Landing page copywriting requires a lot of technique infused with a heady dose of artistic flair.
You need a writer who can convey the best aspects of your product or service to consumers and convince them to buy in; numbers and data work, but only if they’re buoyed by emotion. People want a reason to stop scrolling by and tricking them into clicking through to a web-based snoozefest just isn’t going to cut it.
With so much at stake, it makes sense to hire a freelance copywriter to write your landing page copy, but outsourcing comes with its own unique set of key considerations. Follow these tips for making the most of landing page copywriting services and see what high-converting landing pages can truly do.
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1. Hire the Right Person for Your Landing Page Copywriting Job
Many business owners aren’t aware that copywriting and content writing are different.
Copywriters specialize in creating copy closely tied to sales — think ads, landing pages, websites, billboards, brochures and product descriptions — while content writers lean more toward informative writing and storytelling, creating blogs, press releases, white papers, books and so on. Hiring a copywriter who excels at landing pages is a crucial part of properly shaping and sharing your brand’s message and reaching your goals.
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2. Double-Check Whether Your Writer Knows Their Limits
No, I’m not talking about pushing your contractor to eat three squares a day and get decent shut-eye. Some forms of content come with restrictions. Violate them, and the content could be less effective or even unusable. Landing pages often rely on templates that have fixed lengths for text — does your copywriter know what those limits are, and can they write fluid, compelling content that fits?
Crowd Content lets users build templates that dictate how long each content element can be (either by word or character count), keeping writers on task and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
3. Be Crystal Clear About Your Offer
Writers who work in the dark rarely submit picture-perfect content. It’s difficult if not impossible to create a high-converting landing page if you don’t understand what the page is supposed to do. Tell your writer:
- Where the landing page fits in the funnel
- What the purpose of the landing page is
- Where the user is at in the buyer journey
Paint a vivid version of the big picture and your writer will be better equipped to craft any landing page that helps you accomplish your goals.
4. Know Where Your Page’s Traffic Will Be Coming From
…and share that information with your copywriter. Landing pages should be relevant to the buyer journey, and that means continuing a conversation that started elsewhere. Whether the buyer clicked on a Facebook post or a paid ad or an affiliate link, they’re already mid-conversation and it’s up to the writer to create a landing page that’s consistent.
Remember, ad platforms also rate your page’s user relevancy—Google Ad’s Quality Score and Facebook’s ever-changing ad algorithm have the ability to scan your landing page and decide whether it’s in line with the content used to send consumers there. At the very least, you need to give your writer info on which audience is being targeted, and a set of keywords would be helpful too.
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5. Give Your Writer the Gift of Social Proof
Social proof is kind of like the modern, more positive version of peer pressure. Every time you look at a restaurant’s Yelp reviews before making a reservation or buy into the “4 out of 5 moms recommend…” line featured in a diaper commercial you’re taking action based on the actions of others.
Marketers use social proof to give new concepts, products and services perceived value. Consumers are understandably hesitant to spend their hard-earned cash on a fancy frying pan that could easily be a dud, but show those same consumers a Facebook video of people flipping golden-brown pancakes and talking about how the pan revolutionized breakfast and the hesitancy starts to disappear.
It’s possible to write landing page copy without social proof, but writing copy that incorporates testimonials, case studies or social media engagement figures is a far more effective way to urge potential customers through the sales funnel.
6. Compare Your Landing Page Copy with Split Testing
Even the most experienced copywriter isn’t omniscient. All the writing talent, word acrobatics and technical marketing expertise in the world can’t predict with absolute certainty how a landing page will connect with your ideal customer. The only way to know for sure is to ask your copywriter to create variants for key text elements—headlines, bullet points versus block text and so on — then use A/B testing to compare conversion rates and choose which page to launch in full.
You can also choose to A/B test other elements of your landing page; vary your offer, reframe your selling point, swap out images, or tweak your forms and see how consumers respond. While those decisions are for the client to make rather than the writer, your offer also informs the landing page copy, so if you change one, you’ll need to change the other.
7. Don’t Skip Over the Small Things
Why pay someone to dither over a few words here and a call to action there when you can dash them off yourself? Well, there are several reasons actually, but here’s the big one: you hired an expert, and you should let them do their job.
Cohesion is vital to the success of a landing page, and that’s best achieved by sticking to one voice, one writer, one cook in the kitchen.
Every word on that page plays a role and it often takes writers hours or even days to wrangle those words into submission. You may not be able to see how one stray phrase here or there could make a difference, but trust me, consumers can sense a disjointed message from a million miles away. Great copy is like alchemy—you don’t need to understand how it happens in order to appreciate the result.
Wrapping It Up
A good copywriter is worth her weight in gold… and sometimes more. But, even the best copywriter will struggle to craft copy that drives results if they’re lacking clear instructions along with information and context about how their work fits into the buyer’s journey.
In my experience, following the 7 tips I’ve outlined above will set your writer up for success, and in turn, setup your campaigns to print money.
