Website Copy and Content Development
Although your website design is crucial to converting sales, your content is everything. It speaks about who you are and what you have to offer. It shows your personality in terms of carelessness, laziness, and perfection. It is your sales person and it is your résumé, all in one. When potential customers read your copy, they immediately infer different traits upon you and your products. Sadly, often, these are not positive and they do hamper your ability to create sales. If your grammar is shoddy, then people believe that you will not take the time to service them, or that the product you have created is substandard. So, if you expect to do your best with your online business, your website copy and content development need to be perfect to be effective.
Professional website copy is the promotional material displayed on your site in an effort to sell your product. It is similar to a printed brochure that you distribute to potential clients, except it is online in the form of your website. Regardless of what language you speak, your material needs to use proper grammar and perfect spelling. And, if you are speaking to an audience which does not speak your native language, you really must hire excellent translators to impart your message. Then, you need to hire someone else to read the material, finessing the nuances and identifying quirks in the text.
Aside from the spelling, grammar and language that you choose, your website copy must have certain characteristics.
- It must be succinct and to the point.
- It must be able to impart your message.
- It needs to tell potential customers what you sell and why they must have it.
- It needs to be clear about the features and benefits of your product or service.
- It must be able to produce sales.
- It must direct your customers, easily and logically, through the pre-sale stage, the checkout process, and the post-sale or after-support phase.
- It must mention the keywords you want to rank for -- good SEO content is vital for your search results.
Additionally, the content development is equally meaningful. Many site owners realize the importance of providing useful articles and supporting documentation for their products. Frequently, by providing informative articles, the company can use the material as part of their support processes. An example would be downloadable manuals and step-by-step instructions. Stories explaining how others have used the products, and articles with information about the industry as a whole will also be beneficial in terms of creating trust and making your qualified leads more comfortable with buying from you. Remember that everything you produce directly impacts your sales. You may have excellent after-care personnel, but if your users will not purchase the product based on inaccurate information that they read on your site, they will not buy, so your support department sits idle.
Likewise, your content development should follow a schedule. It should be focused and have a goal. Ideally, you want your users to purchase at some time. There should be a strategy, which moves logically from beginning to end, understanding though, that the content is not a typical sales tool. In other words, some content should be for informational purposes only, while other website copy is promotional in nature.
Whether you require website copy to be used as a standard sales letter, or you need content development in the way of useful information, Lodi Commerce can offer you the expertise of both scenarios.