Whether you’re creating a chatbot or planning an SMS marketing campaign, you face a huge problem: word limitations. You have a lot of value to communicate, but only so many characters to express it in.
This means you need to write good marketing copy that’s clear and persuasive in order to convey the message and create a conversion.
Whether you’re writing marketing messages for a bot, SMS, or email, these 13 tips will help you write good marketing copy that can assist to generate and convert leads.
How to write a clear message
You don’t have many words to work with, so every word needs to count. Your main goal is to cut down on unnecessary words and make the most out of the words you are using.
Cut the fluff
If you’ve written blog posts or long reads in the past, it may be hard to get used to the shorter format. The first thing to do is to get rid of all the thin content. Anything that doesn’t add to the overall message you’re trying to get across should be omitted. Save the long introductions, the storytelling that takes up 200 words, and metaphoric explanations of difficult concepts for your next blog post. In the short form, you need to keep the message direct and to the point.
Avoid formal cliches
This applies to both writing short messages as well as sales copy for websites and landings. When you communicate the value of your product with generic phrases like “professional team” or “product that is worth your attention,” it amounts to nothing.
Instead, write something more concrete. Switch a “professional team” for “work with a team that speaks at hackathons” and “product that is worth your attention” for “join a community of 300,000 customers.” Phrases like this add value, not just present the reader with a bland sentence.
Cut adjectives and adverbs
Your product can be “amazing,” “unprecedented,” or “very good,” but writing that in a pitch is trying to get the reader to take your word for it. Write your message by the principle of “show, don’t tell” instead. Try to illustrate why do you think the product “amazing.”
For instance, describe unique value proposition instead of writing an adjective. Write “a service that saves 10 hours a week” instead of “time-saving service.”
Rewrite passive voice
Sentences written in passive voice may sound odd and aren’t well suited for fast reading. What can be done about passive voice? It can be rewritten. If you’re using passive voice to sound formal like “This product can be used for presentations and training,” change it to active voice: “Use this producе for presentations and training” or “Presentations and training is where this product shines.”
Break up long sentences
Do you like it when your friends send you eight lines of text that are one sentence? The people who receive your ads won’t like it either. Shorten or break up sentences that are longer than 20 words. For a message, you might want to bring that number down to 15.
Use editor tools
Editor tools can be just as important for your business as marketing tools. Run your test through Hemingway App or the Grammar Checker by Writer to weed out mistakes and stylistic errors.
Ask for opinion
Once you have cleared your text of all these writer’s missteps, show it to your coworkers. Ask if they understand the message, and improve the parts they don’t.
How to write a persuasive message
Clear writing is about getting your point across. A weak message won’t persuade the audience to convert. Here’s what you should do to make your texts work.
Study the audience
An in-store salesperson can get acquainted with their customers face to face. They can learn about marital status, budget, and interests in a personal conversation. When a salesperson learns this information, they better understand what buttons to push to close a sale.
Online marketers don’t have that luxury. You have to study your audience in other ways. You need to gather data on them.
You might already have plenty of this data on your hands. The website visitors, the newsletter subscribers, and the social media subscribers all contribute to the data pool you can use.
But gathering qualitative data is only the first step. Run user surveys among subscribers and conduct interviews in-person to learn what motivates customers to make the purchase and what problems they solve with your products.
If you’re targeting a foreign audience, you should know that one of the opportunities of VPN is the ability to see the web from the perspective of another person. Set the location to the country you’re targeting, and try to go through the steps of the customer journey. The difference won’t be huge, but the insights you get may help you make changes that lead to increased sales opportunities.
Solve the pain points
People who buy subscriptions to chatbot software want to save time and money on communication. People who purchase jewelry want a gift or an investment.
Addressing that in your message is more powerful than stating generally that your service works well.
Appeal to emotions
Whether we like it or not, 95% of purchases are driven by emotion. This may be geared towards B2C, but the problems B2B companies solve are also linked to emotions.
For instance, a person looking for a decent chat software may be sick of communicating with clients manually, or anxious to finish the quarter with a profit. Understanding your customers’ emotions and appealing to them will make your message more persuasive.
Use social proof
About 97% of customers read reviews before making a purchase. You can’t add a review to your marketing message, but you can use other ways to leverage the audience’s hunger for social approval.
Mention the number of clients you have, the customer satisfaction statistics, or a well-known and respected customer.
Engage
This tip can be used in any marketing technique, but it’s most prominent in Facebook’s click-to-Messenger ads. The goal of these ads is to get the maximum number of messages, so you should encourage the customers to talk to you. Do this with the following:
- Personalization: “Mark, you can’t miss this offer.”
- Curiosity: “How much money can you save with this chatbot?”
- Fear of missing out: “Gone in a week! Grab this offer before it’s too late.”
- Discount: “30% off all earrings.”
- Freebies: “Free gift with any purchase.”
Focus on the first visible text
The most important thing in marketing is getting people to read your ad in the first place. Customers judge the advertising based on the first thing they see. For email marketing, it’s the subject line, and 47% of customers open emails based only on that.
Since you don’t have subject lines in SMS and Messenger Marketing, you have to make the most of the piece of text customers see first. Put the most converting part up front, and you’ll see a bigger open rate.
Wrap up
Follow these 13 tips to create a clear and converting message, and this unlucky number will become your luckiest one.
Don’t forget that your success depends on your own efforts, not just a formula this article gives you. Develop different variants of a message and test them against each other to see what is most persuasive.
