Question

Topic: Copywriting

Website Content As Marketing Material

Posted by Anonymous on 7/28/2005 at 11:26 AM ET 250 Points
We are an internet marketing company and are trying to create our own website. We have a marketing advisor who has a lot of experience in direct marketing and other offline marketing, he has suggested that we base our content on a long sales letter, similar in format to that used in direct marketing.
However our younger designers and marketing team want to try something shorter and more punchy and maybe even a bit quirky like "Professional web designers looking for young attractive company for partnership" or similar.
Both seem to have valid points, the direct mail, long sales letter approah I know works for many people selling items such as seminars and e-books, however most people who would look at the site surely already want a website in some form and don't need to be "sold on the internet", so we need something which makes us stand out from the crowd.
Is there any advice as to which direction we should take - is there any research or so on to support either arguement? Or should we split test the sites and find out?
All comments would be gratefully received so that we can resolve this quickly.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Pepper Blue on 7/28/2005 at 12:06 PM Member
    Emmie,

    Go with the young designers and marketing team.

    Absolutely don't go for the long style, that will be a huge mistake, if you did that and posted it here for peer critique, you would get slammed.

    Keep it short, and pick up a copy of Seth Godin's "The Big Red Fez". Read it (2 hours) and pass it around. He also gives case studies to support his mantra.

    Also check out Nick Usborne at www.excessvoice.com he has a lot of good info available to support short and punchy.

    Good luck!

  • Posted by ReadCopy on 7/28/2005 at 12:23 PM Member
    You would never use a long letter in DM (well you shouldn't), I agree with the above, short, punchy and visual is the way to go.

    Good Luck
  • Posted by sammykarij on 7/28/2005 at 12:28 PM Member
    As you stated long sales letter seem to work for e-books and other e-products. However, what is more important is not how much you say but how well you say it. That is for sales letter.

    What about content other than sales copy ? It needs to short and punchy. Dont fill your website with sales pitches. Just presell your your vistors using your content. If you dont mind I would suggest you read an interesting book on preselling. Check it out at https://myws.sitesell.com/online-profits.html .

    The sales letter is long but very convincing.

    All the best in your business.

    sammykarij
  • Posted on 7/28/2005 at 1:10 PM Member
    A long sales letter is not the way to go. It's very traditional. People don't come to a web site to here a sales pitch. They visit to see the company's capabilities. Web seekers are after information. The website as such should be a permission based marketing lead generating engine. Along these tenets the content should be valuable, relevant and timely.

    Think of the web as delivering a solution based approach i.e. a soft sales vs. a benefits brochure, which is a hard sale.
  • Posted by mgoodman on 7/28/2005 at 9:56 PM Accepted
    Yep. Less copy is better on a website. No question about it.

    If you absolutely must say a lot (and require a lot of words to do it), split it up over many pages, so that each page is essentially a sound-bite ("visual bite?"). Use pictures and other graphics to give the site personality, impact, and memorability. (People remember pictures even more than headlines, and certainly more than text.)

    There are two things you'd like to do:

    1. Give your site visitors a chance to take action when they've read enough. That means you need a banana on every page. (Read "The Big Red Fez" to understand the banana metaphor.)

    2. Let your visitors select what they want to read and what they don't want to read. On the home page, just give them the big idea, so they know what you do and what makes you different from and better than your competition. If you can accomplish that in one short page, you've done 75% of the work. Once they have the big idea, then they can choose what else they want to know.


    Of course, you need to have your positioning statement perfected and ready to go before you start developing the website. If you don't have a very specific value proposition, expressed just the right way, the chances that your copy will deliver its objective are slim.

    If you have questions, get a few people in your target audience to preview the site and answer some questions afterward. If there are a few different alternatives, use a split panel and compare results. You may need a professional market researcher to help you design the study, but if the questions are important enough, it's well worth the cost.

    Good luck.
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