CONTENT WRITING
CONTENT WRITING
What Is Content Writing?
Content writing refers to creating content for online marketing purposes. With content, businesses can attract leads and foster positive connections with their audience, ultimately pushing them down the sales funnel. 87% of marketers use content to guide their prospects through different stages of the buyer journey. They leverage different content formats for each stage of the journey, from brand awareness to purchase decisions.
Since a myriad of companies are fighting for the same audience’s attention, they need high-quality, targeted content to cut through the clutter and reach potential customers.
Types of Content
Content writing encompasses many different forms of text-based content. Each type can serve a different purpose and promote the brand in a different way.
Here are the most common formats used:
·
Articles
·
Product descriptions (and related
content)
·
Website content
·
Email newsletters
·
Press releases
·
Ebooks
These different content formats can reach potential customers at different stages of the sales funnel, so their purpose is to move that individual further toward the end goal: closing the deal (or making a subsequent sale in the case of return customers).
Each of these content formats requires different talents from the writer, but there are also general rules applicable to all types of content.
Content Writing Basics
Before even choosing the topic to write about, it's essential to do the prep work. This is where content writing actually begins.
Research
Your content should reflect factual, research-based information. Companies that spread false or misleading information are vulnerable to backlash from both search engines and consumers.
According to Hill Holliday research, if a brand generated fake content about their services or products, 59% of consumers would stop buying that brand immediately. Conversely, 64% said they would be more likely to shop with that brand if they knew they were truthful about their business. Misleading content will ultimately lead to negative company and product reviews and once that occurs, a reduction in sales is a likely outcome.
Factual content, however, helps to establish your business as an authority in its field. In-depth research can guide your content creation process, preventing you from wasting your marketing dollars and losing your audience credibility.
Here is what you should research:
1. Business Goals
Think about the business goals you want to accomplish, and how you plan to use content to do this.
You
should understand:
·
What type of content format you need.
·
What style/tone you want your piece
written in.
·
What your goals are for each piece.
If, for example, you want to increase organic visits, the writer will likely focus on high-volume keywords that your site can rank for.
If you want to convert readers into leads, they might create more middle-funnel content designed to capture high-intent users, and ultimately send them to a relevant lead magnet like a downloadable template or a webinar.
Defined goals that include measurable results and detailed plans for reaching specific audiences are essential. Check out our Seven Steps to Creating a Complete Content Strategy Plan for more tips on goals, KPIs, and audiences.
2. Buyer Persona
As our guide to creating a buyer persona notes,a buyer persona is an abstract depiction of your ideal customer. It is founded upon qualitative and quantitative data from market/competitor research and existing customer profiles.
Image source: https://www.pinterest.ru/pin/327777679125490513/
Initially, marketers tend to give their buyer persona a name and a fictional avatar (photo), and then fill in the following details:
While data and online analytics tools can help you establish your customer personas, there are other methods for getting to know the most common traits exhibited by your customer base. To find them, consider:
·
Creating online customer surveys
·
Conducting customer interviews (by phone
or in person)
·
Talking to sales staff about their
customer impressions
·
Using form fields on your website to
request customer information (such as what products they may be interested in)
·
Mining social media for persona-related
information
Focusing on a specific person when creating content can guide the writer and designer towards using the right language and style – your message won’t get watered down from trying to address too many different needs.
Speaking of needs, it's also worth referring to search intent.
3. Search Intent
Users often have very different expectations when using search engines, and, in its guidelines, Google talks a lot about how to understand what users are looking for when using different queries. Providing exhaustive answers to user queries increases the chances of your content being rated as quality.
Search intent can be broken down into four distinct types:
·
Informational – the searcher is looking
for specific information on a topic.
·
Navigational – the searcher is looking
for a specific web page or site.
·
Commercial – the searcher is considering
a purchase and wants to investigate their options.
·
Transactional – the searcher wants to
purchase something.
To understand the search intent of your users, you need to look at the keywords that you target in your piece. We will talk about these in the next section.
