Writing great content that connects with your audience is central to effective digital marketing. But writing great content goes far beyond the rules of grammar and punctuation. Brilliant content should resonate with your target market, helping to guide them along the user journey and foster a relationship with your company. The best content is worth sharing, allowing a brand to start a conversation with those they want to connect with.
Ultimately, great content elevates your brand and helps generate a positive experience for your clients. But how do you write great content?
Here are some top content writing tips that apply to any content – be it a social media post, landing page, article, blog, or press release.
How to write amazing content
Understand your audience
Understanding your audience is key to writing amazing content. At Relevance, we carry out in-depth market analysis that pinpoints precisely who our client’s segment is and how we can best reach them. Once we have identified the audience, we can then create market personas. These market personas help us to establish common beliefs, goals, concerns, and patterns of behaviour amongst our client’s target market, enabling us to create hyper-targeted content. Remember, the key to writing great content is to create a connection between your brand and your audience.
Keep to one key message
If you want to write amazing content, avoid the common pitfall of veering off message. Before writing any content, decide what your key message is and the main points you want to make to support it. If you’ve got lots to say on a single topic, consider breaking it down into a series of articles or blogs – don’t try and include it all in one single piece. If you’re writing for digital, add anchor text throughout your copy linking to content related to the topic you are writing on. This is a great technique to keep visitors on your site and enhance search engine rankings.
Take your readers on a journey
Readers love a clear structure. Using the inverted pyramid format will help keep content structured and your audience engaged. Many people scan through copy – the layer cake pattern scanning and F shape pattern scanning are just two examples – reading just parts of the article they find most interesting. According to research carried out by Nielsen Norman Group, a research-based user-experience consulting firm, only 16 percent of people read word-by-word. Meaningful subheads, or H2s, can act as a road map through your content, guiding the reader and helping them better understand the key messages you want to convey. Ask yourself if you would read through this article without the subheads? Probably not.
Add an attention-grabbing headline
If you want to write amazing content it goes without saying that you need an attention-grabbing headline that marries with the subject of your article. Keep it short and to the point. If you’ve got a great piece of data, a unique product you are promoting, or a creative way to solve a problem, try and include this in the headline. Writing a deck (a series of bullet points) that sits immediately below a headline is also a great way to convey the key messages of your article in a quickly digestible format. Avoid clickbait headlines. They can be tempting to write but won’t attract a qualified audience.
Hook readers in with a clear opening sentence
Getting the first paragraph right is key to writing great content. You need to convey what the article is about in the first couple of sentences and hook readers in. Remember, most readers will judge the entire piece of content by the first couple of sentences and decide whether to continue reading or not. Before publishing any content, read only the first two sentences. If you don’t understand what the article is about from those first couple of sentences, then rewrite them.
Keep it simple
Too many people think that excellent writing needs to be fancy. It’s probably the biggest pitfall of writers just starting in the industry. Great writing is the opposite. The skill of a talented writer is conveying complex information in simple, easy to read sentences. There’s far more skill involved in writing an attention-grabbing strapline than there is in writing 2,000 words of waffle that fails to get your key message across or engage your audience. Keep copy concise and to the point. And on that note, in the majority of cases you will want to ensure articles are under 1,000 words. Very few people will keep reading beyond the 1,000-word mark. Finally, avoid the trap of using overused adjectives and meaningless phrases that instantly disengage the reader. Instead, build trust and rapport with the reader with tight copy backed up with facts.
Always have SEO in mind for digital
If you’re writing for digital, then you’ll also need to keep SEO in mind. At Relevance, all the content we write for our clients is underpinned by a thoroughly researched SEO strategy. But that doesn’t mean we stuff our articles with keywords. Good digital content writers know how to optimise for SEO to maximum effect without sacrificing brilliant copy.
Edit, then edit some more
Content filled with rambling sentences, poor grammar and typos is a sure-fire way to turn off readers. Whether you are tasked with editing your own work, or editing the work of another writer, edit as if you are being paid for every word you cut, and read through the final piece three times to ensure you are happy.
Don’t forget a snappy CTA
Unless you’re writing news articles, you’ll likely want the reader to do something once they’ve finished reading. This is where a great call to action comes in. Whether you want them to sign up to a newsletter, contact you to learn more about your services, or buy your product, a great call to action ensures your content has a purpose.
And, to back this point up……..
If you’re still unsure about how to write amazing content, or perhaps don’t have the time to craft compelling copy, then why not contact our team of expert writers?
At Relevance, our team of content writers craft brilliant copy that gets brands noticed. We find out what your target market wants to read about through our strategic audience insights and then write it. We pride ourselves on crafting brilliant copy that engages HNW and UHNWIs while boosting SEO. Our team of content experts can help with content audits, strategy, and creation. If you want to enhance your brand with attention-grabbing content, then contact us today.