You will lose sales if you break these copywriting rules

If you run your business online, and are writing the marketing material yourself, or have hired a writer that doesn’t understand the nuances of copywriting, you should know.. YOU ARE LOSING SALES!!!! Wanna know why? The answer is simple. The ROI of your business is dependent on how well your marketing copy synchronizes with your potential readers.

In the online world, writing a persuasive marketing message that is not only meaningful and compelling, and can lead a reader to making an action is higher essential. It is the basic foundation of your marketing plan, and without it, no matter what you do, the efforts are worth nil.

WritingZing shares with you 5 tips on copywriting that will help you identify the rules and judge whether you are breaking them or not.

RULE 1:

Is your product/service under-performing and lagging to meeting the needs of the customer? You are breaking the rule 1, as the performance of you product/services is directly proportional to your marketing message.

Poor Sales <> Poor Marketing Message

Good Sales <> Average Marketing Message

High Sales <> Strong Marketing Message

You need to understand that the customer (the audience) has its own expectations on the product/service you are offering. And the reality is that those expectations will be way different from what you think about your product. Here lies a clear different between the expected and the given, thereby leading to a fluctuation in sales. The culprit here is the marketing message that does not communicate the strong features/benefits of your product/service. This makes the customer to have a negative impression of your services.

RULE 2:

Do you writing your marketing content with ‘I’ or ‘We’? If the answer is YES, I am sorry to say that you are breaking the rule 2 of copywriting. A persuasive message will always address the reader as ‘You’, thereby fulfilling the point to address directly to the reader. The use of ‘I’ will involve significant less consideration of what the consumer wants, and high consideration of what you want. Do not generalize the content saying ‘WE’.

RULE 3:

The rule of KISS or better known as ‘keep it simple stupid’ is a commonly used jargon in the world of copywriting. Marketeers prefer to develop content that is engaging and relevant to the interests of the readers. To achieve this, they spend considerable investment in analyzing the readers interests, likes and dislikes. They call it ‘Analysis of the target population’.

Let’s keep it simple! If your marketing content is filled with words that are rather glossy and make no significant difference to the sentence, it breaks the rule 3. To help you better understand, read the below examples:

Content with filler: ‘She was very very excited to go to the auto show to see the big cards.’

Content with no filler: ‘She was excited to attend the auto show and to see the cars on display.’

RULE 4:

Never make our first draft as the final draft!

This is one of the most common mistakes made by people, breaking the rule of marketing content writing. The first draft is always the initial layout of the message being transmitted to the reader. You need to review the draft and making changes at least twice before you publish the final draft. You will be shocked to see that difference between the first draft and the last draft, as almost 30% of the content is either deleted or changed.

This is a process of filtering that will help you cleanse the content of fillers and publish only relevant and up-to-the-point content.

RULE 5:

Also known as the rule of SLAP [Abbreviated for stop, look, act and purchase], this rule will help you develop content that leads the reader to make a purchase. You are putting up good effort to develop a marketing message that is unique, and it does not lead to a sale! Will you be happy about that? No! Put your content through the SLAP rule and verify it the content will lead the reader to the checkout option.