12 Copywriting Tips for 2021

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Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to attract visitors and prospects alike, provided you know what you are doing. 

🚀Read: Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀 

The aim of your copywriting strategy is to consistently produce high-quality copies that appeal to prospects. To avoid running into any stumbling blocks along the way, we’ve rounded up 12 copywriting tips for 2021 that all content marketers should rely on.

12 Copywriting Tips for 2021

1. Conduct More Research

First among these copywriting tips is to conduct more research. And that exactly is what the best copywriters will do to create a copy that sells best. Your goal with blogs and advertisements isn’t to teach readers a lesson, but it’s to impart just enough information to captivate their interests. The next step is to lure them to your website with a call-to-action (CTA). Hammering readers with jargon is not a good idea since they will lose interest. 

The opposite is true when it comes to irrelevant content or fluff. Adding fluff to your blog will push the reader away. Search engines are extremely efficient at picking up the bounce rates of websites, and if they learn that your readers are quickly clicking ‘back’ to the search results, they will respond by reducing your search engine ranking.

So, your goal should be to keep the blog informative while making it simple enough for all your readers to get the gist of things. If your copy is good enough, you’ll even have other authoritative websites link back to you, which is among the most effective ways of increasing your website’s ranking. 

2. Make the Copy More Interesting

The content should not look like a Wikipedia post. Honestly, if they want to read something truly informative devoid of any character, they’ll just consult Wikipedia. If your content is too dry and boring, people won’t bother buying your product/service. You could argue that almost all copywriters are also effective salespeople. 

So how do you make your content more interesting?

One of the most useful copywriting tips is make your copy visually interesting by adding pictures and infographics where relevant. It is important to break up larger pieces of text into a scannable draft. No one likes reading a huge block of text that stretches on and on without any breaks in it. Consider infusing the blog with your own distinct personality so that it stands out.

It is worth noting that a lot of the information that you’re selling is probably already out there. The only way to make your copy more interesting is to add flair and charm to it. To get an idea, consider reading up on some blogs by ArsTechnica, their authors always find a way to keep even the most mundane topics interesting.

Here are a few rules you should keep in mind:

• Use a decent type font that’s big enough to read and looks appealing
• Use short paragraphs
• Keep paragraphs reasonably varied, examples include using bold and underlined font styles in relevant areas
• Using bulleted and numbered lists, this is especially effective when describing product pros and cons
• Use visual cues such as arrows, especially effective for CTAs and form submissions

3. Pay Attention to the Details

As the saying goes, the devil really is in the details. And it could be where your next sale lies. According to researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, they tested the particular way a phrase was worded and how it affected conversions over a certain period of time.

The researchers did this by setting up a DVD trial program that subscribers could sign up for and testing two different phrases, both having the same implications:

1. “a $5 to fee” 
2. “a small $5 fee” 

They learned that the second phrase was able to increase sign up rates by 20%. To sell a product effectively, you have to experiment with how users react to everything you say and write. This requires carefully measuring, improving, and tracking the success of your copy. Businesses that want to sell more have to take out the time to learn more about what keeps their customers going.

4.  The Headline Will Make or Break Your Copy

Remember how Buzzfeed took the internet by a storm and still does to this day? Their blogs were sensational and the headlines even more so. These ‘clickbait’ titles, as they’re often called, may be frowned upon by puritanical marketers, but you simply can’t argue with the results. A captivating headline hooks audiences in and convinces them to read the rest of the copy. 

So, among the most useful copywriting tips you can get is: write an amazing headline. After that, pull out the strongest introductory sentence to hold your readers’ attention for the duration of the article. One way to keep things interesting is to apply the same rule for all your subheadings.  

If your copy is going to be huge, say 2000 words or thereabouts, then make sure to break up the copy using relevant subheadings. The subheadings should be intricately designed, grab attention, and instantly convey the most useful benefit.

Picture 1. Headline preferences statistics

5. Avoid Lengthy Introductions

A quick look at professional bloggers, like Neil Patel, will reveal that they usually start their sentences with one-liners as opposed to fully-fleshed out sentences. These bloggers don’t waste their time with lengthy introductions and instead, focus on creating punchy intros that tap into human emotions. 

This strategy works every time because online readers have tiny attention spans and you could lose them if you speak about irrelevant stuff. A good copywriting practice is to make use of your main keyword early on in the blog. 

6. Simplify Your Content

There’s a very popular subreddit called “r/explainlikeimfive” where users try explaining otherwise difficult concepts in simpler terms that a layperson can understand and relate with. The same principle also applies to the market, for the most part. Your audiences, even those who are highly educated, leave all their professional baggage at work and are essentially ‘lay’. They don’t want to read what looks like a research paper or school thesis – those are too boring and will never make the cut.  

There’s no place for technical jargon, a blog isn’t one of them. So unless you have good reasons, don’t use technical jargon. Your goal as a copywriter is to make the message as clear and concise as possible. Remember, time is your adversary and your readers don’t have enough of it during the day to sit through endless jargon.

