Streamlining Your Copy Strategies for Impactful Content Creation
If one were to break down the layers of a digital design interface, it could be understood best as attaining its own anatomy and just like a growing organism, interfaces are prone to shift, change and grow. A design’s physical appearance is made up of UI and graphical elements, and its coding in the back end of that design can be best understood as the brain of a design. Copy content could then be best described as the voice of a website that helps a website’s personality come to life.
The visual design language of a website within a design system is naturally a part of a website that catches the immediate attention of most users, so, to truly make the voice of a website stand out, it needs to align with its visual counterparts, and leave just as much as an impression. Streamlining your content is an important asset to a whole design, so let’s uncover the best practices to achieve that.
Center an Emotion
Strategizing is ultimately an essential step, whether that means you are a UI/UX designer or a content writer. Before embarking on the story of a design, it is always best to reflect on the emotion you are trying to convey. Ask yourself:
· Does it align with the visual story presented?
· It is cohesive with a brand’s tone/established identity?
· Will a target audience resonate?
· Does it provide enough context to allow brands to achieve their purpose?
Tone is essential because it can reflect the emotion that is brought forth within your readers/users. Yet, if you focus first on the emotion you want to convey, and build the tone around that emotion, it can truly help streamline the writing process. This, of course, builds the personality of a brand, organization, or product.
Choose Your Intension
The market is overly saturated and highly competitive as brands are consistently vying for the attention of audiences. Yet sometimes this can mean there is a need to make our writing stand out with punchy, power words. One thing to always remember is moderation and placement. Too many punchy words can ultimately lose their effect over time if it is overly incorporated, and can even cloud the overall message.
Modern consumers resonate best with a syntax that is clear, purposeful, and informative. Even more so, with social media’s influence on a conversational style of language, audiences have become used to a simplified tone. This doesn’t mean your content needs to be stripped of its creative voice, rather, it helps streamline over-stacked adjectives or adverbs and ensures your users do not feel bombarded by a “sales-pitchy” tone that will push them away.
Rather, your intention is to ensure your users can trust a brand by evoking emotions that reflect a brand promise of providing the user with a unique experience. The bottom line is you want to always strive for authenticity no matter the tone and intention of your content.
Brevity is Your Best Friend
A staple writing best practice that has never gone out of style is brevity. Renowned writers, advertisers, and editors of the world continuously encourage writers to focus on brevity to capture the attention span of their readers and audiences. Especially in our modern-day in which information is available at the tap of a screen, succinct, but purposeful content is important. Less is more.
Don’t Neglect Your Microcopy
Microcopy is a small, but mighty part of content development and refers to the tidbits of copy found throughout. Microcopy can be the singular sentence found at the footer of a website, the micro-interaction that pops up after completing a task, and call-to-actions. Microcopy is super important because it can help tie together content, no matter how short.
You may be tempted to abandon the established tonality since microcopy is not as substantial as the content found throughout a webpage, however, if a call-to-action or even a 404 page does not mirror the tone previously established, users will notice that shift. Consistency here is key, plus, why not increase your chances of conversion with approachable and cohesive call-to-actions?
Content copy is a fundamental piece to the whole puzzle when assembling a design and ties in the whole, completed picture.
