The number one mistake that I struggle to fix as a designer: poorly written text.
I love talking about graphic design and the different elements that make up a good design, like the colors, fonts and more. Here’s the thing, that’s not all graphic design is. Under the pretty parts, design has a job to do. It’s main job: communicate your value and explain your business to potential clients. This is especially important online, which is a 24/7/365 world. This makes design your “night shift employee”, the one who is working while you are asleep. The question is will you wake up to a ton of leads and will they be the right ones? That, my friends, comes down to your message. All the pretty fonts and colors won’t do you much good if the message of the text is off.
What I feel you need to know to have good text
- It needs to be clear and concise.
- It needs to be tailored for your ideal customer/client
- It needs to have a call to action somewhere
Here’s why:
Clear and concise text answers the questions a potential client has about who you are, what you do, how they can contact you. Given how short attention spans are nowadays, having concise text gets your point across quickly. Tailoring it for your ideal client gives you a focused group to speak to and makes it easier to identify their pain points and explain how you can help and the call to action allows gives people the next step if they are interested. One of my former college professors always said that without a call to action what you were telling clients is “put this is in the junk drawer or the trash and forget I exist” and it’s true. You are a lot more likely to move potential customers into active customer with a simple call to action and contact info.
So… how can I do this?
Alright, full disclosure here. I’m a good writer, I’ve trained in public relations, writing and speaking, but I don’t write professionally. I design professionally and I see a lot of text. Some of it is great, and some of it needs…help. Here’s my 2 suggestions:
Suggestion 1: Hire a professional copywriter.
If you are not confident in your writing abilities, have no time or desire to do your own writing, or are doing business in a language that is not your language of origin. Hire a professional writer. I have read so much text that is confusing and hard to understand the main message of it due to poor writing skills and it can really hurt business. Investing in good writing, like investing in good design helps your grow.
Suggestion 2: if you have excellent writing skills, and lots of time, and really feel called to do your own writing. This is the method I’ve learned and recommended to clients.
It’s called the inverted pyramid and outside of most newsrooms and journalism programs, you probably won’t hear about it. However, I like it because it works well and makes my job of fitting the text into a design that much easier. Here’s the method in summary: all of the important bits of info go at the top, next is the main details and last is background info. I’ll give you a quick example, Let’s say I’ve got a business that is releasing a new service. Their inverted pyramid or top down would look something like this:
A sentence to grab attention, followed by the name of service and the basic why you want this details about it. It makes you feel lighter brighter, happier, sleep better, whatever other problem it solves. Next up, the basic details of what it costs and how it works followed by all the background info. You know, like how it was invented one rainy night in a laboratory in some seedy part of town…you starting to get my drift. It closes off with the call to action “Contact us today” or “Call 123-456-7890 to book with us and feel better now” whatever it is you want people to do.
Again, nothing replaces investing in a professional, but this works in a bind when you need to give your designer text in a hurry.
Once your message is on point, I can design it into something functional and beautiful that gets people to stop scrolling or and tells the right people the right message and starts to bring you leads.
If you already have a beautifully written message and are ready to talk design, shoot me an email at Patrice@purplerosegraphics.com and see how I can help you get more customers in the door, so you can scale quick, stress less and sell more. Talk to you soon!