Don’t sweat the small stuff is our anti-motto. We love the small stuff. It should be sweated!
Microcopy is the ant of the content biosphere. Tiny individuals working together to support the whole; often overlooked; and almost eerily powerful.
It's only metaphorically ants. Really, microcopy is the small snippets of text that populate buttons, menus, calls to action, error messages. If you can't fit a sentence there, it's microcopy. Its smallness can give rise to the assumption that microcopy has less importance than its more complex friends, the sentences that make up Big Copy. How important is it really to decide between a button labeled 'OK' and one labeled 'Go'?
As with every kind of copy, we like to make it work hard - as your content, it's a part of your product, and that means it has to earn its place in the business. And the value microcopy can add far exceeds it size. Just have a look at this button, offering a free month's trial of a product.
Not bad - it's pretty clear what's on offer, using the minimum number of characters and therefore saving valuable screen 'real estate'. You've likely scrolled down a landing page before reaching this button, and there's not much more to be said about the product, if the content up there has done its job, so it's time for this neat little call to action. You may well click that button.
But now take a look at this one:
Four extra words, and they're even in a smaller font - but how much difference do they make to your decision to click? On the first example, you may not even have noticed their absence; but their inclusion can:
- give a sense of relief (yay, I didn't have to fill in my entire set of contact details before finding out there's a card needed)- build trust in the company (oh good, these people aren't trying to scam me)
- make the product look even better (this must be good if the have the confidence in it to give it to me free for a month)
- show that the company understands the customer's mindset (that's nice of these guys to let me know that - I'm always concerned about giving up my digits)
Four words! This is why we get excited about writing microcopy: we're always amazed afresh at just what can be achieved by the smallest possible number of characters. You can see why, to writers, that's some kind of awe-inspiring meta-challenge.
If you'd like to set the team at ITZO the challenge of creating your microcopy, we'd really like that; so just get in touch to get started.
