Marketing your business involves a lot of writing.
Whether you do this in-house, or by hiring in the expertise of a copywriter, you’ll need one very important thing – lots of ideas for content.
Ideas can come from anywhere at any time, so here are a couple of tips to make sure your ideas keep flowing.
1. Paper and pen
Because you never know when inspiration will strike, make sure you have a pen and paper with you at all times (or a digital voice recorder).
During your working day, ideas will come at you from all directions:
- Comments from customers
- An article you’ve read
- A news item
- Mail shots
- Emails…
So when an idea strikes, write it down. It could be the start of a blog post, article or newsletter item.
Customer feedback is particularly important. If you’re scratching around for an idea for your next blog post, or newsletter, where better to look for inspiration than your customers? If they contact you with a question, you could create a ‘how to’ or ‘top tips’ article based around their enquiry.
By keeping a record of ideas like this, you’ll never be scratching around for inspiration.
2. Swipe file
One word of warning – a swipe file doesn’t mean you are free to plagiarise other people’s work.
Every day you are subjected to hundreds of sales messages. You probably subscribe to several newsletters, receive loads of direct mail and read magazine and newspaper articles. Some of which you’ll read and some you’ll ignore.
But with the ones you read, think about what it was that made you take notice of them:
- What was in the headline that made you read on?
- How was it written?
- What type of information did it contain?
- What tone was used?
In other words, what was it that captured your attention? Once you discover that, you can reproduce that effect in your own marketing materials.
What it comes down to is this – online marketing is a continual process. We’re talking about newsletters, emails, web copy, blogs and articles – all things that have to be done regularly to keep your business in your customers’ line of sight.
By regularly jotting down notes, you’ll never be short of ideas for your online marketing.
1 comment so far ↓
Having a clear plan and knowing what you want out of your copywriting is vital to getting the most out of online marketing campaigns. The operator of a business is in the best position to understand what the central issues and interests are in their own niche and so they will be in the best position to decide on what sort of content will be the most valuable. The more comprehensive that you can make a brief, the more likely it is that your copywriter will get it right for you.
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