7. Give Readers What They Want

Every good marketer knows that you can’t create desire, you can only find a way to fulfill them. Tapping into your audience’s pain points and expectations are among the two primary goals of your copy. And that’s why we’ve included it in these copywriting tips. For example, most readers want regular discounts. So if the product has a discount, then make sure to advertise that somewhere in the copy. 

Discuss all the advantages of the product in great detail, things like ‘it saves time’, ‘it’s durable’, ‘it saves money’, and ‘it is more efficient’, can go a long in appealing to your audiences. It helps to learn all there is to know about your potential readers to help you craft a suitable copy. For instance, when you’re writing for college going students, you’ll write differently than if you’re selling to 80-year-old retirees.

If you’re selling to startups, you’ll use a completely different writing style than if you were selling to Fortune 500 companies. The best part about marketing tools is that there are a million analytical tools out there that let you pick up social cues. 

The more you learn about your potential customers, the better.

Read 2020 Best Practices to Keep Potential Customers on Your Website Longer.

8. Use Meta Details

Next among these copywriting tips is Meta tags. They are used by search engines to understand what the blog or copy about. For obvious reasons, relevant Meta details will help you rank higher on search engines. They also affect how your site appears in the search results pages. The Meta description deserves a special mention in that, it gives a small summary of the web page to potential readers.

Picture 2. Meta tags statistics

If you’re on WordPress, you can easily add Meta details with the help of Yoast. Yoast even tells you how your site will appear on Google when successfully indexed. 

The three main parts of meta tags that you can use include:

1. Title:

This is the bit that is shown in search engine listings. The title element supports all browsers including Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.  

2. Description:

It contains a summary of your blog post. It should not be too long because search engines will truncate anything beyond 154 characters and that won’t look too appealing to users. 

3. Keyword:

This is among the most important areas of your blog. Search engines use Meta keywords to compare your blog with other websites and see if it is relevant to user interest. 

Include Persuasive Words

Among all these copywriting tips, here’s another one. As a copywriter, part of your job description is to be persuasive. This is where ‘power’ words or ‘persuasive’ words come in. Below are some of the most powerful words you can use in your copy:

• Free: Because who doesn’t like free stuff? 
• Instantly: Everyone is trying their hardest to keep up with time, and if you can save time, you’ve already won half the battle. 
• New: When the video gaming console, Wii, first hit the market, it sold more than the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The Wii was new for its time because it advertised motion gaming. Its successor, the Wii U, which banked on the same principles wasn’t nearly as successful. Because the novelty wore out. So yes, novelty sells. Just make sure it’s not gimmicky and contributes to buyers.

9. Don’t Stuff the Copy with Keywords

Most copywriters are guilty of filing their blogs with unnecessary keywords in hopes of increasing their rank on search engines over time. Search engines have grown clever over the years and no longer reward the practice of ‘keyword stuffing’. It used to work in the past, but Google’s search engine algorithm has been revised to penalize blogs that try to ‘game’ the system. 

That being said, most professional copywriters believe that the blog should have a keyword density of about 1%, or 10 in every 1000 words. Just don’t try to force the keyword in if it doesn’t want to fit in there. 

10. Target Long-Form Content

This is a proven strategy that works best for both search engines and audiences alike. Your readers would rather do all of their research on one website instead of spending more of their time on a dozen other websites. For this reason, they are willing and able to spend through a blog post that may stretch beyond 2000 words.

Picture 3. Long form content research

It’s also why search engines prefer to rank them over shorter blogs. Because A) you’re targeting a lot more keywords and B) you’re decreasing your bounce rates because readers prefer your content. This also doubles as a suitable content strategy if you’re running out of ideas, just convert your older blogs into long-form content.  

In fact, this strategy works for most professional digital marketers like Neil Patel. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t for you.

11. Publish Content on a Regular Schedule

A vital part of your copywriting strategy is to consistently and regularly create content. This will help you stay in touch with your target audience while also getting much-needed attention from search engines. In fact, Google will reward you by increasing your rank if you publish more content on a regular basis. Just make sure not to repeat yourself too often or you’ll end up boring your readers.

Do not publish a like-for-like replica of your content from the past because it won’t get ranked. You can, of course, restructure the content so it looks unique. Produce content useful to your readers.

12. Speak Your Reader’s Language

Ready for last among these copywriting tips? You have to speak their language in order to properly connect with them. This means going back to the drawing board to learn more about them. A fashion blog, for instance, will require a completely different approach to vocabulary and phrases than a blog on car enthusiasts. If you’re stuck and don’t know how to proceed, simply check out what competitor blogs are doing and try doing the same. 

Picture 4. Copywriting quote by Leo Burnett

Copywriting Tips Wrap Up

We hope these 12 copywriting tips will help you to overcome any obstacles that might get in the way. Which one of these tips have you already implemented on your blog? Do you have some more advice? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dave is a content marketing specialist at Content Development Pros. He has helped businesses, big and small, claim the top spot on search engines. When he’s not busy with copywriting services, Dave can be found at the gym or watching Netflix.