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Carlos Lara (left) and Jimmy Young (right) from Bootleg Rascal.
Australia has no shortage of solo musical talent: Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins, Peter Andre (hey, he still counts!) … However, as we groove along and tap our feet to their sublime sounds, we also have to realise that these are musos living off their craft; in the same way an accountant, copywriter or graphic designer lives off theirs.
Aren’t you glad that EOFY (End of Financial Year) is over?
If emails were water during the last two weeks of June, we’d all have drowned. Your inbox was likely crammed with emails from brands you forgot even existed (or bought from.) It’s quite likely you sent about 80% of them to the trash folder - but what about those 20% that made you click on them?
According to Campaign Monitor, the average open rate for an email in 2021 was 21.5% with a click-through rate of about 2.3%. That means for every 1,000 people you send your email to, 215 will open it and 23 people will click the link you intend them to after opening. Ouch.
Of course, these metrics are skewed by modern email clients such as Outlook, Mail for Mac, and Thunderbird (the OG) blocking certain trackers. But the results are reliable enough for 81% of small to medium businesses in the US to rely upon electronic direct mail (EDM) as their primary customer acquisition channel.
So what is email marketing, and how do you write emails that are more effective?
Though it may seem too obvious to even mention, email marketing is marketing your business via email. (Shocker, I know.) However, some marketing strategies around email may vary. Just because a prospective customer has signed up to an email list does not mean they are a guaranteed future customer.
Email marketing may directly sell a product or service; provide information about a product or service to convince the reader to buy in the future; or use other systems to dynamically target emails pulled from other metrics - say, a customer your website analytics has identified as browsing for Size 11 sneakers could fire off an automated email when Size 11 sneakers are on sale.
It could also be purely informational, like a newsletter. Newsletters often presents audiences with new blog posts or video updates on a topic of interest (with some cheeky product placements in the bottom half of the newsletter.)
Email marketing isn’t just one way: it also asks for feedback and opinions from customers to improve their services further. This is called “direct response” marketing and is geared toward eliciting a reply from the reader.
Email marketing is also part of your overall communications strategy. Brand stuff up from time to time and using your email list as part of crisis communications is a tried and tested strategy to allay fears, concerns, and righteous customer anger.
With all that said, is there a secret sauce to getting high open rates and click rates? There is, and you’ll read about it in the next paragraph.
One aspect of writing that’s drilled out of writers who decide to (shudder) enter academia, is the use of verbs to power writing. Verbs or action words are the engine that makes a beefy muscle car blur past, belch smoke, and screech to a halt. That’s just one example among many.
Journalist and author Constance Hale in her brilliant Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch which all about the humble yet mighty verb, says that using active verbs make all the difference, no matter which medium or audience you choose. If you want someone to do something, you have to outright ask them.
That’s where the rather mythopoetic “Call To Action” comes from - 99% of the time, it’s some kind of active verb willing you to click here, download now, contact me. This works equally well as subject lines and inside the body copy of your eDM.
AI can also write these for you - if you’re careful. I’ve come to realise AI is not a replacement for a skill, just an augmentation of skills you already have.
If you’re creative, you can write CTAs without verbs. This might appear as a “pattern interrupt” - something that is so out-of-left field it stops you in your tracks. (Like seeing a baby when you’re upset and calming down - more on that in a future blog post.)
This may come in the form as “Have you seen this yet?” or “You won’t want to miss out on this.” In fact, I do it all the time. By doing it, I often beat the open rates for my industry (20.9%).
Hear that? It’s me, tooting my own horn.
Those funny little strings at the end of the email bring us to our next point - email marketing is meant to be personal.
The essence of good email marketing is to make it seem personal, as if you’re only writing to that one recipient. Just like a good story, it requires a bit of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader; but all good writing should do that anyway (in my opinion.)
Being personal means using a more conversational style and friendlier tone than usual.
Segmentation is one way of targeting people on a more personal level, separating people by common interest, demographic similarity, geolocation, past open rate, retargeting, and other metrics. Capturing their first name and using it to address them directly (again, guilty as charged) can also be a game-changer when it comes to gaining higher open rates.
This is also backed up by research from Hubspot, who found that the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalisation (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).
Automation can also be personal, even if it is just an AI spitting out strings according to an algorithm. Many successful brands might use automation in dealing with customer queries, elevating it to a human if the user can’t find a ready solution the first time around. You’ve probably dealt with it before without even knowing.
Much like good pop songs, good email copy always addresses the reader in the second-personal pronoun - you. “You’re going to love this” or “You could be basking in the Ibizan sun this Winter, [NAME]!” That’s because emails are about pleasing one reader - or at least, they want to appear as such.
If I was going to sit here and say I come up with absolutely everything myself, I would be lying. So I won’t.
If you are stuck for inspiration, there’s no shortage of it on the web. I subscribe to a newsletter all about great examples of email marketing called Really Good Emails. It not only covers copy, but design, video, and other aspects to tweak your email marketing.
Of course, when you are stealing, make it your own. Don’t just crib someone else’s homework and put your name on it. Authenticity is king no matter what industry you’re in - so make sure you’re putting your own unique spin on things. It could very well enhance your email marketing game.
With all that said, you can sign up for my newsletter below!
Remember job hunting? I sure try not to. But, when we used to, we may have come across a puzzling ad for a job that seemed bizarre and whimsical.
If you’ve ever worked in a white-collar professional setting, you have likely come across strange job callouts for ‘word wizards’, ‘marketing ninjas’ or ‘accounting rockstars’. You may understand the words, but they make almost zero sense together.
If so, you’ve encountered something called ‘corporate cringe’ – an attempt for corporates, usually startups staffed by a younger demographic, to appear ‘hip’ and ‘with it’ (disclaimer: I am none of these things.)
Even as a (gasp!) millennial myself, I can’t help but wince when I chance upon these – doubly so as a copywriter who prides himself on being clear in his communication. As the great theorist Ernst von Glasersfeld once said, “you can’t not communicate” – so what are these companies trying to say, and what kind of talent are they aiming to attract? If you’re a small business or startup doing the same … why?
Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and General Motors. Huge companies that have been around for a long time - in the case of GM, over 120 years - but what do they have in common?
They all sprung into life during a recession or depression. They were so successful, the chances of you using at least one of the products those companies make while reading this is almost even money.
With inflation still rampant, interest rates rising, and electricity bills set to soar by at least 25% after the 1st of July, Australia is staring down the barrel of a recession - the standard definition being two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. So what does that mean for us as business owners?
Our first impulse is to cut costs across the board. Where the axe lands, that’s for the almighty to know.
However, planning to cut back needs to be a surgical strike on certain wasteful expenses, not an all out war on your profit and loss statement. Many businesses think that cutting their marketing - usually an outsourced “expense” - is a good idea during a recession. Is it, though?
With SEO copywriting being a vital plank of digital marketing, can we copywriters not only survive, but thrive in unfavourable business cycles thanks to keeping our marketing up too?
40% of American businesses surveyed here said they would cut back on their expenses during a recession.
This makes sense from a household budget perspective - but a household is not a business. If you cut a Netflix subscription, it means no more binge watching Stranger Things. If a business excises its Zapier subscription, it means previously automated tasks need someone to complete them manually.
