Techniques To Mastering Content Writing For All Kind Of Industry (Business)
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.
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 returning customers).
Content Writing Basics
1. Reflect factual, research-based information.
Companies that spread false or misleading information are vulnerable to backlash from both search engines and consumers. Misleading content will ultimately lead to negative reviews and once that occurs, a reduction in sales is a likely outcome.
2. Think about the business goals you want to accomplish.
You should understand:
What type of content format do you need?
What are your goals for each piece?
What style/tone do you want your piece written in?
For example:
If you want to increase organic visits, focus on high-volume keywords that your site can rank for.
If you want to convert readers into leads, 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.
3. Keep in mind your buyer persona.
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.
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.
Give your buyer persona a name and a fictional avatar or photo, and fill in the following details:
Demographics
Professional status
Psychographics
Pain points and challenges
Influences and informational sources
Purchasing process
Other things you can do to learn the most common traits of your customer base:
Create online customer surveys
Conduct customer interviews (by phone or in person)
Mine social media for persona-related information.
Talk to sales staff about their customer impressions
Use form fields on your website to request customer information (such as what products they may be interested in)
4. Understand your users’ search intent.
Search intent is what users are trying to accomplish, and what they expect to see when typing or voicing a query. The content format you choose, the message you convey and the call to action you leave should depend on the search intent.
Search intent can be broken down into four 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:
Informational – ‘guide’, ‘tutorial’, question words, such as ‘what’, ‘how’, or lists with ‘top’, ‘best’, ‘checklist’ in the title (e.g. ‘best music festivals 2022’).
Navigational – the name of a brand, product, or service (e.g. ‘ultra music festival’).
Commercial – product modifiers like ‘cheapest’, ‘review’, ‘comparison’ (e.g. ‘ultra music festival reviews’).
Transactional – ‘buy’, ‘price’, ‘coupon’, etc. (e.g. ‘ultra music festival tickets’).
5. Optimize your content for ranking in search results.
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.
You’ll want to conduct thorough keyword research for each topic you want to write about:
Create a list of the most important and relevant keywords associated with your chosen topic.
Prioritize the highest-value keywords by the keyword’s search volume, keyword difficulty, and average CPC.
Opt for keywords that are realistically attainable for your brand, based on the domain authority of your site in relation to keyword difficulty.
Note: Ideally, you should create a semantic core. This makes sense if you are working not with one article, but in a more complex way, such as 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.
6. Construct a comprehensive content strategy plan.
A comprehensive content strategy plan refers to how you intend to manage your marketing content, and helps to effectively engage with your audience and outperform your competition’s marketing initiatives.
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.
7. Carry out thorough topic research.
You need thorough topic research to 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:
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, identifying potential keywords you can use moving forward.
Repurpose your competitors’ 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, 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 the interest of your target audience.
8. 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 promotes posting consistency, which ultimately leads to improved communication with your customer base.
It enables staff in other departments to be in the communication loop.
It allows the team to develop quality content in advance of publication time.
Draw your content calendar, 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
Consider these questions to determine what your calendar should look like:
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?
Try the Marketing Calendar Tool/CRM to streamline the process of communication between team members during the creation, publication, promotion, and updating of content.
Tips for Content Writers
Let’s start with some general tips that can help create content that wows your audience and converts 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Make sure you’re explaining your methods and linking to reliable resources.
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.
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%).
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.
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.
Depending on your goals, you may need different types of content. Therefore, let’s take a closer look at the specifics of writing each of the content types.
How to Write Different Types of Content
Articles
Over 92% of marketers stated that blog posts were the main type of content marketing they produced. Blogging, if done diligently and consistently, can be a fantastic way of driving more traffic to a website and boosting brand authority.
Here are some tips to ensure you create an SEO-friendly article:
Check use of keywords.
Use keywords effectively in the text, H1 header, meta title, meta description, and subheadings.
Make sure the title is perfectly optimized.
You want the title to be enticing and offer the reader information that they need, while also meeting search engine requirements.
Check the optimization of the meta description.
Explain the benefits of your article and make it unique. You can check the suitability and effectiveness of your titles and meta descriptions with the help of On Page SEO Checker Tool or Site Audit.
Make sure the introduction is magnetic.
Get people “hooked” in the introduction by addressing their feelings, telling them what they will gain (what questions will be answered, how the content will help them), making it entertaining, and demonstrating your company’s core values.
Make sure the copy is easily read.
Readable copy will have a good H2, H3, and H4 structure, skimmable headlines that inform without reading, clear and informative paragraphs, bullet points, and numbered lists.
Check the links to relevant on-site and off-site resources.
Link to reliable external content to build trust around your copy, and to internal content that guides users through their customer journey.
Try using SEO Writing Assistant Platform, which analyzes your target keywords and suggests how to make your copy more readable and SEO-friendly in real time.
Product Content
In the eCommerce business, well-written product descriptions are the key to convincing the reader that your product offers real value to them in a way that resonates.
Here are four tips to help you write effective product descriptions:
Cater to buyer personas.
Use data, market trends, customer profiles, and similar information to understand your ideal customer, and use suitable types of humor, relatable references, and the right tone of voice.
Employ meaningful, technically proficient writing.
Resist the temptation to write that your product is “very”, “really”, or “especially”, or that it has “excellent quality” and offers “great value”.
