Copywriting Is the Differentiator

Your landing page isn’t finished

Your AI-built landing page reads fine. That’s the problem.

Tools like Lovable and Bolt build the page with your app and write the copy for you. There’s a headline, a line underneath and three feature cards. Nothing on it is wrong, and nothing on it makes a visitor stop. They skim it and leave the way they arrived.

Anyone with the same tools can have a page like it by this afternoon. So looking finished no longer sets you apart. The words can.

Plausible isn’t persuasive

Say Haleema runs a small removals firm in Bristol. She builds her website with an AI tool, tells it what she does, and gets a homepage like this:

Stress-free removals in Bristol

Our friendly, experienced team makes moving simple. From packing to transport, we handle moves of every size with care. Get your free quote today.

It’s accurate. It would also work for every other removals firm in Bristol, so nobody reading it has a reason to choose Haleema.

The AI isn’t at fault. Haleema told it she does removals, and it wrote about removals. What it can’t know is what Haleema does better than anyone else, and for whom.

Find what you do best, and for whom

Start with three questions about your own business:

• Which jobs went best, and which customers sent their friends?
• How do you take a customer from their first call to the result they wanted?
• What do you do that others in your line of work don’t?

Honest answers are specific. They show what makes you different, and how you get your customers where they want to be. Here’s what Haleema finds when she asks herself:

• Her best jobs are older people moving out of a family home into somewhere smaller.
• She sits down with them over a cup of tea to decide what goes.
• Her team packs, then unpacks, and sets up the new home before they arrive.
• The move is often organised by a son or daughter who lives miles away, so she sends them photos through the day.

That points to her best customer: the grown-up child organising a parent’s move from far away, who can’t take a week off to do it. A firm that moves anything for anyone can’t serve them as well. Haleema can, and the way she works, from the visit to the photos, is how she gets them across.

Your offer is the bridge

Picture that customer where they are now, where they want to be, and your product or service as the bridge between them. Each point on the bridge is something you do that takes them part of the way.

Where they are now. Describe your customer’s situation the way they would, before you mention what you sell. This is what makes a reader think “that’s me”, which is why their words matter more than yours. Haleema’s customer says “Mum”, “the house” and “time off”, not “downsizing solutions”.

Where they want to be. Their dream outcome, not your features, and not a vague benefit like “a smooth move”. The more concrete it is, the more they want it. For Haleema’s customer, it’s Mum’s first night in her new flat, with her bed made and her photos on the wall, without them having to be there.

The bridge. Only now does what you sell come in, as the steps that take them across. Each step should answer part of the worry on the left. A step that answers nothing is a feature, not part of the bridge. Haleema’s visit settles what to keep, and her photos mean they can watch it all from three hours away.

Copywriters call this before–after–bridge. ^[2] Put together, Haleema’s homepage reads like this:

Moving Mum out of the family home? You don’t need to take the week off.

We’ll visit to help her decide what goes, pack every room and set up her new home before she arrives: bed made, kitchen unpacked, pictures on the wall. You’ll get photos through the day.

The first version said “stress-free” and “with care”. This one uses neither word, and the reader can see both.

It will also turn some people away. Someone moving a two-bedroom flat across town will look elsewhere, and that’s fine. The page is for the customers Haleema serves best.

Write each offer as a print ad first

Here’s an old-school way to find your strongest selling points. Before anything else, write what you sell as a print ad that asks for a response: one page in a newspaper or magazine that has to get a stranger reading, tell them the whole story and make them pick up the phone. There’s no video or animation to lean on, only words. Joseph Sugarman recommends doing this before any other kind of ad, because it’s the hardest format to get right and it shows you what really sells. ^[1]

To fill that page with things your customer cares about, you need to know their problem, their doubts and why your way is better. If you can’t, work on the offer before the words.

Then carry what you found into everything else. For a service business like Haleema’s, that’s a page for each service, walking the reader through the visit, the packing and the first night. For an app, it’s the website that sells it, with a page for each thing the app helps people do. The short lines come last, cut from the long ones: the headline, an ad, your social bio. Written first, they’re guesses. Written last, each one is the best line you already have.

Give AI what only you know

When you ask an AI tool to write the copy for your website, it can only use what you tell it. Ask it to promote your app or service and it will describe the features, because that’s all it knows. That’s not the tool’s fault.

Give it what only you know and the copy gets much better. Talk it through the way you’d brief a copywriter: who your best customers are, where they are now and where they want to be, how you take them across, and what you do that others don’t. Paste in their messages and reviews, so it has their words as well as yours.

This takes longer than generating a page, and that’s the trade. If speed is your only priority, you’ll get the plausible version.

It pays off well beyond one page. Once each service or product has its full page, you have the source for everything else you write, from the words inside your app to your social posts and the way you introduce yourself. That’s how a brand starts to stand out, online and everywhere else you market it. It’s also what makes you worth finding.

Plenty of AI-built pages read fine. Yours can be the one that reads as if it was written for the person reading it.

Sources

The book link goes to Amazon UK and isn’t an affiliate link.

1. Joseph Sugarman — The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. Where the print-ad idea comes from. It’s about print and mail order rather than websites, but the way he builds a case on a page carries straight over. Find the book on Amazon UK.

2. Campaign Monitor — before–after–bridge. A plain explanation of the formula, with an example of each part. It’s written for email, but the formula works the same way on a web page.