Honing your writing skills is one thing; honing your writing skills for marketing purposes is another. Although basic writing principles still apply, there are some marketing-specific techniques you should implement.
The first, and possibly most important thing you should remember is that you’re not writing for yourself, but for a specific, targeted audience. Which is why before you even start writing, you need to find out who and where that audience is.
Before putting pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—create consumer profiles. First determine the age, gender, and industry of your audience. Next, figure out where they spend their time on the Internet, when they’re there, and what type of content they’re consuming. This will give you a great idea of what type of content you need to create.
After you get to know your audience and create your consumer profiles, it’s time to start the actual content writing.
Writing Basics
As I mentioned earlier, writing basics still apply to content writing for marketing purposes. Here are two of the most important things you should keep in mind as you start the writing process.
- Tone of Voice: Find and define your voice and then use it to your advantage. Talk to your audience in a way that stays true to your brand. Be authentic and consistent.
- Style: Be professional yet informal and make sure your content is free of both spelling and grammatical errors. You shouldn’t just be writing content, you should be diligently editing it as well.
Writing for Marketing Basics
Make sure your content isn’t flowery, but effective. You want it to communicate with and elicit a response from your audience.
- The first thing you want to do is hook your readers—make sure they know why they should bother reading your content. After all, you only have 10 seconds to convince readers to stay on your site.
- Ensure that right off the bat, and throughout your piece of content, you are providing value to your audience.
- Don’t use business jargon or complex language specific to your industry or product. Instead, be conversational, and explain terms your readers may not be familiar with.
- Give your readers factual information as quickly and easily as possible. Don’t distract them with irrelevant information; keep them engaged.
- Make sure you are implementing SEO basics including keyword or key phrase focus, headline optimization, incorporating external and internal links, heading tag usage, optimal content length, and use of visuals.
- Break up your content into visually appealing, easily digestible blocks. Group similar text under different headings, keep paragraphs two to three sentences long, and incorporate subheadings and bulleted and numbered lists.
- Make sure that throughout your content, and especially in your conclusion, you clearly lay out what you want your readers to do once they’re done reading. First, identify whether you want them to click a link, sign up for a newsletter, download an eBook, etc. Next, communicate that with your readers, and lastly, make it easy to do.
Whether you’re writing a blog post, white paper, or eBook, both these writing and writing for marketing basics will prove to be effective and easy to implement. Once you’ve identified your audience, your purpose for writing, and your voice, writing content will become less of a headache and a more enjoyable undertaking.
