TL;DR
- Only write content that you actually want to read
- Enjoy writing—it definitely shows in your work
- Execute like a professional by paying attention to all the details
I may be a digital marketer, but I’m a writer first. Writing is my craft—and my flywheel. I wholeheartedly embrace this digital era by being excited about blockchain technology, AI, and the potential of a digital content marketing strategy done right.
One key to being a great writer—not listed here!—is to be concise. So let’s get straight to it—time to reveal my six secrets to writing like a content queen.
1. Understand the business objectives
One way to produce awesome content—arguably the most crucial way—is to dedicate time to understanding the business objectives of an organization. Clearly understanding the goals of the company, team, or campaign can create satisfying alignment between the content that you create and the most urgent needs of the customer.
What are some business or campaign objectives that you might be tasked with prioritizing as a marketing writer? Let’s name a few—
- Raise brand awareness: How can you as a writer raise brand awareness? Be authentic. Creating memorable content is a must for a successful marketing writer. What that means, in practice, varies for every brand, but you can generally aim to be just a little bit 🔥 provocative 🔥
- Educate the target audience: You may be writing content to educate a specific target audience. The best educational content is accessible, informative, and delightfully engaging.
- Boost conversion rates: Informing and inspiring through great content is a popular way to drive sales conversions. People who feel informed can (and do!) convert into customers faster.
- Increase per-customer revenue: Customers who engage with a business through digital content marketing can be more valuable to the company. Awesome content can boost customer loyalty, trust, and lifetime value.
- Nurture existing users: A key business objective may be to better serve existing users, for the purpose of reducing churn rate and increasing product satisfaction. Nurturing the existing client base may require producing technical content that’s factually correct, yet still understandable and engaging.
2. Know your target audience
Who are you writing for? That’s an important question for a digital marketing writer. Identifying and deeply understanding your target audience is a key step that should always precede the flow of words from your brain. Because even a great writer can miss the mark if their content is only great for a different audience.
Knowing your target audience means gathering information about a long list of attributes—
- Professional occupation
- Interests and hobbies
- Values and beliefs
- Pain points and challenges
- Goals and motivations
- Content preferences
- Subject matter knowledge
- Decision making process
- Demographic qualities
Knowing your target audience also means knowing where they hang out online. LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, or another—that’s where your content needs to be. Great marketing writers adapt their style, tone, and content to match audience preferences and needs across digital platforms.
3. Conduct plenty of topic research
You may be a subject matter expert who happens to love writing 🙋, but even topic experts need to conduct research to produce consistently great content. Industries like fintech and web3 are rapidly evolving, requiring most digital marketing writers to stay sharp like news junkies.
How can you get the most out of your research efforts as a content writer? Here are some secrets to avoid getting (too) lost on the internet—
- Leverage many sources to gather information: Digital marketing writers can use a variety of sources—including AI chatbots—to gather relevant information. The information provided by relevant social media channels and credible secondary sources—like established news sites—is often valuable to a content writer’s research.
- Only cite primary sources: You can use a variety of sources to conduct research, but marketing writers with journalistic integrity strive to cite information only from primary sources. That means prioritizing .gov and .edu sites, for example. You can often leverage high-quality secondary sources, like CoinDesk and Decrypt, to find links to primary sources.
- Research until you have an opinion: When are you ready to stop researching and starting writing? When you fully understand and have your own (fresh) opinions on the topic that you are exploring. Research until you have the burning urge to start typing.
- Fact-check yourself: Are all the facts in your brain current? You may know an interesting or relevant nugget of information, but savvy content writers still conduct quick Google searches to verify 100% accuracy. Aim to use primary sources to validate your knowledge.
4. Be extremely organized
How messy is your office? Is your inbox full? Not judging. But the best content writers usually take a highly organized approach to producing a written masterpiece.
What exactly am I talking about? Here are some tactics that content writers can use to make their content more organized, and hence more accessible and engaging—
- Structure the content logically: I use my engineering brain to structure marketing content. How should keyword subtopics logically flow? Using a natural order for subtopics—and plenty of H2s and bullet points—makes any topic easier to understand. A logical structure also makes the page more scannable for your hurried reader.
- Ruthlessly organize every sentence: I have a pet peeve—disorganized sentences. A great sentence in the wrong section of a blog is likely to miss the mark. Great content writers are like surgeons—very particular when it comes to sentence placement.
- Organize your content production process: An organized content production process creates organized and accessible content. Content writers at the top of their game relish in refining their production workflows, and the result is content with brand consistency. An organized content production process also ensures that you never forget to write title tags and meta descriptions or add backlinks and hashtags.
5. Make writing fun
Can you tell that I am enjoying writing this blog? It’s Sunday and there’s nowhere else today that I’d rather be. I love to write, and use that passion to create my professional flywheel. My biggest secret to creating successful digital marketing content is this—
Content that’s fun to write is also fun to read.
It’s really that simple, but I’m willing to break down my flywheel for you—
- Allie creates content, enjoyably. Allie enjoys a lovely day writing about a topic that fascinates her and for which she is a subject matter expert. Allie injects humor and engaging words throughout the content, making the entire day more fun.
- People enjoy reading Allie’s content. The humor and engaging language works, and the information provided is useful, causing readers to benefit.
- Allie gets to produce more content. Allie’s content writing produces a positive impact, resulting in her talent being increasingly in demand. Allie is delighted to encounter many valuable opportunities to produce more content.
- Allie has more fun. More opportunities to write great marketing content means more opportunities to engage, inspire, and inform various audiences. For a digital marketer who loves to write, this can only mean more opportunities to thoroughly enjoy the content creation process.
Flywheel complete. Write on!
6. Remember that every detail matters
Are you obsessed with typos like I am? Exceptional marketing writers display their professionalism, in part, by producing error-free content that is attractively formatted. Credibility on the internet—or anywhere?—is not granted automatically, which is why you need to care about the miniscule details to succeed as a digital marketing writer.
Which details should you care about the most as a fastidious writer? Check out this handy list of mistakes to avoid—
- Using broken backlinks or call-to-action buttons
- Citing non-credible sources
- Not citing any sources
- Using incorrect or outdated facts
- Making poor word choices
- Overlooking grammar mistakes
- Not correcting spelling errors
These fixes are easy wins—and I always take them. Great content writers set themselves apart by consistently aiming high, but not before grabbing all the low-hanging fruit that’s in abundance around them.
