How to write marketing content like a professional
With the development of marketing science, traditional marketing methods have become less effective and impactful; Therefore, modern marketing methods have emerged, most notably writing marketing content, which is included in all campaigns and marketing ads. There is no advertisement without marketing content, but marketing content can be an alternative to advertising campaigns, and it brings much better results than direct advertising, by delivering content. In a natural way for the audience, to be credible and accepted by them.
Writing Content Marketing Like a Pro |
82% of marketers use marketing content effectively during 2021, a significant increase from the previous year, when the percentage was 70% in 2020, according to the annual global report on content marketing, and video outperformed blogs and infographics in the most prevalent types of marketing content writing, Whereas, blogs accounted for 86% of the marketing content published during 2019.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing refers to the process of planning, creating, distributing and disseminating content through various advertising and media channels, such as: social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, applications, press releases, print publications, etc.; This is to achieve multiple goals, such as: reaching your target audience, increasing brand awareness, increasing sales and gaining customer loyalty.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and publishing exclusive content that is valuable and relevant: to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, to drive them to take profitable actions. Instead of directly promoting your products or services, you provide content that is useful and relevant to the nature of your business and potential customers; To help them solve their problems.
The importance of writing content marketing
Marketing content writing depends on building a long-term strategy, and focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is relevant to them and their needs. Ultimately, when customers make the decision to buy, their loyalty is tied to you and your brand; So they will buy your product, receive your service and prefer it over competitors, according to the strong relationship you have established with them.
Unlike a one-time advertisement, marketing content shows that you care about your customers, and this is what the audience wants in light of the large number of advertising campaigns they are exposed to and the crowding of different channels in them, and your audience needs to feel your interest; So you get their attention in return. Attracting the attention of the target audience has become one of the most difficult tasks, but it is one of the main objectives of most marketing campaigns. In order to contribute to achieving the rest of your profit goals.
Benefits of writing content marketing
There are many benefits that marketing content provides over traditional advertising, and here are the most prominent of these benefits:
Providing valuable content
Customers often ignore, mute, or turn away from traditional ads whenever they are exposed to them, especially when they are interrupted by viewing and following their interests, while spending hours of their time pursuing content tailored to what they want or need, developing their relationship with the brand that offer this content, and they interact with their products constantly. So, writing valuable marketing content will attract customers to you.
Increase brand awareness
The primary motive for purchasing any product is to realize its value and need. Often times, people don't buy a product because they don't realize how much it is worth or how much they need it, or they don't understand how it works and how it will help them overcome one of their problems.
Marketing content can contribute to educating customers about the degree of their willingness to buy your product or receive your service, through articles, blogs, videos, infographic designs, and podcasts. To directly invite him to take this action.
It generates a feeling of gratitude and return the favor
When you provide your audience with continuous free content and provide them with real benefit, they will want to return the favor, i.e. they will want to buy something from you or take advantage of your paid services. Just as they benefited from what you gave them completely free of charge, they will be motivated to reciprocate you and help your project and brand, given the feeling of gratitude they have for you and your brand.
Attract clients for free
Unlike traditional ads that need to spend a lot of money to attract customers, you can win hundreds of customers by writing strategic marketing content to be published on your blog, such as: a series of educational and service articles related to what you offer. Which results in attracting continuous views, loyal customers, and a link to your blog, as the marketing content of high quality and great interest will bring you a long-term return.
Re-share content
When you provide marketing content that is related to the nature of your business and interests the audience and meets their needs, this will prompt them to re-share it and publish it among their friends. If you provide 10 pieces of content that attract their interest, they will publish it every time to share it. Whereas if you ask your audience to publish your website or share your activity page on social media, they might post it once, but no new or motive might make them share it again.
So think about what people share online and provide valuable content, the same customer can share your content for 10 consecutive weeks or more, depending on your ability to continue to engage their interest. Thus, you reach the audience of your customers easily and with their recommendations, the more likely you are to republish your content from the audience of your customers, and the probability of publishing the content multiplies with each post, which ultimately reflects on the spread of your activity.
Achieving marketing objectives
Most of the goals of advertising and marketing campaigns revolve around getting your message to the largest target audience that can be reached, where a large audience means that many people have received your message, and a target audience means that a large percentage of the audience are potential customers and are more likely to make a purchase. By developing personalized marketing content for your customers, some audience members will eventually become buyers.
Improves your visibility on search engines SEO
There are two main reasons to improve your visibility on search engines. The first is to provide high-quality, creative content on your website or your various social media pages, which increases traffic to your site and increases the likelihood of potential customers viewing and interacting with your content.
