It is really easy to get carried away when writing about your business. After all, there are so many great things about it and your coaching clients stand to gain a lot from working with you. But overloading prospective coaching clients with too much information is just as bad as missing out key information. Let’s talk about how to trim the fat so your message is clear.
Common Reasons Copy Gets a Little Cluttered
If you have cluttered copy, know that you’re not alone. There are many reasons why your copy is in need of simplification. Let’s look at the most common ones.
Rambling
We are big believers in writing like you speak. It’s a great way to infuse your personality into content and copy. But it’s just as easy to ramble when you’re writing as it is when you’re speaking. Rambling copy is a sign that the writer skipped straight to writing instead of planning the copy. More on that later.
Quick Fixes
Is your website looking a little bit like the Weasleys’ house? You know, bits have just been added on as needed and it looks a little bit higgledy-piggledy from an outside perspective. Service-based business owners are BUSY and often, we just add pieces to our copy with the intention to come back and edit it when we get a chance. Stop gaps and quick fixes are fine in a pinch but going back and streamlining the copy needs to be a priority. Otherwise, the copy will be ineffective.
Lack of Hero Benefits
Coaching products and services have a long list of benefits, but it would take a short book to communicate every single one of them. Instead, you need to zero in on the hero benefits of your coaching program. What are the 3 most important benefits from your ideal coaching client’s perspective? We call these the hero benefits because they are the things that will change your client’s life. Everything else is just an added bonus.
Copy becomes cluttered very easily when you try to talk about every possible benefit of your course. Focus on your hero benefits instead, those are the most important things.
Wide Audience
Trying to appeal to too many types of customers will result in complicated copy. Different client types will care about different things, so you will end up with a long list of pain points you need to address and a long list of benefits to communicate. Write each piece of copy with a particular client in mind. If you have multiple niches, this means writing copy tailored to each niche. Sure, it’s a little more work, but each piece of copy will be more effective.
5 Tips to Simplify Your Copy
Let’s look at how you can simplify your copy, both before and after your copy is live. Even implementing a few of these tips will lead to easy-to-read copy. So, use the tips that come easily.
Plan Your Copy
Planning out your copy is the best way to simplify your copy because it makes it easier to stick to the important points. If you only use one of the tips, use this one. It will have the added bonus of allowing you to write the copy quicker when the time comes.
Planning your copy doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as thinking about who will read your copy and what your CTA is. Then, label the sections in the copy and use dot points to plan out what information will be in each section. This will stop you from straying on tangents when you write.
If you want to simplify existing copy, a plan can come in handy here too. Create a plan for the sections and dot points as you would before you write copy. Then you can pull pieces of the existing copy that you want to keep and add them into your plan. It may need to be changed slightly to fit with what you’re writing, but that will be quicker than writing it all from scratch. Your plan will make it easier to see what needs to go where and what you need to add when you sit down to rewrite or edit the copy.
Think About Flow
Find the most direct route to get your readers from point A to point B. Point A is their current awareness of the problem, and point B is the goal for the copy. Let’s say you’re writing a landing page; point B will be your clients purchasing a place in your coaching program. For another piece of copy, point B might be signing up for your mailing list or booking a discovery call.
What information do prospective coaching clients need to get to point B, and what is the best order to give them that information? It can help to picture the information as stepping stones between point A and point B.
One Point at a Time
After you’ve finished writing a piece of copy, it is time to look back through your copy and neaten it up. One point per section is the golden rule of copy. That gives readers time to digest each point before they move on to the next section. If you’re writing a landing page, then give each benefit its own section rather than trying to cram multiple benefits into the same section.
When you try to address multiple points in the same section, it makes the copy feel rushed and unfocused.
Use Cultural Shortcuts
People often look down on common sayings and cliches, but they can actually help you to keep your copy simple. Piggyback on their storytelling to invoke desired imagery with less work.
Let’s look at an example: “You’ve been working so hard that Cinderella’s life looks like a sweet gig!” What imagery does that invoke?
- Long hours
- Being pulled in all directions
- Thankless work
- Back-breaking work
- Lonely work
- Demanding clients
- Sense of hopelessness
- Monotonous days
Instead of writing a paragraph or two, using a cultural reference injects that imagery in just a sentence.
The important thing to remember when you use cultural shortcuts is your ideal coaching client needs to get the reference. Otherwise, you’ve lost them. Think about what they’re likely to be familiar with and try to stick to timeless references. If you reference the latest Netflix show, you’ve given your copy an expiration date. You’re going to need to update it in 12 months (maximum) or the reference will lose its effectiveness. These references are great for social media or short-term copy, like promotional materials for a masterclass. If you want evergreen copy, then focus on timeless references.
Focus on the Purpose
Each piece of copy and each section of each piece of copy should have a purpose. Keep that purpose in mind while you write and edit. Look at every sentence and ask yourself:
- Does it fulfil the purpose of this section of copy?
- Does it fulfil the purpose of the copy as a whole?
If the answer to both is no, then cut it. This applies to anecdotes too. Personal stories are only good if they further the purpose. If not, they’re just a tangent.
Create a document for these “offcuts” because they could make for good content. This will make it a lot easier to cut irrelevant content or not give in to tangents because you can just transfer them to this document for when you’re stuck for content ideas.
Did These Copywriting Tips Help?
A lot of coaches are great content writers, so they DIY their copy. Writing skills only get you so far when it comes to writing copy, so we’re sharing tips to help copy DIYers master some of the basics. Copywriting is the science of using the fewest words to invoke the biggest emotional response. Modern copywriting, especially for coaches, is about more than just selling courses, it’s about creating a human-to-human connection with just words on a screen. It takes far more than a few articles to teach that, but we can help you to make small improvements that will lead to big results.
Read more of our DIY copy tips here.
Book a Pick Our Brain Call to access our copywriting knowledge. We can audit your copy and give you pointers or even give you small lessons over Zoom if you’d like. The time you book is yours to use as you need. (£199 per hour)