As a freelance marketing copywriter, you use your skills to write the best copy for your clients. Being persuasive when promoting their products is vital for customer conversions and success.
Therefore, understanding how to effectively communicate your ideas to influence customer decisions is a critical tool in your arsenal. But, how do you supercharge your marketing copy to be more persuasive?
By following the techniques in this article, you’ll learn better writing practices to improve your marketing copy for greater success.
10 Techniques For Writing Persuasive Marketing Copy
1. Appeal to the Emotions of Your Audience
Decision-making is emotion-based. When someone buys a new jacket, it’s more than a practical choice. There are lots of jackets available. They choose this one based on how it makes them feel, whether that’s successful, accepted, secure, happy, etc.
Instead of focusing on product specifications, connect your copy to your customers. Address their pain points and tell them how a product can improve their lives.
An emotional appeal works best when you know your audience intimately, including their stance on issues and events. Know your consumer profile and make customers feel like a community.
2. Establish Authority With Authoritative Expressions
When writing copy, authority comes from the subtlety of your words.
For example, the advice “you could eat healthily” and “you must eat healthily” hit differently. One sounds unsure and passive, while the other is confident and upfront.
May, could, perhaps, maybe—these words gently persuade customers, without telling them what to do, for fear of losing them. But they’re unsure and vague to your audience, who need direction.
Instead, consider expressions like “you must, you need, or I believe”. These portray confidence and authority. By expressing ideas with certainty, it’s easier for people to trust your message. Using authoritative expressions can even overcome your own self-doubt.
3. Use Data to Reinforce Your Messaging
Incorporating data into your copy is vital to persuade customers about the reliability of your claims.
Without solid research data, words are just words. Customers have no reason to trust what you say or do what you want. Data turns words from opinion to fact. It allows readers to draw logical conclusions in your favor.
Providing evidence backs up your claims and establishes credibility, making it an essential technique in your arsenal.
4. Be Simple by Avoiding Jargon and Buzzwords
Marketers use buzzwords and jargon to impress their audience. But, most of the time, it distracts from their writing and gives readers a headache.
As prospective customers scurry off to research technical phrasing, like what is VoIP, they’re driven away from your main message. Your call to action is lost between difficult definitions and vague soundbites.
Cutting this out will force you to write original, specific, and meaningful content that gets to the point. Connecting with your audience is a priority and being easily understood is how you do it.
5. Make Use of Customer Testimonials
Credibility is vital to writing effective marketing copy, but readers take what you write with a grain of salt. To them, your copy is tainted with unconscious seller bias, no matter how objective it sounds.
Testimonials and reviews circumvent this problem. People are shown proven results from fellow consumers and persuaded to invest in a product. Use social proof to build the credibility of your copy.
Additionally, consider the person behind the testimonial. A recommendation from Tim Cook goes further than anonymous customer #100 from Europe.
6. Create Curiosity Gaps to Keep Attention Longer
Customers want to fill information gaps. Take a TV show cold open. It piques curiosity, leaving viewers itching to watch more.
Curiosity gaps are essential to keeping people engaged in an online world. The idea is based on the Zeigarnik effect, which states that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better.
Create gaps to build anticipation and entice customers. Introduce customers to problems and convey the value of your ideas before revealing the solution.
7. Make Use of the Anchoring Method When Discussing Prices
People rely on the first piece of information they receive. They use this to influence future decisions. It’s known as the anchoring effect, and it takes advantage of customers’ cognitive bias by showing them the value of a product or service.
It’s used in writing by listing typical costs or competitor pricing before your own. Customers see the higher costs of purchasing elsewhere and are inclined to go with your more affordable pricing. If you’re having a sale, mentioning the retail price can help push customers over the edge.
Price is relative. Always compare pricing to improve the chance of conversions.
8. Repeat a Concept to Increase Understanding
Repetition builds patterns and reinforces a phrase or idea in the mind of your customers. It’s a technique often used in interviews and speeches, such as Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I have a dream”.
By repeating a concept, you’ll increase the chances of making people believe you. Your copy has a bigger impact, and your ideas are easily understood.
Use this technique effectively by repeating key ideas throughout your content, not just words or sentences.
9. Ensure That the Writing is Customer-Focused
Customers care about what you can do for them. Instead of putting a business or product on a pedestal, write about your customers.
What will they gain from investing in your phone PBX systems?
By focusing on your customers, you engage with them, making them feel valued. It leads to conversions.
Some ways of writing customer-focused copy include:
- Replacing “we” with “you”
- Asking questions and immediately answering them
- Avoiding using jargon
- Writing about customer benefits, not product features
- Using videos and pictures to create easily absorbed information
10. Have Someone Proofread Your Work
Mistakes damage your credibility and lose people’s trust. So, proofreading and editing are essential to good copy. But you can’t catch your errors alone. Proofreaders are necessary to highlight issues you’ve missed.
Furthermore, proofreaders bring added experience and knowledge that they can use to suggest amendments. This feedback leads to more appealing marketing copy and improvements to your future writing technique.
Key Takeaway
These techniques may sound like common sense, but they’re vital strategies to boost your marketing copy and aren’t always heeded.
They improve reliability and credibility and connect with your audience on an emotional level. You can be more engaging and persuasive, giving yourself the chance to increase conversions.
After all, this is how you talk to your clients’ customers. Great marketing copy is, therefore, vital to achieving success, whether it’s in an article or a cold email masterclass.
About the author
Richard Conn is the Senior Director for Demand Generation at 8×8, a hosted PBX service platform with integrated contact center, voice, video, and chat functionality. Richard is an analytical & results-driven digital marketing leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive B2B environments. Here is his LinkedIn.
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