When a marketing agency writes content on your behalf, how do they do this? After all, if people who have worked for your company for X number of years struggle to create content around your business, how will an agency employee who barely knows you? When an agency writes your content a lot of research goes into ensuring it is relevant and effective for their marketing efforts. However, the core point is that your marketing content is written for your customers, rather than for your business. Everything starts by understanding your customer, and this is an area in which marketing agencies shine.
Let’s look at some of the strategies marketing agencies use to ensure your content is accurate, authentic, relevant, and effective:
Getting To Know Your Business
Quality content starts with a thorough understanding of your business: what it does and how it goes about it. Your business background is important because it helps engender trust and proves experience. However, the important factor is the service and the value it provides. When working with a new customer we want to learn as much as possible about what the business does and how this works in practice.
This includes understanding your sales process, how you provide information to your customers, and what happens after a sale is made – e.g. after-sales care and service delivery. Our writers create content as you, so as far as possible our goal is to be able to look at the world through your eyes.
Understanding Your Industry
Understanding your company leads to extensive research on the market you operate in. We might conduct research on your competitors – including the services they offer and how they differ to yours. We’ll get ourselves up to speed on the events affecting your industry, whether nationally – such as Brexit - or specific to your sector. Trends, important events and any buzz around new products are all important factors when setting the tone of voice for your content.
Our goal is to adopt the language and terminology that your prospects use without even thinking about it, bearing in mind that many of them will have decades of experience in the industry! It’s easy to get content almost right, but this isn’t enough in marketing. It is why you will hear us ask questions about the right terms for certain processes, and what things are called in the UK. (Sometimes important terms vary from country to country). The end result is authenticity: content that believably comes from an expert in your field.
The quickest way to get this insight is by talking to you, in person, or over the phone. Other sources include respected industry journals, news sites, professional associations, and blogs. We will ask for links to content you respect and like the sound of, and, conversely, examples of poor quality or inaccurate content.
Your Ideal Customer – Developing ‘Buyer Personas’
One of the first jobs of a marketing agency is to help clients create buyer personas. Each buyer persona is a fictional ‘person’ with a name, job title, gender, career history and everything that goes with it – just like in the real world. The purpose of a buyer persona is to provide a blueprint for marketing content – something to draw on when answering questions appropriate to your genuine prospects and customers. Your buyer persona documents are powerful tools when countering objections and putting forward persuasive arguments for your services.
Your Tone Of Voice
Your tone of voice includes the style of writing, such as the words and language you use, and also the style in which you like to talk about your business. Your content needs to express your USPs, your core marketing messages, your ethos, and your expertise. This should come across in the written word as if you were sitting in front of the prospect yourself. The tone of voice that comes across in your content may not be the spoken style you would use personally, because the object of your content is your customer. This may be a person very different from you. The best content achieves a convincing synthesis of styles.
Keeping In Touch
Your industry changes all the time, so a good agency will have regular contact with you to focus on recent news and particular subjects. This helps us keep your content relevant to what’s affecting your customers here and now. We also do our own research and suggest topics you may wish to cover. You can gain a lot of insight into customer motivations and concerns through keyword research (i.e. the queries that prospects type into Google).
Optimising Your Content
An agency that writes your content is there to be led by you, but also to provide expert guidance. What separates great general writing from great marketing writing, is that marketing content is optimised for a specific purpose. Content will go to waste unless it is clearly visible in the search engine results pages, so we optimise it with the right keywords and structure to give it the best chance of being found online. The process of targeting and optimising content is the heart of search engine optimisation, and is how you increase web traffic for search terms valuable to your business.
Find Out More
Almost everything you do in digital marketing depends on high-quality written content. Emails, blogs, webpages, and downloadable materials all have to be optimised to provide a great user experience for their intended audience and to ultimately deliver leads for your business. Don’t leave your writing to chance - work with an agency that knows how to use the right words for maximum impact. To find out more about our services and our approach to content writing, please call 01332 982247 today.
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