From securing funding to dealing with fierce competition, as well as building a reliable and talented team, start-up businesses face many challenges.
And at a point in your business journey where money is scarce, resources limited, and the workload heavy, copywriting may not feel like a priority. After all, it’s just words. Surely it can’t be that hard?
But if, as a small and relatively young company, your aim is to attract business and boost sales, then copywriting is an essential element in your toolkit.
Because copywriting is not just about writing. It goes far beyond simply describing what you do on an About Us page.
Copywriting is about promoting your company, driving engagement, and, ultimately, generating more profit. What’s more, in a world where more and more business is taking place online, capturing the attention of potential customers requires specific tactics—and copywriting is one of the most important.
Persuasive web page copy, convincing product descriptions, impressive press releases, infographics with viral potential, or high-converting email newsletters—copywriting is a marketing essential and plays a significant part in a start-up’s success or failure. Here’s why.
9 Reasons Why Start-Ups Should Invest in Copywriting in 2022
1. Communicate Your Expertise
Start-ups, by definition, are young companies in the infant stage of business.
And so, asserting yourself—proving that you are dependable and have enough knowledge and understanding about your particular niche—can be a struggle.
Copywriting is all about establishing this trust with an audience. With in-depth research, a copywriter will learn everything there is to know about your industry and how your product or service fits into the broader commercial landscape.
They will then communicate to your audience why they can trust you and rely on you for high-quality products and services. This might involve using data and statistics, quotes from experts, user testimonials as social proof, or creating case studies or whitepapers to establish authority.
Plus, if you consistently publish relevant and reliable content about your chosen niche, you’ll become recognised as an influencer—a trustworthy source of information in your industry. You might then find yourself being asked to guest blog on other sites, building profitable partnerships with other influential figures to the benefit of both parties.
2. Build Brand Identity and Awareness
One of the main priorities for a start-up (after finding the necessary cash and growing sales, of course) is building awareness of your brand.
After all, if no one knows about you, how are you going to sell anything?
Spreading the word about your company depends on having a clear sense of who you are. You need to cultivate a distinct identity or vision—one that is consistent and recognisable.
Copywriting can help you do this. Through language, a copywriter can articulate what makes you unique, using a tone of voice and vocabulary that reflects your company and establishes its personality.
By portraying your company in a certain way, copywriting creates a compelling narrative—a story that piques curiosity and makes you attractive. Being interesting is imperative in a world of diminishing attention spans.
A clear and cohesive brand identity will allow you to build a connection with your audience. This, in turn, will grow awareness of your brand, ultimately increasing traffic, conversions, and sales.
3. Drive Engagement
Getting people to engage with your brand is the first step in generating leads and conversions. You need to get their attention and make an impression.
The best way to do this? Address their pain points.
Good copywriting is more about the audience than the company. You need to speak directly to their needs—their struggles and their difficulties.
Lead generation relies on attracting the right kind of customer to your website—people who will be interested in your product or service. Copywriting is about targeting and connecting with that particular person, increasing your visibility and boosting leads.
Copywriters will work from ‘buyer personas’—profiles of your ideal customer. This will help them write content that connects emotionally with your audience, capturing their attention, anticipating and addressing their objections, and building a solid bond.
By understanding who your customer is, a copywriter can speak their language, writing in a way that inspires and motivates them, focusing on the benefits of your product or service for them, personally, as well as using power words to instil certain emotions and incorporating calls-to-action to make sure they convert.
Every business has a message—a mission statement about what makes them unique and how they can help customers. Sometimes this can get lost. Copywriting is about making the message clear, concise, and digestible so that it hits home and drives customer engagement.
4. Grow Conversions
Driving engagement—creating that emotional connection between your company and your customer—is the first stage in the sales funnel. Next, you then want to move them along the pipeline, encouraging them to take action.
This action is known as a conversion and might mean signing up to a newsletter, sharing a social media post, requesting a quote, or, of course, making a purchase.
Copywriting persuades customers to take action using:
- Blog content that is specific and informative and that people want to read and share.
- Product descriptions that provide the relevant information clearly and concisely. One study found that 20% of overall ‘task failures’—times when users failed to complete a purchase when asked to do so—could be attributed to incomplete or unclear product information, highlighting the importance of good copywriting.
- Testimonials and reviews that boost trust and credibility, particularly those that tell a story and feel relatable.
