Copywriting is one of the essential skills inside a Digital Marketing Team. Whether you are someone who is casually scrolling through social media or having your daily newspaper read, you are bound to encounter different types of advertisements. An advertising copy is a product of someone who is an expert in copywriting called copywriters. It is a piece of marketing tool that is used by companies for promotional use of a specific product or service. It encourages the readers to take a form of action such as clicking a link to view web content or straight up making a purchase. These ad copies include promotions that are either published in print or shown online.
What is Copywriting?
Copywriting is one of the different types of writing and marketing strategies used by brands to reach their target audience, and you can find this strategy across multiple advertising channels. Hiring copywriters is essential and a very important skill set if you want your prospects to receive your message and take action. Copywriting is different from content marketing in terms of purpose. Content marketing is focused mainly on attracting and acquiring an audience while copywriting is to get those people to act. Both are just as important, and both should work hand-in-hand for it to be effective and that is the difference between copywriting and content marketing.
You can make many different types of copywriting through many mediums such as newspapers, magazines, billboards, websites, and even your emails. Ad copies are everywhere, and with the speedy growth of the internet and search engine, it has been easier for copywriters to spread and reach their preferred audience.
An effective advertisement should not only spread its message and reach its audience. It should also prompt people to act after reading an ad. It should be engaging enough for the reader to take a form of action upon the encounter with the ad-like.
A copywriter’s main goal is to keep the readers engaged through a story, in a form of ad copy. It is to increase the chances of the copy to serve its purpose. As a copywriter, you have to make sure to design not only be an eye-catching copy but highly engaging as well. Successful copywriters can keep you glued in until you reach the intended course of action.
With the internet, it is now much easier due to how vast the reach is. With that in mind, the platform for copywriting has widened immensely. Now, ad copies come in all forms across different platforms. Some are published in print as we see in newspapers or white paper, magazines, and even brochures.
The print is not as fast as its online counterpart, but both do serve the same purpose. It is just harder to make your reader take a course of action because it does involve physical efforts to do, such as purchasing a product. One way around it is that print advertisements are made sure to catch your attention whether you are driving on the highway or flipping through magazine pages.
Online advertisements or a web copy, on the other hand, is a faster way of getting instant engagement from your audience. You can make your audience act right then and there since you can include purchase links and promo codes into your advertisement. Different types of online copywriting include blog posts, emails, product descriptions, and everything in between.
As a copywriter, you should consider a couple of things in crafting and writing a copy. All your copy needs to be informative, accurate, and versatile for them to have a better efficacy rate. This copywriting type is known as SEO copywriting. In this type of writing, writers will also consider using a word that search engines can easily recognize. This type of process is called search engine optimization. Aside from knowing how to tell a story, it is also important that a copywriter also know this process. White papers and printed copies don’t need to deal with the search engine, but for online publishing, it is of utmost importance.
What are you writing?
The first thing you need to know is the main focus of your writing. The very first step you should know as a writer is to understand what you will be working with. It will act as a root to where you can base your copy out off. Knowing the product or service would make it easier for you to determine your goal. Understanding the brand would also help you to give accurate information.
What is your goal?
Next is you should know what your main goal is because by doing so, you can focus on creating a draft specifically for that specific goal. Your goal is the backbone for your ad to reach more people or making your brand known.
Who are your audiences?
Knowing your target is key to effective communication. Understanding who is at the receiving end of your message, which can be business-to-business or business-to-consumer, would allow you to communicate accordingly. It will enable you to convey the message effectively, which raises the chances of getting the response you want. Your understanding of your demographics is essential, especially in B2C writing, because it may not only lure in potential customers but also for keeping your customers loyal.
What medium to use?
Now that you know what your goal is, and you now understand who your target is going to be, the next step is to determine how to reach them. Your perfectly constructed message should be able to reach the intended people for it to be effective.
How would you reach your writing goal?
Considering all of that, you should have an idea now on how to reach the goal you had set. Determining which type of copywriting you should use would make or break your ad.
Different Types of Copywriting
The importance of research in content marketing cannot be stressed enough, especially when it comes to copywriting. In making sure you get maximum efficacy for all your projects, understanding your target market is the key. Specific target requires a specific type of copywriting, and finding the perfect match between the two would improve the performance of your copy.
Now we have to go through each different copywriting for you to determine which ones work in certain situations.
