copy fear troll

What is it in your copy that leads someone on your site from the point of almost purchasing, to actually converting? Better yet… What stops them from that last step (the sale)? The answer is relatively simple. At some point, they came face-to-face with an ugly troll that is known as prospect fear. Today, we’re calling it the “Copy Fear Troll.” If you’re lacking copy conversions, this troll is out there, living and breathing in your copy, on your web pages, ready to pounce on anyone who is considering a purchase on your site. The good news? You can do more than just stop it: you can kill it. Read on to learn what website visitors fear the most (defining the Copy Fear Troll), and how I overcame a personal troll of our own, living and breathing on our site, as a New Year’s goal for my agency’s online presence. The 3 Subconscious Fears of Your Online Visitors (Before Copy Conversions Ever Happen) Every member of your audience has a different buying style: some are impulsive and will buy with little to no research, while others will want their decisions reaffirmed before making any commitments. Here are some reasons your potential customers may do a quick dash for the figurative door before taking action. 1. Insecurity Insecurities come from many different places, including past experiences, a lack of information, and a sense that the product or service is not quite good enough. This is the fear troll’s area of expertise – dredging up all the reasons why this transaction is going to fail. 2. Mistrust The goal in content marketing is to build trust and keep readers coming back for more quality content. There are many reasons to not trust, especially if your readers have been burned before. The fear troll loves sending subtle reminders about why a customer should quit before getting too involved. 3. Waste Most of us can remember a time when we wasted money on something foolish, whether it was a door-to-door scheme or online purchase we felt we could not do without. No one wants to repeat that mistake, so the fear troll whispers doubt at every step. Getting Rid of the Copy Fear Troll So, what’s a content marketer to do? You might be surprised at how easy the answer is: kill the fear troll with real, down-to-earth, authentic copy that transparently situates your brand and your services before your prospects. Thorough transparency. It’s the name of the anti-copy fear troll game. We recently worked on going from almost-good-enough to fear-killing-copy on our site, and the results have been promising. A Case Study of How Killing the Fear Troll in Your Copy Works In December of 2016, to prep for a great January and an even better 2017, I recruited one of our top internal marketing writers from my agency to help boost our site copy. As of December, we had roughly 6,000 monthly site visitors, and our non-paid reach in Google SERPs was worth $13,000 in organic value: Yet our average new customer number was around 20-30 a month, and some converted at low numbers. Only one or two visitors per day actually sent in a contact form. We wanted to change that! Together, my ad writer and I looked at my agency site, our services, and worked out the best emphasis on “how to sell” in our own copy. 3 Ways We Banished the Copy Conversions Fear Troll—& Won The problem we found was that visitors were bouncing early on—after a few clicks from the home page. My ad copywriter decided that we needed a) more copy and b) more effective copy. The biggest two takeaways I learned from auditing our site and reinventing the weak copy that we had: Cut to the core of what you do best. Be simple and authentic about your product and value. Be confident and speak with confidence. You’re the A-team: show clients that! Here’s the core of the changes we did: 1. New Fear-Banishing Page Around Our Values Inspired, I created the new Our Values page. In it, I concentrated on telling – from my heart – why our brand stands out above all our competitors. We take a lot of pride in a process that removes 98% of the applicants that approach our writing team, but I wasn’t telling the story of our process on the site. 2. New Image Choices (Visualizing a Happy Client) & Friendlier Menu We then re-created the menu at the top of our site with more clarity: We have a lot of resources—podcast, blog, and Twitter chat—and we grouped that under one tab called “Learn.” We created an “About” menu that included Success Stories (which we didn’t have live on the site previously), and a Meet the Team page. We worked together to create a strong page that emphatically shared “our values.” The end result was so strong that we took it out of the About tab and put it live in the menu as Our Values. We even changed the image on the home page. We had a stock image of a writer, thinking, pen in hand. The new image my ad consultant suggested was a visualization of a happy client receiving their content. Literally, someone smiling at a computer, with at least one other person. It was important to visualize the end result for the client rather than just our team doing the work. The result when we changed up the image concept (simple—a Shutterstock purchase!) was tremendously better looking. Here’s the difference, visually, between our old menu and home page stock image: And our new home page menu and image: In less than a week, more than three live chats have been started from the Our Values page by brand new, incoming agency leads (our ideal client type), discussing thousands of dollars’ worth of work. We’re starting to attract communications from our ideal client type—after I decided it was time to speak to them, in our copy! After reading the … Read more