B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine » The long and short of website copy

The long and short of website copy

December 3rd, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

You may need to be of a certain age to relate well to the debate over long vs. short website copy. In particular, as Sonia Simone reminds us in a post on Copyblogger, it helps if you can recall those halcyon days when direct mail (along with print/TV advertising, of course) was a company’s chief means of reaching prospects.

“Decades ago”, Sonia says, “successful direct mail copywriters like Gary Bencivenga and Gene Schwartz noticed that ‘the more you told, the more you sold.’ In other words, the more relevant, compelling information they could cram into a piece of physical mail, the more likely it was that the customer would buy.”

Fast-forward to the Web era, and you’ll find (many say unfortunately) a camp that has taken those principles and… transferred them largely intact to websites, complete with yellow highlighter, centered red headlines, fake handwriting, blinking arrows …yes, the whole nine yards. Mostly, those will be B2C sites.

Among B2Bs – where you probably won’t see the visual tricks just mentioned – you can still hear echoes of that debate, in the form of whether to provide minimal or lots of information on web pages. The silliness of this argument is pointed out by Jeff Sexton in a post over on FutureNow: “Hyperlinks make it possible to get the best of both … worlds. Visitors who want more substantiation and richer content can drill down on the links that interest them; and visitors who only want a quick, bottom-line summary and an express path to converting can get that too – all on the same site.”

So you can write what looks like a clean, elegant “short copy” page, that – together with the daughter pages behind strategic links on the main page – nonetheless provides the information needed to address your prospects’ questions and concerns. And if you do, you’ll be rewarded: “Content-rich sites typically out-convert minimalist designs because they more completely answer the prospects’ questions,” says Jeff. As proof, he cites IDG Communications research on complex-sale B2B websites showing that “well over 50% of potential leads/customers fail to convert because the websites … failed to answer prospects’ questions and provide needed information.”

Oh… and question-answering content isn’t always just copy: it can incorporate pictures, charts/graphs, user reviews, videos, blogs, forums …you name it. That’s part of the beauty of the Web, and why it can be a far more powerful prospect-converting tool than your father’s direct-mail piece ever was.

Developing the ideal page
Jeff suggests using personas to model visitor psychology, because they enable you to “reverse-engineer conversations that lead to conversions.” To do this…

imagine a particular persona’s emotional state, concerns, and informational needs upon entering a website;
compare that starting point with what the visitor will have to feel, know, and believe in order to confidently convert;
then plan out the conversation your site will need to have with that persona in order to make that persuasive journey.

Fast decision makers and late-stage buyers, who simply need a quick and easy way to get to a dialogue with Sales, get exactly that. And early-stage visitors needing a lot of information, insight, and assurance will get that, too. Each gets the exact “length” of copy that’s just right for his/her purposes.

What more could you ask from either long or short copy?