Writing Amazon product pages is a very specific sub-set of copywriting. You can’t do all the things you’d normally do if you were writing on your own site; the format is very tightly specified and there are certain things you need to include.
But you can still do a better job if you treat the page as a copywriting job rather than a product tick-list. That will lead to better sales, as your writing attracts your readers to the product and motivates them to become buyers.
All good copywriting starts by studying your audience. The kind of writing that will press all the right buttons for a 34 year old guy who’s an ultrarunner will do nothing for a 25 year old woman who wants to get “beach ready” – even if the product is exactly the same vitamin supplement. So make sure you know who your buyers are; look them up on Google Analytics, and see what else they are buying. See what they are reading, too; are you selling to someone who usually reads Cosmopolitan, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, or Hombre?
That will help you find the right tone as well as knowing what the things are that they’ll want to know. For instance, should you be casual and relaxed? Fun and a bit zany? Formal and factual? Friendly and warm? Smart and sassy? You’ll need to give the same information that Amazon wants, but the way you put it over is up to you.
Look at your reviews; what words are happy customers using? For instance if you sell cat toys, what do your customers call their cats? Cats? Kitties? Kittehs? Pets? Feline companions? Furbabies? Or ‘owners’?
Reviews will also give you a feeling about the relationship customers have (or want to have) with your product. For instance German pen and stationery firm Lamy bases its marketing around the idea of a pen as your “companion”at work and at home. Is your product a guilty pleasure, a luxury, a friend, or even a partner? (If you think that’s outrageous, ask yourself how much more intimate a product can get than a weighted blanket. Then go look at some of the reviews!)
At this stage it helps to jot down some of what you’ve learned. Then you need to get on to writing. You’ll probably want to describe the main features of your product.
STOP!
Customers don’t want to know about features. They want to know about benefits. Benefits are “What’s in it for me?” Benefits are “will this solve my problem?” Benefits are “Wow, that saves me money!” or “What a lot of time I could save!” Benefits are not the fact that the dress is unique but that “everyone will think it looks a million dollars on me” or “I’ll actually look thin in that!”
Many benefits tie in with a feature. If a radio comes with a whole load of customizable presets, the benefit is “all your favorite channels available on a single menu”.
Think which of these you’d rather buy:
• a cube of transparent plastic,
• organizing your kitchen ingredients so you can see everything at a glance.
I’m guessing it wasn’t the plastic cube.
You also need to tell a story. Human beings love stories. Probably the first thing we did after someone invented fire was to make a nice campfire and sit down to tell a story around it.
Amazon’s format can make that a bit difficult to do, but you need to find a way. You might tell your brand story; “I hated having frizzy hair, so I made hair styling products for women who have given up”. Tell the story of what the product can do for the customer. Think of basic stories to which your product belongs – gift-giving, the birth of a child, growing up, getting your first home.
So far, you have your human readers where you want them. But what about the search engines? Oops. My bad. You need keywords. Don’t start with your keywords; that leads to pages that are all keywords and no persuasion, otherwise known as ‘keyword stuffing’. But go back and see whether you’ve used the keywords in your text. Chances are you have; if not, find a natural place to add them.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it, except to remind you to focus on ‘scannable’ content like:
• bullet points
• short paragraphs
• headings
• subheadings
(Did you see what I did there? Go do the same on your product listings.)
