website copy Archives - Shannan Seely Copywriting

3 crucial copy tips to improve an existing healthcare home page

(What is Website Quick Fix? You watch over my shoulder via video as I talk through a webpage’s copy and pinpoint copy challenges. Then I share tips to improve the copy. Too busy for video? Catch the written summary below.)

ABB OPTICAL GROUP, a B2B Healthcare company

How’s your website performing?

You expect your website to represent your company in the best possible way every day, 365 days a year. Even the days when you’re on summer vacation. (And I hope you’ll be taking a vacation this summer. You deserve it.)

Websites are an investment, of course. You were probably amazed when you learned the cost of launching a new one, not to mention routine maintenance. Your website is important and worthy of your attention.

How’s your website performing? Could boring copy be a contributing factor? If you feel like your website needs a refresh, where do you start?

You start by examining the copy.

In Website Quick Fix #1, I review the home page of an existing healthcare website. Everything I summarize here can be applied to other industries too.

Understand your prospect’s 5 stages of awareness to write more effective copy

Copywriting. Looks easy, but it’s not.

As marketers, we have problems when we write marketing copy, whether we do the writing ourselves or hire a copywriter, we agonize over this issue:

What do we say?

and

What does our prospect need us to say?

But a concept used by experienced copywriters can help us. Let me share the concept and show you how I applied it to website copy.

What’s the Concept?

The 5 Stages of Awareness of your prospect.

How to get inside a prospect’s mind

Before we write, we think about what we need to say. We know we need to focus on the reader.

We need to determine their point of view to persuade them to take action. So how do we do that? By listening to the prospect, which includes understanding the prospect’s stage of awareness.

The 5 stages of awareness is a scale. It shows how much your prospect knows about your products and services. The concept also shows how much the prospect knows about his needs, pain, and problems.

The concept was coined by renowned copywriter, Eugene “Gene” Schwartz. And he wrote about this in the book, Breakthrough Advertising. The book was published about 50 years ago, but don’t discount this idea of its age. The framework is foundational to good copywriting.

So you need to measure your prospect’s awareness level to write to him or her.