Copywriting: What it is and why you need it in your online business

You’ve probably heard of copywriting..

And if you haven’t, surely now you’ve thought “copy what?”.

It’s the most normal reaction, it happens to almost everyone.

Although it may seem like a new word invented recently, the truth is that copywriting has been with us for a long time.

Specifically, in the magazine, radio and television advertisements.

Copywriting or copy emerged in the early 20th century in the U.S. advertising agencies and became popular thanks to well-known publicists such as David Ogilvy.

However, today we are not going to talk about the copywriting typical of advertising agencies.

Today we will explain what is the copy that you can (and should) incorporate into your website and / or e-commerce business.

With this article our intention is that you go from “copy what?” to “it is clear to me that the figure of the copywriter is basic if I have an online business”.

Let’s go! 🙂

We start with the basics: what is copywriting

We could start this section with a typical dictionary or Wikipedia definition of copywriting.

But we won’t (at least for now).

We’d like to explain what copywriting is for illustrative fashion, so let’s give you an example.

Imagine that instead of a website, you have a physical store.

People walk into your store because it’s one of the first people you find on the main street of your city, they’re attracted to the sign outside, or maybe it comes thanks to the flyers/posters you’ve been leaving in busy places in the area. This would equate to traffic to your website from Google search results, social media posts, ads on Facebook and Instagram, Google Ads, etc.

Once inside the place, people like what they see: the shop is tastefully decorated and wants to take a walk around it. This, in the online world would be web design.

And now we get to the most important part. Imagine that a potential customer who is interested in one of your products enters the store, but does not quite know which one would best meet their needs. It needs to be advised by a person who knows the product well and knows how to explain the benefits you will get from it.

This person is the seller or dependent. He’s the one who talks to the customer, listens to his problems and proposes the solutions that are more in line with what he needs. And finally, it ends up closing the sale.

Imagine that customer arrives who doesn’t have very clear what he needs, and no one helps him. What’s he doing? Simple: go somewhere else.

This is what usually happens on most websites: people come in looking for something, don’t connect with what’s offered to them, and it’s going to ten seconds.

However, if you have your own seller on the web 24 hours a day, things change. But since we talk about the online world, and there we can’t have a natural person, we have to find him a substitute.

And guess what: this substitute is just the text of your website. However, as long as you follow techniques that make you connect with potential customers. That is, they are written with copywriting.

So, and now we use definitions, copywriting is persuasively write the texts of your website so that the ideal client that visits her is interested in what you tell her, stays reading and ends up performing an action, which is almost always to motivate the purchase.

But… and what is the difference between copywriting and content writing for blogs?

Now that you have a better idea about what the copy is, you’ve probably crossed your mind about the following:

“So if copywriters write the texts on my website, they’re also the ones who write the blog, right?”

The answer is simple: no. And the explanation is even more so.

As we have already mentioned, copywriting is focused on awakening the reader’s curiosity and taking an action.

Instead, the content writing on blogs is done for another purpose: to inform the reader about a topic. This content alone does not sell (usually).

And since we are many examples, here we leave you another so that you can see more clearly the difference between copywriting and writing,this time by the hand of the renowned copywriter Bob Bly :

“If you write “apples help fight cancer,” you write.”

“If you write “a delicious fruit that helps fight cancer,” you copywriting.”

Therefore, we can say that the writing of blogs or web writing is based on writing articles that bring information of interest to our target audience.

Through the items we raise the “temperature” of a customer, that is, we bring it closer to the purchase of the product or service. We are creating authority:we are telling you that we control the subject we are writing. In addition, we generate credibility and trust with readers interested in the subject.

If this content we are generating brings value to the reader, we will eventually have people who regularly visit our blog.

And this is where the copy will come into play to get a percentage of those readers to become customers.

And how will he do it? Well, as we were saying at the beginning with the example of the physical store, empathizing with the customer and offering him the solution he is looking for.

That is, the copywriting points indicate the points of pain/problems/desires to then present a very concrete solution in the form of the product or service you offer.

These are the services offered by a copywriter

Once we know that a copywriter is not the editor of your website blog, let’s see exactly what services he offers.

These are some of the most in-demand, although the figure of the copy may encompass more types of texts, even in the offline world.

