5 Copywriting Tips For Tech Startups To Captivate The Target Audience

Copywriting the website content for a tech startup can be a critical part of spreading your brand image and awareness. The nature and quality of your content can be a deciding factor in creating the first impression of your organization on a potential customer.

Research has shown that a visitor takes only a few seconds to decide whether the information on a website can be useful for them or not. Therefore, copywriting is an essential step to ensure that you can entice your target audience and turn the visitors into potential leads.

These are some copywriting tips that can help your tech startup to grow through your website and its content.

Outsource if Needed.

As a tech startup founder, you might need to turn your attention to several things at once. But if you overburden yourself, you might hamper your overall productivity. No one indeed knows the product as well as you do. But if you don’t have enough time to do everything, it is okay to outsource a few jobs.

Hiring a tech startup copywriter can take a lot of burden off your shoulders, and you can guide them to ensure that they create your website content according to what you wish to say. Plus, they can use their experience for search engine optimization of your website and increase your conversion rates.

Sound Human.

Tech startups often make the mistake of loading their website content with jargon and geek speak. Remember that your target audience might not have the same level of technical knowledge as you do. So make sure that your website content is in simple language that is easy to understand and engaging for your audience.

Keep in mind that writing your website content is not the same as writing your speech at an industry convention. If your content sounds too complex to understand, you will lose your audience. Instead, try to think about why potential customers might land on your website.

Your product might be a solution to their problems, but they should be able to understand that from the content. Also, make sure that your tone is casual and conversational. The purpose of your content is not to show your audience how smart you are but instead to connect with their needs.

Focus on Information.

You must focus on your business information in a concise manner so that your audience can understand the intent of your product and services from the first few lines. You must direct your words towards your target audience.

If you are not sure what words to use in particular, you can create buyer personas in analytic tools to get keywords that your potential customers are using to look for solutions on the internet. If you hire a professional copywriter, they will be able to guide you in the right direction to create the right content.

Highlight the Benefits.

Highlighting the benefits of a tech product is a necessary step for copywriting your website content. You might be inclined to mention the technical specifications of your merchandise on your website, which you should. But your customer might not be able to figure out how those specifications can prove useful to them.

Therefore, you must include the specific benefits that your audience can derive from the technical aspects. They will be able to relate those benefits to their needs and the problems they might be facing. You can also highlight the benefits to differentiate yourself from your competitors and showcase the advantages of your product over your competitors.

Include Testimonials.

Gaining the trust of your audience is essential to turn them into potential leads and increase your conversion rates. Testimonials and reviews are an effective way to increase the confidence of your visitors and start to build their trust in your products or services.

Testimonials can either be from users of your products or industry influencers. You should place these reviews strategically on your website so that it draws the attention of your audience after they have read about the products and their benefits.

Testimonials also help to invoke positive emotions in your audience. Research has shown them more than 95% of consumer decisions are subconscious and invoked by their emotions.

The theories apply to technological products even more since the audience has limited knowledge and understanding of the technical specifications. Testimonials are a great way to showcase the positive experiences of satisfied customers that can influence the emotions and decisions of your target audience.

Intelligent copywriting can be used in favor of your organization to convert your visitors into leads and customers. You can use the tips mentioned above while creating your website content, or you can hire a professional tech copywriter to help you out. It will ensure that you can finish your project and start your business operations in time.

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Why Startups Need To Have Lead Magnets

A lead magnet can be offered to visitors to your site for free in exchange for contact information. It might be a small course, e-book, or video training. As long as it’s a digital product that offers value to potential customers, you can use it as a lead magnet. The idea is to get visitors to become customers, making them more likely to purchase something. Even if they don’t use the product, you have their information and know they showed interest.

There are several things to know about using this marketing strategy.

Creating Lead Magnets.

The first step in getting more traffic and customers is to make a lead magnet. You don’t have to start from scratch and write a lengthy e-book from nothing, however. Look at your existing content. What can be repurposed while still making it original enough to encourage visitors to sign up for it? An often-overlooked source is video on your site. Chances are good that this content is only in video format. Consider transcribing the video content to text, which lets you use it for different things.

Using a transcription service to convert m4a to text only takes seconds and automates your workflow so you don’t have to do it manually. Use the transcription as the basis for refined content, like guides or e-books.

Building Credibility.

Having a lead magnet builds credibility. Think about the resources you currently have to be credible. Does your target audience know that your brand is trustworthy enough to purchase from? While it’s important to have reviews, potential clients are more likely to trust you if you have a free product. Customers want to see what you offer instead of hearing what you can do.

A lead magnet lets you showcase your skills, problem-solving ability, and knowledge. If it solves a problem for them without them spending anything, you appear much more credible.