Provide value to the customer.
Aim to embody the values and goals of your target audience in the description, and instead of describing the product’s features, focus on the value it creates for your customers.
Know SEO Basics.
Use keywords naturally in the body text (as well as the metadata and title), avoid sentences over 20 words, and use interlinks.
Website Content
Your website is at the core of your content, as it includes all the essential information your business must promote to build its presence online. Website copy encompasses a range of content, including your:
Home page
Landing page (services and products)
FAQ/Q&A
Contact us page
About us page
Here are some of top writing tips to help you motivate users to take an action (such as making a purchase, subscribing to your blog, or joining your mailing list):
Help readers navigate.
Help readers who are not familiar with your brand by adding links to what you offer, and explaining what they may gain from interacting with you.
Demonstrate proof that the CTA is worth it.
Back up any statements you have made about your products or services with success stories, original research data, customer testimonials, a relevant expert’s biography, or partnerships.
Talk to readers as you would to a friend.
Use direct addressing (“you,” “I,” and “we”) and sentence structure (“You can order our services” instead of “Our services can be ordered”) to sound less formal.
Talk in layman’s terms.
Replace professional terminology with simpler alternatives, and explain what you offer in simple words.
Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are important for retargeting customers and maintaining engagement with your company’s base. According to the Content Marketing Trends Research, marketers who want to keep pace with the modern world are looking to customization and personalization.
Here are some tips for writing effective emails:
Hook the reader with the title.
Your subject line should be catchy. It’s great if you can add humor, but make sure the headline is clear. The user must understand what the email is about.
Write about the potential benefit to users, not about your business.
Opt for language like “you can get” over “we offer”, and think about how the user will benefit if they take the action you are asking them to. For example, if you sell multi cookers, then the user benefit is not purchasing the product, but having more free time for other tasks.
Be clear about what you are proposing.
This applies to both text and visual design. The CTA button should be the brightest and most attractive element on the page, and the text should state the main idea from the first or second paragraph. Remember that you don’t have much time to get the reader’s attention, so try to be brief.
Press Releases
Writing a press release is the first step towards attracting media attention, and encouraging them to write a story about your product, service, or event.
For the text to be effective, here are the questions you need to answer clearly:
Who or what is it about?
Where did it take place/is it taking place?
Why does it matter?
What is happening/has happened?
When did it happen/will it be happening?
There are also some tips that you’ll want to consider:
Have a word count in mind
Most press releases are between 300 and 600 words in length. There’s not really a right or wrong answer to “how long should a press release be?” but in general, shorter is better. Some smaller news outlets do share press releases in near-unadulterated form. Bigger news publications don’t tend to do this. So, keep your press release short and simple.
Add seasonality
Another good example of a hook is a seasonal event or a “National Day of” something. No matter what it is you sell or produce, there’s most likely a day associated with it. If you run a dog sitting service, you might find talking about National Dogsin Politics Day (September 23rd) useful. Browse the National/International Day Calendar and make a list of little-known days that you can use to attract attention to your business.
Include your contact details.
Be sure to include a bit about yourself at the end of the press release, along with some contact details and a note explaining that you’re available for interviews or to answer more questions. Make sure you really are available to respond to queries, as journalists are often working to tight lead times. This is particularly true for online journalists, who may be expected to turn around ‘hot topic’ stories rapidly. Being responsive makes the journalist’s job easier, and means they’ll think positively of you and be more likely to use you in the future as an expert, or when they have some space to fill on a tight deadline.
Ebooks
There are many goals that you may want to achieve by writing an ebook, such as establishing yourself as an industry expert, moving potential customers down the sales funnel, or educating readers on your brand or product.
Here’s what you need to know about the different tactics of writing an ebook:
Choose the topic very carefully.
It’s better to spend time researching the right topic than to waste months writing content that no one will read.
Attract readers with a captivating title.
Choose the final title only after writing the body to make sure that it is relevant to what you promise to explore. Make it specific, credible, and show the problem your readers will be able to solve.
Help readers navigate with a table of contents.
Add a table of contents to present the ebook structure, and allow the reader to quickly access its specific parts.
Back up your words with data.
Increase your ebook’s credibility by explaining your methods and linking to credible resources.
Provide actionable content.
Ensure that you provide checklists, actionable tips, infographics, how-to guides, or any other practical tools that support your text.
Capture the attention of readers with images.
If you are unsure where to place your visual, place it at the top of the text above the header. Images placed below the header (and before the text) make information harder to perceive. You can use images on either side of your text if they are of the same height as the text block. If you are using your own original photos, make sure they are properly edited to maximize color and clarity.
Where possible, maintain a page hierarchy.
Images will always be noticed first, followed by your headings, and, finally, the body of the text. Therefore, your images should always serve a purpose by reinforcing and emphasizing your message. For lists, use increased line spacing between your bullet points.
Edit, edit, and then edit again.
Of course, when you are working with longer-form text, such as an ebook, it’s a lot easier to make mistakes and lose sight of the overall picture. This is why you should secure the services of a professional editor or, at the very least, get trusted colleagues or friends to go over the text with a fine-tooth comb.
Bringing your ‘A’ game to content development means tackling each stage of content creation: research, planning, and writing. By carefully considering how you can best optimize your content performance, you will be able to target your audience in a far more efficient way.
