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Start with the Headline
There's more to advertising copy than you think, and its importance can not be overstated.
iMedia Connection
Reid Carr
The first step in creative testing is deciding what to test. The options can often be overwhelming with so many aspects to choose from -- color, layout, offer, size, placement, et cetera. But, if you choose only one thing to focus on in testing creative, the words with which you communicate your message can often be the most powerful. While it may sound almost too simple, your options in selecting copy are many and can have diverse results.
The words you select are intended to initiate a dialog with your customer that will engage, intrigue, inquire or command. When you truly examine your options for the copy on the page, a world of possibilities will open up. You can then consider options in light of your customers’ needs to determine how to make your message best resound with them.
Whether it is the subject line in email alerts, the headline in banners or the lead and call to action on landing pages, these are the first parts of your message that customers will look to and will influence their initial impression. Whatever you put together, your words will be the single-most important part of the creative you put in front of your prospective customer. It will put you on their search engine results page, pique their interest, reinforce their trust and, hopefully, push them to purchase.
For these reasons, you should consider several aspects of your copy -- tone, length, style and search engines among them.
Tone
Whether you decide to keep the creative light or make it more aggressive, you can easily manipulate the tone of your creative through the words you choose. For instance, in the example of selling insurance, you might choose to be very direct with a particular audience in addressing the hazards of not taking action (lawsuits, financial devastation, et cetera), while being informative in explaining the pitfalls to another. Through attempting different options, you can nail down the way your audience prefers to be spoken to and select the tone that best addresses their needs.
Tone may also be affected by the art direction and layout around the copy (the graphic that worked with the ad with the direct tone may not work with the new one that is informative in nature), so, it is still important that everything be cohesive and not appear confusing to the reader. If you have a creative brief that helped to guide what you initially produced, then revisit it each time you revise the content.
Length
Another component in changing the copy is as simple as word count. You can tighten the copy, pare it down even further to the absolute minimum or try lengthening it to get into greater detail.
Many experts subscribe to the philosophy that writing for the web is different than writing for print and that you should write in short, succinct sentences using bullets, callouts and headlines. The common thought is that the audience on the web is younger, more connected and has a shorter attention span. That may be true for the web in general; however, if your product is targeted at an audience that requires more explanation, then you should consider that they may want longer prose in your options. The nature of web copy should really be based on the target audience and their preferences versus sticking solely to a standard guideline. A technical audience, for example, may prefer to get all of the details, while a senior-level executive may want the 50-foot overview.
Style
The style of the copy can be changed by altering the font, color, case or size or other attributes. It is amazing how differently the copy functions when changed from sentence case to all capitalized or vice versa. And a different tone can be implied with a simple font-change, exclamation mark or italics.
All caps can often make the reader feel like they are being yelled at, though with the right font it may tone it down just enough to provide the perfect impact. Red may be too harsh for one audience and just the right color to convey “the need for funds” to another. So, try playing with all four elements -- font, color, case and size -- to change the style of your copy.
Site copy’s effect on search engines
The copy you write will not only show up on your landing pages, but will also appear on your user’s search engine results page (SERP). For this reason, it is important to factor key phrases into the copy you write, as well as ensure that significant words are in HTML text, as opposed to being placed in an image.
During this stage of playing around with copy to ensure inclusion in important engines, you can make sure that various tests do not surface on Google by using your site’s robots.txt file to disallow those landing pages from being indexed.
Conclusion
While reusing the same terms and copy over again can be important in echoing key messages, it is also important to vary copy for you audience’s changing needs. Mastering the skill of writing compelling and diverse copy will help you with your pay-per-click ads, headlines and calls-to-action on your landing pages and the email messages you send. All of these things can greatly improve your bottom line and stand as a launching pad into expanding your creative testing into other components.
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