Historically, marketing has combined multiple tools and tactics in order to attract, convert, and retain customers.
Modern business communication has been made even more complex with the advent of digital marketing, adding websites, blogging, email, paid search, and the explosive growth of social media to the marketing mix.
Through it all, however, one key component that can make all the difference between grabbing the attention of potential patients, or being overlooked in a sea of competing messaging: copywriting.
Here are some things to keep in mind when considering how to best craft the wording behind your marketing efforts.
1. Know Your Audience
Identifying your audience is a key component of crafting attention-grabbing copy. Throughout any given day, people are constantly being bombarded with marketing messaging, and as a result, we have become quite adept at subconsciously rejecting that which doesn’t pertain to us.
Copy for any marketing message—whether an email subject line or a social media caption—should be written with as specific as possible an audience in mind. Marketers often create “personas,” or customer models, each one possessing a set of criteria that separates them from other prospects.
For instance, a practice might envision a persona that represents young first-timers, while another might encapsulate middle-aged women that have had procedures done in the past. Crafting distinct copy for each of these audiences, rather than painting with a generic, overarching brush, can help increase the likelihood of grabbing, and keeping, their attention.
Pro tip: The more you know about your intended audience, the easier it can be to personalize content. This process should start long before you’re sitting down to craft an email or social media post.
Keep this in mind when deciding what information to collect from prospects on your website forms or client surveys. These kinds of data points can help you segment your prospect and client lists and adjust copy accordingly.
2. Humanize Your Brand
Thanks to the power of computing, modern marketing utilizes a great deal of personalization tools and techniques. We’ve seen it in everything from direct mail, to personalized information in emails, to advanced online targeting systems that somehow show us ads for the thing we were just talking about.
At their heart, these tools are designed to help people feel like they are being approached as an individual, as opposed to being just another line in a mail merge file.
Still, humanization should be more than starting an otherwise-obvious “form letter” email with “Hi {firstname}”. Keeping the prior tip in mind, use these copywriting techniques to help humanize your brand:
- Storytelling or anecdotes
- Delivering messages that appear to come directly from a practitioner or patient
- Including words or phrases that evoke the kinds of feelings you want associated with your practice.
3. Ask The Right Questions, Provide Valuable Answers
Great copywriting grabs attention, which is harder than ever these days, considering the vast amounts of information most of us are subjected to each day (particularly online). One simple tactic is often used to help stop scrollers in their e-tracks: ask an engaging question.
Keeping the previous tips in mind—knowing your audience and presenting your brand in a “human” way—choose some questions that you think might spark the curiosity of your intended recipient, along the lines of: “Do you want to know our secret for X?” or “Can we give you something for free that will help you with Y?”
Make sure not to be deceptive. The answers to these questions should provide value and insight, not just a straight-up sales pitch.
By staying true to your overall brand personality and providing actual value, these kinds of questions and answers can not only hook someone in, but help create a positive brand interaction that could lead to a long-term relationship.
4. Tie In To Trends
Marketers often find ways to cleverly work current events into their copy, something that can work particularly well when communicating among the rapid-fire feeds of social media. Pulling from the online hive mind can inspire fun ways to engage with your friends and followers.
Do take care to be thoughtful about this sort of cultural piggybacking, however. While in most cases, referencing trending topics can help further humanize your practice by showing you are in tune with the world around you, there are certain topical areas (politics, social issues) that are usually best left alone.
Even seemingly lighthearted memes might not be what they seem. It was revealed, for example, that the “woman yelling at white cat” meme that caught fire in late 2019 actually had a sad and serious back story. (The meme’s subject, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Taylor Armstrong, said she’s moved past the trauma of the 2011 scene and that, “It’s ok to laugh at images that have been created.”)
5. Demonstrate Value The Right Way
As touched on above, a major key when it comes to marketing is to constantly demonstrate value. However, there is one approach that can work better than others: highlighting not only the expertise that your practice may have, but exactly what problem that expertise can solve.
It’s the difference between “Here’s what we do!” and “Here’s how we can help you!”
For example, instead of simply announcing a new service:
“We now offer Service X!”
Think of a way to show exactly what value this new service provides:
“Need help with Y? Our new X Service can help!”
By clearly demonstrating the actual value of an offer and the exact problem it will address, potential patients will immediately understand how they might benefit from interacting with your practice.
6. Include a Call To Action
Clever copywriting can effectively hook plenty of prospects, but if they don’t know to do next, you might just as quickly lose their attention.
Be sure to consider including a call-to-action (CTA) when crafting copy across any of your marketing channels. An unambiguous CTA not only helps keep potential patient engaged, but can direct them exactly where you want them to go.
For certain messages, a visit to the website might be the desired conversion destination. For others, it might be a phone call, a visit to a particular link, a form, or an email. Whenever applicable, use a clear CTA to let prospects know exactly what steps they should take next.
7. A/B Testing For Maximum Impact
There is as much an art to copywriting as there is a science, and it may take time for your practice to find out what works best.
Luckily, technology offers us tools like “A/B testing” to help figure this out. One often-used example of A/B testing is when sending emails. Email systems can send two versions of the same email to a portion of the overall recipient list. After a bit of time has passed, the system compares open rates (the percentage of recipients who opened the email), and will send the remaining emails out with the subject line that performed better.
This type of comparison is extremely popular for email and social media, giving marketers the ability to test and accurately measure the real-life impact of different messaging, and adjust their copy accordingly in order to maximize results.
