Business owners looking to boost their sales and reinforce their brand perception must be able to write equally persuasive and informative product descriptions for their online listings. This proficiency is a crucial aspect that should be involved in your content marketing and copywriting efforts, but it may be time-consuming and complex.
Billboard Online prepared this guide to help you better understand how well-crafted product descriptions can persuade and inform your target audience and eventually drive results.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Why It Matters: The first crucial step that you should take in writing descriptions for your product or services is to determine your target audience. You must be able to understand their primary needs and even their struggles if you want to effectively communicate with them. By doing so, you’re making it easier for them to trust your offerings over your competitors.
How to Do It:
- You should start by conducting detailed audience research so you can better comprehend your target audience’s demographics, main interests, and purchasing behaviour.
- You must learn how to tailor the tone, style, and language you’d use in each of your product descriptions to truly resonate with them.
Pro Tip: You may want to consider hiring content marketing experts because implementing comprehensive audience research can be time-consuming. They can effectively analyze your audience and help you craft your product descriptions in a way that appeals to your potential customers.
2. Highlight Benefits Over Features
Why It Matters: Once you already know who you’re communicating with, your next task is to learn how to properly highlight your products’ benefits rather than their features. As Medium outlined in one of its blogs, most customers tend to be more interested in understanding how your products can solve their problems or improve their lives than in knowing their technical specifications.
How to Do It:
- You should present your products’ features in a way that highlights their relatable benefits rather than focusing on their technical details alone. For example, you can say, “Stay comfortable all day with breathable fabric” instead of just emphasizing that your product is “100% cotton.”
- You can also use storytelling to showcase how your product can enhance user experience and better appeal to their emotions.
Pro Tip: You can trust professional copywriters to transform your boring product details into captivating narratives that can attract your target audience and convert them into loyal customers.
3. Use Persuasive Language
Why It Matters: You should practice using persuasive language in writing your product descriptions if you truly want your target audience to try out your offerings and take the next step. According to Forbes, words hold the power to inspire action from people and their influence decisions.
How to Do It:
- You can begin by incorporating strong action verbs like “discover,” “experience,” or “transform.”
- You must also be able to express a sense of urgency by using common marketing phrases like “limited stock” or “offer ends soon.”
- You may also include emotive words that can evoke their desire, trust, or excitement.
Pro Tip: We recommend you seek a copywriting service if you want to ensure that your product descriptions are persuasive enough without sounding too salesy.
4. Be Informative and Transparent
Another important thing you should always consider in writing your product descriptions is to be as informative and transparent as possible. You should keep in mind that your customers prefer to learn detailed information about your offerings so they can make informed purchasing decisions and avoid having regrets afterwards.
How to Do It:
- An effective strategy that you can employ is to include dimensions, materials, usage instructions, and any other relevant details in your product descriptions so potential customers can easily understand everything about your product.
- You must be able to address potential concerns upfront, and you can do it by including key phrases like “machine washable” or “suitable for sensitive skin.”
Pro Tip: You can hire content marketing services to write informative descriptions for your products in a way that builds trust among your customers and reduces return rates.
5. Leverage SEO Best Practices
Why It Matters: You must be familiar with SEO best practices and strategically apply them when writing your product descriptions. You’re essentially influencing Google to rank your listing highly in its search results if your descriptions are SEO-friendly. In effect, you’re also increasing organic traffic to your website.
How to Do It:
- You should learn how to naturally use relevant keywords within your product descriptions so they appear on search results whenever potential customers are searching for similar products.
- You must also optimize your meta descriptions and titles to make it easier for search engines to understand your message.
- You can also include long-tail keywords to increase your chances of appearing in search results because they tend to have fewer competitors.
Pro Tip: As what we’ve been advising business owners, a digital marketing agency can help you in implementing effective SEO strategies to elevate your product descriptions and increase their online visibility.
6. Write for Scannability
Why It Matters: You must keep scanability in mind whenever you’re writing your product descriptions. As per Nielsen Norman Group, online shoppers tend to scan content rather than read them word by word.
How to Do It:
- You may use bullet points to effectively break down your products’ key features and benefits and help your potential customers to easily scan through them.
- You must keep your paragraphs short and focused to avoid boring your readers and losing their interest.
- You should always highlight important information about your offerings by using bold or italic text font styles.
Pro Tip: We recommend you hire copywriting experts if you’re unsure of your ability to effectively structure your product descriptions to boost their readability and impact.
7. Incorporate Social Proof
Why It Matters: You should also try leveraging social proofs. You can start by sharing your existing customers’ positive reviews, testimonials, and ratings to build credibility and trust between your potential customers and your brand.
How to Do It:
- You may include snippets of your previous customers’ positive reviews within your descriptions to encourage casual visitors to also try out your products.
- You should also highlight any awards, certifications, or endorsements your products received to increase their confidence to actually purchase.
Pro Tip: You can rely on professional content marketers to present your social proofs without sounding fake and forceful. They can seamlessly integrate social proof into your product descriptions and increased yourboost conversions.
8. Use Engaging Visual Descriptions
Why It Matters: Another effective strategy that we suggest you adopt is to use vivid and imaginative language because it can help your customers to easily visualize your products and their potential benefits in their lives.
How to Do It:
- You may creatively paint a picture of your product in your customers’ minds by saying, “Wrap yourself in luxury with our ultra-soft cashmere blanket.”
- You can also use sensory words in writing your product descriptions to better describe textures, colors, and experiences. By doing so, customers are more likely to get attracted to buying your offerings.
Pro Tip: You can hire a skilled copywriter if you need help in bringing your products to life through engaging words and increasing your chances of getting more sales.
9. Include a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA)
Why It Matters: CTAs are one of the most important aspects that you should focus on when you’re writing your product descriptions. You should be able to strategically incorporate them if you want to drive your customers into taking the next step, like adding your products to their digital cart or exploring more of your products.
How to Do It:
- You should focus on action-driven phrases like “Shop Now,” “Order Today,” or “Try It Risk-Free” while crafting your CTAs to express a sense of urgency to your customers.
- You must always place your CTAs prominently within your product descriptions so they can easily spot them and increase your chances of getting high conversion rates.
Pro Tip: You can seek the help of marketing professionals to write strong CTAs for your product descriptions that consistently align with your brand voice. In effect, you’re more likely to enjoy high sales and engagement rates.
10. Update Regularly
Why It Matters: last but not least, you must monitor and update your product descriptions regularly to ensure that they remain relevant and functional. Remember that you can possibly discourage your customers from purchasing your products and even harm your SEO rankings if you have outdated descriptions.
How to Do It:
- You must regularly review and update your product descriptions to guarantee that they are still effective after some time since their publication.
- You may also incorporate your customers’ feedback to address common questions/concerns while also reinforcing your products’ credibility.
Pro Tip: We suggest you partner with a digital marketing agency to guarantee that your content stays relevant and impactful to both your customers and to search engines like Google.
Final Thoughts
You must realize that you need effective product descriptions if you want to increase your sales online. But writing is no easy task, considering it calls for creativity, strategy implementation, and strong attention to detail. We recommend you seek professional content marketing and copywriting services to help you elevate your product pages and drive more sales for your business.
Billboard Online is more than willing to be your partner in writing product descriptions that can truly attract and convert even casual visitors to loyal customers. Contact us today and learn how our team can assist you in building a powerful online presence for your brand.