits for this feature might be you can hit the nail with more accuracy, more power and less chance of missing the nail and hurting your finger.

If you’re a builder one of your features of your building service could be you always finish the build on time. The benefit of this is the owner of the house can move into it quicker, save money on their loan etc etc.

Done that? – The next step is to put each one into Bullet Points Sentence For Each One

When you’re done doing the features and the benefits, you’ll have something that you can easily turn into a “Feature-Benefit” bullet point for each one.

Example:

• The ‘Swiss Army Hammer’ has an overhead head which means you can hit the nail more accurately, with more power, without hurting yourself.
• ‘The Building Company’ make sure to finish your building on time which means you can move into your house sooner & save money on your loan.

These bullet points will form the basis of all of our copywriting.

A Good Trick

 

(feature)……..which means………(benefit)

(feature)……..because………(benefit)

 

2. The Challenges

This is where you will get right into the meat of it all and write the introduction of your website copy.

Look over the list of bullet points you’ve created, and pick the STANDOUT benefits why you think your customers should pick your service or product over everyone else.

Then the next important step we are going to do is flip it around so that the benefit now will become a PAIN point.

Example:

If people buy from you because you because they are concerned about getting a quality job. Then they fear or are at least concerned and have doubt that your competitors may not be able to provide the same quality of work.

To illustrate this further lets say if people are purchasing your $1,000 pizza over, instead of going to their local pizza shop to order pizza’s, or buying a $200 pizza over, then it’s likely that they want to avoid the pain of getting bad pizza, or unhealthy pizza or to avoid the cost of buying pizza and delivery from pizza stores, or the hassle of going out to pickup the pizza (when some benefits of your pizza over might be the convenience of getting higher quality pizza at home).

Perhaps if you’re plumber who arrives on-time, cleans up after themselves, and charges fairly – you can talk about the pain of plumbers commonly being messy, late, unprofessional and expensive.

3. Create A Pain Story

Now we are going to list these pain points and then turn them into a “ pain story”.

We will be focussing on the biggest challenges your customer will face, and the benefits they will miss out on, if they don’t buy your product.

Your story will aim to grab the attention of your prospects, and prepare them to buy by reminding them of the reasons why they need to buy from you.

Example:

Using a plumber example, you might end up with a story like:

“When you pick an plumber – how do you know you have the right one?

You pick a plumber on the internet because you want a new hot water system installed. They say they’ll be there on Friday morning (later than you want), but you grit your teeth and say “OK”.

You take the first half of the day off to meet the plumber and Friday morning comes and goes… And so does most of the afternoon. And suddenly, the plumber rolls up – disorganised, smelly and dirty and straight from his last job, trudging muddy blundstones across your clean floor.

They pull out the old system and place that outside your back door, install the new system as quickly as they can, finish the job and leave the old system at your place to get rid of. And before leaving, they make sure they slap you with a bill so big it makes you feel like you’re passing a kidney stone.

Later that night, your angry and thinking to yourself….’the guy hardly seemed to be paying any attention when wiring up the new light switch… It seemed to be a complete slap-up job… And they weren’t even diligent enough to call ahead to let you know they were running late (by several hours!)’…

So how do you know they’re diligent enough to do the job right?

There could be electrical wiring or water pipe problems just waiting to happen  – putting you, your belongings, and your family at risk!”

4. Write Your Headline

It’s at this point, your headline will practically writes itself.

Perhaps it could be something like:

“Don’t make these mistakes when picking the your plumber…” or

“Are you putting your family at risk by hiring the wrong electrician?”

Go with your most thought provoking idea that is able to be backed up by your story.

5. Offer the Solution

Now that you’ve built up the pain of not buying your product, they’re practically begging for a solution for all the pain they’re reading about.

Now it’s time to swoop in like Superman to save the day, and show the customer your product.

Suddenly, you’re no longer “selling” to them. Instead, you’re just person who happens to offer the solution to their biggest challenges. Aren’t you a nice guy!

Remember those feature-benefit bullets you wrote? Do you see why you wrote them now? It’s a laundry list of solutions to all of your customer’s biggest challenges, and they’re a great way to demonstrate the value of your product to customers.

Combined with all the fear, uncertainty and doubt your customer has about alternatives and competing products, they’ll be at your whim – unable to resist your product.

4. Call to Action

It’s time to tell them what to do right now…

• “To book now, call {phone number} and register your spot with {person’s name}.”
• “Click on the button below to get your copy now.”
• “Enter your details below for a free measure and quote.”
• “Click here to download now.”

Lay it out for them in precise detail. Tell them what to do, when to do it, and make sure you tell them what they can expect during and after doing it.

5. Give them a reason to act now.

You’re so close to a sale – so make sure you don’t let them get away!

Tell them why they need to act immediately by showing them that your product is legitimately scarce. (I say legitimately scarce, because you should never lie in your sales copy.)

How do you find legitimate scarcity? Every business has constraints. Think about yours:

• A limited number of appointments available each week;
• A 2-week waiting list for appointments;
• Only 2 units left of an item in your warehouse;
• You have a BAS due on Friday, and you need to make some quick sales with a special offer;

These are all great reasons for customers to act now.

If you can’t think of anything, manufacture scarcity:

• A 40-hour special to celebrate your 40th birthday;
• You’re testing a new special offer for the next two weeks to see if it increases sales;
• You want to reward action-takers who buy within 48 hours with a special offer;

Whatever your scarcity is, be a person of integrity and keep your word. (If you say an offer is only available for 7 days, make sure it expires on the 7th day!)

With the right sales copy, you’ll wield a lot of power and influence over your customers – so much that they will literally end up begging to buy from you (particularly when they miss out on a good special offer.)

But if you use this power without integrity to “play” your customers instead of helping them, they’ll never forgive you.

6. Polish Your Copy!

Congratulations! You’ve written some great sales copy – and you can stand back and admire your work.

But before you start using it, there are some simple “tweaks” you can apply to good sales copy to make it work even better.

These “tweaks” are based in sound psychological principles of influence:

• Authority
• Social Proof
• Contrast, and
• Removing Obstacles

Authority

• Show them your awards, licenses, qualifications, industry accreditations;
• Add a security icon to your site, reassuring customers their details are safe because your site uses 128 bit encryption;

Social Proof

• Scatter testimonials from happy customers throughout your sales copy;
• link to your portfolio of work and the case studies you have for them.

Contrast

• Contrast your price against more expensive alternatives (including the cost of inaction!);
• Contrast your product against the results customers will get from less effective competing products;
• Do a side-by-side comparison;
• Show them their annual savings over 12 months;
• Show them how much their business might improve over the next 12 months with your product;

Remove Obstacles

• Make your shopping cart easy to use;
• Take away long queues when people call to place an order;
• Provide a trial offer;
• Provide a money-back guarantee;
• Offer a payment plan for expensive products;

7. Test it!

How do you know whether your copy is any good? …How do you know if it can be any better? …How do you decide between two, or three different ideas for your marketing copy?

Split testing is the “secret sauce” top marketers use to make sure they always make the right decisions, and get the best results from their copy.

To split test your copy, split your customers into 2 (or more) groups and send different versions of your marketing copy to each group.

By tracking and measuring which version results in the most signups, enquiries, quotes or sales.

 

This information has been syndicated on our site via a big thankyou to Brent Hodgson from Zentester & Timbo at Small Business Big Marketing to provide such great copywriting advice!

We Shoot Buildings have adjusted the information provided by these guys to include our help and relevance for the building industry.

We hope you enjoy it!

Cheers