Tips for effective content writing

A look into what makes good copywriting for marketing

You may have come across the quote coined by Bill Gates, “content is king”, as it is very often used in discussions on the importance of content marketing and its impact on SEO. The essence of this quote is that unique, first-rate, compelling, and relevant content contributes meaningfully to your brand’s impact on the Internet.

Content is still king, and content marketing remains the queen, and the queen runs the show, as Gary Vaynerchuk reminded us with his quote. Essentially, a brand needs great content so that your content marketing can be effective; the two go hand-in-hand.

Understand your audience

 It all starts with knowing precisely whom you are creating the content for and ensuring that your content is relevant to that audience. You can organize this part of the process by creating customer personas for every persona, which should include several key details.

It may help to organize your information by assigning each buyer persona a name. You should also ensure that you include demographic details, interests, and behavioral charactertistics. You’ll need to build an understanding of their goals, pain points, and purchasing patterns.

Understanding your audience is the primary step in content marketing, and it is crucial for many parts of your business; how do you know what product to create if you do not yet understand your audience?

Do your research

In order to position your piece of content as an authoritative article, it is fundamental to build a broad knowledge of the matter you’re writing about; this is especially important with businesses operating in the B2B space.

Through research, you should understand what questions your target audience asks online. Or you can see what your competitors are writing about to identify gaps and opportunities. You should consult your sales team to see what questions your customers are asking and their current painpoints. You can then brainstorm a short list of ideas with your team.

Once you have conducted appropriate research, you are then in a position to determine what unique insights you can offer to your target audience. The content could be a guide or how-to piece, lessons learned from a particular experience, a product review, an analysis of a topic related to your target audience and brand, and many more options.

Plan the content

Now that you have generated your content ideas, the next step is to consider what type of content would best match your content marketing strategy. This is important to remember, as it’s not just about copywriting; it could be an infographic or short video, as different pieces of content can be more effective at various stages of the customer journey.

To support your idea generation and research, you can conduct some keyword research to help explore if your shortlisted idea contains a question that your target audience may be asking. There are many keyword tools to support this part of the process, such as Google Ad’s Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, etc. All these tools have different options, often depending on the price level; however, they all will you the data on which keywords related to your idea have the highest monthly search volume and how difficult it is to compete on these keywords.

You can bring your planning together into a content marketing plan, including the ideas you have generated, content type options, and keywords researched. This will help you formulate and structure your ideas before writing your content.

Structure your content

Your content should be clearly structured so that it can be easily consumed by your target audience, along with search engines. You should consider including the following elements in your article: an introduction, body text, and a conclusion.

The sequence in which you create your copy is your decision. For example, you could begin with the first paragraph, or you may find it makes sense to add your steps and key points before writing the introduction. However, whichever order you write your article, you will need to create a structure.

Make use of subheaders, bullet points, and numbered lists to organize the core elements of the article. Try adding media such as relevant images, infographics, and videos to liven up the content and illustrate key points. You can also bold text to highlight key points, keeping to a standard of only one bolded sentence per paragraph or several paragraphs.

Conclusion

The key with content marketing is to retain audiences’ attention, it is important to keep in mind that people consume a lot of information every day, so it is your job to help them by making your content interesting and easier to process than your competition.

Don’t forget the storytelling. Along with helping your audience empathize with your points – and understand your content – readable, structured content that contains good storytelling usually works well for both the search engines and people.

If you have any questions related to content writing, please feel free to contact us at info@relevantaudience.com for more information