Your copy does not need to be short

(This originally appeared in my newsletter. Sign up now to get content like this, for free, every Monday.)

"We can't have too many words on our website."

"This email needs to be nice and short"

So on, so forth. This is a bit of conventional wisdom that I hear quite often - "we can't use too many words."

I think the reality is more complex than that. Here's why:

Not all long copy is wafffle, and not all waffle is long

Right off the bat, let's clarify that waffling is bad. Taking 10 sentences to communicate 2 sentences worth of information is not a good way to communicate.

This is the case no matter how long or short your copy is. If you write a short sentence that doesn't really say anything, the fact that it is short is not going to save you. Waffle is always bad.

I think this is where the misconception about short copy being the ideal comes from. There's lots of waffly writing out there - too much. So we assume that all long copy is bad, because so much long copy is waffly. But these are two different characteristics!

Not all audiences were created equal

The amount of copy you should write is - like all the copywriting decisions you make - going to depend on your audience's stage of awareness.

If you're writing social media ads that are going to a completely cold audience, you probably want to keep it short and tight.

You can see that in the Linkedin ads I'm running at the moment. These are to a cold audience who have never heard of me before; all I want them to do is to watch the video directly underneath the ad copy.

So I wrote a line asking them to do so, then a secondary line promoting my home page review service - just on the off chance that they are so wowed by the video that they book a review right away.

(Nobody has yet).

Anyway, take a look. Short and sweet:

But contrast that against someone who's deeply engaged in your buying process, and needs information to make a decision about whether they're going to make a purchase or not.

These people need information - they need to know what your product does, they need to know why they should buy it, they need to have their objections dealt with. You're not going to accomplish this if you get fixated on keeping everything as short as possible.

Check this example out

Here's my favourite example of longer copy - a digital marketing firm called Backbone Marketing. These firms are in an incredibly competitive space, so their website really needs to do a good job of differentiating them from the other options out there.

At the same time, pretty much everyone is under the collective delusion that copy has to be short at all times. This means that writing a bit more than everyone else in the space can be a way to differentiate.

So here's what they put on their website:

As you can see, it's not really an opus. Maybe 200 words at a stretch.

But that's so much more than your standard website. And it uses those words to really intensify the problem that people have, explain their value, and overcome objections.

You just can't do this in three sentences.

And this approach makes sense, because a digital marketing agency is a considered purchase. There are thousands of dollars on the line. People are willing to spend a bit of time reading when they're making a decision like that.

The bottom line: it depends

If you're worried about whether your copy is too short or too long, you're asking the wrong question. The better questions are whether your copy is long enough to tell the story you need to tell, to the people who are going to respond to it.

You also want to ask yourself how much you have to say. Is it a lot? A little?

Sometimes the end result will be long, sometimes it will be short - but let the needs of your audience drive that decision, rather than an arbitrary fixation on short copy.

Have a great week

Sam

PS: You can see an example of slightly longer copy on my landing page for my home page review service. Check it out - then book one for $799.

PPS: I'm closing the books for the year. Not taking on any more work until 2021. If you have a project you want looked at next year, book a call now, and I can get you scheduled in.