Value in a business isn’t always measured in profit and loss statements to begin with - but it will come back to haunt you eventually in terms of slower cash flow, which can often lead to a death spiral where more cash goes out than comes in. According to ASIC, about 20% of businesses that went insolvent during 2018-2019 was down to poor cash flow management or high cash use.
Though many companies see marketing and communication as a third prosthetic limb they can take on and off at will, it’s essential to maintain that “third arm” for keeping your current customers on side and potentially reaching new clients. According to WordStream, repeat customers are a 65% chance of conversion, while new customers are a 13% chance.
Besides, how cool would it be to have a third arm?
Almost every study conducted into marketing during a recession shows one outcome - businesses that maintained or increased their marketing usually did way better than their counterparts who cut back.
Buchen Advertising discovered that companies that cut advertising during the 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961 recessions fared poorly compared to businesses that did the opposite.
The International Journal of Research in Marketing paper ‘Turning adversity into advantage: Does proactive marketing during a recession pay off?’ noted that “firms that have a proactive marketing response in a recession achieve superior business performance even during the recession.” Companies can shore up their position with some strategic, entrepreneurial marketing.
For example, during the 1990–1991 recession to improve their position, microprocessor giant Intel launched its “Intel Inside” brand-building program, aggressively promoting the brand when there was little advertising competition.
During the 2008 financial crisis, analysis by Kantar Millward Brown found that 60% of the brands that stopped all TV ad spend for six months saw their brand use decrease 24%, and brand image decrease 28%.
McGraw-Hill’s oft-cited study into the marketing habits of 600 B2B companies during the early 1980s recession showed that brands who invested in better marketing and advertising grew 275% more than those that didn’t.
The most recent example is home short-stay rental’s darling AirBnB and how they fared during the pandemic. They cut almost all their ad spend during the COVID-19 pandemic, where many jurisdictions were locked down by their governments in response. Competitor VRBO outspent AirBnB ten to one during that initial 2020 global lockdown period and saw their bookings recover by 61%, while AirBnB’s slumped by 15%.
Though we may want to tighten the belt during a recession, we really ought to be grabbing a megaphone.
If you use an amateur you’ll get an amateur result. Keeping on your professional digital marketing or copywriting specialists means a consistent tone of voice, branding, and audience engagement.
As information analysts and resources, they can help you identify strategies that will return on your investment more than simply “pouring more money” into PPC or social media ads. They’ll be at the forefront of new channels, techniques, and messages that cut through to people during a recession. They can explore new keywords to target or niches to penetrate. Their creativity is a value-add that you can leverage at almost every level of your business.
Outsourcing your marketing - or bookkeeping, or administration - means concentrating more on your core business and delivering more value to your customers, whether you’re a B2B or B2C business. Everyone needs their dollar to stretch further. Figuring out how to do that with what you have is a big boon for business once the recession passes.
Further, copywriters and marketers are natural networkers. They have their ear to the ground when it comes to new trends, grants, and other opportunities that could come your way.
Though you may be fretting that dreaded phone call to tell your faithful marketing or copywriting firm “your services are no longer required” it’s better you work with us rather than cutting us off altogether.
Though you may have ordered a blog post every week, it’s unwise to just “stop.” Tapering that back to once a fortnight or month means your SEO won’t stand still compared with the competition who is still investing in their digital marketing - if you stop, they can and will overtake you.
You may want to invest in content at scale using AI while your copywriter edits it using their skills in Artificial Intelligence Optimisation. Even if copywriters become “obsolete”, there are still some opportunities left out there for us!
If you stop advertising or content marketing until you “ride out the storm,” playing catch up may end up costing far more.
Oh, and you know we’re a GST deduction, right?
So, should you cut back on marketing during a recession? I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Get ahead of your competition and invest in award-winning, cut-through copywriting and marketing with I Sell Words!
If you’ve been around the soloist traps long enough to forget the dark times of working for (shudder) an employer!!! – it’s even odds you’ve heard the phrase “givers gain”. That is, doing right by your customers, going the extra mile, and giving away your time to good causes means you gain something far greater in return.
I don’t have to tell you we’re soloists because we know our worth and we’re good – damn good – at what we do. That self-belief and determination to strike out on our own leads to better and brighter things. It’s also the same reason why some of us, when witnessing an injustice, something broken, or someone who needs a lift up, do something about it.
Though we may have heard about the big corporate charities and organisations such as Oxfam, World Vision, or Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), smaller charities and not-for-profits that labour on part-time and run on the ‘smell of an oily rag’ don’t just need money to survive – they need skilled people to help.
That’s where soloists can shine.
AI, TikTok…what’s next? Digital marketing seems to be so evolved it barely resembles this time last year. In a new report by Hubspot has taken a snapshot of the state of digital marketing in 2023. We all know about the advent of artificial intelligence - but is it all its cracked up to be? Is short-form video still effective? Will budgets increase or decrease in 2023 and 2024?
Drawing on other trends and sources on digital marketing, let’s have a deep dive into the State of Digital Marketing in 2023.
According to Hubspot’s report, the average marketer works on five campaigns at a time, and a total of seven campaigns per quarter. Using AI to automate certain processes makes business sense to gain more productivity with less time spent on admin and busywork. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E are proving to be useful in generating ideas, creating templates, and churning out content at scale. However, the time savings may be offset by the limitations of GPTs which are prone to repetition, “hallucination”, and limited in scope.
Notice how “big data” died suddenly and without warning? With Apple and Google both tackling the problem of terrible user privacy with new features that restrict the tracking of data from third-parties via cookies - and users taking matters into their own hands with AdBlockers and the like - gathering first-party data will be the boon for marketers wishing to personalise and target content to their audiences. 86% of marketers told Hubspot that that data privacy changes have impacted their overall marketing strategy over 2022. Giving users control over their data by opting in to newsletters, shopping accounts, and other data capture methods such as surveys, yields a sense of trust and an opportunity to create value in the often hidden transaction of harvesting user data.
Instagram Reels is just YouTube Shorts for people who don’t like TikTok. Whatever the platform may be, short form videos are reigning supreme for marketing in 2023. (Especially the tarted up AliExpress tat hawked by people in sweatpants - but that’s a discussion for another time.) 21% of marketers are going to be investing in short form video, and ad revenue from the format is set to surpass $10 billion (USD) according to Woosuite. Research by Wyzowl shows that 91% of businesses are using video and 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short-form video to learn about a potential purchase. 90% of those businesses that are using video has helped them generate leads.
According to SimilarWeb, 57.36% of Australian web traffic is consumed on mobile; the present and the future of the web will be mobile optimised. That means optimised designs, user experiences, and even instant apps will be in-demand among users - and businesses. Though desktop designs may look great, the chances are your customers are scrolling with their thumb, not their index finger.
“Sliding into DMs” or direct messages over social media was once describing a slick romantic gesture - and businesses want the romance between customers to blossom as they use social media to directly interact with customers by answering questions, handling complaints, and general interaction. Hubspot says 30% of younger (Gen Y and Z) have bought products on social media over the past three months, thanks in part to direct message customer service. Using AI chatbots and other automation can help start the conversation with humans taking over when things get too complicated for the machine to handle.
