Why carefully construct your business’ written content?
If you properly utilize it, written content can convey your company’s values, lead your audience to emotionally connect with its brand, and remarkably distinguish its services.
Your brand’s verbiage — wherever potential customers may see it — should be thoughtfully curated to represent its ideals and appeal to its intended audience.
What exactly can you do to ensure that your writing is engaging?
Define and Share Your Goals
Establish Your Brand’s “Voice”
Similarly to your or your coworkers’ collective commonalities in tone and speaking style, your brand’s voice represents how you communicate with consumers everywhere: on your website, flyers, advertisements, and more. It may adhere to any style — formal, casual, serious, humorous, or something else — but must be consistent with your business’ ideals.
Define Your Differentiators and Values
Can you effortlessly name your brand’s differentiators — any characteristics of your company that are rare but valuable — like its specialized capabilities, convenience, or type of customer service? Even if you can, continue to explore and practice communicating how its special features contribute to its value by providing something few others can, regardless of how competitive they may seem.
Some of these differentiators may also be your company’s values: about three to ten words or short phrases that describe its core beliefs, ethics, and approaches. Laurelow’s values, for instance, are:
- Quality
- Clarity
- Innovation
- Collaboration
- Personal expression
Write Mission and Vision Statements
A brand’s mission statement helps customers quickly understand what it does. It describes a brand’s purpose by expressing its objectives and strategies for meeting them, both through day-to-day service and overall strategy.
You’ll also want to draft a vision statement focusing on its long-term goals. It should describe how your company plans to change its local community, or even the entire world, for years to come.
Mission and vision statements are usually one to three sentences; they echo any company’s differentiators and values.
If you need examples of complete statements, take a look at Laurelow’s mission statement…
Laurelow helps service-focused brick-and-mortar businesses build innovative brands by merging art, design, and strategy.
… and its vision statement:
We imagine a future where many brand narratives stand the test of time through thoughtful and thought-provoking engagement of the senses.
Both of these statements and their associated values are often restated, reworded, and/or reinforced through biographies or public statements from companies’ leadership, Home and About pages of websites, company biographies on social media, and more.
Arrange Long-term, Strategic Content Plans
Which combination and frequency of print media (e.g. magazine ads and billboards) and digital media (social media posts and blog posts) will best reach your target market?
If you haven’t already, analyze market research into your audience’s preferences. Once you’re aware of which types of messaging, materials, and platforms will most likely appeal to them, plan exactly what you will deliver to them ahead of time through organized, comprehensive descriptions, due dates, and other necessary information essential to efficient project management.
Get Responses from Readers
Words are great persuaders. If you want to capture others’ attention and convince them of your brand’s quality, the obvious place to begin is with your language.
Use Emotion-activating Words
Certain words are far more emotionally-driven than others. Those that carry especially significant emotional weight are referred to as power words, often due to being extreme or exaggerated and evoking feelings such as comfort, completeness, and excitement, as well as memorability and novelty — or even impatience and difficulty. Whether they’re positive, negative, or somewhere in between, power words provide simple ways to increase the persuasiveness of your writing.
A few examples of these words and their potential contexts within sales copy include:
- A button linking to a company’s About page that says, Read Our Heartwarming Company Story
- An employee’s biography beginning with the headline Meet The Meticulous Editor
- An advertisement for a musical production describing its songs as riveting
- A performing arts center’s blog post beginning with the title We’re Preparing for an Unforgettable Performance This Weekend!
- A website’s call to action encouraging users to subscribe by email so they can receive its latest updates
- A hotel advertising that its audience members can enjoy effortless vacations
- A tutoring company’s tagline and slogan Conquer Challenging Classes
Utilize power words and phrases to make your headlines more alluring and draw readers into your detailed content, and selectively distribute more of these throughout the content to help drive readers through to the conclusion.
Leverage Storytelling
Becoming an exceptional storyteller is another method to infuse emotive design into your brand’s character. Communicate your company’s past by describing the challenges and successes it has faced throughout its history, in addition to testimonials in which former customers describe their personal experiences with your business.
We have all connected with stories because they are often relevant to our own lives.
This is why customer-centric brand storylines are the most captivating. Concentrate on the change your buyers expect to accomplish and describe how their lives will change as a result of interacting with your business. A carefully thought-out and well-written story, whether real or theoretical, can work wonders!
Introduce Sensory Details
Try to add as many sensory details into your writing as possible to help any reader feel like they are experiencing what you are describing.
In many cases, we focus on sight and sound when we write; don’t forget about taste, smell, and touch! These can be just as important in setting the scene and getting the reader involved in your content.
Understand Phonetic Influences
People sometimes develop either unintentional devotion or antipathy toward brands while knowing nothing about their services. How could this be?
Sounds have profound emotional links, too; you can employ the power of sound in each syllable.
Each sound or collection of sounds has its unique meaning and emotional influence, which may change over time.
Linguists have devoted decades to studying sound symbolism and comprehending its effects on humans. However, the intricacy of sound symbolism starts to disintegrate if you learn how humans respond to individual sounds and languages.
Here are a few methods you can use phonetic symbolism to your brand’s advantage.
Interjections
It’s second nature for many of us to quickly use interjections to show strong feelings through vowel sounds, whether they’re found in a perplexed oh, a surprised wow, or an enlightened ah. Frequently using interjections — especially those with prominent, instinctive vowels — in a comfortable, conversational tone can help your content feel more relatable and intuitively connect with viewers.
Vowels and Consonants
Vowels and relatively soft-sounding consonants are also associated with smooth, rounded shapes and flowing curves. Alternatively, the majority of us visualize harsh consonants as jagged edges and sharp points. The balance between your vowels and consonants should therefore complement your graphic design, and vice versa.
Literary Devices
Incorporate literary devices such as:
- Alliteration, repeated sounds at the beginning of each word
- Onomatopoeia, an imitation of a sound created by nature, things, people, or animals; examples include whoosh, click, sigh, or chirp
- Euphony, created by harmonious, easy-to-pronounce combinations of words
- Rhythm, repeating words or phrases at regular intervals
- Rhyme, the repetition of words with identical or similar sounds
By understanding phonetic influences, including these literary devices plus many more, you can add even more rich, expressive layers to your content writing and to your entire brand.
Optimize Web Content for SEO
SEO, also known as search engine optimization, consists of the numerous ways you can help your corporate website show up early in relevant search results by signifying to Google that it is helpful and trustworthy. It often includes the following processes:
- Keyword research to determine which keywords are most popular among your ideal audience
- Including those keywords in your website’s content
- Linking internally to pages within your site and externally to other authoritative websites; it also helps to have backlinks from other sites that point back to yours
- Optimizing all pages for mobile devices
- Making sure your site is generally easy to navigate
- Testing and increasing your site’s loading speed
- Continually posting and updating new content
- Analyzing the SEO strategies of competitors
The best SEO-friendly content strikes a balance between appealing language and technical mastery.
Maintain a Polished Presence
Don’t forget to check your work! Proofread it yourself, use spell-checking software, and request feedback from your peers or colleagues. Regardless of what it represents, your brand’s professionalism should be among its most important and noticeable features.
What is your company’s copywriting process?
I’m interested to hear your thoughts and plans, and I can also help you navigate their requirements if needed. Contact me for more information and future in-depth resources about content writing and SEO!