- Powerful calls-to-action that make it clear what the customer needs to do and emphasise the value in doing so.
- Social media posts that are the right length and in the right style to capture audience attention, keeping the brand tone of voice consistent across all platforms.
- Email newsletters that people open, read, and click. Email has an ROI of 4,400%, so it’s worth making sure yours are written well.
5. Distinguish Yourself from Competitors
Competition is one of the biggest challenges for start-ups. How can you get noticed next to all the well-established and successful players in your industry? How can you get the attention of customers and show them what makes you special?
Copywriting can help you gain recognition and amplify your voice in the din. Copywriters will work with you to define your USP and use their copy to articulate why you’re different and why that matters to your audience.
Copywriters will also tell your story—a great way to make you stand out. Your story—why you founded the company and what your purpose is—will make you more relatable, less corporate and differentiate you from rival brands.
Copywriting can also help brands distinguish themselves from the competition by speaking directly to the customer in a unique voice and communicating the company’s particular personality. Catchy and compelling headlines and creative calls-to-action will also help get them noticed.
6. Rank Higher on Search Engines
SEO copywriting is when copywriting is used to drive organic traffic from search engines by helping you to rank higher in results pages. This is essential given that the first five organic results on Google account for 67.60% of all clicks.
SEO copywriters optimise your page to increase the chances of people coming across your product or service organically. They do this by working out what people are searching for and incorporating these ‘keywords’ into your website pages, as well as by providing relevant content that proves to search engines that users will derive value from your site.
SEO copywriting allows you to connect with your target audience. By ranking higher in search results, you grow brand awareness and get more people on your page, boosting conversions, leads, and sales.
No wonder 61% of marketers consider improving SEO and growing their organic presence their top inbound marketing priority.
7. Create a Blog
These days, content is a vital part of any marketing plan, and blogging is one of the most cost-effective and scalable forms of content marketing out there.
Use your blog to publish news and company updates and share customer advice and information. This communicates your expertise, builds brand awareness, creates a dialogue with customers via the comments section, and can also help you rank higher on search engine results as you establish authority in your niche. On average, companies who blog produce 67% more leads per month.
But creating a successful company blog isn’t easy. Common mistakes include blogging about unrelated topics, pushing products and services rather than providing genuinely helpful content, losing sight of the end-user and their pain points, and failing to edit and proofread a post.
The best copywriters craft blog articles that are specific, authoritative, educational, unique, SEO-optimised, written in a conversational tone, and feature eye-catching headlines.
8. Build Your Social Media Presence
All start-ups should invest time in cultivating a social media following. It’s one of the best online tools for engaging with customers and promoting your brand. You get access to a massive number of potential customers, can chat with them directly, answer their questions, and cultivate a friendly and human brand ‘persona’.
Given that around 54% of social media browsing is for research regarding a product, social media is a very economical way to boost sales for start-ups with tight budgets.
But different social media platforms require a different style of content. The business-focused content of LinkedIn won’t do so well on visuals-driven Instagram. The best copywriters know how to write for different platforms and make posts creative and unique while still maintaining professionalism. They’ll also stay up to date with various social media algorithms, ensuring your posts get seen.
9. Maximise Marketing ROI
If you’ve invested in PPC (pay-per-click) adverts, then you want to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. Paying for an advert isn’t enough. The advert must be perfectly crafted to ensure it gets attention from the right people and that those people actually click.
Professional copywriting can make your PPC ads more profitable by tailoring them to your target audience, addressing them directly using emotional triggers, and emphasising your USP.
Quality Copywriting: Always Worth It
From helping you to stand out in a noisy marketplace to driving engagement and building trusting relationships, copywriting plays a pivotal part in the marketing campaigns and, ultimately, the success of any start-up.
This is why outsourcing the job to an experienced copywriter is a wise move. Not only does it allow employees to focus on other things, but you’ll get access to the expertise of a writer who understands SEO, knows how to connect with your audience, and can craft creative and compelling content that converts.
Rather than settling for error-ridden and run-of-the-mill content that could, at best, fail to get you noticed and, at worst, put off potential customers, save yourself time and hassle with a talented wordsmith whose job is all about connecting and communicating with an audience.
Most start-ups wouldn’t think twice about hiring a professional graphic designer or programmer. Copywriting is no less of a specialist job—and an intelligent investment where results are pretty much guaranteed.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- CONTACT US