An Initial Point of Contact.

The most basic part of marketing is contacting potential clients. Sales can’t happen unless you contact potential customers, and you might need to do so multiple times before you’ll make a sale. With a lead magnet, you can contact the potential client without being too pushy or making the interaction forced. When this converts, the potential is essentially giving you permission to contact them in the future. If they weren’t interested in hearing from you again, they wouldn’t have given you their email.

With a lead generation magnet, you can take that next step. Don’t waste time making cold calls to people who might not be interested.

Testing Products.

Perhaps you want to determine how many sales you will get from offering a new product. Instead of spending money testing that product and potentially facing a loss, try putting a small sample out to see what the interest is like. Lead magnets offer a method of testing your product instead of emptying your wallet right off the bat. Depending on what you offer, you can choose to offer one or more samples of the product.

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5 Risks You As A Consultant Should Know About

by Erin Yurday, CEO, Co-founder and Editor of NimbleFins

Consultancy is a career option for professionals in a wide range of industries – marketing, finance, accountancy, architecture, business management, the list goes on. Although the industries may not have much in common, consultants of all stripes face some of the same risks in their work.

Here are the five risks you as a consultant should know about.

1. Giving the wrong advice.

Talking clients through various situations, giving recommendations and offering advice is often part of the everyday work of consultants. What is easy to overlook is the considerable financial risk involved. If a client takes your advice but things don’t work out quite as planned, the client can sue you for the financial losses they suffered.

For example, if you as a business management consultant advise a client on how to increase their profits in the next financial year, but they end up suffering a loss, you can be liable for professional negligence.

2. Violating intellectual property rights.

Many of us don’t give too much thought to laws and regulations outside of our main field of work. But even if you are not working in a creative field, intellectual property rights are something that should concern you. It’s too easy to get yourself into trouble over copyright, for example by getting a photo off Google for a presentation, or even using your client’s materials without a proper agreement.

3. Making a misstep online.

Viruses and malware can be found everywhere online, and chances are most of us have had to deal with one at some point in our lives. Professionally, failure to avoid hazards online can open you up to legal liability if you cause damage to your clients.

For example, if you receive an email and forward it along to your client, you might not know it contains a virus. If the virus corrupts your client’s database leading to financial loss, you can be sued as a result.

4. Losing documents.

People make mistakes, as do computers. Sometimes, documents get lost, and if they are valuable, you can be sued for losing them. It’s a good idea to back up all documents, for example by using an external drive or cloud software.

Apart from losing documents, another common risk for consultants is mishandling sensitive information. If a client’s confidential document ends up in the wrong hands because of your mistake, you can face an expensive lawsuit.  

5. Failures by employees or service providers.

Growing your consultancy business is great, but a larger team brings more responsibility and increases your risks. Any acts of negligence committed by your employees can lead your business to a lawsuit. All the points outlined above apply to people in your team as well.

If you use any service providers, their failures can also impact your work. Even if you are not found liable, a legal case can bear considerable costs, both in terms of time and money.

How to minimise risk.

We all try to be careful in our work, but mistakes and accidents happen. So how to minimise risks as a consultant?

Apart from following protocols and being diligent, it’s worth considering the insurance needs for your profession. The risks outlined above fall under Professional Indemnity insurance, which is considered a must-have for consultants in many industries.

The costs of Professional Indemnity insurance vary widely by profession – management consultants and software developers can expect to pay around £114-£174 a year on average, while architects can expect to pay upwards of £1,300. Although insurance coverage can be pricey, it does improve the financial security of your consultancy in the long term. Some clients also require consultants to have a Professional Indemnity policy in place, and may even ask to see the certificate.

Now that you are aware of the common pitfalls faced by consultants across the board, you can weigh the costs of insurance against the risks relevant to you and your profession.

 

Erin Yurday is the CEO, Co-founder and Editor of NimbleFins, a market research company specialised in aiding businesses and professionals in their decision-making. Prior to NimbleFins, she worked as an investment professional and as the finance expert in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business case writing team. Read more on LinkedIn.

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[Interview] Jim Ewel, Author Of ‘The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing: Proven Practices For More Effective Marketing And Better Business Results’

How can businesses and marketing teams reach customers in the age of COVID-19, respond to lightning-fast changes in the marketplace, and keep up with new consumer demands?

Marketing pioneer Jim Ewel has the answer in three words: “With Agile marketing.”

As Ewel says, “Agile marketing teams can think on their feet, pivot at a moment’s notice, and ride a continuous wave of new ideas — allowing businesses to win in a post-pandemic world.”