When downturns occur, people look for authentic, organic content. Not paid advertorial but something they can connect with and feel good about reading. Hubspot says that 7% of businesses will cut their ad spend during recessions and bottom-out business cycles - but that doesn’t mean you should skimp on your organic content that improves your SEO. Though marketers may do this as a business-building exercise, B2B and B2C companies should be thinking of investing in SEO content that isn’t engineered to hard sell, but connect with customers while taking home the added benefit of improved Search Engine Results Pages. That means providing real value for their reader - not so much top of mind, but strong of heart.
Ready to leverage the top marketing methods that will keep your business thriving during 2023? Want the best marketing copy to fuel your videos or SEO? Contact me!
Meg Ryan in 'You've Got Mail' (1998) / Warner Bros.
Once upon a time in the kingdom of Solonia, a frazzled artisan threw his hands up into the air. “Every ten seconds I’m interrupted by calls from the Palace,” he said, pacing around his office. “Surely my written missives are sufficient. But no!” he says, thrusting a finger into the air, “They call and call and call.”
He had proclamations from the King and Queen on the wall, reminding him of his good and faithful service, and the treasured sketch of his appointment to the royal court, framed in the finest oak. He sat down with head in hands, about to write another missive – this time to end his association with the court.
As he dipped his quill in ink, the Royal Poet Laureate appeared at the door in white flowing robes. She saw the artisan and inquired to his frustrated state.
“My child, what troubles you?” she said.
Blogging: once the province of teenagers with too much time on their hands (hello, LiveJournal) is now the backbone of corporate and business marketing and communication.
Blogging, or adding authoritative and trustworthy content to your website is a time-honoured and proven strategy for increasing your Search Engine Optimisation. Blogs that target keywords can help increase your ranking and drive traffic to your site, theoretically increasing conversions and revenue.
With all that in mind, how often should you blog for SEO purposes?
The advantages of determining your appropriate posting frequency are considerable.
Blog entries, first and foremost, help you rank for natural keywords. For your website to receive organic traffic, you need these.
A blog that is regularly updated also raises brand recognition. Your target audience becomes more aware of your web presence, your products, and your services as you post more about your sector.
Your company can gain the community's trust by blogging. Regularly updating and posting pertinent articles about your sector can help you establish credibility with your audience. In contrast to a rival that rarely refreshes their content or publishes blogs, they are more likely to convert on your website.
You need to establish a blog post frequency first and foremost. How often can you afford to blog, in terms of time and resources? An ad hoc approach of “when I’m not busy” will lead to exactly zero blogs being written.
A blog post frequency lets you set a baseline for yourself or your content writing staff for more pragmatic reasons. Without a schedule in mind, you can neglect other tasks in favour of creating blog entries all the time. This also applies to teams that are close to one another, such as social media and design, who would significantly benefit from a set frequency so they could order their tasks.
You have an upper and lower limit for blog post frequency, allowing you to concentrate more time and resources on other areas of your company.
Newer websites or start-ups should blog at least once or twice a week to play “catch-up” with their competitors. For established businesses, blogging bi-weekly or monthly may be key. The important factor is to keep adding to your pool of content, as the SEO benefits will emerge over time.
Even a solo writer like me can’t compete with enterprise level communications firms or dedicated blogs that churn out content several times a day – so you have to keep your expectations reasonable and sustainable. Burning yourself out writing blogs all day as an accountant will likely upset your clients due to a lack of attention!
With many things in marketing and communication, too much of a good thing can often lead to diminishing returns. Having too many blogs – especially blog posts of equal quality and authority – on the same topic or search term can lead to keyword cannibalisation.
Keyword cannibalisation means that a site has too many pages that are competing against one another, potentially driving away traffic from more important pages, especially ones that are geared towards conversion (e.g., a sales page.)
You should be targeting key phrases and keywords related to your business – just don’t choose the same ones too often!
You can compliment evergreen topics or blogs with new information and timely resources. Just remember to keep on top of new developments to share on your website – because old and outdated information can work against you the staler it gets.
Blogs don’t have to be any particular length – though more words are better to convey as much information as possible – but experimenting with the “Skyscraper” or “Hero” blogs once a month can lead to greater SEO dividends than peppering your site with smaller blogs more often.
One client of mine uses this strategy, producing timely and keyword rich skyscrapers of over 1,500 words every month. It not only increases traffic for their chosen keywords, but it also garners considerable media attention and the all-important backlinks from other authoritative sources.
This of course takes time, research, and editing to make it all flow and read well.
The trick is to examine other blogs in your field and assess how frequently they post in relation to their organic keyword distribution. For a hint as to how many posts per month are optimal for your site, search for a strong organic keyword profile that has the largest percentage of industry-relevant page one keywords.
That way, you’ll see significant upticks in your Search Engine Page Results over time!
Want to supercharge your blogging output? Get a professional award-winning copywriter to create a blog post frequency that helps your website stand out with superior SEO.
Going days without eating. Constant stress and rumination about work. The tightness in one’s chest as your phone buzzes over and over in the wee morning hours; a welling up of guilt as you let it go to voicemail. So much for a job that so many think adds up to ‘scrolling through Facebook all day’. Such is the life of a social media manager or strategist in the modern world.
Read my latest column for Flying Solo here.
Of course, this could be the shortest blog post in the history of this site - Choose me! I’m awesome! End of story.
However, not all SEO Copywriters are the same. Some have particular niches; others are generalists (such as myself.) One may emphasise on-page techniques over off-page optimisation. I am more creative - others are more technical. Learn about the differences between types of copywriters here.
Identifying a suitable SEO content creator or copywriter for your organisation is vital to the success of your digital marketing and content strategy. It’s important to consider various factors when selecting the ideal SEO copywriter for your business.
It’s important to research a potential copywriter’s portfolio before hiring them. Check out their past work and see if it aligns with what you need done. You want someone who can provide quality content that will help boost your website’s visibility and attract more customers.
Gaining an insight into their methodology is key when searching for the right SEO copywriter. To make sure you’re on the same wavelength, ask questions about how they approach a project, what kind of results can be expected, if they’ve worked on projects within your industry, and any other important details like turnaround times or keyword optimisation techniques.
Gleaning information from reviews and testimonials can provide insight into the efficacy of a copywriter, allowing you to make an informed decision. Seeing what others have said about them can give insight into how reliable and effective they may be when it comes to producing content for your business needs.
When selecting an SEO copywriter, make sure to read through some samples of their work so that you understand their writing style and determine if it fits with yours or the brand identity that you want portrayed online. A great writer should be able to produce content tailored specifically towards meeting all of your objectives while also staying true to the tone desired by both parties involved in the project (you included).
I Sell Words, for instance, always produces “test pages” to ensure the tone and style of your content suits your brand’s personality and your target market’s expectations.
An experienced SEO copywriter should be able to offer valuable insight into how best to optimise content based on industry trends, keywords used by competitors in similar markets, etc. What's more, it is essential that they understand exactly what success looks like from your perspective; meaning having a clear grasp of both short-term and long-term objectives associated with each piece of content written/produced for the best results across multiple channels (e.g social media platforms).
By following these steps when selecting an copywriter, businesses can ensure they find someone who meets all expectations set forth prior to engagement, ultimately leading up towards successful digital marketing campaigns.
To make things easier, why not choose I Sell Words? Award-winning SEO copywriting done right for small, medium, and ASX 200-listed companies.