The second lies in the continuity of publishing periodically, as the increase in the number of website pages as a result of the continued publication of marketing content contributes to improving your visibility, as a result of search engines indexing the different content pages that you publish, if you publish weekly content, within one year the number of your website pages indexed increases to 52 page, which increases the reliability of your site and increases its ranking in searches, without spending a single dollar on ads appearing at the top of search results.
Increases audience reach
If you create a specific marketing content as a podcast file, when you extract a video from it and publish it on YouTube, and convert it into visual infographic designs that are easy to understand, you contribute to spreading your content more widely to your audience of different characteristics and interests. The content will reach YouTube fans, fans of designs, graphics and numbers, and original audiences of audio and podcast fans.
Types of marketing content
Anything you create that doesn't have a public selling message is a type of marketing content, and it can be broken down into the most common categories that you often use to create your content. Here are the most prominent of these categories:
1. Blogging
Blogging is one of the most powerful and prevalent types of marketing content in the past, and blogs allow you a lot of creativity in the presentation and presentation of topics, you can share different types of content within a single post, attach files, multimedia, and links to enhance the content, and you can add share buttons on networks Social communication, and open the door for comments and public discussions.
Blogging is an ideal option for small businesses with a tight budget, and their value increases when they focus on topics that interest the audience and meet their needs, answer their questions, reduce their fears, and provide them with the information they need. Don't talk about the features and how great your products are, but focus on the content your audience wants to see.
Blogs achieve the ultimate goal, when they keep a wide segment of the audience reading them periodically, to derive information from them and push them to share content, evaluate it positively and recommend it to others. And you can simply ask for help from your audience to help you set the agenda of the content and topics that you will publish, and Khamsat blog is one of the most prominent Arab blogs in providing articles related to many fields, such as marketing, programming, design, and others.
2. Infographic
An infographic design presents content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand format, by blending simple phrasing with short phrases, clear images, icons and digital data. So it is a great way to communicate content and information effectively, especially when you need to summarize an educational or specialized topic, or summarize a study or survey you conducted in brief points; So that all members of the public can understand and assimilate it.
It can be used to enhance written blogging content, or display as standalone content without any plugins on blogging and social media platforms. With the need to maintain the simplicity and clarity of the design, choose the appropriate graphics with the content and adjust the format to reach the final high-quality content, and the design is attractive to the eye and facilitates the movement between its information and data.
An example of an independent infographic is what the Fiverr blog published on pintrest about freelancing, where the whole topic is summarized in the design of the infographic and answers all questions, without the need to attach other text content. Another example of an infographic for a blog can be found in an article on how to use infographics in marketing. You can use infographic designers to quickly complete your project through Fiverr.
3. Podcasts
Professionally written podcasts contribute to increasing your brand awareness, especially in hard-to-penetrate markets, and also a way to show your brand personality in a different way. You can also adjust other factors related to it, such as the clip's tempo, duration, and presentation.
A high-quality podcast is complete when you carefully plan it and produces it with the right equipment and voice, and reaches your audience when it's distributed across your audience's most popular and listened podcast networks. You can also forward it on social networks, repost it in full or in episodes, or add it to a video and post it to YouTube; To further expand his audience.
And you can request various podcast services through Fiverr, from audio commentators, content creators, editors, sound engineers and others, to come up with the best podcast that expresses your activity.
4. Video
Statistics indicate that 96% of consumers prefer to learn about the product or service through video, and 79% are affected by their purchase decision after watching a video about the service or product, as marketing content through video enhances the percentage of customer conversions, improves the return on investment and helps you build relationships. with members of the audience.
Video content can cost a lot of money and take a long time to produce, but it generates massive consumer views and the most powerful impact among other types of marketing content. A well-crafted video shows a different side of your business, as it can better explain how something is done or how it works, answer customers' questions about your product through it and show hidden aspects that can influence their decision, and their realization of the importance of what you offer them.
You can use the video to provide service and educational content to your audience. If your activity is specialized in software, you can shoot videos of how to install some complex programs, how to protect your computer from viruses, and other ideas that attract the audience interested in the nature of your activity.
To complement your featured clip, it should include a clear and real title about its topic, with a simple paragraph about the contents of the video; To make it easier for audiences to navigate through video clips and get the information they need clearly. Then you start spreading your clip far and wide, from your website to your blog, social media pages, or email campaigns.
5. Social media content
With more than 4.48 billion users on social networks globally, providing customized marketing content for these platforms has become essential to keep pace with the development and communicate with your customers directly and more effectively without an intermediary, as social platforms offer a large and free space to express you for free.
