Day in and day out, you’re encircled by copy. You’re watching TV advertisements, you’re seeing PPC ads in your search results, you’re going to SaaS pricing pages, you’re shopping online for a brand-new office printer… the list is endless.
It’s straightforward to look around and think, “Yeah, I could have written that.”
Whether you’re just getting started with copywriting or you’ve already written a few dozen landing pages, it’s very important to know that copywriting mistakes are not few and far between.
To avoid making them yourself, it’s important to be aware of the most common (and costly) copywriting mistakes plaguing websites.
Focusing On Features Rather Than Benefits
In your copywriting, it is a mistake to focus the message on the features of a product or service as opposed to the benefits or impact it has on the proposed audience. The audience does not care about all the stuff which the product can do. Your audience cares about how it makes them happier, more fulfilled, less stressed as well as higher performing. Stop with all the features. Tell me how I cannot live another day without buying.
Writing For Everybody
When the copywriter’s goal is copywriting for business communications, this frequently translates into writing something boring, which is likely to try to appeal to a broad audience by being completely safe as to not spark any type of negative reaction in the reader. This also means that you aren’t sparking a positive one, either, and will rather be ignored totally. Don’t write for everyone. Write for your target audiences.
Not Telling A Story With A ‘Hook’ And A Payoff
The problem with copywriting is that it just isn’t engaging enough. Copy doesn’t the have extrasensory things going on which video does, for instance, so that means that the writer’s words do all of the heavy lifting. If you want to draw people into your copy, you need to be a good storyteller. Stories begin with a “hook” and naturally have a beginning, a middle as well as an end with a big payoff.
