The old adage of “practice makes perfect” holds true in writing. If you're responsible for your organization’s content efforts, or if you’re somewhat new to the game of business writing, below are six steps you can start implementing today to write engaging copy your readers will love.
The Six Steps
Understand your audience.
Learn your subject.
Pay attention to grammar.
Think visually.
Create a delivery plan.
Measure and fine-tune.
Step 1: Understand Your Audience
Engaging content starts with providing information of value. Readers today have a myriad of options at their fingertips to satisfy their content needs. Your job as a writer is to understand what those needs are and craft your copy accordingly. To do so, you need to don your detective hat.
While performing research on your target audience, figure out the following:
Key demographic information. Who are they and what are their likes and dislikes?
Fear and needs. What keeps your readers up at night?
Motivations and desires. What inspires them?
For instance, let’s say your core target audience is female, between the ages of 55 and 84, and you work for real-estate company:
Are they single or in a committed relationship? Are they about to become empty nesters? (Key demographic information)
Are your readers worried about outliving their retirement income? Do they need assistance downsizing to a smaller home? (Fears and needs)
Are your readers looking for information on 10-day Scandinavian cruises? Are they on the market to buy a recreational vehicle? (Motivations and desires)
As you can see, the more information you gather about your readers, the easier it’ll be to provide the content they are searching for, as well as position your company as the solution to their needs. (This blog provides information on ways to start researching information on your audience.)
Step 2: Learn Your Subject
In addition to getting to know your readers — their needs, fears, motivations and desires — you need to become thoroughly familiar with your subject matter. This will help you to better identify the keywords and phrases that will maximize your chances of appearing on a search engine results page.
Following are suggestions to get started:
Interview. Reach out to subject-matter experts in your organization and ask them to point you to additional sources of information, including other industry experts.
Research. Read previously published materials, both online and in print, from professional associations that provide free information on the topic you’re about to cover.
Monitor. Keep tabs on your competitors to understand what topics they are covering. Pay close attention to content gap areas, which can present your company with opportunities to provide much-needed information.
Follow. Look at content published on social media by influencers and organizations in your industry to understand the latest trends and topics of interest.
Search. Conduct online searches to see what keywords and phrases people are searching for that will help you rank higher. Free keyword search tools such as Moz.com can help you identify the level of keyword saturation based on search volume and provide alternatives.
Step 3: Pay Attention to Grammar
Clean copy — content that is free from grammatical errors — is important. While the occasional spelling mistake is typically forgiven and forgotten, copy that is riddled with errors erodes people’s confidence in your organization’s credibility as an industry leader or the writer’s subject-matter expertise.
Besides spell-checking and proofreading your copy, you might want to leverage more robust tools such as Grammarly, which can help you identify sentence flow and punctuation errors. Depending on your budget, you can always rely on the skills of a professional proofreader or copy editor. Fiverr is a good website for identifying professional editors who can perform freelance work.
When reviewing your copy for spelling and grammatical errors:
Print or Magnify. Printing the document or magnifying the screen size allows you to see words clearly.
Read. Reading the copy out loud enables you to catch sentence flow issues easily.
Spell Check. Using a proofreading tool helps you to catch obvious but easy-to-miss mistakes.
Repeat. Reading the copy and spell checking once more might identify new errors, especially after substantial copy edits take place.
Step 4: Think Visually
Adding visual elements to your copy can increase people’s willingness to read your content. It can also help to enhance the appeal of your story. Thinking visually, however, means going above and beyond the use of pictures, illustrations, gifs or videos. It means using descriptive language.
To think visually, pay attention to your use of:
Passive vs. active voice. What is your ratio of sentences containing passive voice vs. active voice? In addition to being shorter, active-voice sentences are more direct, which enables the reader to get to the point of the story quicker. Given decreasing attention spans, getting to the point quickly is necessary to maintain engagement.
Adjectives and adverbs. Do you use strong adjectives or adverbs to describe emotions, feelings or action? For example, “I feel tired” might get the point across that you’re lacking energy, but “I feel exhausted” lets the reader know the extent to which you’re lacking energy.
Verbs. Are you incorporating descriptive verbs in your copy? For instance, “The girl bolted through the front door to answer the phone” paints a clearer picture of how fast she was running compared to “The girl ran quickly through the front door to answer the phone.” (The second sentence also relies on an adverb to describe the verb.)
Long sentences. Incorporating shorter sentences allow readers to catch a mental break before moving on to the next one. As a rule, I try to keep each of my sentences to three lines of text or less to avoid mental fatigue. Often, a highly complex thought can be split into two (or three) sentences.
Section breaks. Finally, breaking up your copy into smaller paragraphs, using headers and bolding words indicate when a new thought is about to begin and help to add emphasis.
Step 5: Create a Content Delivery Plan
The second-to-last step to creating engaging content is distribution. You’re probably thinking, “But distribution has nothing to do with words. How can a content delivery plan help me engage my readers?” Because it will be much harder to reach your target audience if you’re starting a conversation at the wrong place and time. For instance:
Do your readers prefer Facebook over Twitter as a means of content curation?
Do they prefer e-books over e-newsletters?
Are they mostly active before 10 a.m., around noon, early in the evening or late at night?
Do they consume content mostly on their smartphone, tablet or desktop?
To create a content delivery plan, at a minimum, you should document:
Where. Identify where your readers are most active (social media, discussion boards, etc.).
When. Identify the time of day and day of the week your readers are most likely to engage with your content (Tuesdays around lunch time vs. Friday nights vs. Sunday evenings). Also pay attention to content preferences by time zones.
How. Identify how your readers prefer to be notified about new information (email, notifications via desktop widgets or app push notifications).
(Check out this blog for additional information on how to craft a content strategy.)
Step 6: Measure and Fine-Tune
The rationale that “what gets measured gets improved” applies to content creation. Measuring things like your e-newsletter’s open rate or your blog’s bounce rate will help you understand your audience’s level of engagement with your content. In essence, you’ll be able to identify what worked and what didn’t. You can then use this information when outlining future content opportunities.
Your metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), will need to be based on the delivery channel. For instance:
E-newsletters. Track unsubscribe, delivery, open and click-through rates per email and per link (if more than one hyperlink is used per newsletter).
Online content. Track bounce rates, demographic information, time spent on page, devices used to access the content and other pertinent data provided by Google Analytics, Bing and Yahoo!
Social media posts (nonvideo). Track engagement and reach metrics, in addition to demographic information.
Videos. Track average view times, engagement and reach metrics.
In Short
Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, content is engaging if your readers think it so. These six steps will get you on the road to creating copy that not only captures your readers’ attention, but makes a lasting impact.
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