Ewel recently sat down with Young Upstarts to share his insights about this futureproof approach to marketing, why it gives businesses an edge, and how organizations can get started.

Here is some of our conversation:

What is Agile marketing, and what makes it so different?

Agile marketing takes its inspiration from Agile software development, which is how 90% of companies develop software today. It adopts Agile’s process management techniques, such as daily standups, to coordinate a team’s work and uses visual tools, called Kanban boards, to track work in progress.

What makes Agile marketing different is that it values different things than traditional marketing. For example, it values “responding to change” over “following a marketing plan.” What does this mean? Agile marketers recognize that the future is impossible to predict accurately, so how customers will react to a marketing promotion is equally impossible to predict. Rather than projecting a false sense of accuracy through a set-in-stone plan, Agile marketers develop the skill of responding quickly to changes, whether they’re brought on by the business environment, competition, or customer needs and wants.

It sounds like Agile is particularly suited for the times we’re facing now. How can it give businesses an edge?

The pandemic hit just as I was finishing up some of the interviews in the book. Without prompting, many of the clients I spoke with brought up how Agile marketing helped them adjust to the pandemic and the associated economic challenges.

One client said it helped them because they hadn’t made long-term commitments to advertising buys, and it was easy to cut back spending when their revenues declined. Another talked about how they used Agile techniques to create and test new product and service offerings for customers struggling with the pandemic. A marketing agency I spoke with was a brand-new startup, just months old, when the pandemic hit. They used Agile to differentiate themselves and help their clients deal with the radical changes in the business environment.

In your book, you explain that Agile is more than a methodology; it requires leaders to make specific organizational shifts. What does this look like?

I recommend that marketing leaders make four specific shifts in the beliefs and behaviors of their organization:

Shift from a focus on outputs to a focus on outcomes.

Many marketing groups focus on how many marketing campaigns they can run, how many marketing emails they can send out, or how much marketing content they can generate. The non-marketing parts of the business (sales, finance, and the CEO) don’t care about more marketing “stuff”; they want more leads, more sales, and more profits. In other words, they want business outcomes. Marketers need to shift their mindsets and assume accountability for business outcomes.

Shift from a campaign mentality to continuous improvement.

Most marketers think in terms of campaigns. They write a campaign brief. They produce “creative” or content for a campaign. They run the campaign once and then declare it was successful based on vanity metrics.

Agile marketers take a more incremental and iterative approach. They test an idea on a small scale. If it works, they improve it and run it at a slightly larger scale. If it doesn’t work, they try something else at a small scale. This leads to more effective marketing, in terms of business outcomes, and more efficient use of their marketing spend.

Shift from an internal focus to a customer focus. 

Of course, everyone says they’re customer-focused. But this needs to be more than happy talk. Marketers need to spend more time with customers and dive more deeply into the customer behaviors that lead to business success.

Shift from top-down to decentralized decision-making. 

Many marketing executives approve every visual and every line of copy in every campaign. This slows everything down through endless approval cycles. Marketing executives need to focus on a few key decisions and push everything else down in the organization.

I was surprised to read that Agile marketers have 74% job satisfaction. Tell us more.

This statistic comes from an annual survey of Agile marketers done by AgileSherpas and Aprimo. I’m happy to see it, but not surprised. Agile marketers have more autonomy, greater mastery of their work, and more of a sense that the work they’re doing has purpose, both in terms of delivering on business outcomes and meeting customer needs. As Daniel Pink taught us in his book Drive, what motivates knowledge workers, including marketers, are these three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

In your experience, how do sales teams react to Agile?

Sales teams almost always greet the adoption of Agile with skepticism. They’re accustomed to marketers who spin the numbers without delivering the goods. Agile marketers show transparency. They’re not afraid to reveal to the sales team that an idea “failed” because they didn’t devote all the marketing dollars to that idea, and they expect to iterate on different ideas until they come up with one that works.

Sales teams generally love the increased transparency, honesty, and accountability that comes with Agile. In many cases, sales organizations become Agile marketers’ biggest supporters.

If you could offer young professionals one word of advice, what would it be?

Examine your assumptions. As Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

To learn more about Jim Ewel and his new book, visit his website.

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Not Digitally Transforming? You’re Dying. Here Are Six Reasons To Do It Now.

by Howard Tiersky, author of “Wining Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance“

The world is changing rapidly, and once-loved “legacy” brands are falling out of favor. The reason is painfully simple. At one time these brands exceeded customers’ needs and stood for something they cared about. (That’s how you earn love.) But today’s customers are different. Very different. The vast majority are living a lifestyle that has digital at the center… and many companies haven’t transformed to meet them there.

