Whether it’s on social media, websites or printed collateral, with every piece of content we publish, we aim to ensure that we are presenting the brand in its best light, leave a positive impression on our readers and ultimately, turn our lookers into bookers!
Great writing is about so much more than understanding the difference between ‘they’re’, ‘there’, and ‘their’ – follow our guide below to make the most from your content writing.
1. Goals
With each piece of content you publish, what are you aiming to achieve?
Empower
Help your audience understand your brand by using language that informs.
Respect
Don’t market at people; communicate with them – use respectful and inclusive language.
Educate
Provide informative content – your audience don’t have the same experience and access to information – and may be their first time interacting with your brand.
Guide
Make the path easy to navigate for your audience. Whether you’re guiding to a contact page, sales page or to book in product demonstration, lead the way with appropriate call to actions.
Be Honest and Truthful
Your audience should be told the truth about your products and services – avoid promotions that you cannot deliver. This will build trust with your audience.
Attract New Customers
When using both content marketing and PPC together it can drive great results for a business. After creating relevant and valuable content for your audience it is important for that content to reach potential customers.
2. Content Writing – Language and Tone of Voice
In order to achieve the above goals, you should ensure your content is:
Clear and Concise
Understand the topic you’re writing about. Be consistent in your language, tone and writing style.
Focus your Message
Start your content with the most important point and then group your content under headings and sub-headings. Some readers will read everything, while some will read the introduction and headings only – make your content suit both reader types.
Have a lot of content to share? Vast quantities of content can be repurposed into smaller, more consumable pieces.
Useful
Before you start writing, ask yourself: What purpose does this serve? Who is going to read it? What do they need to know? Once answered, you can then determine the language, length, where to publish and what information to include.
Be Specific
Avoid vague language. You will lose the trust of the reader if they are not confident in your expertise.
Friendly
Write like a human. Use a tone that resonates with your audience. Speaking of writing like a human, have you read our recent blog: ChatGPT vs Human Writing: Can ChatGPT be used for Content Writing?
Appropriate
Adapt your content and tone to suit each situation. For example, if you’re responding to a complaint your tone may be more muted, in comparison to when writing a sales pitch.
3. Grammar
Adhering to certain rules of grammar and mechanics helps keep writing clear and consistent.
We would generally recommend proofreading content before publishing. At Sprint Digital, client websites are proofread by a team member that was not involved in the project.
This gives the advantage of ‘fresh eyes’ and can raise issues of content that may be unclear to someone seeing the project and content for the first time.
Abbreviations and acronyms
Remember you are the expert of your content. If there is an abbreviations or acronym that someone may be unfamiliar with, explain it the first time you mention it. All references below can then use the abbreviation, once it has been explained.
First use: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Second use: SEO P.S.
Capitalisation
While using uppercase words can highlight a specific word or point – if overused the focus is taken away from the important part of your messaging. Use sparingly, where appropriate. (Apply the same thinking for exclamation points too).
Consistency Is Key
Choose a standard for your tone of voice and stay consistent. For example, when skimming through content, the time or dates could be written in several formats. While the information is still correct, the consistency is not. E.g. for the time, you could say 08.00 – 22.00 / 8am – 10pm / 8h-22h – all are correct, but choose just one.
Punctuation
We all have different strengths, and while this may not be everyone’s strong point, we think it’s beneficial for content to be proofed, even by a colleague, as small mistakes can easily be missed.
If creating content, downloading a free punctuation checker can be beneficial, such as Grammarly. As mentioned above, we always proof our website content before a website goes live.
Write Positively
Use positive language rather than negative language. One way to detect negative language is to look for words like “can’t,” “don’t,” etc.
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4. Writing for Social Media
According to DataReportal’s ‘Digital 2024: Global Overview Report’ overview-report
‘More than 66 percent of all the people on Earth now use the internet, with the latest data putting the global user total at 5.35 billion. Internet users have grown by 1.8 percent over the past 12 months, thanks to 97 million new users since the start of 2023.’
With so many people with access to your brand on their fingertips – the potential for growth is exponential. On the other hand, so is the potential to damage our brand by saying the wrong thing or voicing opinions that don’t align with our audience.
Strike that delicate balance by continuing to use your brand’s tone of voice.
• You don’t always need to jump on the bandwagon – if unrelated to your company, avoid commenting and interacting with trending topics.
• Use hashtags
• Where appropriate, tag relevant accounts on your social media posts.
• Social media is not designed to keep attention on one post for a long time – between ads, reels, and a continually updating feed – keep your content short and sweet.
Author Bio: Katie McGarr is one of the resident writers for SPRINT DIGITAL Agency Dublin, a firm offering an extensive range of digital marketing and website services to businesses across UK, Ireland, and Continental Europe. She enjoys sharing her insights about blogging, web design, SEO, and other forms of digital marketing.