There’s a new buzzword/acronym floating around the writing space at the moment, and it’s the “AIO writer” - the Artificial Intelligence Optimisation writer.
Some sites are saying that the advent of the AIO marks the death of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) writer - and at this stage, there is merit to the argument.
What is AIO writing, and will it really kill the SEO writer?
AIO writing is a bit of a misnomer. AIO writing is more like AI editing - taking the output from an AI text generator and editing it up to make it seem as if a human wrote the piece itself.
The business model is to have an AI write a blog or webpage in mere minutes, have a human AIO specialist massage the content so it bypasses any potential AI-detection algorithm (the kind that can scuttle your hard won SEO) and appears as if a human wrote the entire thing itself.
If you are an SEO content writer, the usual process is to write an article that caters to a certain search term, keyword, or keyphrase.
The aim of this is to provide expert-level, authoritative and trustworthy content so it ranks higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a user query. The higher the ranking, the more likely it will be clicked on, resulting in more traffic for the site. For business or commercial sites, this forms a crucial part of their digital marketing.
Instead of an SEO writer writing the content from scratch, the initial ‘draft’ would be generated by an AI algorithm. This can take minutes instead of the hours in which a human would usually complete a draft.
As discussed in a previous blog, “ripping and posting” AI content can potentially harm your SEO efforts. An AIO writer (or editor) would “massage” the AI content so it has the superficial appearance of “experience” - the Google PageRank metric that AI struggles to replicate in its writing.
The AIO writer could also edit the work so it has a consistent tone of voice, is free of glaring copy errors, and/or factual inaccuracies.
However, it could be argued, that any veteran SEO writer would not need to edit their own work to a significant degree. In the three hours an AIO writer shapes a 2,500 word AI-generated article so it’s worthy of PageRank and human eyes, a deft writer could have written the article itself with the editing process resembling proofreading (fixing grammatical or spelling mistakes) instead of substantive copyediting (making stylistic or editorial changes to the piece, e.g., removing entire sections.)
A human writer could also have made critical decisions when it comes to linking to other authoritative sources, instead of shoehorning them in after the fact.
It would seem that my job is caught up in a “rapidly developing, uncontrollable technological system” as the thinker Jacques Ellul would say.
However, the fact I just (rather shamelessly) name-dropped an obscure technological thinker from the late 20th Century also shows the limitation of AIO writers. If they are mere editors, over a long-enough timeline, all AIO writing will sound, feel, and read the same.
AIO writing as a bonafide “profession” may also be a flash in the pan. Google and other closed-source detection algorithms may become so sophisticated they will ferret out AIO content from the “real thing” and end up penalising “cheaters” who take the easy way out.
Ellul said “every problem generates a technological solution; computers breed ever larger, more fragile, and vulnerable systems. But the solutions raise more and greater problems than they solve.” His disciple, the incomparable media ecologist Neil Postman went further: “like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other.”
Like the smartphone revolution in 2007, it “solved” many problems by combining many different technologies into one device. It also had unintended consequences. Mental health problems, addiction, and cyberbullying are now rampant problems caused (at least to a significant degree) by smartphones and “always-on” social media.
The academic Evegeny Morozov in his landmark To Save Everything, Click Here, argues that technology can often be an improvement, and is not necessarily revolutionary in and of itself. Even the once “revolutionary” streaming service Netflix has lost more than one million subscribers.
There is a tendency to view any mass-adopted technology as truly game-changing. I even wrote in a journal article (2011) that businesses don’t use computers because they’re handy; you literally cannot run a business without one and a connection to the World Wide Web. Is AIO in the same category? Would this level of introspection even be possible for AI? Or is that not what we want?
I mean, you can travel by horseback these days, but why would you?
That said, I still wear mechanical watches when many of my friends wear Apple Watches. What does that make me?
Get your premium human-written content here at I Sell Words! No computers harmed in the making of any articles!
I used the dialogue artificial intelligence ChatGPT to respond to questions about AI writing content. Here is the unedited response:
It depends on the specific use case and the type of content being produced. AI can be used to generate certain types of content, such as product descriptions or news articles, but it may not be appropriate for all types of content, such as creative writing or content that requires a high degree of industry expertise. Additionally, it is important for businesses to consider the ethical implications of using AI to generate content, as well as the potential for errors or inaccuracies in the generated content. Ultimately, businesses should weigh the benefits and drawbacks of using AI to generate content and determine whether it is the best approach for their specific needs.
A business may choose to use AI to write blog posts for them, but it is important to consider the potential drawbacks. One potential drawback is that the AI-generated content may not be as high-quality or unique as content written by a human. The AI-generated content may also lack the personal touch and human connection that many readers look for in a blog post. Additionally, there may be ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI to generate content, particularly if the content is being used to influence or persuade readers.
Another potential drawback is that the AI-generated content may not be able to capture the nuances, tone and style of the company, which can make the blog post look less professional and less engaging.
It's also important to consider that AI-generated content can be less creative and less engaging than human-generated content, which may lead to lower engagement, fewer shares, and less ROI.
In summary, while AI-generated content can be useful for certain types of content, such as product descriptions or news articles, it may not be the best approach for a blog post, as it may lack the high-quality, unique, personal touch and engagement that many readers look for. Businesses should weigh the benefits and drawbacks of using AI to generate blog post content and determine whether it is the best approach for their specific needs.
As an AI, I do not have the ability to predict the future and can't say for certain whether or not AI will take your job as a human copywriter. However, it is important to understand that AI has the potential to automate certain types of writing tasks, such as product descriptions or news articles. However, it is likely that AI will not be able to completely replace human copywriters in the near future, particularly for tasks that require creativity, emotional intelligence, and a high level of industry expertise.
Many experts believe that AI will augment human work rather than replacing it. AI can help copywriters to improve their productivity, efficiency, and quality of work. For example, AI can assist with research, data analysis, and even with the generation of ideas and headlines.
Additionally, human copywriters have the ability to understand the nuances and subtleties of language, as well as the ability to connect with audiences on an emotional level, which is something that AI currently lacks.
Therefore, it is important for you to stay informed about the capabilities of AI and to adapt and evolve your skills to stay relevant in the field. It's also important to focus on your unique strengths, such as creativity, storytelling, empathy, and personal touch, which are not easily replicable by AI.
If you haven’t taken the AI natural-language dialogue engine ChatGPT for a spin, you definitely should.
It’s astounding how it can take a normal query and reply in a structured, easy-to-understand, and if you didn’t know any better, thoughtful way.
Friends and colleagues have been sending me links to ChatGPT, fearing that this will kill off my livelihood. As an SEO copywriter, at least on the surface, it can produce articles in minutes for cents while it takes me hours and hundreds of dollars of investment later.
With that scary thought in mind, should I learn how to code these machines instead of competing against them?
The written word by a scribe’s hand has been around for tens of thousands of years; we aren’t extinct just yet.
The irony of logging into ChatGPT is the reCAPTCHA asking if you aren’t a robot. AI cannot access itself, it would seem.
I asked it “How do I optimise my content for Google?” - and it returned a pretty decent list of best-practice SEO techniques. Use H1, H2, etc. headings, use internal and external links, upload sitemaps, conduct keyword research. Couldn’t fault it there.
