Product descriptions play a crucial role in helping customers make informed decisions about buying products. A good product description can help the customer take that last step toward purchasing a product. It is true an effective product description can make or break your sale.
In this post, we'll show you some best practices that every business should follow when writing product descriptions. By following these tips, you'll ensure that your product descriptions are clear, informative, and effective in helping customers make purchasing decisions.
Why does product description matter?
A good product description is as important as having good product images and an easy-to-navigate website that functions well. Why?
Customers visit your website when they hope to buy something you offer. A good user experience and a smooth, seamless process are a plus, but it does come down to the product. If your product content is written well, potential customers get all the information they want from it, plus it persuades them to buy the product.
This means the customer has an overall positive experience with your website or online store. Such experiences then lend to the credibility of your site, meaning it will tend to rank higher, and ultimately push up your conversion rate.
This is why the optimization of a good product description matters. It has a bearing on everything else.
What is a good product description?
A product description, as the name suggests, is a written description of the features and benefits of your product. A good product description should represent your brand and your target audience while giving all of that information.
The purpose of a good product description is to capture the attention of potential buyers and encourage them to make a purchase decision. It should help connect your brand with your audience. It informs the potential customer about your brand. In essence, it acts like a sales pitch for your brand.
A good product description, other than describing your product well, should cover three crucial aspects:
- Fit: It allows potential customers to qualify the product and decide if it is a good fit for them
- Entice: It tells your target audience how the product will solve a problem for them
- Emerge: It helps search engines showcase your product page through the right and natural use of SEO keywords, all towards reaching your target audience
Let's look at some examples of good product descriptions:
This webpage lays out the features and benefits of the product in a very easy-to-read manner in the form of bullet points
Alt text: Screenshot of an Amazon Bose noise-canceling headphones product page. It shows the features & benefits listed as bullet points, such as powerful noise-canceling headphones, astonishing sound, unrivaled voice pickup, etc.
Image name: Screenshot of an Amazon Bose noise-canceling headphones product page.
File name: Screenshot of an Amazon Bose noise-canceling headphones product page.
This Amazon product page spells out the features and benefits of the product,
again in the form of bullet points, but specifies a summary of each point. The potential customer can read the summary to know what the points will elaborate on.
Best Practices to follow while writing product descriptions
There are a few things you should keep in mind to write an effective product description. Here are a few tips to follow that might help. (And no, contrary to popular opinion, you do not have to be a copywriting wiz to come up with a good description for your product page.)
Know your ideal customer
The first and most important point to writing an effective product description is knowing your ideal customer. It is important to understand who your target audience is and the best way to communicate with them.
The biggest mistake that people end up making is that they try to sell their product to everyone, which ends up meaning they are selling to no one in particular. It is important to understand who your audience is. Creating a buyer persona can help with this.
There are certain questions you should ask yourself while defining your ideal customer and creating a buyer persona. If you'd like to learn more about how you can come up with a buyer persona, refer to this blog that provides buyer persona template & tools.
For instance, if you are selling vegan toothpaste, the target market is probably different from the target audience for regular toothpaste. The buyer persona might have buying concerns regarding how the product is made and the environmental impact, other than how the ingredients might benefit them.
Once you have an understanding of the buyer persona and the characteristics of your ideal customer, you will be in a position to analyze what features are important to potential customers. It is important to consider how you want to represent your product to your ideal buyer so they can resonate with it.
Answer customer questions before starting to write the product description
Before starting to write out your product descriptions, you might want to ask yourself certain questions to help guide you. This information is usually pertaining to the potential customer and the product.
You can get clarity on most questions related to the customer, such as 'who is my ideal customer' and 'what do they expect from my product', once you develop the buyer persona. Other customer questions that might help are 'Do I use formal or casual language when addressing potential customers' and 'what can I do to improve customer experience'.
Product-related questions can be 'why do they need my product' and 'where will they use my product'. Asking yourself more questions about the product and its use might help you understand what features to highlight. Now you know the tone you want to proceed with when writing your product description.
Focus on benefits more than features
It is always a good rule of thumb to focus on benefits rather than features or specifications (specs) when describing your product. Identify the potential customer's pain points and use this information to highlight how the product solves these problems.