Direct Mail
Direct email marketing is an email-based campaign in which you send advertisements to the targeted list of recipients. Contrary to popular beliefs, direct mail is different from spam in ways that it will not bombard you with useless emails. A well-trained direct mail copywriter sends copies in an attractive and a very professional manner to a specific group of recipients. These can be tailored to individual recipients taking into consideration a few factors such as income, location, profession, and other identifying information of that specific person. They also include mechanisms that provide senders feedback on the effectiveness of the campaign. The direct mail can also be used by B2B copywriters, to send their messages directly to companies.
The email refers to a piece of content that is sent straight to your email inbox. It is similar to direct mail with the only difference. It is either you as a customer, have opted-in to the company’s’ mailing list, or you acquired a service from them in which you also provided your emailing details.
Billboards
Billboards are tricky because it is a kind of a hit or miss when it comes to copywriting and marketing. This is because most billboards are now overrun by online media. But still, billboards show no signs of slowing down since they are the ones who rule the freeway. Billboards do lean towards being image-heavy for it to be eye-catching, a written component is still needed for it to be successful.
Press Releases
Copywriting in press releases is a very important aspect of a company’s public relations activities. Written communication in which you intend to share important, or exciting information about an event, development, and business plans. The purpose of it is to release newsworthy information intended to grab the attention of media professionals. It is in hopes of them spreading the details and information that you wish to convey through written content such as news articles, interviews, and so much more. Because of the advances in mainstream media now, a press release can be sent directly to influencers, bloggers, and consumers. They can then send and share the details on Social Media or Blogs. A great way if you want to make your brand gain recognition.
Social Media
Copywriting for social media is not as easy as it sounds. It takes skill and thought to write a compelling copy that would surely encourage engagement from your audiences. Social media is a compilation of many different platforms, each with its own sets of audiences. As a copywriter, you should know how to adapt to every website because it is not a one size fits all type of copywriting. Perfecting a headline can land you closer to getting your readers to act.
Styles of Copywriting
Now that we had established the types of copywriting, we now go to the different styles of copywriting.
SEO Writing
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving your website to increase its overall visibility for relevant searches. Having better visibility means that your page or website has higher chances of showing up in search results. This means that it will increase the people giving attention to your website content such as blog posts or a news article. SEO can be a little tricky and it poses certain challenges to SEO copywriters as it requires you to constantly strategize but still keeping that creative element to it.
But why do we need SEO copywriting important? It is because search engines such as Google and Bing collect data from websites and then putting them on an index. They then consider hundreds of ranking factors to determine the order pages should appear in search results for a certain query. Content quality, keyword searches, and meta tags are the key factors for content optimization. Search algorithms are designed to surface relevant pages to provide users with an efficient search experience. With that in mind, optimizing your website and web content can help you and your paged rank higher in the search results because one word can make a difference for your content. Therefore, as an SEO copywriter, do take note that search results have been evolving to cater to the users by giving them direct information straight from the results page instead of driving them to other websites.
With very little time to capture your prospects’ attention, creating the perfect ad can be a bit tricky, this is where creative writers come in. Your content needs to stand out for it to be noticed by your users. For a lot of things such as the headline up to the body of your content, you must ensure that your customers are tuned in from start to finish. Not only does it keep the existing customers, but also attract new ones as well. At the end of the day, copywriting is, to a degree, creative.
Sales Writing
A sales copy is what marketers often use to persuade a reader to purchase a product through advertising. They design it in a way where it presents their brand in a good light writing so that their consumers couldn’t just say no. Sales writing is quite tricky for writers since letting the product speak for itself just won’t cut it anymore. As a marketing copywriter, your content needs to capture your customers on an emotional and visceral level for them to realize their desire to purchase whatever product or service you’re providing. You must be able to tell a story within your content to appeal to your target, making them relate to the product and diminish any objections they might still be having. A sales copy doesn’t need to be straight forward and just be a list of product descriptions. You can still make it creative which prevents it from looking like boring user manuals.
Technical Writing
Marketing agencies often use technical copywriting to provide their customers with detailed procedures on how to use their product or service. This may come in forms such as guides, instruction manuals, release notes, case studies, etc., to provide accurate information regarding a subject matter. Meaning, it leans more towards handing out information rather than marketing. Some marketing departments from other companies would release technical copies in the forms of white papers and help forums so there’s still a degree of creativity needed for you to have an effective technical copy.
Bottom Line
Being a copywriter is not just a mere job title. For some people, it’s their passion. Whether you do freelance writing or work as a full-time copywriter for an established brand, know that all industry is ever-evolving so as a marketing copywriter, adaptation should be a key part of your skillset. Knowing how to ride and adapt to these changes is what makes you a successful writer. Everything we’ve covered is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are still a lot of things to unpack as the industry progress. If you want to learn more about Digital Marketing, check out Digital Marketing for Dummies to know more.