Then I asked it something more subjective - something that required real-world experience to answer.
“Who's the better Starfleet captain, Picard or Sisko?” If you don’t speak nerd, this is the eternal debate as to whether who is the better fictional starship commander - Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise-D or Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine and the Defiant in the iconic Star Trek spinoffs.
Here’s where things got interesting; or from my perspective, quite boring.
Its opening line was this:
It's difficult to say definitively who the better Starfleet captain is between Jean-Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, as it ultimately comes down to personal preference.
That’s not what I asked, ChatGPT. I asked who is better.
It rattled off, in natural-language, how Picard was a level-headed, intellectually curious, and stoic diplomat; Sisko by contrast was an impulsive yet decisive warrior who let his emotions guide him more often than not.
That’s all fantastic; but AI will never ever give you a “straight” answer. So who’s better, HAL? I am unable to tell you that, Dave.
If it was attempting to persuade me one way or the other - the essence of sales - it was doing a pretty poor job.
Fortunately for us mere mortal copywriters, Google has seen the inherent flaw in AI copywriting and adjusted its PageRank algorithm, the fundamental programming behind its search engine, to accommodate.
Prior to 2018, Google’s quality index rated pages in terms of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). If a page could demonstrate more of these attributes compared to others, it would rank higher in Search Engine Page Results (SERPs).
In August of 2018, Google added another metric to the ranking system: Experience. (E-E-A-T.)
Google is essentially asking if the writer behind the content has accumulated actual, real-world experience on their chosen topic. Have they actually made Gramma’s Sausage Gravy & Biscuits? Have they actually stood underneath and witnessed the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel? Have they binge watched Star Trek: The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine to truly evaluate whether Picard or Sisko is the better captain?
An AI could have high levels of Expertise (they have the entire internet at their disposal), and in turn Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness owing to prior social proof, high traffic, or user ratings on a particular site.
However, if this high E-A-T site begins churning content written by a machine lacking Experience, their ranking will be soon be diminished in comparison to a site that has a real human that has actually done all the things it’s writing about.
Expertise is also a subjective measure - just because I changed my oil on my car, does that make me a motor mechanic? Hardly. How do I stack up against Star Trek nerds who saw the first television run in 1966 and stuck with it ever since? At the end of the day, it’s for the reading public to decide.
Training and formal education can go a long way to establish credibility as a subject matter expert or influencer - but I can’t sit here and say that I learned everything there is to know about copywriting by attending university. That took independent research, trial and error, informal learning, and practice.
If you’re a business and you’re thinking that SEO copywriting “costs too much” we now have something that can do it for free. But should you use it?
Remember the triangle of value: good, cheap, and fast - you only ever get to pick two.
AI copywriting seems to pick “cheap and fast” each time, every time. That doesn’t bode well if you have high search engine ranking aspirations in the short-term or long-term. AI will always be one step behind human minds doing real and original research.
The Hungarian scholar and author Arthur Koestler once remarked, “true creativity often starts where language ends.” For AI, there is no end to language. It can only regurgitate or synthesise what we feed it.
For now, pioneers will always be flesh and blood; and machines will be playing second fiddle.
Get your own human-written and award-winning copywriting for your business right here at I Sell Words!
In the 1990s, the internet (or just “Internet”) was referred to as the information superhighway. Many on-ramps and off-ramps taking you where you want to go from point A to point B. After the smartphone revolution in 2007, the World Wide Web resembled less a highway and more of a vending machine - content was now on demand, curated by algorithm, stopping and starting at the whim of the user.
Copywriting was once the province of “Mad Men” who wrote pithy, predictable, and gimmicky headlines.
For the most part, they were effective.
Now, headlines are boring in comparison to other forms of content. Text is competing against short videos on TikTok, pictures on Instagram, and podcasts on Spotify. Not only that, but endless streams of them, all the time.
Your business isn’t competing against other businesses, it’s competing for attention. This is the crucial distinction between doing copywriting the old way and doing it the new way in 2023.
Let’s assume the “snappy headline” is no longer relevant since the competition is just too fierce and compelling. What must you do right away? Your content and copywriting should convey the value of your product or service in a way that is educational, insightful, and interesting.
If you can't connect with your audience, you won't be successful since they'll go on to the next exciting thing. These constant bursts of content releases dopamine chemicals into people's brains to maintain their bio-transmitter levels and hold their attention.
Former Facebook engineers have since admitted their medium was built around “continuous partial attention,” as Justin Rosenstein. inventor of the ‘like’ button, told the The Guardian.
If you can't convince potential customers to remain, you lose them. However, you need to know how to maintain consumer interest throughout the entire transaction. You must establish a compelling value proposition, a compelling story, and a reason for people to care if you want to do it well.
Curiosity is always the call for attention. One of the most famous examples in narrative storytelling instills a burning curiosity that leaves even five-year olds spellbound: a flickering, repeating hologram of a woman saying, “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
Who is that? Who is Obi-Wan? What kind of help? Why is he her only hope?
We are inherently and naturally highly interested as humans.
You can hold someone’s interest for a while if you tell them something intriguing and engaging without immediately providing the solution.
In the end, we want people to understand that we have something that can benefit them, and that is what we as copywriters are trying to convey to them with this interest. People need our help. Someone's time is wasted if your product or service doesn't genuinely provide something of value. They'll be irate if they spend five seconds or five hours with you if you don’t give them anything truly valuable.
The last thing you need is a disgruntled customer since they won't do business with you again. It cannot be overstated how little time you have to capture and hold someone's attention in the present environment with all of your competitors. It follows that your headline, hook, and entrance point into that person's world has to be intriguing otherwise it’s a flick of the thumb and on to something else.
The first part is giving someone a reason to be interested in what you have to say - which is how you sell. Motivation is what drives characters in narrative fiction, and it’s what drives humans to do pretty much everything. In business, the motivation may be the profit motive. In Law and Order: SVU, the motivation might be something more sinister.
Then, comes Information. Information that a target audience can actually use. Not just “five tips” that have been recycled ad nauseam, but information that is the entry point into a grander and more compelling narrative.
Once Luke takes R2D2 to Obi-Wan, he learns that Princess Leia is seeking the old man’s help after a failed diplomatic mission to Alderaan. We enter the world of the dastardly Galactic Empire, swashbuckling Jedi, scheming bounty hunters, and an entire galaxy of creatures. Will the Rebel Alliance prevail? Every scene in Star Wars ended on an old serial style cliffhanger by design - we all couldn’t wait to see what the next scene had in store.
By sharing a little of your experience or explaining why you might be able to relate to their suffering, you are also connecting with them. And the world's top start-ups and businesses are built on the principle of relieving someone else's suffering or making a difficult task simpler.
The next step is to give the customer a Call to Action. These can range from asking customers to follow your channel or to look at the free report or case study at the bottom of an email. It could ask someone to begin a risk-free trial. It may be to purchase a product or sign up for a free consultation. Giving consumers the next step in the process of becoming and keeping a client is the ultimate destination on this journey.
The more value you can provide people, the more trust they will develop in you. The more examples you can provide of the job you can really execute, the more probable it is that they will become your clients or customers.
Always conclude with a strong call to action, and be extremely precise about what you want them to do.
