B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #38 - Practice Metrics-Based Copywriting
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS
The B2B Lead features a number of helpful articles on copywriting, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite tips for ensuring B2B marketing copy is relevant. As marketers we constantly try to write compelling copy that motivates people to take some sort of action. The trick is to write in the voice of our target audience; speaking to them using language they respond to. Sometimes we use focus groups or A/B testing to help with this; getting out in the field and talking to prospects/customers also helps. In the end though, the words we choose often amount to best guesses.
Keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends, and the Google Keyword Tool provide a wealth of insight into the voice of our audience. Using search data and trends can give excellent clues to the words people use to describe things. Talking to your audience, using the same words they search for themselves, puts you at a major advantage. For example, the other day I was crafting an email to promote a new webcast. Problem was, some people were calling it a webcast and others were calling it a webinar – which was it? What would more people respond to; a webcast offer or a webinar offer? I decided to use Google Trends to compare the search volume of both words. I figured the term that is searched more often will also be the term used more commonly in conversation. This term should also spark a higher interest if used in my email. So I quickly pulled up Google Trends and here is what I found.
This obviously made my decision easy. Split testing my email offers confirmed that using “webcast” got the better response.
Now, this is just search-driven copywriting in its simplest form. If you want to take this further, you can use the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker almost like you would a Thesaurus. For example, maybe you are promoting a “golf strategies” guide. If you plopped this keyword into the Google Keyword Tool, it would offer you numerous suggestions for related terms people are searching for. In this example (shown below) maybe you would be better off promoting it as a “golf tips” guide since that term is searched more frequently.
Hopefully by now, you are starting to get the idea. This stuff really works – I have personally seen higher conversion rates on landing pages and emails by using this strategy. If you are interested in reading more about similar ideas, Aaron Wall has a very interesting article on keyword research that is definitely worth a read.
http://www.wordtracker.com
http://www.google.com/trends
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Breaking News - Length of Headlines in Google Shortened
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007This week, Google alerted Business Wire that press release headlines should not exceed 22 words. That’s eight words shorter than what we were told months ago. “An ideal headline should be between two and 22 words,” advises the search engine giant. Read more at BusinessWired.
Marketing and Sales Tip #24 - Just Shut Up and Tell Me What I Need to Know
Friday, September 28th, 2007Back to our favorite topic – writing—or, in this instance, writing for the Web. Ragan Communications recently posted 25 tips for busy Web site managers . In it they provided this very intriguing benchmark:
If you expect to get your content read today, you need to keep it very short. Memorize this table:
If you write. . . You’ve lost. . .
100 words 25% of your readers
300 words 40% of your readers
500 words 60% of your readers
1,000 words 80% of your readers
There are, of course, the other writing advisors who counsel that you need to provide all of the information a buyer needs to make a purchase right there on the page? Isn’t there a happy medium? This is the Web, after all. What do you think? How long should web copy be?
Marketing and Sales Tip #22 - Forget Everything You Know About B2B Web Site Design
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007Our beloved advisor, Marketing Sherpa, has released a lengthy study on B2B Web Site Home Page design. The researchers used eye-tracking and multi-site testing techniques to provide numerous lessons that most of us don’t have the budget to discover on our own. I highly recommend purchasing it and putting the lessons into action. Not convinced? Here are a few highlights from the study and some surprises:
- Don’t copy the big guys or your competitors when it comes to Web site layout. Always design with your user in mind.
- Here’s a big surprise (but it makes total sense when you think about it) - Having a sticky homepage is no longer the right goal. In the Sherpa tests, homepages with shorter average visit times generated more sales. Think of it as a table of contents – show people how to get to the information they need quickly.
- Fewer columns are better as people prefer to read down a list, similar to search engine results. However, you must beware of overly wide columns—do not use more than 65 characters of type across a line).
- Always use bullets, they receive much of the eye’s attention.
