The Hyped Marketing team recently hosted a brilliant seminar-style event at the Aviator, Farnborough. Among other topics, our presentation explored why content creation is one of the most important things you can do for your business’ marketing strategy.
We’ve summarised everything our brilliant copywriter, Cecilie, went through at the event (and added a little more) below. Find out why developing your written content is crucial to your digital marketing strategy.
Give your writing a main role…
Copywriting (rather than copyrighting) has nothing at all to do with law and simply refers to any written promotional material. This written content can be printed or digital. From leaflets, brochures, magazines and whitepapers to blog articles, social media posts and eBooks — all of these are examples of copy.
There are five essential elements of copy which combine harmoniously to create beautiful writing.
1. Technical
Before you start trying to make your writing sound swanky by adding stylistic twists, it’s crucial to nail the basics of copy. While there are thousands of nit-picky copywriting rules (and some rules are made to be broken), you should never be publishing anything where there are blatant errors in your spelling, grammar or punctuation.
Ensuring you have the fundamental aspects correct means you can then focus more on crafting writing that is engaging and enjoyable. After all, we’re sure you want to take pride in your business and appear professional both on and offline — which is hard to do if you’re making sloppy errors. Keeping a close eye on the technical side of your writing also means you’ll avoid printing hundreds of copies of something only to spot a glaring typo when it’s too late. A costly mistake to make!
2. Tone of voice
The words you choose to use and the way you use them will create a certain “feeling” to your copy — also known as your “tone of voice”. It will be a combination of either funny or serious, casual or formal, cheeky or respectful, or enthusiastic or matter of fact. These dimensions will overlap and work together to create the tone of voice that is right for your business.
3. Audience
To ensure your message gets heard and remembered by the right people, you first need to know who those people are! While this may seem straightforward, it can be easy to lapse into the wrong style of writing when you forget who you’re talking to.
An effective way of establishing your target audience is to think of them as one individual and create a profile for them. Give your target reader a name, gender, age, job, marital status, interests and so on — then tailor your copy to suit them.
4. Format
As well as putting words on the page, you’ve got to consider what page they’re going to be on. If the content is being published online, it should be shorter and snappier to keep the reader interested. If you’re looking to pitch out content for PR purposes, you can afford to make the piece a bit lengthier — just stay clear of anything overtly “salesy” and focus on thought-led content instead!
5. Purpose
If you can’t think of a good reason for writing the copy, it’s probably not worth writing it. Whether you are informing the reader about a company update, convincing them to purchase your new products or simply wishing your followers a merry Christmas, it is vital to know the purpose of your copy. This will help steer your writing and make a massive difference to how effective it is.
…but don’t forget to fill the supporting parts!
If you’ve started implementing the five copy elements into your written content, you’re on the right track for marketing success.
However, no matter how good your writing is, it is never going to engage new customers or attract potential sales leads if it’s just a block of black text on a white background. Equally, nobody is going to find your fabulous content if you’ve not taken the time to perfect the SEO or shout about it on your social media channels.
What we’re trying to say is: you need the full marketing package.
Keen to know more? Get in touch now to learn about Hyped’s monthly marketing packages. And make sure you stay tuned for the next blog in our YBOL series — where we’ll be talking all about the power of PR…
