Reevaluate and rewrite with your ideal customer in mind

From listings to form emails, there’s a lot of written word involved with selling on eBay. Let’s take the time to make it all consistently speak to your ideal customers to encourage more sales.

Here’s what to do:

A few steps ago, we wrote up a list of everything we knew about our existing customers to get a picture of what our ideal customer is like. Now it’s time to make sure we’re talking to those ideal customers with every single line of written word we put out. This step can and should take a little while to make sure you’re doing it right, so I’d recommend splitting it up into smaller, more manageable groups of text and doing them one at a time. For example, you could focus on your standard listing text and form emails one day, your About Me and other bio-type pages another day, and your store pages and off-eBay presence from social media to any external websites such as a blog on other days. If you don’t have strong writing skills, professional freelance writers to help you out are plentiful and often cheaper than you might think.

Tom Hanks knows the importance of finding just the right words.

Revisit the profile of your ideal customers as you read over all your text. Is the language you’re using too formal and highbrow for your more casual ideal customer or the other way around? Are you using local expressions that your international customers might not be familiar with? Acronyms and text speak are second nature to young people, but what if your target demographic is older?

When you look at everything all together like this, you’ll get a sense of what your company’s voice is like. Once that voice is in your head, you’ll be able to not only carry it throughout everything you put out but also be able to identify the things that sound wrong and fix them. If you’re struggling with this, look at similar sites in your niche or use the celebrity trick. Picture a celebrity that typifies your ideal customer and imagine them speaking your text, reworking the words to reflect their speech patterns. It can seem like a gimmick, but you’ll be surprised at how easy it makes it to not only keep your company voice consistent but also to pick it back up easily whenever you’ve got to write something new.

Why are we doing this?

Writing is so easy to take for granted because we do it all the time and you can easily overlook what a big difference good writing can make and how much damage poor writing can do. Voice and tone are a huge part of marketing from commercials to coupons. When something speaks directly to your customer in a voice they’re comfortable and identify with, it automatically makes them feel more affection for your company and makes them that much more likely to make a purchase and return for more. Smart phones have given rise to the “Too Long; Didn’t Read” generation, which means quality writing is more important than ever since you’ve got even less time to make an impression and get your meaning across before they move on to the next thing.

As sellers, it’s also all too common for us to just throw any old text up there when we’re signing up for something or just trying to get an item listed without really thinking about it. There never really seems to be the time to take to do it right, which is why it’s so important that we take this time and do it now. Once you’ve adjusted all of your existing text, you’ll find it that much easier to stay in that voice for everything new you add afterwards.