Like in this instance, I want you to sign up to my newsletter. The form is below!
I’m a wordsmith but somehow, I fell into finance and economics copywriting. One of my nearest and dearest clients is Savvy, one of Australia’s leading finance brokers. It’s been great to learn finance from experts such as the CEO Bill Tsouvalas, and gain insights into PR and SEO from Satwik and Adrian over the last decade.
With all that in mind, I’ve also learned how to leverage copywriting to enhance a finance business. I’ve written for many different finance businesses: brokers, lenders, financial advisers, debt negotiators, financial educators, investment firms, and companies working in financial technology (fintech.)
So how does professional copywriting boost your finance business?
Finance is complicated. Extremely complicated. For instance, all types of consumer (not business!) lending is overseen by ASIC under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act. Finance is a bit of a taboo subject in the West - people don’t readily tell you how much they make; nor will they volunteer whether that shiny new Beemer is under finance, either. People want to feel reassured that the people that will handle their money will treat it with kid gloves - and do right by them. Not just because they have to, because that’s part of their mission and core business principles. Professional copywriters can craft that narrative, so it’s baked into all financial communications.
Full disclosure: I haven’t touched a mathematics textbook since I was in Year 11. Finance is all about numbers - and some of the trickier calculations can often go over my head. However, interpreting dense and often confusing concepts such as chattel mortgages so laypeople can understand it is half the marketing battle. Technical explanations of chattel mortgages can often throw people for a loop; but explaining products or loans in simple terms make them easier to sell. A chattel mortgage is a loan for business to buy equipment or vehicles that gives them tax advantages and allows them to borrow more than the value of the item being purchased. A few of you reading may be thinking, “That’s just what I need!” See? Simple.
There is no advantage to “tricking” people into your financial product. ASIC will eventually find out and you’ll lose your credit licence. Simple as that.
Financial education in Australia is lacking to say the least. A Savvy survey in 2020 showed that about 35% of Australian adults have a “fair” grasp on financial literacy which corresponds to a primary school equivalent of knowledge. For a society that runs on finance, that’s pretty woeful.
An educated audience is an empowered audience and an empowered audience makes better financial decisions. Copywriting can be tailored to introducing new technology in finance (fintech) and helping people help themselves when it comes to finance and economics. This all feeds into trust and credibility for your financial business.
As someone working in finance, you may think there’s only so much you can write about. A copywriter can broaden your appeal by writing for several different niches at the same time. Just writing about highly abstract “car loans” can be drilled down into:
How to save money on car loans for single mums on a budget
Bad credit car loans
How to get a great deal on car loans as a pensioner
What scams to avoid when applying for car loans
How your business can save money on car loans
What is the difference between a car loan and an unsecured personal loan?
Those are all free ideas (that I’ve already written about - sorry!) which your financial business can leverage to expand on your content base and improve your SEO for niche keywords. Professional copywriters are also lean, mean ideas machines - use them! They also make for great newsletters, social posts, and blogs.
With an expanded content library you cement your thought leadership - and trust in your brand. Which can go a long way into developing an ongoing audience; you’ll never know when the family you got a car loan inquiry for may turn to you for their mortgage broking!
Writing out everything yourself can be exhausting if you aren’t a writer. If you’re doing the writing and marketing as well as all the broking or advising, it can be a struggle. Copywriters are much more efficient at writing and researching than doing it all yourself. Just like outsourcing your plumbing to a plumber, outsourcing your writing to a writer makes financial sense. For a modest investment, you’ll make a good ROI over months and years with good content.
Using high conversion content for transactional emails are even better investments; and there are so many points of losing a prospect in a financial sales funnel, too. Qualifying leads, supplying estimates, getting documents submitted, consenting to credit checks, conditional approval, unconditional approval, settlement, post-settlement follow-up - that’s almost 2,000 words of copy if you wanted to send nurture emails to your prospect at each step. For someone like me, it’s a breeze. But that figure may send some finance people dizzy - and rightly so!
If you want to get the best financial copywriting in Melbourne, contact me! I’m always happy to get stuck into financial copywriting and help take your business to new heights.
Living in a fast paced world where news goes in one ear and out the other in a matter of minutes, having solid evergreen content for your business will feel like herding cats - cats who may or may not exist depending if you look at them or not. (Schrödinger’s content, perhaps?)
With some businesses, some truths remain self evident. Good narrative writing, no matter what language you speak, will always need a beginning, middle, and an end. In Accounting, showing people how to balance their books will always be a valuable skill to impart.
So what is evergreen content, and how do you write it for your business?
Evergreen content is content that will be relevant now, tomorrow, and (hopefully) five years from now. Evergreen topics are ones that people will always be interested in and will search for consistently.
Topics based on:
Recent news or current events - X did Y at Z time
Temporary trends and fads
Pop culture
Statistics or reports
Are not evergreen, as the map they are trying to create will not correspond to the real-world territory for very long. There’s nothing more disheartening finding out-of-date statistics when conducting a research project.
Evergreen topics may look like:
How to come up with ideas for your blog
How to write a mission statement
Steps for creating and sticking to a budget
Choosing complimentary colours for your logo
Usually, evergreen topics are highly abstract in nature - they don’t focus on a specific application that may not exist in a year or two - and conversely they don’t try to predict the next best thing. It remains as relevant now as it will five or even ten years down the track.
Evergreen content needs to be thoroughly researched - even if you feel that the topic is “played out,” you can conduct research by looking up already popular articles on the topic. You know you have researched the topic to its limit when you are finding new articles or websites that contain almost the exact same information.
Now that you have your research, it’s time to write the content. Evergreen content is rarely “novel” - but there’s nothing preventing you from putting your own spin on things. Coming up with new ideas for blogs is a broad topic - though you could drill down into a niche such as Finance or Automotive to appeal to a select audience. You may want to produce smaller pieces, or create long-form ‘skyscraper’ content that touches on almost everything there is to know about the topic.
Evergreen content should be aimed at laypeople or beginners. It shouldn’t contain jargon; unless it’s vital to the topic. At any rate, you need to explain what it means and how it fits into the broader subject.
Evergreen content should form part of your comprehensive SEO and content strategy. That means choosing the right keywords, optimising the meta descriptions, having relevant headings, adding links and having good backlinks. It should be authoritative and valuable to others - not a cynical play at boosting your Search Engine Results.
You may be thinking - once I’ve written my evergreen content, that’s it - I’ve painted myself into a corner. I can’t say the same thing on the same topic twice! That may be true, but you can refresh evergreen content by:
Turning it into a video or podcast.
Reminding your audience of the content via social media.
Looking at the “state of” or “trends in” the topic as a follow-up (which unfortunately is not evergreen, but may be useful for others in their research.)
Create case studies based on others who have followed your advice.
Turn your information into an infographic.
Use it as the basis for an email onboarding campaign.
Tailor it for other websites or niches.
I’ve worked with businesses where I’ve written evergreen content on subjects so many times I’ve seen them in my dreams. The information is relevant but tailored for certain audiences. “How to get a car loan with bad credit,” with a little creativity and research can also become “Tips for single dads to get a car with impaired credit” which speaks directly to certain demographics.
That’s up to you - pick something you’re knowledgeable in, something other people will find useful, and start writing!
