If you are looking at trying to improve or enhance your digital marketing, there are a lot of things that you might need to consider along the way. When it comes to copywriting, or creating writing in any capacity for the sake of your digital marketing, it can be a huge help if you have the appropriate understanding behind it of what makes great writing great.
To help you with that, we are going to take a look here at some of the writing techniques and principles that are most important when it comes to copywriting and other kinds of marketing writing. Let’s take a look at how you can incorporate these for the benefit of your marketing goals.
Show Rather Than Tell
You will often hear people talking about this in creative writing, and it is exactly the kind of rule that can prove to be important in marketing as well. Essentially, it is all about how you present information to the reader. The most effective writing generally takes the salient information and illustrates it in such a way that the reader can see for themselves what it is all about. This is much more effective than simply telling your reader what you want them to know.
You can probably already see how this applies to the world of writing for marketing purposes. What really gets people engaged is actively seeing what you are talking about in action, so that is something you need to try and achieve if you are hoping to create a truly compelling copy. It’s this which really gets people visualizing what you are talking about.
Chekhov’s Gun
This is another well-known writers’ principle that can be useful in pretty much every kind of writing, including marketing, copy and so forth. Essentially Chekhov’s Gun is all about making sure that everything you write, and everything you mention, has its place. In terms of writing stories and plays and so on, it means that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it should certainly be fired in the third. And when it comes to writing copy, it means that you should only mention something if it is going to advance the process that you are trying to play out.
Always keep your goal in mind when copywriting, and you should find that you have a pretty good innate sense of whether or not something needs to be mentioned. Then you just need to follow that feeling, and try to only include information that is actually going to help achieve your aims. If you can do that, you’ll have a much more concise way of writing that will be so much more effective.
Consider The Reader’s Knowledge Base
You always have to write with one eye on the reader, and particularly with an acute awareness of what kind of knowledge base they have and do not have. This is especially important when you are dealing with information on specific, niche topics – often, diving too deep into jargon is a great way to actually put people off. So be aware of that, and make sure you are considering your reader’s understanding when you are writing about technical or specific topics. As long as you can do that, you should find that you are able to bring the reader in a lot more effectively, or at least avoid shutting them out, as often happens.
And of course, to understand who your audience is, you need to carry out some market research – a vital part of the process that you should be doing anyway.
If In Doubt, Strip It Down
When you are editing a piece of writing, and you can’t decide whether it’s too long or too short, whether it needs more adding to it or more taking away, it is generally wise to assume the latter over the former. Most writing, in the early drafts, ends up sprawling out too much, in an effort to cover all the bases. But that rarely means good writing has happened. And when you are editing, you need to make sure that you are therefore able to strip it down if possible – and it is pretty much always possible.
That will lead to much more concise writing, which will be a lot better received and so much more effective. So it’s really important that you are doing this wherever possible.
Those are just some of the main principles to remember when you are copywriting in the future.