LinkedIn Ads

Copywriting is one of the most underrated skills in digital marketing, and in business in general. Copywriting is writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. In digital world, good copywriting can be used in your Google ads, social media, blog posts, email marketing etc. Many businesses can rise or fail solely on how good a copy they write. Some of the biggest brands we know of- Coca Cola, Pepsodent, Mercedes and Rolls-Royce, have a lot to thank good copywriting for. And genius marketers like Ogilvy insist that good copywriting is the foundation of good marketing. So what, then, is good copy? Are there some principles we can follow to write good copy- each and every time? In his much acclaimed classic, “Tested Advertising Methods”, copywriting genius John Caples gives some simple rules. These rules can help you improve your copywriting for your Facebook ads, Google ads, emails, newspaper ads, and so on. There are three basic rules for Good Copywriting: 1) Focus on the benefit to the user: This seems obvious, but if you look around, so many companies forget this simple rule. It’s important to remember that people DO NOT care about your brand. They care about themselves. How does your brand or product help them? Be direct about this. Headlines that insist how great your brand is without pointing out the benefits it’ll give users are ineffective. For example, “Trusted since 1929” is a useless headline for an ad, even if your company is about to turn 100 years old. Who cares? Headlines like “Amazing offer for you” are useless. You may ask- “aren’t these talking about the user’s benefit?“ On the surface, it appears like that. But there are thousands of offers floating all around a modern user. Who cares if you have one more? It’s too vague. “Best T-shirt offers for you“- now that’s a little bit better. It lacks personality, but at least it’s more direct about the benefit- you will get T-shirts at offer prices. 2) Make it NEWS People hate salesmen and advertisements. They, however, love to know the latest news. Use this to your advantage. Make your sales copy about a news. How can you achieve this? It’s simple. Start your ad with words like “Introducing…”, “Announcing…” or “All-new…” Words like this make your ad copy sound more like a news or announcement, and less like desperate sales. They catch more eye-balls and make more people read the rest of your ad. 3) Use curiosity IF (and only if) you’ve done the first point right (made the self-benefit to the user crystal clear), can you move to the next point of good advertising. WHich of these do you think is a better headline for an ad or email: Improve your sales performance How I went from total failure to massive success in selling in one year Both the headlines get the first point (self-benefit) right- they’re both going to teach the user how to improve their selling skills. But the second headline gets an added advangate, it makes you curious to learn the story. As a caveat, note that using just curiosity without self-benefit is a recipe for disaster. For example, a headline like “how I went from failure to success” in itself is terrible. Even if it makes a small percentage of people curious enough to read the rest of your ad or email, they might not be the ones who’re actually struggling with sales. Those who want solutions for their sales problems are the ones who should read the ad. How do you filter them without even mentioning “sales” or “selling” in the headline (or subject line.) Therefore, above all else, remember to keep the self-benefit direct. Things to avoid while writing good copy: Do not forget rule 1: focus on self-benefit to the user. This is 90% of the game, and still often ignored. Do not try to write like Shakespeare. Good copy should be easy to read. Fancy poetry can be wonderful to read as a pastime. IT IS not wonderful to sell products. Do not write your copy in a hurry. Spend time on making it perfect. Get feedback from others. Especially spend time thinking of the headline or subject line. Do not make it a chore. Enjoy the process. The more fun you have writing copy, the better your copywriting will turn out. The advantage of the digital medium for marketing is that feedback is instant. You can figure out how even a minor change in your copy improved your clickthrough rate or conversions on facebook ads, for instance; and this makes the process more exciting as you really start learning more about human behaviour. Do not forget to use good images to support your copy. It’s a myth that people see the image before the headline when they see ads. Most people read the headline first. However, a good image which makes your product or product benefit obvious will assist your copywriting. Ideal is to have images of person(s) using your product and enjoying it. That’s why all cola drinks have images of celebrities happily drinking from their bottle in their ad campaigns. Do not ignore audience-targeting. Even more important than copywriting is reaching the right audience. If you show a beautiful ad for a Rolls Royce to a family with a very low annual income, and I show a terrible ad of Rolls Royce to families with huge net worths, guess which of us will do better? It’s nice to improve ad performance with copywriting, but audience selection still remains the main skill for a digital marketer.