So, it is wise to take advantage of it perfectly, to gain your audience and maintain their loyalty and interest in your activity and what you publish. If you provide advertising content most of the time, there is no strong reason for the audience to follow you after they finish receiving your product or service, but when you provide them with useful content and suitable for their characteristics away About direct sales messages, this will pay him to continue to follow, support and post about you.
It is not necessary to be on all social platforms, but you should be on the platforms where your target audience is located and focused. If your audience is teenagers, then Tik Tok will become an ideal option, but if your main audience is companies and business owners, here must You are on LinkedIn, and if your audience is general and includes multiple segments, your presence on Facebook is inevitable.
Marketing Content Writing Strategies
With the continuous development of marketing content and the expansion of its use, there are many strategies for writing marketing content, and no specific strategy is better than others, but you have to try in more than one way; To find the most appropriate strategy for your business, and the types of content that are appropriate for your business and that your customers prefer.
There is a quick strategy and its steps are simple, and it is called “three-dimensional content”, as it is based on three main steps, namely:
- Focus on the point of pain or problem your product or service is addressing.
- Use the most appropriate type of content for this problem.
- Finally, set the content you've created to reach people with this problem.
This strategy focuses on the person you are trying to reach, i.e. your target audience and who is interested in what you offer, as it is the person with the greatest interest and the ultimate goal that you seek to reach and influence. Realize that your content needs to meet the needs of people with the problem your product addresses, in order to achieve its goal.
These steps must be adapted to suit your audience and marketing goals, and whatever your business, you should always start with your audience, create content that fits that audience, and only then will the right people pay attention to you. Here is another strategy for writing marketing content with more detailed steps, that you can try and choose the most appropriate for your activity, and its steps are as follows:
First, set SMART goals
You should set SMART goals when writing marketing content for your business, and they must align with your marketing goals and the company’s goals more broadly. To set an SMART goal, it must be specific, measurable, achievable, timely and specific.
Among the goals that you can set while writing marketing content:
- Improve brand awareness.
- Increase revenue.
- Increase conversions from potential customers.
- Improve brand loyalty.
- Attract strategic partners.
- Second: Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
According to the goals you set in advance, define the KPIs for your goals, which are specific measurable points by which you can measure your actual performance against the goals you set, did you achieve the goals in full, or exceed them, or only achieved half of them, or did you achieve nothing Of which.
Third: Determine the type of marketing content
Choose the type of content that you will create in order to achieve your goals. You have to start thinking about your target audience and identify the ideal customer, and segment your audience into different segments according to its different characteristics; So that you address each segment with the most appropriate content for it.
And you need to answer some questions to know your target audience more deeply, and choose the most appropriate content for them, such as: What do they need from you? And what challenges do they want to overcome? And why do they need your product or service? And how can you help them succeed and overcome challenges? And where do they spend their time? And what are their interests?
After answering the above questions, take a look at the different types of content marketing we mentioned; To determine the types of marketing content that you will create that you expect to achieve your goals.
Fourth: Choose the appropriate channels for your content
Once you have decided on the type of content you will be marketing, this is the perfect time to choose the most appropriate medium or platform to publish your content. If you create a video, your primary channel will be YouTube, then you can expand by sharing the video again on different social platforms, on your website and your blog.
Fifth: Determine the budget
Now, you have to determine the budget that you need to complete content creation, publishing and marketing, so think about the type of content you have chosen and the channels on which it will be published, and select the programs or tools you need to create content, such as: subscribing to design or montage programs or buying a high-quality camera, and other The tools you may need.
Determine the people who will create the content, are they company employees, or do you need to request voice over, writing, editing and design services from Fiverr, and do you need to subscribe to specific tools or resources to improve content or measure results later, and identify the essentials and what can be dispensed with and replaced with fewer resources cost; Do not even find that the required budget is endlessly increasing.
Sixth: Create and publish content
Create and distribute your content so that members of your audience can benefit from it and enjoy it. Audiences may share your content with their peers and result in more conversions in actual customers, or you get ratings and recommendations from existing customers.
You can customize content on a monthly or weekly basis and schedule it on social media platforms at fixed dates, so that your content continues to spread and continuity, with the need to pay attention to the results it achieves, moment by moment, while continuing to interact with the audience and communicate with them, and put their comments and opinions among your interests.
Seventh: Analyze the results
Finally, analyze your results so that you can make any necessary changes to enhance your and your team's content marketing efforts; In order to reach more audience. Look at your goals and your KPIs, to determine how successful your content marketing strategy is. Did you achieve your goals according to your KPIs? Were you about to reach it? Or are you far from it?
