For B2B manufacturing companies looking to separate from the competition, it’s critical to create impactful product descriptions that educate and entertain your target audience. Not only do product descriptions make a better customer experience, but it adds credibility to your business to boost sales from buyers. In this post, you’ll learn how to create great product descriptions that convert website visitors into customers.
Product descriptions are vital to the decision-making process in the sales cycle. If you don’t provide enough information, you risk a customer going to a competitor – too much information, and there’s no way they’ll take the time to read it and will move on. As 70-80% of B2B buyers prefer to research and engage with businesses online, it’s all about finding the right balance to capture their attention.
Ready to discover how product descriptions can help you attract your target audience? Let’s dive in.
Key Takeaways:
- Product descriptions are a great way to drive website traffic and increase sales.
- Including an impactful title, description, and key benefits will help customers learn more.
- Write descriptions with natural language and industry terminology to appeal to buyers.
What are Product Descriptions?
A product description is a form of marketing copy that describes products on your website. The purpose is to provide potential customers with necessary information like details, specifications, use cases, and more about your product, so they’re persuaded to make a purchase or contact you for more information.
To create impactful product descriptions, you’ll need to answer these questions: What problems do your products solve? Do customers gain anything from your products? What makes you better than the competition?
Your product descriptions sit in landing pages and typically include a combination of the following elements:
- Feature image
- Overview
- Title
- Features and benefits
- Call to action (add to cart, purchase, buy now, etc.)
- Price
- Reviews and ratings
- Similar product recommendations
Why Are Product Descriptions Important?
Did you know that 37% of businesses don’t have a website? Quality product descriptions can strengthen your brand voice, boost search engine optimization (SEO), and improve conversions.
At the core, product descriptions are important because they:
- Help potential customers qualify your products and determine if they should make a purchase
- Connect with the customer and provide compelling reasons why a customer should consider your products
- Use quality search terms and keywords to rank your website higher on search engine result pages
Your item descriptions act as your first impression to grab your customer’s attention. Think of your product descriptions as a quick sales pitch or a 24/7 sales representative – they should represent your brand and target your ideal audience to build trust.
8 Best Practices to Write Dynamic Product Descriptions
Now that you understand product description basics, it’s time to put pen to paper and start writing your own. Here are a few tips to get started:
1. Focus on Your Target Audience
Businesses often make the mistake of talking about themselves in product descriptions instead of focusing on how the product helps the customer. Instead of using the traditional “spray and pray” strategy, your product descriptions should speak directly to your target audience. You actually want to use the word “you” to address customers personally and avoid talking about yourself.
To get started, you need to build buyer personas and break down the common characteristics of your ideal customer. Buyer personas will help you navigate what content will appeal most to your customers. If you haven’t created buyer personas yet, use these questions to help:
- Who benefits from your products?
- What pain points do your products address?
- Do your products fulfill any desires?
- Why would customers choose your products over a competitor?
- What keywords or phrases do customers use to find your product?
By keeping these questions in mind, you’ll be able to write product descriptions that speak to your audience and convert.
2. Write Enticing Benefits and Features
You need to include both benefits and features in your material descriptions. A feature is a technical and factual statement about your product. However, a benefit includes how your product helps solve the buyer’s pain points and challenges.
As a manufacturer, your products might be complex and have very specific use cases that only your target audience will know. Your features should most likely include specifications, weights, material, and more to describe your industrial products. Unlike B2C companies, who don’t need to focus on mundane details, it’s essential to use the benefits section to include the elements required to make a purchase decision.
3. Use Your Brand Voice and Tone
A key to writing quality product descriptions is maintaining your brand voice and tone throughout the content. While you don’t want to sound like a robot, you need to appeal to your buyers and speak in their natural language.
What type of language do your customers use when searching for your products? What kind of impression do you want to make? It’s recommended to use a more natural tone that sounds conversational but still stays in line with your brand.
The types of words you use matter in your descriptions. For example, adjectives often don’t add meaning to your content, but using power and industry-based words, like durable or long-lasting, can help appeal to your buyer.
4. Make it Scannable in an Easy-to-Read Format
With the average adult’s attention span being only eight seconds, you have a short window for your product descriptions to capture a customer’s attention. To avoid sending customers to a firehose of heavy content, make your descriptions scannable so customers can quickly find the information they need.
Here are a few ways you can design your descriptions to be more user-friendly:
- Write eye-catching and descriptive headlines
- Use plenty of bullet points to break up heavy text
- Design with white space
- Increase font size
- Upload plenty of images and videos if available
- End with a call-to-action
5. Show Social Proof and Reviews
79% of modern consumers trust reviews that they read online, and 89% read at least four reviews before making a purchase decision. For your product descriptions, it’s essential that customers can leave reviews to make your site seem more credible and trustworthy. To make them more impactful, allow customers to upload images and integrate your social channels to display user-generated content.
Get started by making it easy for customers to leave reviews:
- Include a “leave a review” button on the product page
- Send a follow-up email after each purchase
- Use incentives like loyalty points or discount shipping
- Post reviews on social media or newsletters
- Respond to any negative reviews
6. Optimize for Search Engines
As Google and Bing algorithms continue to evolve, it’s more important than ever to optimize your descriptions for search engines. In fact, some businesses have experienced a 102% increase in sales after implementing SEO best practices.
You can optimize your content with relevant keywords that your customers use to search for similar products. Then, you’ll include these keywords in your page meta descriptions, page titles, ALT tags, and the product content themselves.
Here are a few best practices to get started:
- Write for your target customer first and the search bots second to provide a better experience
- Research keywords with factors like search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms to help determine what to use
- Place the keywords strategically like once in the title, twice in the copy, and once in the ALT tag
- Avoid using duplicate content across different product descriptions
7. Post Quality Images and Videos
Since your customers can’t physically hold your products, an image is the next best option. While product descriptions are content-heavy, using photos and videos is a great way to help customers visualize how your product fixes their problems. While you might not have a professional photographer on your team, make sure the images display multiple angles and are high-quality – you can typically achieve this by using a modern smartphone.
To really make a great first impression on your customers, use video to showcase a tutorial, answer common questions, or even demonstrate your products in action. Not only will your customers appreciate more product details, but videos also make excellent social content to promote your product.
Quick Product Description Template
While product descriptions vary by industry and product type, you’ll want to tailor them to your customer’s buying needs. If you have a decent understanding of your buyer personas, you can create a product description template using the following criteria:
- Headline: Your headline should grab your customer’s attention and focus on a particular benefit. Example: 1” Stainless Ball Valve
- Short paragraph: Use features and benefits to create a brief entertaining introduction paragraph to your product. Example: Our 1” Stainless Steel Ball Valve with PTFE seals and seats provides exceptional corrosion resistance for most water, oil, gas, fuels, and alcohol applications. These ball valves are long-lasting and guarantee no leakage for five years.
- Bulleted key benefits: List key product details and specifications. Be sure to include details like size, weight, and material.
Regardless of your e-commerce or website platform, keep each product description consistent to deliver a better shopping experience for your buyers.
Boost Your Online Presence with Powerful Product Descriptions
While you might be hyper-focused on product development and sales, you shouldn’t overlook product descriptions. Quality product descriptions not only help you reach your target audience, but they can make a massive difference in earning new customer sales. Use product descriptions to describe your products and tell a story around why customers choose you over competitors.
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