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Russian Copywriting Tips and Tricks

“The more education you have, the less good a copywriter you will be. Copywriting is really the everyday spoken language in written form.” David Garfinkel, professional copywriter.

Copywriting is the foundation for any successful online marketing. Poorly crafting content into sentences will merely result in a cluster of words appearing on your brochure or web page. Creating descriptive, compelling and culturally appropriate content will result in content that seems to artfully flow into your sentences.  A skillful Russian copywriter can help a company not only expand into the Russian markets, but also help win more business and sell more efficiently by creating effective content that appeals to potential Russian clients. Regardless of whether the copywriter is creating website content, audio, video or a marketing brochure, the primary goal is to ensure that the tone and style of the newly created content is unique, adheres to the customers’ requirements, and resonates with a wide range of people. It goes without saying the writing should be relevant, intuitive and “mirror” the reality of the market.

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Here are 4 copywriting tips that can help create exceptional Russian content and help you attract and engage your Russian target audience.

1. Always keep your target audience in mind

Your target audience is a group of people within a target market to which the product or service is directed. Defining the target audience is the first significant step to successful Russian copywriting.  Defining your target audience in copywriting can be compared with stage scenery in theatre: the better job you did, the smoother the play went. The professional Russian copywriter always surveys the customers to get a better understanding of how they think and what they require. The copywriter should always keep his/her specific audience in mind otherwise the results will be less impactful.

2. Write read-worthy, sensory content

A main challenge of Russian copywriting lies in the fact that many copywriters have a tendancy to give a list of features instead of describe a product or service in a way that appeals to the potential customer’s feelings or emotions. The features of a product or service are required and should be presented at the right time to show exactly what the customers can get for their money.  However features alone will never convince them to purchase anything. We buy a dream not a product or service.  The idea is simple: if you ignore the benefits, you can say goodbye to sales. Professional Russian copywriters will describe and evoke emotions and feelings which the customer can gain by buying a product or service. Below is an abstract from a Hotel Special Offer. There is nothing special in this offer as it includes only complimentary breakfast and lunch or dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants. But the copywriter met this challenge and painted a colorful picture, suggesting the customer take a culinary journey and taste new dishes.

“Мы приглашаем вас совершить потрясающее гастрономическое путешествие и попробовать настоящие кулинарные шедевры разных народов мира, сервируемые в роскошных ресторанах отеля, во время бесплатного завтрака , а также обеда или ужина по выбору. “

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3. Great titles and headlines

Writing headlines is an important copywriting skill that involves imagination and expertise. It takes the reader a few seconds to scan through the headline and make the decision if the content is worth reading. A skillful copywriter like a tropical spider is spinning a web, setting traps and spraying alluring aroma to make the potential customer “stumble” over this very headline, continue reading and as a result purchase the product or service and identify the company by the wide range of competitors. You may have heard that any catchy headline should meet the following “S” requirements:  be short, sticky and make sense. A few headlines that demonstrate what I feel are good examples are:

Magic: “Волшебство в каждой детали”

Luxury: “Сдержанная элегантность у истоков исключительной роскоши” or  “Чарующий мир подлинной роскоши”

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4. Write for the person and the search engine – Russian Keywords

Today Russian copywriters need to be able to write for both the person and the search engine. When it comes to web content copywriting, what good is great content if nobody can find it? Likewise, what good is a very findable website where the content stinks?  One of several SEO factors in improving your Russian website’s ranking in search engine results is to enrich your content with relevant keywords.

There are certainly some best practices with Russian copywriting and SEO including; performing Russian keyword research first, arrange the keywords in order of importance and start to include keywords from the list top down, use the keywords in title and subtitles and then in the main body of the text.

Yandex is the most popular search engine for the Russian online consumer with about 60% market share in Russia. It is very important to consider optimizing keywords for Yandex during the SEO copywriting process. Yandex provides an effective keyword tool to help SEO copywriters and advertisers with their keyword research.

For more information about multilingual keywords, please check our blog post The Difference between Keywords Translation and Keywords Localization.