Copywriting is an essential skill to have as a small business owner.

Either you are doing the marketing yourself or you need to know enough about marketing and copywriting to assess the quality of the work that your team members or marketing agency/freelancer is doing for you. The goal of copywriting is to get the reader to take action, not just write for the sake of entertainment or education.

In short, copywriting sells, content writing tells.

When creating copy for your business, you can and should leverage various frameworks to create engaging and effective content in a short amount of time. Small businesses of all sorts work off of the same principles, so you don’t need to become a genius copywriter or try to reinvent the wheel with your writing for advertisements, landing pages, and newsletters.

Here are 4 proven frameworks that I use all the time:

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It's a classic marketing model that guides the reader through a linear journey from awareness to taking action.

I love using it because you can create effective copy for ads and social media posts in as little as 4 sentences.

• Attention: Grab the reader's attention with a strong headline or opening sentence.
• Interest: The second sentence provides interesting and relevant information to keep the reader engaged.
• Desire: Build desire by highlighting benefits and creating an emotional connection.
• Action: Encourage the reader to take the next step, whether it’s subscribing, purchasing, or booking an appointment.

Everyone loves a story.

Storytelling is how we best learn and have information stick. This framework helps structure blog posts to ensure they are comprehensive and compelling using themes from storytelling. I learned this framework from John Romaniello, a renowned trainer and author in the fitness world who went on to create an incredible copywriting company.

It’s my go to for engaging copywriting that people don’t just gloss over.

Frame - set the scene for the reader.

Hook - The hook in this framework usually involves calling out the pain point your target customer is facing.

Turn - Offer a solution, explaining how it addresses the problem.

Dive - Go further into your solution by providing evidence, such as case studies, testimonials, or data, to back up your solution.

Payoff - this is where the desired outcome that you have the solution for comes in. Summarize the key points and include a call-to-action (CTA).

PAS stands for Problem, Agitate, and Solution. It's a simple yet powerful framework for persuasive writing.

• Problem: Identify the problem your audience is facing.
• Agitate: Agitate the problem by explaining the consequences of not addressing it.
• Solution: Present your solution to alleviate the problem. This includes your explicit call to action in copywriting for a small business.

Storytelling can make your content more relatable and memorable.

All the best stories follow a predictable outline with enough twists and turns along the way to keep readers engaged. In copywriting we can use the 5-part foolproof framework which is adapted from the Hero’s Journey story framework or use the 3-Act Structure shown below.

First, outline the story using these prompts:

Who is the character?

What do they want?

Why can’t they get what they want?

What are the stakes? Ie: What will happen if they don’t get what they want?

Who or what helps them?

How do they get what they want?

How are they transformed by this experience?

Fill in these sections to get the structure for your content, then use the 5-part foolproof framework or 3-Act

Structure to assemble your writing.

By using any of these frameworks, you can structure your copy effectively, making it more engaging and persuasive for your audience.

You’ll notice that there’s a commonality to these frameworks. While some are to the point and others flow through more of a story to get there, all copywriting ends in a call to action. In the small business world you want this to be explicit 99% of the time. There’s too much competition for you to try to implicitly persuade your clients with your copywriting as if you were producing a TV commercial for the latest iPhone.

So always finish your copywriting with a clear call to action.

AI is an incredible tool to use in your writing process for your small business.

I’ve mentored marketing students from the local university’s school of business during their placement programs over the last several years. It’s not an understatement to say that AI generates far better drafts of copywriting than almost every one of these 4th year students I’ve worked with. You need to learn how to harness AI as part of the tools you use for running your small business.

Take any of the frameworks listed above and use it as context for the prompt you enter into whichever AI tool you like to use. I prefer the paid subscription to ChatGPT as I find the quality of results are the best and save me time iterating on the draft.

Prompt:

I'm writing the copy for a social media post for a sale I'm running for my small business.

[Copy and paste whichever framework you want to start with]

Use the AIDA framework: - Attention: Grab the reader's attention with a strong headline or opening sentence.

• Interest: The second sentence provides interesting and relevant information to keep the reader engaged.
• Desire: Build desire by highlighting benefits and creating an emotional connection.
• Action: Encourage the reader to take the next step, whether it’s subscribing, purchasing, or booking an appointment.

[Enter the relevant details for your business - location, service offering, business name, what the call to action you want is] My business is a float therapy centre in Peterborough called Flow Spa. We're running 30% off float sessions from now until June 30 for the summer solstice sale.

Here’s a chat example you can see of how I used one of our frameworks and prompted the AI to produce an ad that I can use as a social media post for a call to action or run as a paid ad. I could even use this as script for a video to post on social media.

Use these prompts and my Small Business Copywriter GPT to quickly draft the copy you need for your small business.