Top Tips to Create Effective Content Writing
Your copy and content are vital elements of your overall marketing strategy, serving as an essential vehicle of communication to your audience to deliver messaging, sell them on your products or offerings as well as reflect your distinctive brand voice and identity. The right copy and content can also help optimize your site and web pages, generating traffic to your site, and help position your company as a leader within your industry.
As you have devised your own marketing materials and strategy, you probably have come across the concepts of copy vs content writing. In order to understand how to create powerful and effective content writing, you first need to understand what the purpose of content writing is. There is a common misconception that copy and content writing are the same thing, and while they are similar to each other in that they both are forms of written communication, they serve two different key roles.
We will be exploring the important role your content writing plays to your greater marketing operation and offer top tips on how to create stronger, more effective content writing that will not only resonate with your audience, but also drive traffic to your site to maximize your overall performance.
What is Content Writing and What is Its Purpose?
While copywriting is a form of writing that is used to directly sell or advertise your products, the main purpose of content writing is to offer information to your audience to demonstrate your knowledge, brand authority and expertise. Examples of content writing are blogs, articles, social media posts, newsletters, emails, and scripts for videos or podcasts.
Tips to Create Killer Content Writing
1. Know the Objective of Your Content
Before you write a piece of content it is important to understand what the purpose of that piece of content is and how it will serve you. Again, although content writing is not intended to directly promote your services or offerings, content writing serves a very integral purpose to your overall content strategy. Having a strong understanding of the piece of content’s main goal will help inform the strategy of how you write it as well as what marketing techniques you will employ to create it.
Maybe you are looking to create a piece of SEO-driven content to drive traffic to your site and enhance your presence in the SERPs. If so, you will want to make sure that the piece is utilizing key SEO strategies and techniques as well as includes highly searched, competitive and relevant keywords. Maybe, you are writing a blog to elevate your company’s thought leadership. You will therefore want to ensure that your content is contributing value to the conversation about the industry topic, perhaps reflecting your company’s unique and strong stance. You will also need to do extensive research to understand the conversations that are currently being discussed about the topic within your industry to determine what your company’s angle is and the story you are telling.
2. Write in Your Unique and Distinct Brand Voice
To ensure that all of your content pieces reflect a consistent brand voice, it is important to have a clear and deep understanding of your company’s brand identity. When you create a piece of content, one of your goals is for it to immediately be recognizable as well as belonging to your company or brand so your audience can easily distinguish your brand from another. Having a distinct brand voice helps your company stand out from the competition, as well as help you more strongly connect with your audience, as certain tones of voice and brand voices will resonate more deeply with certain types of audiences.
For instance, if you are a women’s cosmetics brand geared towards millennials, your content pieces will likely reflect a younger and more fun-loving tone of voice. Maybe, it would be common for you to even use millennial slang words in your content that will help you immediately connect with a younger crowd as those may be words your audience uses in their everyday conversation with their peers.
On the other hand, if you are a SaaS company who engineers technical solutions for your clients, you will obviously have a very different brand voice from a consumer-driven cosmetics brand. As a B2B company, in order to demonstrate your knowledge and value to your clients who are representing other businesses themselves, it will be important that your brand voice maintains a level of professionalism and gravitas to assert your thought leadership, while still helping you stand out from your competitors.
It is vital that your brand voice is consistent throughout all of your pieces of content. Therefore, make sure that all of your content writers are on the same page about your company’s brand identity, and that they have a clear understanding of who your target audience is, who your brand personas are as well as your brand’s messaging.
3. Use Strategies to Hook and Keep Your Audience’s Attention
Keep in mind the fast-paced, digital first world we live in when you create your content writing pieces. You don’t have too long to hook your audience’s attention, maybe only a few seconds for them to decide if your piece of content will offer them value or not. Therefore, you should be very strategic in how you write your piece of content to attract and maintain your audience’s attention. Make sure that the headline or title of your piece is written in a savvy way clearly stating what the content covers. Using engaging words such as “top”, “must-know”, or “why you should” as well as active words will capture the attention of your readers. Wording the headline in the form of a question may also help spark curiosity from your audience. Using numbers in your titles or headlines is a smart idea, helping to not only grab your audience’s attention, but it also may help your content rank better in the SERPs.
Remember, an effective piece of content writing is able to both hook your audience’s interest and then maintain it throughout the entirety of the piece. Think about how you should structure the piece of content, what H2s you should use to organize your discussion
to create an engaging and user-friendly experience for your readers that encourage them to continue reading and extend their session on your webpage.
4. Use CTAs and Hyperlinks to Your Advantage
Most pieces of content are not stand-alone, and serve their own role within a larger body of your content as well as your greater marketing strategy. You can use one piece of content writing to help you generate traffic to other pieces of content on your site as well as your main products or offerings, through the use of CTAs and hyperlinks. Using hyperlinks, you can easily link to other pieces of content such as articles or blogs to continue demonstrating value to your audience, encourage your readers to continue exploring your content as well as stay on their journey of discovery. Also, extending your audience’s session on your site by motivating them to navigate to other pieces of content looks good to Google, helping that piece rank higher in the SERPs as well as other pieces of content linked to it.
You can also use hyperlinks to also link to your direct products and offerings. For example, if you are a wellness company writing a piece on the benefits of a certain supplement, you can add a link to one of your web pages advertising that supplement in one of the sentences, encouraging your readers to click on that link and not only find out more about your products but possible convert into customers as well.
CTAs which stand for calls-to-action, are a very effective way of compelling your audience to take some form of action which helps maximize the results of your marketing efforts and possibly add to your bottom line. An example of a CTA could be something as simple as “learn more,” or a longer phrase such as “reach out to us today for an audit,”(like we often use) “Feel free to contact us for a consultation.”, etc.
Content writing is an integral part of your marketing operation, and without strong content, as well as effective content strategy, you could be missing out on vital opportunities to maximize your results. If you want to elevate your content writing game like never before, partner with us at Firon Marketing. Our expert copywriters are extremely skilled and passionate wordsmiths who will deliver spot-on messages that deeply resonate with your audience as well as make your products and offerings sing. Reach out to us today.
