Since we’re DigitalMarketer and our entire company is built around helping your business succeed, you knew we were going to give you some insights as to how to write the best copy for your business.
Strategy #1: The Power of One
The Power of One plays off of one good idea, core emotion, captivating story, or inevitable response.
It’s the headline that makes you think, “That’s brilliant,” the tagline that sings your heart, the bus stop ad that makes you stop and read the entire thing, or the Google ad that tells you to get ready to laugh.
For example:
- Good idea: How to Use Body Language to Land Your Dream Job
- Core Emotion: We’re fighting for the 1.5 million animals who will be euthanized this year.
- Captivating Story: An advertisement talking about how a woman was able to save a man and his dog from the roof of his home after he was caught in a hurricane
- Inevitable Response: You’ll Laugh When You Realize How Many Times You’ve Made This Copywriting Mistake
Strategy #2: Verb, Noun, Goal
Jon Benson, living copywriting legend (and one of the first copywriters I ever looked up to), uses this strategy as one (of hundreds) in his CopyPro copywriting AI software. The idea came from a pattern Jon saw in all business owners.
They all wanted to do something to help a certain avatar reach their goal. Jon realized, in order for these business owners to achieve their own goals they had to be able to clearly communicate them to clients.
For example:
DigitalMarketer provides marketing agencies the strategies and tools so they can double their business.
Verb: Provides
Noun: Marketing Agencies
Goal: Double their business
Infusionsoft grows businesses with an all-in-one CRM.
Verb: Grows
Noun: Businesses
Goal: to have an all-in-one CRM
Strategy #3: Always Write Below an 8th-Grade Reading Level
This isn’t a template copywriting strategy, it’s an overarching strategy. All of your copy, regardless of where it is posted, should be written below an 8th-grade reading level. Why? Because the average US consumer reads at an 8th-grade level, which means our content can’t be more complicated than that.
To determine the reading level of text, there are 3 factors:
- Total Words
- Total Sentences
- Total Syllables
Strategy #4: Benefits > Features
Your copywriting shouldn’t talk about how great your product is, it should talk about how great your product makes your customer’s life.
Remember, your business has more to do with the problem you’re solving for your customers than the fancy bells and whistles you use to make it look good.
For example, on the landing page for our Content Marketing Specialist Certification Course, we put bullet points of everything you’ll learn from taking the course.
Strategy #5: Play on FOMO
Remember the last time you weren’t able to watch Game of Thrones on Sunday night and had to spend all of Monday in a pit of FOMO as you dodged everybody’s conversations around who survived and who didn’t?
FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” can be felt in person AND online.
For example, we sent an email with the headline:
“ICYMI: Want to be a better copywriter? Open this before midnight.”
The email had a 14.82% open rate thanks to FOMO and one other copywriting strategy that we added at the very end, urgency.
Strategy #6: Leverage Quantity and Availability Through Urgency
Urgency in copywriting is the persuasion that pushes a customer to want to sign up, buy a product, etc., because they are given a specific amount of time to do so. This can work in 2 ways:
- Quantity: There are only so many units of a product, tickets for an event, seats at a Mastermind
- Availability: The product or service is only available at this price or at all for a limited time
For example:
Rachel Hollis, author of Girl, Wash Your Face and keynote speaker at the 2019 Traffic & Conversion Summit has built her business around urgency due to a lack of quantity. For each of her products, she orders a set amount and that’s it. Once her planners sell out, they never come back in stock.
This makes her fanbase take her product launches very seriously. They’ve been trained to know that if she drops a new planner and they don’t get it, they won’t ever have it.
Strategy #7: Speak Your Customer’s Language
Copywriting should always use the verbiage of your customers, but adding urgency, discounts, or benefits can take away from your opportunity to do so—there’s only so many characters you can use on an email subject line or Google ad.
In this copywriting strategy, you’ll only play on your customer’s language.
