Writing content as a digital publisher is about building a relationship with your audience. With no face-to-face interactions, your words are crucial building blocks to online engagement and sales.
No matter what kind of material or content you produce, cultivate a unique brand voice that resonates and sells. Elevate your ebooks through playful storytelling or sell your online subscriptions to discerning B22 buyers using data-informed pitches.
Whatever your niche, here are some of our copywriting tips for digital publishers to help you sell your digital products and services.
Your words are your brand: selecting a tone
Publishers should cultivate a specific brand or house style that communicates their vision and mission to the world. Playful, direct, informative: all writing styles are valid and open to you. Think about what your audience resonates with.
- Remember that your brand is not only encapsulated by your industry standing, reputation, and design, but also by the words that you use. Be careful and thoughtful with your word choices. Coming up with your own concepts and ideas, even inventing words, can be a great way to be innovative.
- Opt for clarity. When it comes to selling digital products, having clear copy will really help people understand how to use your products and services. Even if you are telling a story or being playful, don’t be too obscure.
- You will need to adopt different tones for different parts of your digital ecosystem. In support literature, you will want to adopt a much more process-driven style.
If you’re creating a membership portal, password reset flow, writing newsletters, or dealing with error messages on forms, it’s unlikely that whimsical playfulness is going to work! But equally, a book review or blog post won’t attract a lot of attention if it’s too dry.
Niche-specific lingo and jargon is your calling card
It’s important to be fully embedded in your niche to build trust and authority with your audience. (This will also help with SEO rankings and media credibility/reputation).
- Expert interviews and author deep dives are good ways to get some excellent niche specific content and copy. Plus, readers love seeing the people story behind the material!
- Research what sort of messages your brand should be putting out there. Glean this by researching your niche and its specific jargon and culture. The competition may provide you with some interesting ideas and context to which you can “talk back to”.
- It’s important to be aware of industry conventions and follow them where appropriate. Balancing between disruption and convention is one of the key ingredients of good copywriting.
🏫Here’s our digital publishing guide for publishers in the business of education.
Aligning with audience purpose to centre the user
Really investigate what is the purpose behind your writing.
One of the most important copywriting/content tips: think about purpose! Or, context is everything. Evaluating content comes down to specificity and knowing the goals behind the piece of content.
- What is the purpose of this piece of copy?
- What are the different platforms and channels in which it will be published?
- Who am I aiming this copy at?
Think about your audience as you write and direct your words to them directly. Your writing will be much more audience and user-focused if you focus on their needs and their goals rather than your own. In the digital economy, prioritising users is a no-brainer.
Pitch hard or go home
When selling digital products such as ebooks or e-learning courses, it’s very important to have a compelling pitch. Be explicit in your sales pitch and be direct when asking your customers to sign-up, buy etc. Too much cutesy copywriting will kill your conversions.
- Breaking down product copy into shorter sentence and having bullet points for top features/benefits will help busy people make purchase decisions faster!
- Visual aides are a powerful asset to be used alongside copy. Product pages and blog posts can be enriched with visual materials and explainers.
- Have a transparent and clear approach to pricing and make it easy for your customers to decipher different product levels etc. Unclear sales pitches are a conversion killer.
Thought leadership is your secret weapon
Brands often want to lead and direct the conversation, and as a publisher, you are in a great position to succeed in the knowledge economy.
- Being a thought leader, despite its name, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are the only one talking about something, or even that you are at the forefront of a debate. Sometimes thought leadership is just about engaging with current topics. If you can do this in a creative way and find new angles to add to the conversation, even better.
- Co-create content with your authors and offer behind-the-scenes exclusives.
- Personalised and curated content can help create an engaging experience where people feel that they are ‘in conversation’ with you. Encourage your readers to be thought leaders too.
- Being original is a hallmark of thought leadership, so don’t be afraid to be creative too.
SEO-informed pillar content is a good return on content investment
Getting sales, subscribers, and more people to engage with your content is important, and that is where SEO can help. SEO-informed content is a good way to invest in the future of your digital brand, as building good rankings provides you with a steady stream of traffic.
Some SEO content myths:
- Longer is not always better: it’s all about query/content match.
- Writing for SEO is writing for robots: untrue, it’s writing for users.
- Writing SEO content is hard: writing for SEO is mainly being educational and helpful.
📚Check out our SEO content series for more information.
Be aware of SEO issues, not just for SEO purposes, but for discoverability, accessibility, and user experience.
- How available it is your content?
- How findable is your content?
- Are you using good metadata?
- What about keywords, how are they working for you?
As well as optimising your copy for SEO, keyword research can help you find new angles and content ideas.
Creating online communities helps your readers feel engaged
Sometimes you need social proof: people listen to other people.
Involve your readers and creators with your online content. Create a community and offer up spaces for them to contribute, have a say etc.
- Social proof is compelling sales copy, so integrate social proof on your product pages.
- Guest blogging is a great way to engage people with your blogging strategy.
- Reader stories and testimonials are an important asset, so why not feature some of your community members online?
- Giveaways on social media can help build engaged social communities, but you also may want to consider paid social media for audience discovery.
Use your content to educate
You should also use your content strategy to educate and help people. As a publisher, you have the unique ability to create amazing resources and become a resource yourself.
- Creating an online knowledge base is a big undertaking, but it can help you attract a lot more readers and potential customers.
- Explore partnerships with professional bodies and organisations to help you build authority as an educator.
- Offering up training, workshops, and events, is one way to build yourself up as a resource. This is especially important in the B2B industry.
- Offering content for free is a great way to build an audience. Consider how much you need to put behind a paywall.
Don’t underestimate the power that words have to sell. Learn how to use copywriting to sell yourself as a digital publisher and content creator.
