Great copywriting is meant to prompt visitors to your website to take action like sign-up for an email newsletter or purchase a product on a landing page.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is copywriting’s big brother; it’s blogs, podcasts, ebooks, white papers and video that are created directly for the purpose of marketing.
If you’re new to digital marketing, a first time business owner or just setting yourself up as a consultant, before you think about investing in professional copywriting services to tighten up or even create the copy on your website, it’s important to understand that online marketing is not just an online CV or newspaper ad.
Online content marketing, for example, is NOT:
- a salesy landing page pimping your products or services!
- or an advertising banner you see down the side of your Facebook page
- a landscape gardener’s blog post that tells you how to create the perfect lawn
- a fitness coach’s video that shows you how to perfect your abs
- a language teacher’s podcast on conversational French.
- worthwhile,
- helpful,
- informative,
- entertaining
- and builds rapport with your audience.
- it will increase traffic to your website if updated regularly and make you easier to find in the search engines
- it will give you a platform to develop and promote your own brand online that you control
- it’s a low cost marketing device that allows you to instantly communicate with customers
- it helps you manage your online reputation because it gives you a platform to always get your own message out
- it provides a platform to showcase other content such as podcasts, videos, and ebooks
Content marketing is, for example:
Think of it Another Way
Content marketing is meaningful content that delivers something:
It’s marketing that doesn’t feel like schmaltzy, cheesy sales bull****.
What Are Your Options?
Small and medium-sized businesses have plenty of options when it comes to developing a successful platform for content marketing.
As far as I’m concerned a blog is the best starting point because:
Copywriting is a Critical Part of Your Content Marketing
Even if you develop a well-thought-out content marketing strategy, clearly pinpointing the kind of content that will help foster a greater rapport with, and produce plenty of content, it won’t be worth a thing if your site doesn’t ooze great copywriting.
It’s easy to spot a blog that lacks copywriting because it won’t encourage people to take action such as click through headlines, purchase an ebook or subscribe to the blog; it won’t drive visitors through to landing or sales pages, and it won’t turn visitors into customers.
Develop a Successful Online Marketing Mindset
To give your business the best chance of success you need to combine an integrated online marketing campaign delivering a combination of text, video and audio with strategic copywriting that gets the visitors to your site to take the kind of action you want.
As an example, blog posts pull visitors into my site through Google search results and the promotion box under each post encourages visitors to check out my online marketing and communications podcast. My strategy here is that the blog both generates traffic and then provides sufficient value to encourage people to check out the podcast. The copywriting and image in the promotion box then encourages people to click through to iTunes.
So how about you?
What do you think is difficult about juggling content and copy ? Or do you have any tips to help other use content and copywriting to take their business to the next level?
Let us know in the comments.
