Words are an emotional, evocative, and powerful tool for your small business. Exceptional product descriptions do more than tell the customer what they’re buying. Good product descriptions highlight your product’s various features and benefits and tell your customer exactly how your product can address their needs. Read on for 10 simple strategies for writing product descriptions that sell!
Understand your target audience
You should know who your customer is and why they’re browsing your website. Cue: your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a document that outlines the characteristics of your ideal customer. Your buyer persona will allow you to address your customers and their pain points in your product description copy. As you’re crafting your product description, keep these questions in mind:
- What problem or need does this product address?
- Why would my customer be seeking out my product?
- How would this person describe my product to a friend?
- What features and benefits of my product would interest this person the most?
Avoid a boring, boilerplate description
Ever see “superior craftsmanship” or “ultimate reliability” used in a product description? Not only do generic terms like these scream low effort, but they may also be hurting your bottom line.
Generic descriptions stuffed with dry verbiage will cause your reader’s eyes to glaze over. Nobody wants a disengaged customer. Instead, touch on the specific qualities and benefits you’re selling and let the product’s magic speak for itself.
Steer clear of hyperbolic language
When you write a product description, you should be as specific as possible. Avoid using fluffy language that doesn’t add value to the product description.
After writing a draft, see if every sentence adds value. For example, does each sentence educate a visitor about either the product or your brand? If not, take it out.
In much the same way that bland, corporate-speak can harm your customer’s impression of your business and your product, so too can sensational copy.
“Best in class” or “most advanced” sound like buzz words without data to back it up. If you have good reason to use superlatives in your product description, listing the product’s achievements or awards can do the job more authentically.
Appeal to the senses
There’s always an opportunity to incorporate sensory details into your product description copy.
Invoking the smell and crackle of a campfire or the feeling of being wrapped in a warm, down feathered sleeping bag will whisk your customer away to faraway places and invite memory recall.
Don’t hesitate to use this to your advantage and take your customers on a sensory journey.
Sell your customers a story
When you tell a story about your product, you’re more likely to connect with potential buyers on an emotional level. Your customer isn’t just another transaction; they are a human being, just like you. Understanding this simple concept is the key to converting your potential buyers into loyal customers.
Telling someone why they need something doesn’t hit quite the same as showing them how your product will improve their life. Inviting your customer to put themselves at the center of the product experience makes for a more personalized description.
Make it scannable
It’s essential to strike a balance between the beautiful story you’ve crafted for the customer and keeping the copy easy on the eyes. Taking the extra time to trim the fat from your copy ensures your customer can navigate your product catalog with ease and clarity.
Swap bullet points with images
Humans are visual creatures. Even if you manage to craft a masterful product description in writing, you still need quality images to go with it.
63% of customers believe a product image is more important than the description or even the product reviews. Research shows customers who can physically touch and feel a product are more likely to purchase the product. The same consumer psychology applies to product images or videos that encourage touch.
As a small business owner, you may not have the financial bandwidth to create polished video walkthroughs of your products. Still, you can, at the very least, present high-quality photos of your product that illustrate its features and benefits.
Leverage social proof for credibility
Before anyone makes a purchase online nowadays, they look at the reviews for that product online. The better the reviews, the more likely people are to make a purchase.
It’s important to reduce the need for a customer to do further research on your product. All the information they need, including what other people are saying about your product, should be displayed on your product page.
Positive reviews and ratings will entice customers to your products because social proof instills trustworthiness in your product and brand.
You can include your social proof in the form of a quote or add the reviews below the product description.
Priortizie keywords and SEO
While SEO may not be a thing you should focus on straight out the gate, that doesn’t mean you should forget about it entirely. Careful keyword choice can mean the difference between getting found or relegated to the bottom of Google search results.
Make sure you are very deliberate with the keywords and keyphrases you choose to rank for. Incorporate keywords in your page titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and product description copy.
A/B test to measure your success
Once you finish writing your product descriptions, you might have different versions you want to test to see which one leads to a higher conversion rate. By employing A/B testing, you can test multiple product descriptions for different lengths, keywords, or formatting.
A/B test by running each product description for a set amount of time and tracking how your customers respond to them via conversion rate, cart abandonment or any other metrics that point to how well one product description is performing over another.