Patience Hurlburt-Lawton
We all know by now how important content is to a digital marketing campaign. Quality content attracts links, builds credibility, engages your readers and keeps them coming back to your website.
In addition to a relevant and interesting topic, it’s important to know the digital communication basics – who is your audience, is the format readable, and what are you trying to accomplish? Writing with these questions in mind will help you craft a well thought out article that can create the biggest impact possible with your potential customers.
So, let’s get to it.
Who are you writing to?
You probably wouldn’t speak the same way to your lawyer as you would your teenage daughter. That’s because we humans like to adapt our words, tone of voice, etc. to different people and situations. Make sure you know who your audience is and how they communicate (Formal? Informal? Techie? Down-to-earth?).
For example, if you are writing a blog about the benefit of cloud computing and your audience is the average computer user, don’t write as if you are talking to IT managers. Use words, phrases and a tone of voice that your audience can understand and relate to.
Make the format easy to read.
A single, large block of text is not easy to read. Titles in all caps are not easy to read. Run-on sentences with no paragraph breaks are not easy to read. Internet users come across dozens of articles a day – if yours isn’t easy to read or even skim through, they will move on.
Make your format readable with titles, subheads, bullet points (when relevant), call outs, quotes, photos, captions, etc. Limit paragraphs to only a few sentences. Text is much easier to read when it’s broken up into bite sized chunks. Also, try and organize your thoughts. Make sure the introduction and conclusion tie together and everything in between flows in a logical order.
Know your goal.
What do you want your audience to do after reading your content? Do you want them to visit your website? Do you want to persuade them to purchase an item or attend an event? Do you want to influence opinions? Or do you just want to inform your readers (so they know you’re the expert in your industry, of course).
Think about what the end goal is before starting to write. That way the article will actually accomplish what it’s intended to.
As the saying goes, ‘content is king.’ While that may be true, well written, clearly communicated content is even better. Taking a few minutes at the beginning of your content creation process to think about these important digital communication questions will help your content get read, understood and shared.
