Step 1: Define Your Ideal Client

The most important thing when it comes to copywriting is to know your target audience and define your ideal client. By identifying your target audience you’ll know how to craft the tone of your copywriting. Identifying your ideal client is a key point because we need to know who we are marketing to and how to use the most receptive languaging. Our goal is to encourage your audience to buy into your brand, creating more exposure and revenue.

Let’s say we’re a Canadian activewear brand and we are targeting Vancouver women in their thirties. Our ideal client is employed with a salary of 60K/year and up, enjoys an active lifestyle, goes to weekly yoga classes, works out 5x per week, shops organic because she wants to and can afford to, is focused on a healthy lifestyle, has an appreciation for the finer things in life, has a soft spot for buying local, isn’t into fast fashion and prefers quality garments.

Step 2: Research competitors

It’s time to look at the market and see what else is out there. Who are your competitors? It’s important to see what your competitors are doing and what they’re not doing. 

Go to competitor websites and visit their socials. How often are they posting on their social media pages? Which social media platforms do they use most? How many followers do they have? How engaged are they with their followers? Do they have an ambassador program? If so, what are the details of their ambassador program and how are those campaigns doing? Who are they marketing to? What type of business marketing do they use on their website and social media posts? What is their price point? What makes their brand stand out and why are people buying from them?

Find out what they’re not doing and use it to your advantage. Their missed opportunities are your gained advantage!

Step 3: Headlines and Hooks

We live in an age of scrolling to the next best thing. Craft compelling headlines and hooks through-out your writing to engage your audience and keep their attention. Come up with clever copywriting and create witty and engaging phrases, something that will stick in their mind on repeat. As a copywriter, I alllllways encourage the use of literary devices. Alliteration is one of my favourites (in case no one has noticed). 

Take Lululemon for example: they are promoting their new footwear line and came up with a catchy phrase, “A feat for feet.” and “Discover beyondfeel: A running breakthrough in comfort.” They incorporated a clever play on words with “feat” and “feet” and kept their statement short, sweet, and concise. They incorporated the word “running” into their copywriting because they are marketing running shoes. Think about things like that when you’re copywriting and don’t be afraid to have fun! 

Step 4: Edit! Edit! Edit!

Something I learnt when I attended the Vancouver Film School, Writing for TV, Film, and Video Games is, a large part of writing is editing. In fact, any good writer will tell you - writing IS editing. It’s so important to go over your work with a fine toothed comb. Look through your copywriting and make sure there aren’t any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. If this is something you struggle with, try copy and pasting your writing into ChatGPT and ask it to check your spelling and grammar. Or there is always the option to check out programs like Grammarly. 

Have a read over your copywriting and get a feel for the flow of it. Are you getting tripped up on certain statements or phrases or does your copywriting flow nicely and keep you engaged to the next sentence? You are your ultimate test audience and if you have a hard time flowing from sentence to sentence, then chances are your audience is going to as well. It’s time to smooth things over and edit, edit, EDIT! 

Step 5: Optimise for Impact

You can have an amazing website with stellar copywriting but guess what… so do a lot of people. It’s a race for online businesses to get to the top of the Google search results. How do you do that? By utilising SEO. 

What is SEO? Great question! It stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s basically a behind the scenes marketing tool for websites that ranks your website to the top of search engines like Google. It’s like a magic trick that helps people find what they are looking for on the internet. 

Utilising SEO is like dressing your company up in an outfit worthy of a RuPaul Drag Race season finale winner and parading it through the internet. It’s going to put you to the top of the line and get you noticed! 

SEO is a whole other topic in itself and I could go on and on but instead I’m going to keep this post short, sweet, and focused on how to create the perfect website copy in Vancouver in 5 easy steps. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, check out my other blog posts!

Key Elements of Your Business

In order to work with my clients on the power of persuasion, I need to understand who they are, what they do, where they excel, and where the areas for growth and improvement are. It’s also important for you as a business owner to know this about yourself too.

Your Unique Brand:

Oftentimes I ask people about their brand identity and they start to tell me about their business, rather than their brand. In order for the power of persuasion to work, you need to establish a unique brand and understand what brand identity is. 

Your brand identity encompasses the visual, emotional, and conceptual elements that collectively represent your business. It refers to the unique characteristics, values, personality traits, and visual elements that distinguish you from competitors. It also shapes how you are perceived by your target audience. Establishing your brand identity includes things like brand name, logo, colour palette, typography, visual elements, voice, tone, values, personality, positioning, story, and messaging. 

It’s important to stick to your brand guidelines once they are set. Following your brand guidelines creates brand consistency. When consumers see brand cohesion it builds a sense of trust in the product and/or services being offered. A client who trusts a brand translates to loyalty, and loyalty translates to continued sales and increased revenue for your business. (WIN!)

Define Your Target Audience:

In order to powerfully persuade consumers, you need to define, know, and understand who your target audience is.

I always suggest my client build mock-ups or avatars of their ideal client. Think about the minutiae and get descriptive. Let’s say you have a men’s skincare line. Don’t just tell me that your target audience is “men”. Who are they? What do they do? What are their hobbies? What is their yearly income? How old are they? What other products and services do they like or buy?

It’s important to know your target audience so you can better understand their demographics, emotions, pain points, and how to market to them in the most effective way possible. As a copywriter, I collect this information to tailor my copywriting to resonate with their needs and preferences. 

Tap Into Emotions:

Tapping into human emotions is where the true power of persuasion lies. It’s the sweet spot of copywriting and where the best marketing and advertising opportunities exist. Leveraging emotional triggers such as joy, desire, or curiosity to capture the attention of your audience evokes a response. My goal as your copywriter is to appeal to your target audience’s emotions by highlighting the benefits of doing business with you and your brand in a way that resonates with their feelings and aspirations.

Tell Compelling Stories:

The most powerful way to persuade someone is through clever storytelling. My copywriting stands apart from others because I am a natural born storyteller. I focus on using storytelling techniques to create narratives that resonate with your audience and illustrate the benefits of your product or service in relatable and memorable ways. Stories speak louder than basic words and cheesy sentences strung together. Stories psychologically persuade the audience by evoking emotion, capturing attention, and making your message memorable.