You want to talk about how your product is a potential solution to their problems and the benefits the customer can gain from it. This way, you help them bypass the stage where they have to look at the feature list and put two and two together to know how the product can help them and enhance their lives.
Potential customers do not care about the product itself; they care about what they can achieve or get done with it. When you spell this out for them, you're helping them make a buying decision.
For example, look at this product description. Under 'About this item', you can see the features highlighted as benefits—this way, potential customers can see which pain points are addressed and narrow down what appeals to them by looking at the relevant information.
Use storytelling and justify your words
Storytelling is one of the best and most underrated ways to appeal to the emotional side of a potential customer. Instead of just pointing out technical details, which get old fast, use storytelling to weave words together beautifully to appeal to a potential customer.
Emotions motivate people. Painting a picture of a product or product usage for them inspires them. For instance, this product description is for a flavor of this naturally flavored soda. It paints a great picture of what that particular flavor is inspired by, almost making for poetic reading.
Another example is this Body & Earth Ocean spa gift box spotted on Amazon. The description focuses on a self-care ocean theme that feels like a spa experience.
Make it easy to read
While long, poetic descriptions have a different charm altogether, they usually don't work for more generic products. It usually depends on the type of product, but a potential customer is usually a shopper looking around and does not have a wide attention span.
For a perfect product description, you'd want to make sure the information is easy to read and scannable. Relevant headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs help with better readability.
Bullet points summarizing the main product features or benefits are the best way to ensure your customers get to see key product information. This is quite important because a majority of customers skip long texts and jump straight to bullet points to get a gist of the product features.
You might have noticed that the top of Amazon listings has key product features as bullet points. These five bullets are usually one of the first things customers gravitate to.
There is a popular strategy employed on the Amazon marketplace known as “two-tiered bullets,” which helps increase readability. The method entails beginning each bullet in all caps, then continuing in the sentence case. This way, if a customer decides to skim through the bullet points quickly, they can get a gist of the point in all caps and then proceed to read the rest of the point if they are interested.
For example, for the product below, you can see that the brand has used the "two-tiered bullets" approach to list key benefits. Customers can get an idea of the feature and read more about it if they choose to.
Use quality product images
Product images should reflect your brand image. This is quite vital, so your customers continue to trust your brand and associate a consistent level of credibility with the brand voice. Images, videos, and other product page elements also add information about your brand.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes you can convey a lot more with a picture than from text. In your pictures, try to include different angles of your product or the different ways it can be used.
In the picture below, you can see a product that has uploaded multiple pictures. Each picture tries to convey something about the product. You can see a highlighted picture showing a dial, depicting that the blender has 4 different speeds at which it can be operated.
Follow platform-specific SEO practices for writing product descriptions
It goes without saying that you have to optimize your content to suit the platform you are using. Most major platforms, such as Amazon, Flipkart, and Shopify, have different SEO practices. Hence, marketers have to write content differently.
It is best to be familiar with the SEO practices and guidelines for the platform of your choice. Shopify, for instance, is an eCommerce platform that looks to ensure that its websites rank well in SERPs of search engines such as Google. SEO, for an ecommerce business, on a very high level, depends on factors such as keyword strategy, product descriptions, site architecture, etc.
Amazon, on the other hand, is an online marketplace. Amazon SEO looks at where your listings rank in Amazon search results, which in turn depends on your keyword strategy and strong sales numbers. Amazon offers a Quick Start Style Guide with tips on how to format product details.
It is thus important to follow the guidelines specified by each platform if you want to improve your content’s rankings.
Use Scalenut’s free product description tool
As you saw, a lot of work goes into generating captivating content for product description writing. Being an important part of SEO strategies, it is important to get it right.
There are several tools out there that can work towards overcoming writer's block and saving time while providing a helping hand to your copywriter.
Scalenut's free product description tool is easy to use and very intuitive. It helps you generate enticing, high-quality content in record time. What's more, Scalenut is one step above the competition as it offers two templates—one for product descriptions and another for eCommerce product descriptions.
Would you like to learn more? Visit our product description generator page.
To create a free account and explore the many features of Scalenut, click here.
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