Digital is no longer just a ‘need’ for customers. Expecting to access a seamless digital experience on demand is more like a value. If you can’t provide that, you’re not only not resonating with their lifestyle, you’re in conflict with their fundamental worldview.

The move toward total digital immersion has been happening for a while; COVID has only accelerated it. And here’s the thing: Almost all businesses have digital operations, so you may think yours is meeting customer expectations. But there’s a good chance it’s falling short.

To deliver ‘digital’ at the increasingly elegant level today’s customers expect, most of today’s large companies need to reinvent themselves in a variety of ways, and quickly. Unfortunately, many aren’t designed for this kind of rapid change. They might lack an aligned vision, or encounter resistance, or have the wrong technology. Maybe they’re entrenched in a way of thinking that just isn’t customer-centric. And so despite their best efforts, they fail.

Let’s say your organization is already using digital for marketing and e-commerce, but you are not truly “digitally driven.” Maybe you provide customers with a good app — but it’s really just an add-on. You’re not aggressively creating products and experiences that take full advantage of the potential of digital. You can’t honestly say you’re digital at the core. If this describes you, is it truly necessary to change?

Most likely yes. Here are just a few reasons why.

REASON 1: You Need to Remain Relevant to the Customer.

Customers today demand a superior digital experience. A Salesforce study found that 80 percent of customers view “the experience” a company provides as equally important as its products and services. But across industries, most experiences offered today are simply not up to customers’ expectations. PwC found that 49 percent of U.S. consumers say that companies are providing a “good” customer experience today.

Brands also spent a lot of energy on online content about their brand and products. But market research shows that consumers today have massive cynicism today about what brands “say” about themselves. As Trinity Mirror and Ipsos Connect found in a study, almost half of consumers have a general distrust of brand and 69 percent specifically distrust their advertising.

So how do consumers evaluate your brand and products if they assume most of what you say is a lie? Mostly, from their own digital experiences. If your website is confusing and disorganized, that is the message people will take away. If your signup process is cumbersome, they assume that your product will be as well.

REASON 2: You Need to Gain the Efficiencies to Be Cost-Competitive.

Companies that are winning in the digital economy are delivering a dramatically improved value proposition — offering customers more for less. It helps to have investors who are patient about whether the company operates at a profit. But more long-term, these companies are able to operate in a different way — harnessing tools like crowdsourcing, AI, and process automation.

If you don’t have access to these types of opportunities to increase efficiency, it’s difficult or even impossible to be price-competitive with those that do.

REASON 3: You Need to Attract and Retain Talent in the Organization.

Millennials want to be a part of companies that are digitally savvy. This might be the most important reason of all to ensure that your company has a high level of digital effectiveness.

A study by the market research firm Penn, Schoen, & Berland found that 82 percent of millennials can be swayed in their career decisions by a digitally equipped office, while 42 percent would leave a company due to “substandard technology.” Similarly, Microsoft found in a study that 93 percent of millennials polled cited modern and up-to-date technology as one of the most important aspects of a workplace.

REASON 4: Digitally Driven Companies Have Greater Revenue Growth.

A study by the Aberdeen Group found that the top 20 percent of companies as measured by their “quality of digital customer experience” enjoyed an average year-over-year increase in revenue of over 35 percent, compared to a 7.7 percent average for the rest.

“Digitally advanced” companies create 9 percent more revenue than their industry competitors, as reported in a study conducted by MIT. And digitally “mature” companies are almost three times likelier than lower-maturity organizations to report annual revenue growth significantly greater than their industry average, according to yet another study, this one by Deloitte.

REASON 5: Digitally Driven Companies Have Better Profit Margins.

Despite the investments they need to make to transform, studies show that digitally driven companies deliver better returns. A Harvard Business School study found that the three-year average profit for “digitally centric companies” was 5 percent more than that of those companies “behind the curve.” A different study at MIT concluded that “digitally mature companies” are 26 percent more profitable than competitors.

What’s more, digitally effective companies tend to be highly customer-centric. A KPMG study showed that “customer-centric” companies saw a projected profit growth rate that was 3.6 percent greater than “non-customer-centric” companies.

REASON 6: Digitally Driven Companies Have Higher Valuations.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, digitally driven companies have consistently higher valuations.

According to MIT, more digitally “mature” companies achieve market valuations 12 percent higher than competitors.

Forrester calculated that in recent years, the stock price of “leaders in digital customer experience” grew by nearly 30 percent more than that of lagging brands.

Bottom line? It’s a new era. There have been many periods of time when businesses could operate in more or less the same manner for decades, updating their advertising campaign periodically, creating marginally “new and improved” products every few years, and making small incremental changes to keep cutting costs and drive profits higher.