Looking to get your own evergreen content up and running, written by a copywriter who’s worked with some of Australia’s top ASX 200 companies? Contact me to get started!
Melbourne business needs local SEO more than most - especially with hidden laneway shops!
As a business that’s vying for prime position in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you’re using every Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) trick in the book - but are you focused on local SEO?
Local SEO is becoming vital, especially when searches for “X near me” have surged 500% over the last few years, according to WebFX.
Couple that to 78% of local mobile searches convert into offline sales; and you’re probably wondering why you haven’t amped up your local SEO already!
So what is Local SEO and what do you need to consider when writing landing pages to take advantage of local SEO?
Local Search Engine Optimisation or Local SEO is an SEO technique focused on catering to searches within a discrete geographic area, instead of just generic keywords. For example, “hairdressers near me” or “Plumbers in Ultimo” are search engine queries that businesses that have good local SEO will rank highly for. Businesses with multiple locations or are Service Area Businesses (SABs) benefit most from local SEO. A leading technique that chases these queries is having a area-specific or local landing page.
You may learn more about your existing visitors' origins and online behaviour by using Google Analytics, Google Trends, or SEO software such as Ahrefs. Make a list of potential local search terms for these people using this information. Leverage your position as a local businessperson to your advantage by asking clients about their search habits and the phrases they use to describe the services or goods you provide.
You will either have a single local landing page or an overview page with multiple pages beneath, depending on the number of locations. It makes sense to include these pages in your navigation in order to guarantee that they will be found. Is there room on your menu to put "locations" as an item? Or do you want to include your overview page or a few significant landing pages in your site's footer?
Consider where in the navigation of your site your visitors would want or expect to discover your places. Link internally to your landing pages from other website pages or blog posts wherever it is possible to do so naturally.
Elements of a good landing page are universal - that means having the right keywords in your meta and title tags; having clean URLs; internal linking; a definite call to action; social proof such as testimonials, preferably from someone in the area; a contact form; and your name, phone number, and email address so people can contact you directly.
A good local landing page should also include an interactive map of your location or service area; special local offers if applicable; and local schema markup too. This all enhances your local SEO.
Repeating the same information over and over can get tedious to write; and it also means duplicate content that search engines will penalise. The object of the landing page is for people to find your business when running a local search. It should be obvious that you are located or service that area. That means you’ll also have to be mindful of localisms and other peculiarities of language. If you’re a fast food wholesaler, a “potato cake” in Melbourne is a “potato scallop” in Sydney. Let’s not forget the eternal barney over what constitutes a “pint” in Australia.
Writing authentic and authoritative content needs a local flavour - and if you don’t know what that is, do your research by visiting the area (if possible) or making a list of consistencies in language among other local sites to use in your own landing pages.
Looking to supercharge your local SEO with specialised local landing pages? Get started with award-winning SEO copywriting from I Sell Words.
Conventional wisdom on web content writing ten years ago was to “stuff as many keywords into your copy” and the reader be damned.
Of course, Google’s PageRank algorithm was refined further - and so has web content writing.
We now arguably live in the age of “clickbait” - though the future of web content may look very different.
In this blog, I’ll break down emerging trends in web content writing and what the future may hold for marketers and web content writers of all stripes.
We all know that AI copywriting is coming. In fact, it’s here.
However, despite our collective best efforts to replace humans with machines, we still encounter the uncanny valley. This is no more obvious in supermarkets; I’ve yet to meet one person who’s felt a connection or affinity with an automated checkout. Does anyone find a soulless voice announcing “unidentified item in the bagging area” cute or endearing?
The same will apply for content writing. There will be an upsurge in AI content - but humans are smarter. We can tell there’s no soul behind the screen - we know something is missing, even in Zoom meetings.
Authentic, thoughtful, and informative web content will always remain king; despite an army of bots invading the kingdom and threatening its throne.
As an SEO copywriter and web content writer, I know all about keyword relevancy. It’s how your business gets noticed on Google.
However, Google’s AI and crawlers will transition toward topical authority as a ranking tool more so than keyword relevance and backlinking. As marketing AI and machine learning expert Eduard Klein says:
When marketers talk about authority, they talk about building backlinks. This is still the case, but as google gets smarter about semantics, link relevancy will likely decrease over time. Organisations that cover a topic with the most depth will own the future traffic flow for related queries.
The remedy is to focus on long-form, well researched, and potentially peer-reviewed web content that forms the pillars of your web content writing. Having web content that is thesis-like in scope but rich in media and interactivity will be a boon to business. The “mega-skyscraper” web content will be in vogue soon.
Just having web content on a white blank page that loads slow won’t cut it any more - good web content will be part and parcel of delivering a good overall user experience across all device types - perhaps even AR and VR such as the Oculus or HTC Vive (as an owner of one, I can tell you how awful reading web content is on one of those things.)
Interactivity and other experiences that users will come back to time and again will drive the future of web content writing.
This means how they consume, share, and remix content - can they get the same content in video as they do as text? What about as audio, like a book on tape? Giving users the option for multi-faceted media that suits their lifestyle or consumption habits will be valuable to marketers and businesses in the future. If you’re a web content writer that only writes for web copy, be prepared to branch out into writing for podcasts and video, too.
Free eBooks about how to set up Mailchimp or the five best tips for writing about ducks in exchange for an email list sign-up won’t cut it any more. There are so many tips out there for the taking, a bit of Google-fu can give you the entire sum of knowledge in the area without signing up for anything. If you think what you are offering is an insight and you’re peddling it without cost, it’s probably not.
Gated and cards-to-the-chest web content will become extinct - providing valuable web content as your core offering will be the future that inspires the success of your business or brand. The value proposition should be immediate and obvious.
Are your ready for the future of web content writing? Want to know more, or get started while the competition sleeps? Contact me!
Digital marketing - we’ve all likely heard the term being bandied about in boardrooms and offices - but what is it really? Marketing is the process and art of identifying and satisfying customer needs through mass communication. Marketing has been aided by digital means since the 1960s, with mainframes crunching demographic numbers for advertising agencies. However digital marketing refers to marketing purely using media driven by digital means - the World Wide Web, hand-held computing, electronic billboards, and so on. Now that our culture is digital, our marketing is also digital. This gives marketing greater speed, accuracy, and channels to promote products and services than ever before.
The biggest difference between “traditional” marketing and digital marketing is that digital marketing is often bi-directional - audiences can “talk back” to brands and companies. This can be a blessing and a curse for digital marketers, who can use the data to refine their product or service; but also means managing negative feedback and how that can effect community and sales. So what is digital marketing in 2022?
Digital marketing companies will often tout they are “channel agnostic” or “omni-channel” - meaning they employ as many media (that is, carriers of messages) as possible. Digital marketing channels need not be discrete: they often overlap and complement one another. For example, let’s take a look at the web and Search Engine Optimisation first.
If you are a business and have a website, the aim is to have it shown to as many people as possible to gain as much traffic and sales as possible. This is achieved by Search Engine Optimisation, as I’ve discussed in detail here. This means organising or curating your content to match what people are searching for on Search Engines so it ranks higher in relevance and above your competitors in search engine results. This organic, or non-paid traffic, means a higher return on investment over time than paying for leads or sales over and over again.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has been around a long time (in computer terms) with the first ever PPC ad bought by a Silicon Valley law firm on the now defunct Global Network Navigator site as far back as September 1993.
