10 Copywriting tips for small businesses

Copywriting for small businesses can be tough.

The quality impacts how many customers you connect to and in turn, how many leads are generated.

Whether you’re copywriting for small businesses or large, international corporations, you’ll need to cater your style towards your audience.

With these tips, you’ll have a greater idea of what to expect when copywriting for small businesses.

1.  Researching the team

It’s likely that your team might be headed by one individual, and you may centre your copywriting around that personality. Copywriting for small businesses requires a solid level of knowledge.

Aligning your tone of voice with your brand is imperative.

So, look through your previous posts or content to really mould your copywriting.

A good example of this is “I often find that businesses can’t tell me who or what they are”.

This is preferable to “We often interact with businesses that can’t tell us who or what they are”.

It’ll make you sound like a brand, speaking as one team, and for copywriting for small businesses that’s imperative.

2.  Finding the balance between design and copy

For many, being confronted with a website full of chunky text will turn them off, which doesn’t help your engagement. Enabling your web design to speak for itself will help the copy to stand on its own feet.

Using images and sleek design will help your copy stand out and provide an engaging experience for the customer.

White spacing allows the reader to breathe, providing more time to digest the content.

3.  Research

It almost goes without saying, but within the copywriting that you do, prior understanding and knowledge is vital.

Customers will know if this is your area of expertise or not, and this could hinder or help the business.

No matter the audience, understanding your UPR (Unique Value Proposition) is important.

In the case of smaller businesses, this is vital, as you may be serving a specific niche of the market.

You need to be prominent, and shine in your local industry!

Copywriting for small businesses needs to reflect this knowledge.

4.  B2C or B2B?

Within copywriting, there are two styles – generally.

• B2C means business to customers, which means a warmer tone of voice and more informal language. Copywriting for small businesses tends to include this style.
• B2B means business to business, which relies more on statistics, and requires less content and more information.

It’s vital for small businesses to cater directly to customers, so this is important with regards to your copywriting.  Ultimately people buy from people, so copywriting can really build that trust.

Your copywriting needs to be more friendly, personable and approachable.

5.  What’s your overall message?

What will your theme be, running throughout your copywriting?

If you were a mortgage company, how would you differentiate yourself from the competition (also known as UPR)?

And how would you tie the information back to how you can provide that service?

6.  Capitalise on your status as a small business

Recently, a trend for people is to put trust in smaller businesses. So, use your size as your superpower!

Since the pandemic, the government, local authorities, and campaigns have pushed for support of small businesses, so this trend could have begun there.

Ultimately, there seems to be a link between trustworthiness and a smaller business, so capitalise on this through your copywriting!

So, it’s important that you explain your status and help connect to that image of a small but dedicated entrepreneur/enterprise.

Your copywriting on LinkedIn and other social media will help boost the engagement with your audience.

Ultimately, copywriting for small businesses helps you highlight your status to your audience.

7.  Linking pages internally and externally

Once you’ve got quite the collection of content on your website, you should start to reference back to previous posts.

This collection of copywriting will give you more authority in what you’re saying, and search engines will notice this.

8.  Identify the customer’s needs

Regardless of what you’re selling, your ideal customers have a problem that you can solve through your services.

Once you have these secured, copywriting will become that much easier.

Identifying these and threading them throughout your copy will keep them attached to your content.

Utilising LinkedIn will help you get more information regarding your customers. This is also known as social listening.

Interviewing customers and fellow employees will help you in finding the customer’s needs.

As a small business, this will boost your audience engagement, as they’ll see that the service you provide is thorough.

Past clients will appreciate the effort and respond honestly to your queries about what you solved for them. Copywriting for small businesses becomes that much easier once you’ve got the needs covered.

9.  SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) is imperative for digital copywriting, (especially in your case).

Once you have a grasp of SEO, you’ll start utilising keywords, back linking, and internal linking to boost your visibility.

As a smaller business, using local SEO can boost engagement and provide that edge you need in the local market.

Keywords are an important part of your SEO strategy and the way you use them is crucial.

They will influence the title and themes of your content.

This helps search engines zero in on your copywriting and connect your content to your business.  This then translates to the SERPS (search engine result pages).

The more unique content that’s connected to your business; the more search engines will recognise your authority on the subject.

Without SEO, digital copywriting would simply be a waste of time as it won’t be found by search engines.

10.  Outsourcing

Now it may seem daunting to outsource, but it’s one of the best ways to grow your business. It will save resources through submitting a project to a professional, therefore increasing efficiency.

Copywriting for small businesses is no exception, and all copywriters should proudly possess the following qualities:

• Excellent reading and writing
• Good understanding of SEO and its implications on digital copy
• Keyword research skills
• Great topic research skills
• Excellent at meeting deadlines.

Conclusion

So, what have you learned through this blog? You know how to:

1. Sharpen your tone of voice for your customers
2. Appear on search engines for your local audience
3. Help your small business thrive
4. Capitalise on the perks of copywriting for small businesse
5. Enable your business to generate more profit
6. Translate your posts into more leads.

And once you have all these components covered, you’ll be able to wow and engage with your audience!

What can Vocal do for you?

At Vocal, we’re a loud bunch of creatives, focused on providing you with awesome services such as:

• Copywriting
• Marketing
• Branding
• Websites
• Design
• Illustration.

Get in touch for a quick chat with our team about how we can help your company reach your goals.