Know your audience by understanding their pain points and motivations. Highlight benefits over features and craft a compelling call to action to drive conversions.
1. Know Your Audience for Better Conversion
The essential part of writing persuasive copy that converts is understanding who you’re writing for, and not just in a superficial manner. To write copy that resonates—that gets your audience to say, “Yes, that’s me!”—when they read your words, you must delve into their psychology. You must know, with some degree of specificity, the pains and problems they have and the language they use to talk about them.
Start by examining the demographics—age, gender, location, and education level. Understanding these factors is essential for creating communications that resonate with your intended audiences. Once you grasp the basic traits, you can refine your understanding further by considering the psychographic profiles and digital behaviors of your various targets.
The next step is to know what your audience is passionate about. This is key when trying to capture their attention and get them to engage with your message. For example, say you’re selling a software tool. If you know your audience is passionate about automation and efficiency, you can structure your message around those passions.
Another crucial aspect is the pain points. What difficulties does your audience experience that your software can alleviate? This is not merely a matter of putting features on display; it is about showing empathy and understanding. When your copy conveys that you comprehend their exasperation and that you provide a workable solution, you reach an emotional level that makes your words far more persuasive.
Developing a detailed comprehension of your audience begins with the creation of elaborate buyer personas. These personas don’t just exist in the realm of imagination; they have a foundation in research and use inferences to get as close as possible to depicting the reality of your audience. A successful copywriter gets to know the audience as well as possible before ever putting pen to paper.
Another important step is to shape the language and tone so that they align with the audience’s preferences. Do they like to engage with a brand in a formal, professional manner, or is a more casual, friendly approach what they would prefer? When you match your communication tone to what your audience finds relatable, you create an effortless bridge between brand and consumer.
When we drill down into the audience, we find that we have two basic segments—an early-adopter segment for whom we must craft tech-driven narratives and a much larger, mainstream segment for whom we must construct simplified, story-driven narratives. Each segment deserves and demands a tailored approach.
As Jaleed Abdullah emphasizes:
“Your audience is at the heart of your content strategy, and catering to their needs should always be your priority.” — Medium
Including these components in your copy makes it more effective, and not just because it may help the copy itself resonate more with the reader. The parts of a story compel the reader to move from section to section, and more often than not, to the end. When you’re trying to persuade someone to do something, whether to buy your product, click a link, or sign up for your service, you want to structure your message in a way that keeps them “reading” to the end and, if possible, to the desired conclusion.
2. Highlight Benefits Over Features
If you want to connect with your audience and improve your software copy’s conversion rate, you must do more than present a vision of the technical marvel that is your product. You must engage and persuade by painting a picture of the benefits. What will the user experience with your product, and how will it enhance their lives?
Rather than simply saying that a software product includes “Content Management System (CMS),” we can convey the intended meaning much better by explaining the kind of control this gives users over their content. Imagine you’ve decided to take a well-deserved vacation, but suddenly you need to update your website. The CMS gives you the kind of “devil may care” management privileges that let you do it anytime, anywhere, and without the “technical hurdles” that often accompany website updates. That’s a more favorable emotional and functional positioning of the product for potential users—to know you can “kick [the CMS] into gear” under almost any circumstance, notes a CMO.
In copywriting, distinguishing between features and benefits is vital but often muddled. A feature is a technical aspect of a product—its memory capacity, for instance. A benefit is what that memory capacity means for the user, such as not wanting to feel the pain of suddenly running out of storage at a time when you’re actually using the phone. This is a rephrasing of the perspective that the authors of “Copywriting 101” take on the matter, but it’s pretty in line with common advice.
The true strength of benefits is in addressing the user-centered question “What will this do for me?” When a writer answers this question, they link the features of a product to the benefits it provides the consumer. A good copywriter is a good storyteller. They tell a story that paints a picture of the consumer in the not-too-distant future, a picture in which they are living and loving the life made possible by the product in question. And in making that link, and in telling that story, the copy becomes a powerful incitement to action.
3. Craft a Compelling Call to Action
The audience can be convinced to take the necessary action only if there is a strong call to action (CTA). What follows is advice on creating effective CTAs and the psychology behind why they work.
Using strong action verbs is a great way to craft compelling calls to action. Verbs like “discover,” “save,” and “join” naturally energize sentences. They create a sense of urgency (or at least a very good semantically implied reason) for a reader to go ahead and do (or not do) something. For example, “Learn More” as a button copy is an effective call to action because going deeper into engagement with something, like a text or a product, is always good (and easy). On the other hand, “Save” is an effective button copy because we readers are always looking for a way to save (source).
Another essential element of a CTA is urgency. Urgency expresses a sense of “you must do this and do it now.” It is not easy to be so emphatic while also being polite, but some phrases that get the point across succinctly are: “limited-time offer,” “act now,” and “don’t miss out.” These phrases prod people to do what we’re asking them to do—mostly because they don’t want to risk not doing it and then wishing they had done it. This is tapping into what experts now call FOMO (fear of missing out) (source).
Finally, express the action’s worth. Convey, if you haven’t already, how the action benefits the user. The CTA should leave no ambiguity about what the user stands to gain from clicking through. The promised gain can be something as straightforward as “You will receive this content if you continue.” Or it can be more complex and involved, hinting at rewards.
An expertly designed CTA nuzzles your audience from interest to action in a carefully structured narrative. It ensures that all your persuasive energies build to a peak in this moment and that your audience can’t help but heed your irresistibly beckoning call.
FAQ
What is the importance of knowing your audience in writing copy that converts?
Knowing your audience is the key to writing persuasively for them. You have to understand their pain points and motivations so that you can craft a message that resonates. If you know what kind of audience you are speaking to, you can also better anticipate their reaction to what you say.
How can understanding audience demographics improve copywriting?
Understanding the audience’s demographics—like age, gender, location, and education level—helps hone the messages into direct conversing. This kind of demographic knowledge lets the messenger (or the message itself) speak to the audience in a way that’s kind of like being with them in a familiar space and time.
Why should copywriters highlight benefits over features?
It is crucial to emphasize benefits rather than features because benefits illustrate how a product can change a user’s experience for the better. That makes the content more engaging and relatable. Features talk about the technical side, but benefits answer the all-important question, “What will this do for me and my life?” When you make that connection, you get user interest, and more importantly, you get conversions.
How can benefits be effectively communicated in software copy?
To convey the advantages adequately, you must translate technical attributes into relatable tales and experiences. You need to describe how a particular trait addresses a certain issue or enhances the user’s existence, making it easy for the listeners to picture a favorable transformation. You want to make them yearn to dive into the product’s world.
What makes a compelling call to action (CTA)?
An effective call to action employs vigorous action verbs that compel the reader to do something specific. It also creates a sense of urgency that makes the reader feel the need to do this something right now, rather than later or never. And it delivers, in clear and concise form, the value proposition of doing the something that is being urged. The CTA is the persuasive copywriter’s final push, on top of all the other persuasive elements that have been laid down, getting the audience to transition from interest to decision.
How can urgency be incorporated into a call to action?
Use time-sensitive terms abundantly to create an atmosphere of urgency. Employ phrases like “limited time offer” and “act now.” These words and expressions form a sense of immediacy around the message.
Your audience might be tempted to act when they think they might miss out on something good, and that’s what we call the “fear of missing out” or FOMO for short.