How to create effective marketing content
Maintaining a comprehensive and considered content strategy is still enormously beneficial for every business keen to boost their approach to digital marketing services in an ever-shifting digital marketplace. However, it is essential that you feel both proud of the content you create and confident in its ability to engage your audience and drive results.
From writing engaging Twitter threads and mastering your Instagram copy, to perfecting your email marketing approach and creating informative blog posts, every component of your content strategy can benefit from keeping the following 4 points in mind.
Good content needs time
Writing concise, informative and valuable content that is fully optimised is a skill that requires both care and time to develop. In business, time is always at a premium, but rushed writing will always result in poor quality content that is littered with wholly avoidable errors. Maintaining error-free content is key to sustaining your position as a trusted authority within your field, and cutting corners here can very quickly damage your reputation.
While developing and implementing solid content strategies can be time-consuming, putting in the work here will help you to plan your time effectively and allow you to dedicate the appropriate amount of time to each piece of content, to shape it into something that provides genuine value and effectively conveys your authority.
Writing with your specific target audience in mind is crucial
To create engaging and genuinely interesting content, you first need to know what your audience wants and needs from you. It can sometimes be tempting to include wandering sentences that sound intriguing, humorous or poetic, but the very best marketing content consistently maintains a laser focus on delivering value for a specific audience.
Audiences simply do not want to wade through superfluous sentences, but equally, this doesn’t mean that you can’t be at all creative with your copy. It is imperative to consistently question whether your choice of words is genuinely beneficial for your audience and if it isn’t, it will be worth thinking about rephrasing it or omitting it from your copy entirely.
Go easy on the exclamation marks!
Punctuation is an excellent way to communicate tone, but overusing exclamation marks often just looks messy and detracts reader attention from the purpose of your content.
If you want to sound enthusiastic or stress a particular point, it is important to focus on your choice of words and the structure of your sentences first, without immediately reaching for the exclamation marks to try and make your content look and sound more fun or exciting. Using exclamation marks only when they are absolutely necessary is actually far more effective anyway.
Maintaining clarity throughout is key
It is incredibly easy to ramble, aimlessly wandering from topic to topic before eventually arriving at the point you were intending to make all along. Writing concise content is difficult, but it is important to consistently remind yourself that you aren’t writing an epic fantasy novel or a Victorian classic.
If it is possible to convey your point in fewer words, always make the necessary edits before hitting the publish button. Thoroughly editing every piece of content from start to finish will also begin to make you a more effective writer, ultimately helping you to streamline your writing process in time.