A lot of time and effort goes into writing product descriptions. In today’s post, I’m going to break the process down into five key components: brand information, product specification, product photography, keywords, and competitor awareness.
Brand Information
Right at the start, you need to know who the creator of the product is, what other products they have designed, and a basic level of information about the purpose of their products. Ask yourself questions like:
- What does the brand specialise in?
- Are they sustainable?
- How do they assure their products are high-quality?
What are the key selling points of the brand and their products? - What other products do they sell? Is this particular product part of a collection?
- Most importantly: what problem does their product solve?
I find brand information incredibly useful because in the product description, I’m not just selling a product – I’m selling a vision.
Product Specification
It might seem obvious, but product descriptions require a degree of product knowledge. In an ideal world, every copywriter would have access to a full specification for every single product they wrote about. However, the reality is – copywriters make do with what we have. I don’t have a direct connection to the brands I write product descriptions for, and their product specification information is usually minimal. So, I rely on the next component: product photography.
Product Photography
If the product specification is unclear, then the product photography becomes even more essential. I recommend creating a word bank from the product photography you receive, and utilising this when it comes to writing the product description. Having a creative mind certainly helps when it comes to describing an image in a way that your customer will connect with. If you’re looking to practice this, consider a free creative writing course to transform your product descriptions.
Google Keyword Planner
An essential for anyone in the marketing industry, the Google Keyword Planner allows you to access the average search volume for terms and see trends across the past few years, as well as predictions into the future.
Product descriptions aren’t just a description of the product – they’re also part of the sign posting leading the Google crawlers towards your business. Using the correct keywords in a well-written product description is a key strategy to improve the SEO of your website.
Competitor Awareness
Writing product descriptions can be tough, especially when writing large batches at once. I like to keep my product descriptions original and avoid copy and pasting large chunks of sentences – so, before I start writing, I skim read through product descriptions of similar brands, products and e-commerce websites to see what other copywriters have done. When looking at the work of competitors, there are a few potential issues, of course. Copywriters need to pay special attention to the risk of plagiarism and need to ensure the description they write is specific to the product in front of them.
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