By Anna Curnow, Internet Strategist

Given that your website is your online sales representative, how it talks to your customers is vitally important. We’ve put together some helpful hints on finding the right voice for your website.

Just like any sales process, getting your website to sell starts with knowing who your customers are. Before writing website copy take a moment to fully understand your customers. And I don’t just mean the old age, gender, location information. Think about what sort of people they really are. What sort of education do they have? What life stage are they at? What are the key things that motivate them (are they traditionalists or inspired by innovation)?

I have found it useful in the past to draw a picture of my customer and give them a name. Then put that picture on the wall above your desk and start listening to your customer telling you what they need to hear. Now, perhaps I’m veering away from wholly sane with this, but try it, it works!

Now you need to look carefully at your website and figure out what sort of sales process is going to work best, given your products and your (now well-acquainted) customers. Will the straight sale work? Or do you need a longer sales cycle with a more informative writing style?

Think out your ‘storyboard’. By this I mean the route that you want your customers to take as they make their way through to the sale. It’s for this reason that supermarkets put milk and pet food at the furthest point from the entrance. You have to go through all the other aisles picking up biscuits and makeup along the way before you get to what you thought you had popped in for!

Online, your customers will want directions around your website. Your navigation will be their main road map but your page copy can act as the shop assistant who guides them on to the next step. Make sure that every description ends with a clear ‘call to action’. This might be “Buy Now” or “Find out more about this product” or “Ask for more information” or even “Enter your email address here to receive updates on this product”.

If you have a search function (recommended for most catalogue sites), provide helpful hints towards the best use of the search engine. Again this is the voice of the shop assistant “Are you looking for something special?”

There is a temptation with a website to load all your products in, add some helpful copy and then move on to the next project. But remember your website is your sales assistant and as such needs freshening up from time to time. You want your sales assistant to approach returning customers with a new message regularly. It keeps customers interested in what you have to offer. So add new copy, perhaps a new article about a special new range of products, ideas for ways to use your products, examples of your customers benefiting and so on.

Who actually writes your copy is another area to be considered. This is a particularly hard one for small businesses in which the business owner is used to doing everything. Writing good copy is not easy, especially online as your copy can be approached from any angle rather than front to back as is offline writing. You might want to consider hiring the services of a copywriter with experience of writing online. Ask them for references and examples of work.

If you go decide to write the copy yourself, remember to think like your customer. That may mean that you have to explain things that they may not understand. Watch out for jargon and special names. Wherever possible, use generic terms that are clearly understood. This will help with your search engine placement too!

Whoever writes the copy, you will need to come up with a house style guide that sets in stone how you say things. Think about correct spelling and capitalisation, when to use trademark symbols, what industry specific terms and words you can use and how you are going to present times and dates. A style guide can be really useful for your other marketing collateral too, so share it around!

Finally, don’t forget that your website voice should be reflected in your emails too. Make sure that everyone in the company is using the style guide and talking in the company voice.

Thanks to Simon Young for inspiration and ideas for this article
http://www.simonyoung.co.nz