Those days are gone. You need to reinvent yourself, and there’s no time to waste.

Whether your business is window washing, restaurant supplies, maritime navigation, or podiatry, your customers’ expectations are digital. Your competitors are leveraging digital to drive better customer experiences and increased operational efficiencies — enabling them to offer more compelling value propositions to customers. If you aren’t doing the same, it’s going to be tough to remain relevant and price competitive.

 

Howard Tiersky is the author of “Wining Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance“. He has been named by IDG as one of the “Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today.” As an entrepreneur, he has launched two successful companies that help large brands transform to thrive in the digital age: FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency and Innovation Loft. His dozens of Fortune 1000 clients have included Verizon, NBC, Viacom, Avis, Universal Studios, JPMC, Crayola, Morgan Stanley, Condé Nast, the NBA, Visa, and digital leaders like Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon.

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Planning For Uncertainty As A Leader

2020 has taught the world the importance of contingency planning and how our response to a crisis can make a huge difference. As a budding entrepreneur, you should understand that crises will come and go but your leadership determines whether your business venture will survive the onslaught.

Leveraging the chaos.

Disruption is one of the most effective ways to enter an industry and rise rapidly to the top. It is a tactic that has often been employed in the digital era but not always effectively. The recent shutdown of video platform Quibi despite a $2 billion investment within 6 months of its launch is proof of that.

However, risks can return handsome rewards if managed carefully. For example, cfds trading is seeing an enormous boom due to its low investment-high return revenue model despite some inherent risks.

The difference is that successful CFD traders leverage the word of chaos while the management at Quibi succumbed to it.

Certain uncertainty.

As they say, change is the only constant. Consider the companies that have emerged as world leaders over the past few decades. Mega corporations like Google and Facebook worth hundreds of billions of dollars emerged as leaders in their respective fields by bucking the prevailing trends.

They offered the world an alternative to something that they already used but did it in a way that was intriguing, useful and original. This pursuit of customer-focused creative innovation forms the basis of their success, and that of virtually every successful business entity.

They didn’t throw money to try and win like Quibi; the owners spent the effort to ascertain what consumers needed and crafted their product to match those needs.

Staying the course.

Launching a new venture can be a thrilling experience but it is also a demanding one. The odds are that you will be pressed for time, resources and energy, and perhaps all of them at once. It is times like those that your team will look up to you for leadership. If you can drive yourself to conquer the hurdles, you will inspire them both as a business leader and a strong individual.

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Starting A Successful Video Production Company Business

Starting a profitable video production company business is not a walk in the park; you must win the clients’ trust. Today video production company owners can only earn their clients’ trust by making sure their video production company adheres to some crucial yet straightforward practices. It’s an essential part of any business, and it defines the difference between small-time operations and more prominent video production companies. Always do put in mind that clients always have very simple but awkward preferences that you might not know about not unless you are very wise.

Here are simple yet crucial tips for building a client’s trust in your video production company.

Build a Strong Reputation for Your Brand.

Building a strong brand reputation corporate video production company is one of the most important things to do as a company owner, and it often happens in two ways. One, deliver the goods time and time again for years, and two, tell people about your company through networking, advertising, marketing, and showcasing your most-accomplished projects. Regularly submit your projects for awards. Find press and gain publicity. Although word of mouth is excellent, doesn’t stay away from trying to push your company forward by finding as many tangible ways as possible to get your name out there. Use all means to make your brand known by many people, and soon you will see your business thrive.

Good Customer Service.

Clients often reach out to video production companies to look for a robotic, manufactured product. They’re looking for a creative partner hence if you can spend the time to work with your client and understand their needs. The exact problem they’re trying to solve, you can not only provide a more excellent product but also help them with their bottom line making you win more work in the future. Clients appreciate the little things, and you’d be surprised by the insignificant gestures that some clients will say won them over to sign a contract with you. It is imperative to make an effort to show your clients some appreciation showing that their business means a lot to your company.

Consistently Respond with Accurate Information and Support.

Many clients look for people they can solve problems with, and succeed. So, if a corporate video production company cannot respond to their queries, you will lose that genuine connection. Similarly, when a client is going to sign on for a project, they want to know precisely who their point of contact will be and when and where to reach them at all hours of the day.

This, however, doesn’t mean you can’t set boundaries. Regular business hours are essential but providing a real person, one who can consistently respond promptly with accurate information and support; your clients will sleep easier at night and be more willing to come back again. Besides, clients will always appreciate accurate quotes for how much a project will cost. Better still, you can choose line-item costs so that clients can see exactly where their money will be going and for what purpose.

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