As a product marketer, when you write content for your website, don’t you want your readers to say “hell, yeah” instead of closing their tabs and moving on? Don’t you want them to feel like you read their mind, sign up and try your product?
How do you write copy that truly moves your readers to take action?
Often, people will tell you that you need to get into the shoes of the person who landed on your site. They’ll tell you you need to ’empathize’ with them. They’ll say you’ll need to talk about the problem statement so that your readers just ‘get it’.
But for someone who is getting started with copywriting, ‘getting into the shoes’ or ’empathizing with visitors’ barely means anything. These concepts are alien to folks who are just getting started.
As copywriters, we often end up opening Google Docs, writing sentences, looking at them over and over again. And after a couple of days of self-loathing, we finally push the work we’re often not happy about, on our sites. We’ve all done this before - I’m guilty of it too.
But what comes out of this process is forgettable copy. You know what it leads to – poor signups, poor conversions, and whatnot.
In this post, I want to talk about how I got over this habit and learned to write better copy. I want to unpack how you can actually go about empathizing with your users so that empathizing becomes more than just a jargon everyone throws around at you. This is certainly not rocket science - I’ve done this only by naturally studying what the best web pages I’ve seen have done in the past with words.
Imagine I’m building a product that any home baker across the world can use. I can write this headline and description introducing it on the homepage of Goodcookie, my product: