Website copywriting — getting started

the exact brand voice guide that I use for clients to help them easily write compelling website copy.

This video covers:

OUTLINING your ideal client
defining your brand values
HOW TO WRITE WITH EFFECTIVE STORYTELLING
Crafting your brand tone & personality
FINDING INSPIRATION

📝 WANT TO CREATE your own brand voice guide? Click here to download the BRAND VOICE GUIDE template!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

 Before you even begin writing the words for your website, I always recommend starting with strategy. This is going to give you a solid base and framework to write copy that's actually going to be effective to speak directly to your ideal clients, and also it's going to give you framework for writing great messaging on social media, within your email marketing, and so on and so forth. You want to make sure that your brand messaging is consistent and sounds really great, not just on your website, but at any touch point where someone could encounter your brand.

As someone who does both website design and copywriting, I'll be 100% honest with you the design of your site actually is not as important as your copywriting.

Your copywriting can make the difference between someone purchasing with you and someone clicking back to Google and purchasing from a competitor.

If you don't know how to speak about your services or product in a way that's actually going to intrigue people, you could have the coolest looking website in the world, and it's not ultimately going to translate to sales.

And importantly, with brands focusing more and more on creating personal connection and leading with values, you're going to want to make sure that you're really clear on the why behind your business.

That way you can clearly communicate and connect with people who share similar values to you.

So firstly, before we start with any writing, you're going to want to really sit with your core values and figure out exactly what's important to you in your business and why.

To show you exactly what building a strategic brand voice and writing your copywriting looks like, I'm going to walk you through a complete example of the brand voice guide that I use for my own client work. In this case, I'll show you a breakdown of one of my restaurant clients and the brand voice that we built for them.

Firstly, you're going to want to start with your core values. Again, this is going to be the space that you can write from that's going to feel the most genuine and authentic to you. AKA, it's going to be the thing that sets you apart from everyone else because you're a unique individual.

When thinking about your values, try to be as specific as possible. For example, don't just list authenticity as a value. I would actually argue in that specific example, authenticity isn't a value. Authenticity is the way in which you uphold your values.

People will know you're authentic if you say that you hold a value and then you follow through and showcase and you speak to that value all the time.

The more focused you can get on what's really important to you and what you really want people to feel when they're interacting with your business, the better. Once you've decided what your overall values are, think about what that looks like in practice.

When people interact with your brand, when they visit a physical space, when they go to your website, when they talk to you, what does that feel like and look like? Are your values easily distinguishable?

What does the action version of those values feel like, look like, and translate as?

Based on your values and what it is that you want to be known for, think about what your brand personality is. It's really helpful to think of your brand as if they're an actual person.

Think of what that interaction or conversation looks like.

Is your brand playful and cheerful? Or snarky and fiery? Is your brand modern and understated or gregarious and ostentatious? Is your brand cool and luxurious or is it approachable and casual?

There's no wrong answers here. Again, you want it to be based fully on your values and how you want your brand to feel to your ideal clientele. Just as it's important to decide what your brand personality is, it's also really important to be clear on what you're not.

This is especially important because in social media world, it's really easy to get caught up in trends or look at what other people in your industry are doing, and it can sometimes feel overwhelming or make you feel like you have to replicate what everyone else is doing to stay trendy or relevant. Ultimately, what that's going to do, though, is create confusion with your audience about what your actual brand stands for, what your personality is, and what your messaging is.

So make sure you decide what kind of personality traits and tone you don't want to emulate.

Next up is understanding your target audience. There's a lot that goes into this and you can really deep dive into brand strategy with things like demographics, interests, hobbies, personality traits, and building out client avatars.

For now, we're just going to stick with some basics and focus less on demographics and more on core emotional needs. Think first and foremost about what your customers are looking for. This can be the tangible product and service that you offer, but you should also think about the overall feeling that they're looking for as well. Is your product something that's going to give them confidence? Is it going to make their life more joyful? Is it going to free up more time and energy?

Is it going to provide connection and community? What are the end results they're wanting from shopping with you or working with you?

Once you've figured out individual problems, try to figure out how those all come together and create an overarching theme.

Then, really look at how your business does things differently or better than what's currently in the market that fits as a solution for those problems they're facing.