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-click (on search engines) are the ways that help you grow traffic on your website. Both the techniques are useful to fulfill your purpose but the selection depends on the type, scale and motive of the business. The end goal of both the approaches are the same but the way they work is quite different. Explore our blog SEO vs PPC to decide which technique is the best for your business. Before you move ahead for SEO vs PPC comparison and determine which one is more desirable for you, let us first understand both the techniques in brief. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) SEO is the practice of increasing quantity and quality of traffic through organic search results. It is the organic approach of attracting visitors. Google crawls your website and with the help of its algorithm, it determines the quality and content of the site and ranks the pages accordingly on Search engine page results for different search queries. PAY PER CLICK (PPC) Pay per click is the technique where advertisers pay a fee to the search engine every time their ad is clicked. It is like buying visits for your site rather than making an attempt to earn them organically. Typically, if you put any search query into Google, the first few links are likely to be paid ads. (New to PPC? Learn how to set up your first campaign here.) APPROACHES Both the approaches are completely different but a businessman or a website owner’s objectives may differ. A businessman who can afford the cost of PPC and desires to get huge traffic to his website quickly, and demands big turnover, will opt for PPC. But a small businessman who can afford the time to boost the traffic by improving quality will opt for SEO. And a businessman who understands the importance of a website’s quality and the significance of attracting visitors that will get converted to customers will opt for both the techniques. It will be a hybrid approach of SEO and PPC and this approach is often most desirable. WHEN IS IT BEST TO USE SEO? WHEN CONSISTENT RESULTS ARE REQUIRED SEO is not a practice that will happen overnight or in a week. You need to have patience and wait to get your site show up on the first page of search result. Once your site is there, you may get to enjoy consistent and free traffic. If you continue with the same tactics and SEO campaigns, you will be able to stay there and can reap fruits for a longer period. DESIRE TO BE AN AUTHENTIC SITE  It’s like building a reputation for your website on the virtual platform. When the content on your site is so relevant that it makes the other members of your niche to recommend your website. It is like the “go to” website for your niche. Your webpage will get mentions that will generate backlinks and this helps Google to determine how significant your website is in your niche. This way your website will be able to get a lot of traffic which is organic, significant and consistent. INCREASE THE VALUE OF YOUR SITE   In case you think of selling the website in the near future, you can earn a higher price only when the value of your website really stands out in the market. Websites are like real estates on the digital platform. To earn a good price, you need to augment the value of your website. Some of the variables that go into determining the value of your website are: Traffic generated Consistency of traffic generated Page rank Search engine rankings over the period of time Link popularity Likes and Followers on Social Media (Check out our Link Building Guide for SEO.) These factors fall under the ambit of SEO. WHEN IS IT BEST TO USE PPC? WHEN YOUR BUSINESS DEMANDS IMMEDIATE RESULTS PPC results come very fast! The results are instantaneous. Once your paid promotion campaign is started, you can get a lot of visitors visiting your page immediately. This happens because once your PPC campaign is approved, provided that your bids are high enough to get the priority placement, your advertisement is seen by plenty of people who can click on it to visit your webpages. This works really well for product launches, affiliate marketing, seasonal promotions, event marketing and many more. WHEN YOUR SITE DOES NOT QUALIFY SEO CRITERIA For SEO, website needs to be rich in content and must be regularly updated. This is the only way to say to Google that your site is relevant and it must keep your site on top of the pile. But many websites cannot afford regular updates. Also, some keyword categories are so competitive that it seems unrealistic to be among the first few links in that niche. Also, just think about squeeze pages, what is there to update on such a page at regular intervals? (Squeeze pages are pages with forms and no other links, they force your visitors to either sign-up the form and get the offer or to leave the site. They’re usually