You can follow some simple tips outlined by the Content Marketing Institute while developing your content marketing writing strategy, including:
1. Keep the audience in mind, and understand your customers and your audience's expectations. Once you do, you can create content that solves their problems and helps your business thrive.
2. Don't get distracted by endless content formats, standardize your content format; Become one person and connected and your audience realizes that your content belongs to you before they even catch a glimpse of your brand name or logo.
3. Use the type of content and channel that is appropriate for your goals and audience, and do not waste your effort and money in useless means for the purpose of covering all types of content, and appearing in all means.
Marketing content writing tools
There are many free and paid tools that help you follow high-quality marketing content, and here are the top 6 tools you may need:
1. Google Docs
Google Docs is used to plan and prepare for writing marketing content. It is a free tool. It is the place where all the work is carried out before the final presentation. It is suitable for editing and collaboration between writers to come up with the best texts, and ideas that will be used later in the marketing content.
It provides a pleasant and smooth user experience, gives you access to edit for specific people, and view their feedback using suggestions, comments, and responses. It also makes it easy to upload Google Docs directly to different content management systems, and easy to share across different platforms.
2. Grammarly
One of the important tools for writing in English in particular, writing that contains spelling and grammatical errors may negatively affect the audience’s interaction with you, so you can use the Grammarly tool to review and evaluate the content you write linguistically and grammatically, as well as give you an impression about the nature of the content you wrote, and whether it is official or Written in a friendly or semi-formal manner.
The tool works across multiple means of communication, from e-mail to various documents to social media. You can install the tool on the Google Chrome browser, and you will be able to use it on any text you write, and enjoy the various advantages of the tool, as the tool protects you from being embarrassed by the public or losing confidence. your. The tool includes a large portion for free, as well as a set of additional paid features.
In the Arabic language, there are tools that provide the same benefit, such as the Sahahi tool, which you can install on the Google Chrome browser, and is characterized by simplicity and smooth use, as you add the text you want to check, and provide you with a full audit with identification of language and spelling errors, and common errors found in Text.
3. Adobe Photoshop
The program for editing and modifying images is the most famous at all, and it is characterized by its professionalism and the independence of the designs that are created through it. Precise adjustments are required, and Photoshop also overcomes the shortcomings of most non-professional programs.
Adobe also offers a wide range of other editing programs that you may need when creating marketing content, such as: InDesign to create designs for magazines, newspapers, desktop publishing and most of the printed and published media even online, and Illustrator for logo and character designs, and others.
And advanced video editing programs, such as Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere, which offer a wide range of video editing tools for professional editing, and Adobe Audition, which specializes in editing various audio clips and podcasts. If you enter the world of writing marketing content, you will use an Adobe software to make your work easier at least once.
4. Google Sheets
Google Sheets helps you plan your marketing content, as it is divided into vertical and horizontal cells, making it easier to place different links and relationships, and clarifying the timing of publishing. As it is an organized tool, you can make plans and present them to your team, and it is easy for you to add your team members, modify and make suggestions for improving the plan.
It is also an ideal tool in tracking the customer's journey with the appropriate content and tools and through the channels on which it is located. Spreadsheets can also be used to collect customer data, and retarget them again with paid advertising campaigns through various social media platforms.
5. Google Analytics
As we have previously explained the importance of measuring and evaluating results in developing content and achieving goals, you should use at least one of these tools, and Google Analytics is one of the best of these free tools, as it is easy to use, obtain information and data and filter it, as it tells you how visitors access to Your website, and provides accurate tracking of user movement and behavior on it.
It also provides a set of tips to improve performance and develop it later, to provide a better and smoother user experience, and to keep the audience's interest within the site for as long as possible. It also offers a wide range of advanced options that the software expert can benefit from, so that the marketing specialist and the programming specialist can collaborate together to improve the user experience, and improve the appearance of the website.
finally
Remember that educating customers about your products and services is far more important than directly inviting them to buy, and may ultimately result in increased customer conversions. So, start building a strong relationship between your customers and your activity, to increase loyalty and trust, give them messages that they want to hear and complete, and stop creating annoying ads that interrupt their interests, but you write marketing content as one of their main interests.
Finally, you can use experts in writing marketing content of all kinds and in various fields through Khamsat, the largest Arab market for buying and selling mini-services, to provide you with high-quality marketing content, and you can also use training and consulting experts, to improve the level of your services, evaluate your marketing content, and train you on some content writing skills catalog; To plan and create your own content.