Is your content feeling a little lacklustre? Are you not getting the proper engagement you want? Ace your approach to generating effective written material with this article.
We delve into content writing, exploring its importance, best practices, and techniques to create a compelling and impactful copy. Plus, aspiring writers, marketers, and business owners will find valuable insights to enhance their communication skills. Read on and get started!
The Significance of Content Writing
While today’s online world is fraught with endless messaging, ads and options, the need for unique, discoverable, compelling and carefully crafted material is more crucial than ever. Written content in today’s digital landscape is the core of successful marketing and branding.
Effective content writing can drive audience engagement, increase conversions, and build brand authority. All of which are the main pillars of a winning marketing game plan.
Here are the seven main approaches to tackling and executing galvanising content writing strategies.
1. Understanding Your Target Audience
First and foremost, you must know your audience to appeal to their interests and to talk to them. Audience research and persona development in content creation is a top priority.
We suggest identifying your audience’s pain points, preferences, and motivations to tailor content accordingly. To execute this seamlessly, evaluate your brand strategy to ensure you know your audience and how you speak to them.
2. Crafting Powerful Headlines and Introductions
Establishing attention-grabbing headlines and compelling introductions are the next steps in hooking readers. You need to address this clearly, efficiently and with enough of a tease to get them wanting more.
We summarised some techniques to captivate readers from Neil Patel’s headline writing guide:
- Incorporate numbers and data
- Include a rationale/reason as to why something needs to be done
- Spark attention by being unique, specific, urgent, and useful
- Apply emotions and adjectives, and address the reader
3. The Art of Storytelling
Your readers love a good story. By implementing storytelling techniques into your material, you can make your content more relatable and memorable. Captivating your readers starts with incorporating narratives, anecdotes, and emotional appeals – the basics of storytelling techniques.
Always be sure to feature the five components of a good story – premise, plot, prose, character and theme.
In marketing terms, these equate to – the circumstances, the experience/sequence of events, the language, the brand/product as a character/solution, and the takeaway/action you want the reader to use.
Invaluable features include case studies, reviews, visuals, and emotions. (Emotions come up a lot in tips for content. It’s the universal human element in all of us.)
4. Structuring Engaging Content
Allow readers to navigate your content easier by intuitively organising content and providing a logical structure. This means applying informative subheadings, bullet points, and concise paragraphs. (See how this blog post has utilised numbered sub-headings, lists and short paragraphs? Case in point.)
The more concise (to communicate information in as few words as possible) and precise (to communicate all required information) you are, the more readers can skim and scope out what they need.
Remember – online readers these days have short attention spans and limited time to stay on your page. Get them to where they need to be by allowing them to scroll to the piece of content they are interested in.
Need help with this process? Use our Content Marketing and Design Services to have a professional sort out the nitty-gritty.
5. Ensuring Readability and Clarity
As much as a novel approach is entertaining, content writing needs to be clear. You’ll save time and master conciseness, and your reader will appreciate it.
Have you searched for a recipe on a blog post? They are notorious for painfully long content scrolling to get to the ingredients and steps. Pro tip: don’t irritate readers. They will leave your site and go elsewhere.
Be readable and accessible, use active voice, and avoid jargon. This means being readable to all visitors – save the intense material for your white papers.
And while you are at it, proofread and edit for error-free and polished content. Need a second pair of eyes? We have a team that can edit for you.
6. Content Writing for SEO
For anybody who wants to have a well-performing online presence, your site and content will need to rank well. And by this, we mean using the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO).
What exactly is SEO? MailChimp succinctly describes this process used to optimise a website’s:
- Technical configuration
- Content relevance
- Link popularity
After applying SEO, your web pages become more easily findable, relevant, and popular for user search queries.
Furthermore, by incorporating relevant keywords, and meta tags, and optimising content for improved search engine visibility, your material will drastically improve just by tweaking a few elements in your content writing. From this, you can leverage your best organic content with your long-term strategy with some paid advertising. This seamlessly transitions your approach between the two spheres of media strategies (organic and paid), giving it better longevity and value (woo-hoo!)
What is an example of the above? Picture creating a fabulous blog post. It entices online readers, answers a question, provides stellar insight into a unique problem – and punts a product or service. You can use this piece of material as a topic in your organic social media or boost it in an ad, as a feature section in your newsletter, and ultimately use it to drive and gain leads. This is one of the many reasons why content writing is a great launch point for a sales funnel, which intertwines with copywriting.
7. Call-to-Action and Conversions
Last but not least, get your readers to do something! In marketing, we call this a ‘call-to-action’ (or CTA). By guiding readers towards desired actions, you give them clarity, and your material purpose, and ultimately improve your leads.
To create compelling CTAs that drive conversions and encourage reader engagement, use YAMM’s CTA guide which highlights:
- Clarity
- Action
- Urgency
- Relevance
- A showcase of the benefits
- Good design
Trial some A/B testing on your CTAs to gauge your users and readers’ preferences and what works best.
Content Writing to Communicate and Convert Readers
After applying the seven techniques above, your content writing will start achieving improved results. Want expert direction on creating your content and meeting your targets? Get in touch with our marketing team today.