• Sales pages: The copywriter is the person who writes the text of the pages where you sell your product or service.
  
  For example, if you’re a law professional, the copywriter will write you the page where you offer your attorney services so that the person who reads it ends up requesting your services.
  
  This is usually one of the star jobs of copys.

• Comprehensive project: your entire website needs to have good texts, not just your product/service page. For example, the about meis usually one of the most visited pages on a website.
  
  And why?
  
  Because we want to know the person who is offering us that product or service.
  
  But you can’t write in any way, but through a series of techniques so that the reader empathizes with her and has a more willingness to buy her something.
  
  The same goes for the home page, the contactpage, etc. In short, leaving your entire website in the hands of a copywriter is a smart investment for conversions (sales) in the short and medium term.

• Social media ads: Customers spend significant money on advertising platforms like Facebook and Instagram Ads, and they need to optimize the texts of their ads.
  
  Through copywriting, we get more clicks on these ads, as we generate interest, attack a problem or desire that the potential customer has and provide the solution through the product/service we offer.
  
  
• Product sheets in e-commerce: When you buy a product, such as a mobile, you don’t buy it because it has 24Mpx on the camera and 256GB of memory.
  
  You buy it because it will allow you to take great photos of your holidays as if you were doing them with a professional SLR camera. And in addition, all these photos will be stored on the mobile without being asked to delete some for lack of space.
  
  In short, people buy because of the benefits that a product or service will bring us, and not because of the characteristics of them.
  
  For this reason, it is interesting that a copywriter has a look at the product sheets of your e-commerce, and apart from characteristics (which are also necessary), add that emotional connection that allows the reader to imagine enjoying what that product offers.
  
  
• Email marketing: copys also bring a lot of value here by writing emails focused on selling or generating potential leads.
  
  Some of the main tasks that copywriters perform within the world of email marketing are newsletters, creation of autoresponders, writing of all the steps of a funnel, campaigns to launch courses, services or products, cold-door emails, etc. There’s everything.
  
  And that’s why copywriters never get bored with their work. 😉
  
  

Copy is not magic… even if it seems so

We mentioned earlier that Ogilvy was a famous copywriter. The truth is that even Sherlock Holmes could have been.

I’m sure we’ve surprised you right now. It’s normal. There are many false beliefs about the copywriter’s work.

The first is the most typical: your job is simply to write. And that’s it. Basically, grab the laptop and hit the key with what goes through its head.

And this is linked to the second best known belief. Copys are highly creative people: they get a page of services out of a blank Word document that perfectly attacks the problems or desiresof the potential customer and offers you the best solution to that problem.

Nothing further from reality.

This is where the role of Sherlock Holmes comes into play. To make a good copy, you have to spend a lot of time researching,both internal about the product or service that your client offers to know the table, and external researching the competition of that client.

This internal and external investigation will extract the information necessary to answer three key questions:

• Who is the ideal customer (the buyer person)
• What problem or need can be helped to solve or satisfy
• How your problem or need will be solved

In other words, the copywriter should put himself in the potential customer’s shoes to know how to talk to him and connect with him to convince him that the product/service he’s writing about is what he’s looking for.

And this is not something you can get overnight.

Need a copywriter in your online business?

Finally, and recapping a little, we hope that at this point you have a little clearer the figure of the copywriter, its difference with the content writer, what services copywriter offer the most, and above all, that you know that behind a good copy there is no high dose of imagination, but a good research.

Copywriting is currently booming because it is the easiest change you can make to your website and that produces greater results.

Simply changing the way texts are written can make you a lot of money.

If you also want to have your own online dependent/seller 24 hours a day, do not hesitate to hire the services offered by a copywriter – and have your website take off!

And if you don’t already have a website and have doubts when it comes to hiring an agency, or you’re not very clear about what technology to use, check out these articles that we’ve prepared for you: How to choose the best web development agency and Types of CMS for web development.

If you have any questions or if you would like to work together, please do not hesitate to contact us or follow us on our Instagram profile.

At Kiwop, we are specialists in content creation, digital marketing, web development and e-commerce.

Don’t hesitate any longer and…

Boost your online business thanks to copywriting!