110. 6 Copywriting Tips to Help Food Brands Stand Out with Celsea Jenkins of Grassfed Copy

Have you ever thought about the difference between content and copy? And how each works differently to connect with your reader depending on if you’re talking about a website, social media, ads, packaging, etc?

Today on Episode 110 of the Real Food Brands Marketing Podcast, Host and Food Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva has a conversation with Celsea Jenkins, the owner of Grassfed Copy about the art and science to writing great copy that converts people from readers to taking an action. Celsea shares Katie’s passion for health and wellness – and clear messaging – and the episode highlights their shared enthusiasm! Listen to hear Celsea’s six copywriting tips to help your food brand stand out.

Why Copy Is More Important Now Than Ever

Celsea’s work is all about how great copy creates authentic connection, but what does that mean for food and farming businesses? “We’re at a really critical point in the world right now where people are more interested in health, well-being, and nutrition than they’ve ever been before,” she says. “That gives brands in our space a really big opportunity to go deeper with our customers, get them excited about where their food comes from and the impact of that supply chain on all of us.”

The trick is to really focus in on your ideal customer: their needs, their pains, their goals, and where you come into the picture to help make their lives easier or happier or more rewarding. To help, Celsea has six tips to help natural food brands and wellness brands stand out with their copywriting:

1. Get to Know Your Audience

Do at least some branding work before you start working with a content creator or copywriter. Understand who you’re working to engage with as your ideal audience, where their pain points are, what their level of awareness is about those problems or opportunities, what their level of awareness is about the solutions. This kind of brand strategy work is essential to knowing what you want to say and how you want to say it, but if you’re already listening to this podcast you’re in the right place ????. You can learn more about ways to work with Katie to position your brand to stand out in the links below.

2. Copy and Design Should Work Together

How do you make the copy and design both friendly for your user and work in tandem to help the right people see you as the go-to solution? You don’t want it to be confusing to navigate the page by breaking up the copy in a weird spot or crowding the page or email with images. Celsea recommends giving copy and images room to “breath” with blank space around them. Make sure both elements – copy and visuals – are giving each other the chance to do their job. She says that if a person cannot understand what you’re selling, how it helps, and how they can take the next steps, then your design and copy have failed.

3. Tell Your Unique Story

“More and more customers want to buy from brands they believe in—no one wants to be sold to,” Celsea says. You need to weave your brand work in so your story is all about the customer you serve how you’re helping them solve a problem and/or delight them in their everyday life. When you have your brand strategy work done properly, using your unique vision, purpose, values, and advantages as the key inputs to position your brand to stand out, and you understand your consumer and competitor, it’s nearly impossible to position your brand exactly like another brand. We want to share that story! As Katie has shared in the past, we want to “invite people into a story so that in turn they invite you to be a part of their story.”

4. Capture the Voice of Your Ideal Customer to Speaker to the Buyer in Their Own Words

Weaving the exact words your ideal customers use into your copy is a key way to make it come alive for them. One easy way to do that is to get on review sites like Yelp or Google. What you’re looking for is “sticky copy,” words that are repeated and phrases or themes that come up again and again. You’ll learn a lot in this research process and stay tuned for a special Facebook Live where Katie and Celsea will dig into this topic in-depth.

5. Tell Your Prospect What You Want Them to Do

This is one of the most common problems Celsea will find when she’s auditing a page for a client that’s not converting. Make sure that your call to action is clear (you’ll also seen this referred to as CTA) and know that a once is rarely enough for a call to action to appear on a page. You’ll probably need to nudge the reader over and over because of how different people read and process information. In the episode Celsea explains how she approaches having multiple CTAs on your home page, but a singular focus in on other pages.

6. Use Keywords Carefully

While there are people who focus their whole day on SEO alone, an experienced copywriter should know a little about SEO and how to write something that appeals to Google while also being conversational in tone. For multiple reasons, you NEVER want to be keyword stuffing. Your copy needs to incorporate keywords in a certain way and in certain places (e.g. headlines, copy, picture labels, etc) but also needs to sound conversational, like you’re talking to a friend.

BONUS – Test Test Test

Celsea shared a bonus tipthat one of the best ways to optimize your copy results is to test your copy and see which actually performs better with your audience. The answer may surprise you! An easy place to start is with your email headlines. Most email services make it fairly easy to do a random A/B split on subject lines so you can test and learn what gets your readers to take action.

Join us LIVE in the Real Food Brand Marketing Round Table Community!

Katie and Celsea will be going through these tips, plus how to really get to the golden insights of what your customers are saying – and the exact language they use – that can make your copy more engaging. They’ll also be happy to answer some questions live.

To get notified of the date, join Katie’s email list by downloading the Brand Checkup Scorecard and stay tuned.

Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!

Quotes:

“We’re at a really critical point in the world right now where people are more interested in health, well-being, and nutrition than they’ve ever been before.” – Celsea Jenkins

“Brands in our space have a really big opportunity to go deeper with our customers, get them excited about where their food comes from and the impact of that supply chain on all of us.” – Celsea Jenkins

“If a person cannot understand where they’re going or how they can take the next steps then your design and copy have failed.” – Celsea Jenkins

“When you get to know your audience and understand their needs, their pains, their goals…you build that know, like, and trust factor – that excitement and authentic connection turns one time customers into brand evangelists.” – Celsea Jenkins

In This Episode:

The difference between copywriting and content writing.
How you can step into the shoes of your ideal audience to know what to write about.
Why good copywriting that sparks action starts with good brand strategy.
How copy and design can work together to communicate better than each alone.
Why telling your brand story is about inviting the customer into a story.
Where to look for “sticky copy” and why it’s so valuable.
A key thing that web pages and emails that don’t convert are usually missing.
How to strike a balance with SEO keywords and a conversational tone.
How you can get notified when Katie and Celsea go LIVE in the Real Food Brands Marketing Round Table on Facebook.

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