4. Keyword Research and
SEO
For a business, it’s important to remember that, in today’s digital era, content writing is closely aligned with SEO copywriting. Google and other search engines play a vital role in sending organic traffic to websites, and they value quality content.
In order to ‘encourage’ Google to rank your business page highly in the search results, you need to offer content that is optimized and designed to render your business as relevant for keyword searches. If your business website is loaded with generic or scraped content, it could be penalized by Google and buried three, four, or more pages back in the search results.
SEO is important not only for ranking in search, but also for proper communication with clients. Therefore, you want to select topics and keywords with both of these things in mind. In this regard, content writing supports SEO and helps businesses communicate optimally with their customers to achieve their marketing goals.
You’ll want to conduct thorough keyword research for each topic you want to write about. Ideally, you should create a list of the most important and relevant keywords associated with your chosen topic. Then, you should prioritize the highest-value keywords by the keyword’s search volume, keyword difficulty, and average CPC.
You can also choose to create a semantic core. This makes sense if you are working not with one article, but in a complex way - with the whole site or a section of the site. Building a semantic core means collecting all keywords related to the resource's topic, clustering them, and optimizing all pages for groups of collected keywords.
Opt for keywords that are realistically attainable for your brand, based on the domain authority of your site in relation to keyword difficulty. Tools such as Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can help you get insightful data, enabling you to research the entire market by starting with a seed keyword.
The tool generates topic clusters, as well as lists of related terms and questions people search, which is perfect for creating a semantic core. In addition, you can rely on the ‘keyword difficulty’ metric; the lower it is for a keyword, the easier it will be for you to rank higher.
5. Content
Strategy
In order to effectively engage with your audience and outperform your competition’s marketing initiatives, it helps to construct a comprehensive content strategy plan. This plan refers to how you intend to manage your marketing content (i.e. where and when you plan to publish). Your content strategy should include:
·
Your content formats (i.e. social media
posts, articles, etc.)
·
The channels you will publish on (i.e.
your business website, social media networks, etc.)
·
How you will manage the content (who
will do the posting and manage the customer engagements)
·
Content construction (who will actually
do the writing? If outsourcing, what firm will you use?)
·
Content performance (who will analyze
how your content is performing and report back to you?)
A well-crafted plan provides a framework for creating and posting your content. Without one, your content campaign is likely to become disjointed and ineffective.
6. Topic Research
Take the time to carry out thorough topic research, so that you can come up with strong, strategic ideas for your content that will resonate with your audience and drive results.
When doing topic research, consider using the following tactics for idea generation:
·
Find your audience’s
biggest pain points. You can do this by
looking at online reviews, Google’s “most asked questions,” and Quora articles
that are related either to a general topic or your industry overall.
·
Run a survey on social
media. Ask your followers what they’d love to
read about, or what questions they may have.
·
Conduct a content gap
analysis. This looks at the keywords your
competitors are ranking for that you aren’t, and for the
keywords in which you are being outranked by your competitors. Our Keyword Gap tool can
help with this, identifying potential keywords you can use moving
forward.
·
Repurpose your
competitor’s content. See what’s performing well
for others, and look for ways that you can make your own piece more valuable and actionable,
ensuring that you provide the winning resource.
·
Use content ideation
tools for research. Look for the hottest and
potentially trending topics that you may be able to rank well for. Semrush Topic Research gives
writers and strategists a helping hand with content brainstorming, generating
cards on related subtopics and ideas that you can include in your content.
Talk
to other departments in your company. Content
creation is all about teamwork, and liaising with other relevant teams (such as
customer support, product managers, and commercial) helps ensure that your
content arouses interest from your target audience.
Now let’s get on to planning. What is the best general content planning advice?
Planning
Once you’re clear about your goals, topics, content formats, respective funnel stages, and marketing channels, you can work out your content calendar.
An editorial calendar is something that content specialists, marketers, and SEO gurus can’t do without, because it provides them with a clear view of their tasks:
·
It allows the team to develop quality
content in advance of publication time.
