Convincing your market
| August 17, 2011 | Filled under Copywriting |
Whether you are a freelance copyrighter, like me, or a corporate copywriter employed within a business, it’s often a challenge to get the business executives in your market to see where the value of content creation lies. This topic came up recently in a LinkedIn online forum, reminding me to reflect on this issue in a little more depth.
Business competition is fierce in this age of digital communication, and consumers are expecting more from their interactions—both online and off. In this context it’s crucial that business leaders recognise the role that copywriting plays across their marketing and public relations efforts, and how it could improve their bottom line over time.
The first step is to help them realise that dedicated copywriting skills and strategies are relevant to business in so many areas—from improving SEO (e.g. understanding and building in keywords), to positioning a company as a leader in its field or region (e.g. ghost-writing blogs and articles), to strengthening customer relationships and encouraging brand loyalty (e.g. creating relevant, targeted marketing material).
What really underlines the importance of strategic, skilled content creation across a range of applications is that fact that it’s no longer enough to push messages—you know, stating in the grandest terms possible that your products and services are the best. Instead businesses need to pull their audiences in, and this requires communication with a lot more finesse. More than that, it requires skilled storytelling. Why? Because to pull audiences in businesses need to make them care about their products and services. This is where copywriters and copy strategy can add incredible value—hooking audiences to turn them from readers into buyers.
To get business leaders to understand these connections—and hence the value of your copywriting—don’t just highlight what isn’t working in their current copy be it website, promotional or marketing material, help them see that content creation is an opportunity to increase revenue, industry standing and brand loyalty. Show them how a good copywriter can turn brand messaging or campaign objectives into compelling content that feeds into their overall marketing and/or public relations strategies.
Thanks for this very interesting post Sammie!
Thank you, Tom, for inspiring it
Agreed! Its a constant challenge. From a web perspective many staff think- oh its on the web, tick off, job done. But its getting them to ‘care’ about their content, to constantly nurture it throughout its lifecycle on all the online channels. And getting them to recognise the skill and time it takes to make great content.