27 Jun 2020
Insights, Marketing
A tech company’s copywriting tone and style should be uniformed across all their sales and marketing channels. Copywriting can connect the audience with your brand, provide more profound meaning to your product or service, entice an enquiry and empower your sales process. Excellent copy can be the differentiator between making the sale or losing the prospect, so you need to make it count.
Having worked with hundreds of tech startups over the past decade, I’ve noticed three common problems around the copywriting process which are impacting business scalability.
“We do this, we do that, we won this, we created that”. Too much talk about “we” and you’ll catch Weitus. I get it. You’re amazing. Your tech is groundbreaking. You’ve spent blood sweat and tears developing it, so you deserve to shout about it from the rooftops. But that’s not necessarily how you should go about your copywriting. If you turned up to a first date and spent the whole time talking about yourself and how wonderful you are, you’d likely get ghosted before the second date. Instead, you need to speak to the audience. Show that you have an understanding of their problems and how your product or service will benefit them. Let’s take a look at some examples:
We have developed an AI-powered machine-learning technology to create efficient processes in our system.
Try instead addressing the audience’s problems in layman’s terms:
We use AI-powered machine-learning technology to make your work easier.
Another example:
Our software is super-fast and delivers pin-point, accurate reports.
Instead, you should talk to the audience:
Our super-fast software saves you time and enables you to deliver reports with 100% accuracy, every time.
Flipping your copywriting to talk to the audience, rather than about yourselves, will result in them having increased feelings of connectedness with your brand. They are more likely to have that lightbulb moment where they understand the real value your tech would bring to them. This connection turns a cold lead into a hot one.
All too often, I see tech companies putting a technical emphasis on their copywriting at the initial prospect engagement stage and woven throughout their website and marketing materials. Overly technical copywriting can often result in the audience being unable to understand who you are, what you do and how you benefit them. If a website visitor cannot grasp these three things within the first few seconds of loading your homepage, they are likely to bounce. You’ve just lost out on a lead.
Of course, your tech is a highly complicated and a specialised bit of work. You’ve spent hours upon hours coding the software or building the hardware. The whole process to get you to the launch stage has been a complete geek-fest. When writing copy, it’s often all too easy to write in your language as this is where you feel most comfortable. But you need to remember that your target customer probably isn’t half as clued up on tech as you are. You may naturally want to show off about how you wrote your own Java library, or have a 16 core and 32 thread overclocked processor powering your tech. The majority of your customers probably aren’t going to understand or care. When it comes to copywriting, you need to know when and where to get techy. Your initial engagement with a prospect, be it the website homepage, initial pages of a sales brochure, advert etc. should generally avoid overly technical copy. You need to connect with the audience with terms and expressions that they understand. Discuss their problems, what your solution is (as a non-technical overview) and what benefits you will bring them.
On your product or services page, you can have a clearly labelled “technical specifications” section, where you can geek-out to your heart’s content. Having this as a separate section will allow non-technical people to skip over it and technical-minded people to take real value from it.
Tech companies are made up of pretty smart people (most of the time, anyway!). There’s usually someone in the business who’s pretty good at writing. But copywriting comes in many different forms and skillsets. Just because someone writes flawless emails or pumps out professional whitepapers for fun, doesn’t make them a talented brand, website or marketing copywriter. You need a copywriter who understands the power of a heading, speaking to the audience (not suffering from Weitus), creating a uniformed tone across the brand, enticing the visitor to make an enquiry and SEO.
Keeping the copywriting in-house seems logical because you understand your business better than anyone else. An external copywriter just won’t understand the tech or the complexities of your offering. This is a valid concern. Hiring an external copywriter, unless they spend the time to really get to know your business and tech, can result in generic and inaccurate copy. In our experience overcoming such problems, we find the best results are when the client writes the initial draft or a bullet point list of what they want to say on each page; then a copywriter comes in to clean up, polish and add some sparkle. As the copywriter isn’t writing the copy from scratch, the costs are considerably reduced, and the content is accurate.
Keeping these three common mistakes in mind when writing new copy, or rewriting your existing copy, will significantly benefit your sales and marketing efforts. It will turn lost, bored or confused prospects into hot to trot leads.
If you would like to discuss how we can turbocharge your tech company with digital solutions that deliver outstanding results, book a 30-minute strategy call with me.
