Designing Your Copy
When selling to someone in person, you have the opportunity to uncover their needs and objections. If you’re good, you will figure out their pain points without adding any objections into the purchase journey.
Of course, we’re not doing this in person, we’re selling online. We can’t ask questions, but with well designed content, we can lay out information in a way that answers them.
In most cases, the goal of your web page is to answer questions quickly. So the design 100% impacts the success of your page.
Mobile First
Fittingly, I wanted to have this be the first topic on the page as it is the most important. For most websites, mobile will be the primary way people will consume content.
There are plenty of easy to find best practices on proper font sizing, etc. What I also want to convey is how important the design of content matters for mobile.
Not Everything Matters
For many CMS tools you can hide content or graphics on mobile. Review your page, if it’s two miles long, it might benefit from condensing. You have to be strategic about this, but don’t overwhelm your customer.
Above the Fold
The mobile fold offers even less opportunity to engage a customer. Yes, one swipe up and they can get more content, but one swipe back and they’re gone. So you need to make sure your first paint of content connects with the customer’s intent and encourages them to continue.
Scannability
Because of the length of pages on mobile, people are prone to swipe until the right message connects. Break up your page in a way that makes it easy to digest.
use of Headings
There’s a tendency as a writer to add flair to headlines. Personally, I stay away from trying to be overly playful with headings, and be more straight to the point.
Headings are designed to help a customer skip content until they find the right content for them. Remember, we probably don’t know the exact question or concern a customer has when reading our page, so we want to be efficient in getting them to the right answer.
Use this important, short bit of large text to quickly tell the reader what the following content entails.
Chunking
There is a design principle called ‘chunking’ which is essentially the mental behaviour to interpret content in one area to have a similar purpose. By breaking up content with images, borders, colours, etc., we give the reader a sense of what territory belongs to a particular topic.
We want to be cautious about too much whitespace or adding distracting elements, but this balance shouldn't be too big of a challenge.
Let the Customer Decide how much to read
With complex topics, it can be easy to get into a crazy amount of depth on everything. I look at the first content people read as a wayfinder to more information.
Start with a strong header and follow it with a summary of your information. At the end of your summary, provide a link to further reading. This means every customer can get served without getting lost in mountains of content.
The other reason I like this approach is from an SEO standpoint. By creating specific pages of content to serve specific needs, we can rank better for those searches. Cramming every piece of information into one page muddies the waters of what the page is about.
Key Takeaways
It seems strange to talk about building copy that is aesthetically pleasing, but it does factor into the legibility and attractiveness of a web page. I wouldn’t say that it comes at the cost of good quality content, but if you’re going to take the time to build great copy, and hopefully copy that ranks and converts, you should invest in its visual appeal as well.