high-converting pages.) Squeeze pages usually can’t even afford to merit themselves on the second page of Google. Such pages can grab traffic through PPC campaigns. DOMINATE YOUR KEYWORD CATEGORY. When you are very sure about the keywords which are apt and also popular on search engines that will bring paying customers to your business, then dominating that keyword is a great move. PPC results are always displayed over organic search results. And 50% of the traffic goes to the top 3 sponsored links. So if your business requires instant traffic, quick conversions, or to maximize your turnover by dominating the keyword category, then you must opt for PPC. CONCLUSION One cannot choose which method is better without knowing the motive and the website’s situation. In my opinion, you must never believe that there is a trade-off between SEO and PPC. Both the techniques (SEO vs PPC)

Today I want to quickly summarize what I think will be the biggest digital marketing trends for 2019. Already, 2018 saw massive changes occurring in this field, so before we go further let’s look at the most significant changes we saw in 2018. Trends from the previous year: 1) The importance of influencers (which is still massive), is reducing compared to direct promotions by brands. Marketers are realizing that buying the influence of influencers proves more expensive than direct campaigns in many cases. 2) Live videos are IN. No matter what the social media, all channels are incentivizing content creators to go LIVE and interact with the audience. The result- better views, more influence and more engagement. 3) Chatbots are hot. Companies want to keep the conversational tone casual, so instead of boring forms, increasingly brands are using chatbots to interact with their audiences. 4) Localization is increasing. More marketers are now spending on localized content in the languages spoken in the relevant geographies they’re targeting. So what are the upcoming digital marketing trends for 2019? Well for a start, I’m almost certain that all four of the above will continue to trend further. Additionally, we are likely to find that: 1) Voice marketing will increase. Every year the number of people searching Google with voice are increasing. With more and more devices aiding such search (Alexa, Google Home etc.), marketers will innovate to make the most of these increasing search volumes. 2) Social media will increasingly penalize excessive use of hashtags, as all channels focus on delivering only relevant content to their users. 3) After the data leak scandals of 2018, another digital marketing trend for 2019 will be that the big digital companies (think Google, Amazon, Fb, MSFT) will be increasingly cautious of how data is used. Legal rules are also changing in many countries around these ideas. This means that gaining and sharing customer’s personal information will get restricted, at least in theory. 4) Visual search will increase. Pinterest and Google Lens are visual search engines. Although still in the infancy, marketers can get an edge over competition by jumping on this trend before it is noticed by others. 5) Stories. Since they disappear after some time, users are likely to engage with them. Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and now YouTube all have their versions of stories. The newer story-formats are a field that will see a lot of innovative marketers trying different concepts and this should be on the radar of any serious digital marketer. Concluding thoughts AI, IoT and incremental improvements in digital media platforms will all contribute to making 2019 a great opportunity for serious marketers to jump the curve and stay ahead of the game. However, amidst all these digital marketing trends for 2019, the biggest change still remains the massive new user-base that the internet is generating in developing countries. Keeping an eye on how they interact with the web (instead of giving all one’s energy to studying the trends in relatively smaller number of advanced web users) will remain the most fruitful activity for most marketers to do. What do you think are the digital marketing trends for 2019? Do share with me, I look forward to hearing from you. At WebKow.com, our expert digital marketers are well-versed with data-driven and result-oriented approaches to business and digital marketing. We can help you come up with customized, result-oriented marketing campaigns to get amazing ROI. Contact us now to know more about how we can help you. We promise results!   About the Author: Neeraj Ramnani is the founder of GrowthFoundation.in and WebKow.com. He is a digital marketer since 2011, and has pioneered some of the most innovative approaches in this field over these years. He’s worked with over 40 brands for their result-oriented digital marketing. He’s an alumnus of IIM Indore and SVNIT Surat.