Combining your values and your customer's values and your customer's problem and your solution is going to be the foundation for your brand storytelling.

The most effective brand storytelling speaks to deeper subconscious needs or desires rather than just talking about the products or services that you sell.

On the surface level. In your copywriting, you could talk about your actual products and services. This is logical, factual, and is just addressing the surface level problem that they need solved.

If you dive a little bit deeper, this is where you could start to set yourself apart in how you solve those problems. For example, instead of just a beauty brand, it could be a clean beauty brand or a sustainable beauty brand.

We see this a lot with big brands, but it doesn't necessarily go deeper than this. To connect with your customers even more, you really want to get to the root of things, emotions and subconscious levels.

This can be directly rooted in your story and how you started your business and what makes you passionate about it. Or speaking to their deep pain points or burning desires.

For example, for describing this brand, you could describe it really simply and succinctly, who they are and what they do. If you want to get even deeper, you could talk about what kind of restaurant they are, how they're different from other restaurants around,

and different reasons why people would want to get excited to visit them. If we go even deeper, though, that's when we start to pull out all of those values, and the core problems and frustrations that their ideal audience has.

As you can see, this description sounds a lot more compelling, unique, and personal than either of these.

So again, this is why we're starting with strategy. If you're going into your writing without clear definitions of what your values are, or who your customers are and what their values are, it's going to be really difficult to speak from a genuine and authentic place, because you're probably just going to end up sticking at the surface level, buzzwords and things that everyone else is saying in your industry.

Once you've laid a bedrock of strategy, what does that copywriting actually sound like?

When you're writing, you should be thinking about all of these things combined.

Their problems and how your solution solves them. Both on the surface level and on the deeper emotional level.

And then sharing your values and the deeper emotions behind your business. Why did you start it in the first place and what keeps you going? What lights you up about it and what gets you excited about it?

Try to think about what this sounds like in a simple headline statement and play around with writing a bunch of different kind of headlines or elevator pitch style statements. This, again, will just help you laser focus in on the most important parts of your brand and your brand voice.

Keep in mind, too, depending on what you're writing for, your writing style can sound a little bit different. Your website and sales copy is going to be much more written with the idea of persuading and converting, so you're probably going to want to speak a little bit more to problems and solutions, versus content like social media and email newsletters is going to be written probably a little bit more casually with the desire to create connection and personalize your brand.

Getting clear on the type of tone and word choice you want to use is also going to be key for establishing consistency with your brand messaging. Again, thinking about your brand as more of a person, try to think of description words and adjectives to describe what that tone looks like and feels like.

And from there, think of keywords and phrases that you want to use throughout your copy. Having a list of these will be helpful as you write copy for your website, as well as social media, or any kind of marketing you do.Because then you can make sure that you're staying consistent, and people will quickly be able to pick up on what it is that you offer and who you are.

As you're going through this exercise too, you'll probably run into things that make you realize what you don't like so take some space to specify those. it's especially helpful to think of specific words and phrases that you want to avoid, either industry jargon that's confusing for customers, overdone or overly trendy words, Or anything that makes you sound too similar to other people within your industry or space.

To help with your decision making, I highly, highly recommend doing a bunch of research. This doesn't look like competitor research, where you're trying to figure out what people within your industry are doing so that you can copy what they're doing.

The purpose of this exercise is to look at all the brands that you love and copywriting that you're really drawn to, whether they're in your industry or not, and then figuring out what it is that you love about it, and how it's applicable to the way that your brand speaks.

So based on the personality and tone that you've established, think of segmenting brands into these different categories to figure out the type of voices and word choices that sound most in alignment with the type of personality you're wanting to build for your brand. This will help you gather some inspiration as you're trying to write your own copy. This doesn't have to be specific to brands, too. You could draw inspiration from your favorite books, podcasts that you always listen to, and magazines that you read.

And always remember, when you're writing your copy in any context, always center your target audience. You don't want to just be talking about yourself, being salesy, or pushing why your product or service is amazing. You want to be thinking about how you can give value and how you can create connection with your audience.

And there you have it. That's the exact brand voice guide that I use to write strategic copywriting for my clients.

I've actually turned this into a template for you so that you can create your own brand voice guide. To access it, just click the link below.