The first experience anyone is going to have of a corporate brand is going to be online.
It’s no exaggeration to say your website can make or break your chances of success. And Nielsen Research has found that unless you communicate your value proposition successfully within 10 seconds, visitors will start leaving your site in droves.
We’re amazed by how many organisations we meet don’t like - or are even a little embarrassed by - their websites. But they don’t know how to make things better.
Our advice is straightforward. If you want your corporate brand to succeed, you need to learn how to write web copy that intrigues your readers and hooks them in fast – whoever they are – so that they stay on your website.
Here’s the key to doing this. Website visitors are never going to read each page in order, from top to bottom, as they would a novel. Websites have changed corporate writing entirely because website visitors don’t read things. They scan.
A successful website will recognise this fundamental change. How can you do this?
Here are five tips.
People who scan can’t absorb long sentences. So, dispense with any unnecessary words, keep sentences short, and make sure no paragraph has more than four sentences. And remember that web readers love a bullet point!
Imagine what your website visitor is looking for. This will help you develop copy that is useful and intriguing to them. It means they will stay longer on your site and will be more inclined to do business with you. We figured, for example, that our future clients would be looking for a strategic communications agency that was helpful, and we decided to start giving them some of the tools of our trade in blogs.
A web page isn’t the place for beautifully crafted arguments that lead to a dramatic climax in the last sentence. Truth is that 99 per cent of your visitors won’t be bothered to read that far down. You have to hook them in early – and this means giving them the juicy bits in the first couple of paragraphs of any page, and a title that will drive search traffic to your content.
The tone of websites is dramatically different to traditional corporate writing. Web readers react badly to jargon, and they don’t like being preached to or patronised. And they don’t like companies who go out of their way to be too clever. The best corporate websites use an approachable, friendly, even humorous tone, using techniques such as the second person to engage with their reader. You know this makes sense…
Although keywords are less powerful than they used to be, there really is value in using a tool like Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner to find out what words people are using in search, and making sure you include them in your copy. We started doing this a while ago, and we’ve had a dramatic uplift in visits to our site ever since.