All content must serve a purpose. Whether it’s to entertain, inform, or flat-out sell, your content must be persuasive to achieve the results you’re after.
Understanding how to guide users through your sales process and closer to the solutions they need is what matters most to your online success.
Knowing the following 6 tips for writing persuasive website content enhances the results you’ll achieve from all of your marketing efforts.
1. Start With a Promise
Your headline is a promise to your readers. It articulates the benefits they’ll receive from engaging with your content. It should also express the value proposition of your product or service.
The goal of the headline is to persuade readers to move on to the first sentence of your website’s copy. This is a principle that many businesses overlook in their attempts to be clever, flashy, or provocative.
2. Be Customer-centric
A strong headline allows you to convert attention into interest. This principle applies to all mediums including video and audio content.
Your headline must focus on the user. It’s not a place to boast about your business. Make your headline focused on the value that users will obtain from your content and primary offer.
Headlines must be specific to their needs. This causes your message to resonate deeply with the ideal users and prospective customers. Specificity in your content contributes to your credibility.
3. Anticipate the Reader
Your persuasive website content must guide the reader once you’ve fostered an interest from the initial attention. Consider what questions or objections users might have while anticipating and resolving them throughout your content.
More importantly, your content should speak in a language that matches that of your readers. This can only come from taking the time to engage with and understand the needs of your customers.
4. Understand the Language of Your Readers
Your keyword and customer research are sources of invaluable information that contribute to the words you use in your content marketing.
Technical language may be ideal for certain industries and products, but using a natural and conversational style may provide better results for others. Your ongoing testing and website optimization helps you identify which language works best for your business.
5. Optimize Your Sales Funnel
What action are you trying to persuade the reader to take? Use this to gain insight into the overall context of your content as you guide them through your sales process.
A sales funnel consists of the series of steps that users take from the initial prospect stage to the final purchase and ongoing support stages. These steps can present potential pitfalls along the way.
Optimizing your sales funnel supports your website content. You must know where you’re taking readers once they’re engaged with your site’s pages.
What’s the next step? How will they get there? Answering these questions helps you strategically plan your content for better results.
Your sales funnel should create a consistent and easy experience for your users. Interruptions in this process lead to an increase in friction, which ultimately hurts your conversion rates.
6. Getting Back to Your Promise
Throughout the process, you should revisit the promise made in your headline. Ask yourself if you’ve made good on that promise and provided the content the user expected.
Satisfied users become return visitors. But if you fail to follow through on the promise of your headline, then their first visit may be their last. This is one of the biggest reasons why many sales funnels lose more customers than they acquire.
Knowing how to write persuasive website content is the engine that drives all of your marketing efforts. Getting a reader to move from the headline to the first sentence (and beyond) is what the success of all your strategies will depend on.
Make a strong promise and create the content that delivers in a way that resonates with your target market. These tips for writing persuasive website content will help you achieve that goal and establish a successful future for your business.
