If you sell products online, whether they’re automotive parts, mobile apps, arts and crafts, cosmetics, furniture or just about anything else, you need to have product descriptions that are compelling and grab your customers’ attention.
Rather than simply describing items and what they do, the best product description copywriters entice readers to learn more and drive them toward making a purchase. This isn’t an easy process, and it takes an experienced writer to know how to take a product and create a description that attracts, persuades and leads to a sale.
Who is your target customer?
This is the first and arguably most important step for product description copywriters. Here, writers create what’s known as a buyer persona—the ideal customer for your products.
For example, a company selling athletic apparel online may find that its buyer persona is a 32-year-old woman who is a working professional with two kids. Perhaps she has just decided to begin working out and recently bought a gym membership.
Obviously, this company’s customers will vary, and may also include older or younger men and women who have many different lifestyles. However, identifying a typical customer helps inform the content product description copywriters develop.
Focus on benefits, not just features
You may have a fantastic product with a wide range of impressive features, but you must go beyond simply listing everything your product has or does to draw in customers. Skilled product description copywriters start with a list of features, and then translate them into benefits.
This is where your buyer persona becomes especially important. What are the benefits this person is most likely to gain from using your product? And which messages are most likely to resonate with this person?
That’s not to say features are not important. They are, especially for some types of products, such as electronics or hardware. But unless your target customers know how the product will benefit them personally, they’ll be unlikely to buy.
Write for scanners
No matter how great your product descriptions are, the fact is that most of your readers are unlikely to read them all the way through. Rather, they will almost always read the first couple lines or sentences and then scan the rest.
Because of this, experienced product description copywriters create content in a basic F-shaped pattern. They focus on direct, concise language and make use of bullet points and sub-headers to grab readers’ attention. This allows them to communicate all pertinent information while avoiding large blocks of text that people are unlikely to read.
Copyediting is important
The most effective product description copywriters are also great editors. They take the time to review and revise the content they’ve written for flow, readability, keywords, grammar and messaging.
The process works even better if you hire a copywriting service, which will have a separate editor review all content. This puts another set of eyes on your product descriptions and gives you the benefit of two or more copywriting professionals developing and fine-tuning your content.
In a digital world in which there are millions upon millions of people, businesses and organizations selling an endless stream of products online, it’s important that you create and publish descriptions that truly sell. If you need some assistance, consider working with a team of professional product description copywriters.