Effective Content Marketing
Marketers need to be excellent writers or have content marketers on their team who are brilliant with words. Writing well is an invaluable skill and an asset to every business with marketing goals. Each piece of content your business crafts (even your social media posts) need to be written by a wordsmith. Achieve unrivalled results by writing for your audience, rather than writing for a search engine.
THERE’S MORE TO CONTENT MARKETING THAN JUST WRITING
Copy for a business needs to be clear, concise and compelling. The words need to be read with ease and encourage the reader to perform an action. The most important thing to remember is: Brainstorm. Before. You. Write
Awareness of users and user experience. When planning your piece, consider how much people know about your business by determining what stage they will be at when they see/read your writing. Are they well-informed or less informed? You will need to provide more in-depth writing if they have just discovered your brand. Vary your bait depending on the fish you aim to catch. Learn as much information as possible about the type of fish you are aiming to catch and use this to your advantage. Understanding people makes marketing far easier, trust us!
Take some time to think about the goals of the reader. Ensure your writing allows them to understand that your business can achieve their goals. If their goals are not aligned with your company, write in such a way which creates a common ground.
Think Psychology. You can make the audience of your copy feel special by using words based on the psychological impact they will have, such as ‘hand-picked’ or ‘randomly selected.’ Make your audience feel important. Using exclusivity to induce a certain response is a psychological tactic which has been used by marketers for years.
Analogies, similies and metaphors. Using these literary techniques adds value to the copy written. A message which doesn’t use compelling literary techniques will have little to no effect on the reader. Analogies, similies and metaphors help put the concept being explained in the copy into perspective by describing things in a descriptive and exciting way.
Rewriting! Your first draft of copy will always need shining by rewriting and amending it. Read and rewrite at least four times. It’s always worthwhile and beneficial to hone your copy. Checking for typos and grammatical errors is also an absolute necessity. There’s no shame in then asking somebody else to read your piece and editing it where needed.
Never write without including a Call-To-Action. This may be a button such as a buy now or click here, or it can be a sentence which compels the reader to carry out an action. A CTA combined with a compelling conclusion is a winning framework.
As technology and other fields become more and more advanced, it is becoming increasingly important to enlist a writer who specialises in your specialty. Brilliant content marketing is only achievable by trusting someone who has a great deal of experience in your niche. A piece can be well-written in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but it will not engage and convert its audience if it doesn’t relay subject knowledge.
Search Engine Optimisation understanding is, of course, crucial to your marketing. However, your writer should not write with SEO at the forefront of their minds. There is a tendency in this digital age to ruin good quality copy with forced content which is then received negatively and therefore repelled by readers and potential customers. Focussing on the reader will then allow SEO to take care of itself, engaging users will positively influence SEO.
THINK DIFFERENTLY
Ultimately, marketers need to start thinking differently because the digital world is saturated with oodles of irrelevant, meaningless and boring content. Copy needs to achieve the following in this exact order: attention, interest, desire, and action. If you would like more advice on attaining excellent copy for your audiences, then contact us today for an informal and free chat. IT’S FREE!