As I wrote on my blog Crushtor.net,
“Advertising alongside search engine results pages (SERPs) became the standard in October of 2000, when Google launched its AdWords service. Companies and brands would pay for sponsored links that appear at the top of search results, bidding for the top spot using automated algorithms. When a browser clicked on the ad, the company paid for the privilege – what’s known as a “Pay Per Click” advertisement.”
By most accounts, a business can expect to earn $2 in revenue for each $1 they spend on PPC. This is further refined by using data to pinpoint where ad spend (i.e. higher quality keywords, remarketing, demographic shifts, etc.) should go to receive the maximum return on investment.
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are “no brainer” digital marketing platforms. Billions of people combined use social media every day, and deploying advertising and marketing through these channels is the reason why these channels exist in the first place. However, it also gives brands and companies opportunities to talk directly to consumers and hear their concerns - as well as the added challenge of responding to negative feedback. Social media marketing comprises Pay Per Click advertising, organic community management, and content strategy or curation.
Content strategy, as I’ve outlined here, is a part of digital marketing in terms of reaching customers or audiences using text, video, moving images, audio, and other multimedia. The more strategic content a brand or company can leverage, the more it flows into SEO, social media, and other aspects of digital marketing.
Email marketing or electronic Direct Mail (eDM) is a powerful tool in a digital marketer’s arsenal, allowing marketing communications to be sent to willing customers (as almost all jurisdictions forbid unsolicited eDMs - aka spam.) These customers opt-in to mailing lists to recieve special offers, tips or tricks, or affiliate offers. Sort of like my fantastic eDM, which you should definitely sign up for!
Native advertising is a story or piece that’s published to a blog or online news site that’s supposed to look like normal, unbranded content - but in fact is an advertisement for a product or service. This may be disclosed as “in partnership with” or “promotional consideration by.”
Producing video or podcast content is fast becoming a new avenue for digital marketing, as it too is a space where digital marketers can either buy up time in various (and hopefully popular) video/podcasts for impressions or launch a video or podcast series that directly markets to consumers on their own. This has some overlap with influencer marketing.
One of the more recent developments in digital marketing is using affiliates or influencers - people with a substantial following on social media - to promote products or services. This could appear as native advertising - e.g. sending your new prototype watch to a watch review channel on YouTube (my favourites being The Urban Gentry and Just One More Watch) or paid advertising such as sponsored posts. Affiliates get a commission for each sale they make, usually through partner programs as run by Amazon.
One of the major differences between digital and traditional marketing is the data this type of marketing generates. Clicks, page views, bounce rates, interaction rates, demographic information - is all harvested through various applications such as Google Analytics, Google Search Consoles, or Customer Relationship Management software (CRM.) This helps marketers identify incoming search terms, what people are looking for and tailoring content to fit, and market to specific niche segments, e.g. 18-24 year old men who enjoy watching football and eating chocolate ice-cream (yes, it can get that granular!)
In short: yes. If you want to reach customers, create a community, and sell to a wider audience, your business absolutely must employ some measure of digital marketing. “Building it and the audience will come” is relying on hope and prayer to ensure business success. Holistic and sustained digital marketing campaigns help your business not only survive in the online marketplace, but thrive and grow into the long term.
Do you need help with your digital marketing and copywriting in Melbourne? Contact me today!
In business, you have to have a plan. Because in business, we all have goals to hit. Writing content for your website should also have plan – and a goal. When it comes to content, you should be strategic about it. Having a long-term plan informed by real intelligence which exists to achieve a chosen objective doesn’t just work for armies and business, it works for your marketing. Though some people feel that marketing and content writing is a creative endeavour, the framework that your content sits on must have some kind of strategic direction.
So how do you write a content strategy, even if you’ve never written one before in 2022?
A strategy needs a broad goal: do I want to increase page views? Do I want to expand my social media following? Do I want to sell more products? What is the point of my content, and how – in an ideal sense – will my content get me to where my business going?
Your content should be linked to a goal – a SMART goal, or a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Limited goal. This could be summed up in a sentence or a statement: “To become the premier resource on novelty straws within five years.” Then the objectives sit underneath that – “To gain 100,000 page views for my novelty straw content within three months,” or “Rank on the first page of Google for ‘novelty straws’ by the end of 2023.” If you need help setting marketing goals, Neil Patel has some great quotes about goal setting by some leading marketing experts on his site.
Your content in part will be informed by your audience. Your audience is almost like a persona or character you’re pitching to – 25–34-year-old women who enjoy socialising – and naming that persona “Social Butterfly Jane.” You can determine where they are hanging out online and what other content they consume through analytics.
Using that data, you can establish a voice or tone that is authentically matched to that persona. To that end, you can read similar websites, looking for affinities with similar products or services, or doing boots-on-the-ground market research: your content has to engage your audience specifically lest you risk turning them off. When making content, just like in fiction when fleshing out character, you need to ask: “Would Jane actually enjoy this?”
A style guide is a must, especially if many hands are involved in the content writing project. This ensures brand consistency across all your media. This includes style such as whether you spell out numbers from one to ten; but also tone and certain words that your brand will use (or never use) as part of meeting the expectations of your audience.
This is the next part you need to weigh up – which apps is your persona or audience spending most of their attention? If you are a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company, a visual medium such as Instagram or Facebook works best. If you are a B2B rope company (my favourite analogy ever) then LinkedIn and EDMs would probably make more sense. Don’t just create content and shoehorn it into media and expect people to love it – tailor it for the personas you are trying to target.
At this stage, you need to set up data collection and analytics. This may be Facebook Business Suite, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other data gathering tools. This will enable you to do keyword research, find when your most traffic is active, and other drilldowns such as already popular content. This will help you re-evaluate your strategy later on.
Strategy is a byword for planning in advance to achieve a goal later. At this stage, you should have an overall plan of “attack” for your content strategy – how often you will post, where, and at what time. You should also have themes for your content – brand awareness, product highlights, community stories, insights & tips, “hard sales,” etc. This is dependent on your personas, message, and brand voice. Splitting your posts up into themes help you determine what kind of posts work best.
Staring at a blank piece of paper is far more daunting than having a topic to write about. Creativity happens within limitation – and idea generation should have the same sort of parameters. The strategy you’ve created for yourself so far should inform your ideas. What do people need to know? What will be high impact and high performance? If you’re really stuck, you can use idea generation software such as Blog About by Impact – it spits out ideas which you can run with or modify as you see fit.
If you’re a small business and tight on time, you need to set up a workflow from start to finish – who will come up with the creative? Who will write the copy? Who’s responsibility is it to program or schedule the posts? Make sure you delineate each task and give clear direction over who does what – it prevents “too many cooks” and also saves a lot of time and angst. Using a workflow tracking tool like Teams, Monday, or Asana can also help smooth out any potential hang-ups.
After about three months, you need to reconvene your team and look at the data you’ve collected. What’s working? What isn’t? Are the people looking at the content still in the persona we created, or do we need to pivot? Are they clamouring for longer form content, or are they enjoying videos more? A content strategy should be a living, breathing document and process – and continuous improvement means a better return on investment!
If you need a killer content strategy created by someone who’s done it all before and can do it all again, contact me!