·
It enables staff in other departments to
be in the communication loop.
· It promotes posting consistency, which
ultimately leads to improved communication with your customer base.
We recommend drawing your content plan and calendar on an Excel sheet, detailing the following for each individual post:
·
The goals you have for the post
·
Marketing promotion channels
·
The chosen content type
·
The topic
·
Deadlines and publication dates
·
Task owners or other team members
involved in the process
To stay organized across multiple departments or with different clients, you could use an editorial calendar tool such as the Semrush Marketing Calendar. This streamlines the process of communication between team members during the creation, publication, promotion, and updating of content.
The tool also enables you to keep on top of both team tasks and deadlines, ensuring that each activity runs smoothly.
When creating a content calendar, consider the following questions to determine what your calendar should look like based on your team's needs:
·
How often do you publish content?
·
Do you publish more than one type of
content?
·
How many people need to access the
calendar?
·
How many content stages do you go
through prior to publishing?
·
What platform will you use for the
editorial content calendar?
Now, let’s move on to the general writing rules applicable to any type of content.
Writing
You’ll want to find a writer or a group of writers that can quickly and seamlessly integrate with your marketing team to develop content that’s on point with your brand and marketing goals.
Professional writers working in the marketing field know how to incorporate effective hooks, consistent tone of voice, and goal-oriented language designed to get results (i.e. increased sales).
Here are some tips that can help create content that wows your audience and, most importantly, convert them into leads:
·
Make sure all content
has a clear goal. Your content direction
starts with what you want to accomplish and who you need to reach to meet those
goals.
·
Think enticing
titles. You need to draw your audience into
reading your content; keep your titles short and sweet, but indicate the
benefit of your content.
·
Hook your readers from
the first line. Start your copy with some exciting
data, a one-sentence story, or a question. Make people hungry for the details
after reading the first line.
·
Make your copy
scannable. Most people skim read, so use
descriptive subheadings, bulleted lists, and white space between paragraphs to
ensure that the text is easily scannable.
·
Use visuals. Videos,
images, presentations, charts, infographics, and social media stories are
highly effective ways to communicate with your audience. For example,
during our recent research we
discovered that the majority of tweets we analyzed contained visuals, and 20%
of these contained infographics. “What is visual content marketing” is also the
11th most popular question people ask about content marketing on Google.
·
Be consistent. A
consistent brand voice and set of values across all your channels can help to
fuel audience connection, and make your brand recognizable.
·
Choose an interesting
angle. Millions of pieces of content are going
live every day, so what makes yours different? You need a fresh perspective
that hooks readers and makes you the leading authority on that topic.
·
Tell a story. Storytelling
is a way to inspire, motivate, and ultimately encourage your audience to act,
making it a highly valuable tool for facilitating interaction between your
consumers and your brand.
·
Use data. This
is an excellent way to add credibility to your words.
·
Repurpose old
content. You can find excellent topic
opportunities when repurposing content;
for example, a list-based article may work well as an infographic, or an old
blog post could be turned into a video for social media.
·
Use calls to action
(CTAs). Add a short, action-oriented phrase that
convinces your consumers to act in a particular way. The action must be easy
for the audience to carry out, such as buying your product or subscribing to a
newsletter, for example.
·
Modify the content type
according to your goals. Some forms of
content are better at reaching engagement and conversion goals than others. For
example, in email newsletters, the subject line is crucial. Meanwhile, for
product pages, things like visuals, testimonials, and detailed product
descriptions are paramount.
·
Keep an eye on the
metrics. Make sure that you are monitoring and
tracking important metrics. Content efficiency is mostly measured through
organic traffic (83%) and sessions/pageviews (70%). The next most popular
metrics are leads (66%), and conversion rate (53%).
·
Avoid spelling,
grammar, and punctuation errors. Don’t forget the
importance of grammar and spelling for readability and for creating trust; this
is just as crucial when it comes to creating great content
Comments