Content writing is one of the top buzzwords. Content is the currency of your business in this digital marketing saturated business marketplace. Concurrent to the capital investment, your business must invest in good content to boost sales and grow your business online.
When there is such a high demand for good content, the need for efficient content writers escalates, opening up several content writing job opportunities.
As a result, you find tens of hundreds of content writing agencies and freelance content writers on the Internet, offering content writing services. Let's take a dive into content writing and its types.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
WHAT IS CONTENT WRITING?
Content writing is defined as a holistic process of planning, writing, editing and optimizing online content that helps a business achieve its digital marketing objectives at various stages of a buyer’s journey.
Content writing is professional-grade writing to deliver your brand message and convey your business values to the audience. Content helps to inform, educate, entertain, persuade and fascinate the audience about your brand.
The digital wave has cajoled every small or big enterprise to launch their business in the digital space. And in this digital arena, at every consumer touchpoint, you require rich content that informs the audience about the solutions you offer to make their life easy. This helps your prospects make informed decisions in your favour.
Content writing is the key to transforming your website visitors to leads, leads to consumers and consumers to promoters of your business.
It is a marketing tool that conveys your business objectives to the target audience and establishes a bond with them. This is the reason your business needs a content writer to engage with existing customers and attract potential customers.
WHO IS A CONTENT WRITER?
Conventionally, a person with an academic degree in Engineering gets known as an Engineer, and a person with a degree in MBBS gets recognized as a doctor, however, there is no such degree for a person to get recognized as a Content Writer.
A content writer is a professional writer who specializes in storytelling and communicating to the audience how the business solves their problems making life easier, via engaging pieces of write-ups.
Content writers help your business achieve its marketing objectives at various funnel stages by understanding your target audience, realizing their pain points and writing content that addresses their pain points or aligns with the audience’s interest.
Now, you might wonder that content writing looks simple, so can anyone write and publish content?
Most people think a content writer only pours words, but that's an act of sheer folly. With the above meme on content writers, you can realize the depth of a content writer's work.
Anyone can fill up a web page with some 800-1000 words. But when your business requires professional-grade content that resonates with the readers, you must hire a professional content writer.
There are various reasons to hire a professional content writer, for instance, a content writer not only understands the audience but writes content that aligns with their interest while concurrently integrating the best SEO practices, keywords, etc., to help the content rank higher on search engines.
To better define, a content writer is someone who enhances your brand awareness by driving increased traffic from search engines like Google and then nurtures the incoming traffic to move down the various stages of the marketing/sales funnel.
WHERE DO YOU USE CONTENT WRITING FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
Even a small piece of content like a social media copy can act as a lucrative lead magnet to seal the best deals. There are various consumer touchpoints where your business can use content to move the prospects down the sales funnel.
Website content
Social Media content
Ad Copies
Landing page content
Email content
Video scripts
Marketing collaterals
Ebooks, newsletters
Whitepapers
WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF CONTENT WRITING?
Content writing emerged as a source of passive income but has eventually evolved to be a lucrative full-time career.
A career in content writing for beginners could be overwhelming without knowing which area of content writing to begin with.
Content writing, not only denotes writing lengthy blogs; there are various types of content writing services that you might be interested in:
Blog Writing
Technical Writing
Copywriting
Marketing Writing – Email Copywriting
Social Media Content Writing
Scriptwriting
Press Releases
Ghost Writing
1. BLOG WRITING
Blogs are the pivotal forms of content writing from the past to date. Blogs are online articles written in a simple conversational style to educate, inform or entertain their audience. It provides a great platform to communicate to the audience about your business and how you bring solutions to their daily challenges.
The written blog articles are further optimized with the best SEO practices to rank higher on SERP. For every search query related to your industry, you aim to rank on top of search results to boost your online visibility and drive more visitors to your business.
To drive increased traffic, it is necessary to optimize the content and use relevant search terms or keywords in the blog that the audience uses while making a search.
Blogs are the best ways to include as many relevant keywords as possible on your website and drive more visitors. Secondly, search engines like Google love to rank fresh content on their results page. Via blogs, you can regularly update your website with fresh content and stay ahead of the competition.
By stats, there are over 1.7 billion websites on the Internet from around the world; out of these 1.7 billion websites, more than 500 million are blogs.
In a nutshell, blogs account for more than one-third of all the websites on the Internet. Thus there is significant scope for blog content writers.
2. TECHNICAL WRITING
Technical writing is a field of content writing where good expertise in technical niches like electronics, computers, programming, robotics, biotechnology, science and technology is demanded.
Technical writers help companies and businesses draft their instruction manuals, user manuals, technical modules, white papers etc.
A technical writer simplifies the highly technical details like technical jargon, complicated mechanics, working of various machines, etc., for the end consumers using simple language. It helps the consumer understand and take better decisions regarding the products/services offered by the company.
If you have a deep interest and understanding of technology, initiate your career as a technical writer. With technology being at the forefront of the majority of businesses, the demand for technical content writers is proportionately high.
In fact, the employment of technical writers is projected to grow 12% from 2020 to 2030.
3. COPYWRITING
Copywriters belong to the creative cohort of writers that make sales happen via their words. Do you remember those catchy phrases or enchanting jingles in advertisements that etched the advertised brand’s identity in your memories for long? That’s the forte of a creative copywriter!
Copywriters are entitled to write advertisement copies for social media ads, banners, billboards, flyers, sales collaterals, infographics, etc. They write a shorter form of content that inculcates the brand messaging while concurrently highlighting the USP of the product/service.
Copywriters are super creative and resonate with how audiences think and act. Stimulating the audience to make informed decisions, especially making a sale, is one of the main objectives of a copy.
To accomplish this objective copywriters target users’ emotions and motivate them to click the CTA.
Website copywriters, also known as web content writers, aim toward a rich user experience. Web copywriters ensure that every form of content they put out reflects the brand message clearly and concisely.
A copywriter is an important piece of the content marketing puzzle that pulls sales out of words. With the hype of social media and creative and minimalistic content, the demand for skilled copywriters is increasing day by day. For you to bag the role of copywriter, hone your creative writing skills and have a knack for thinking both inside and outside the box.
4. MARKETING WRITING – EMAIL COPYWRITING
Every business requires marketing to exhibit their product/services to the world and pull the public's attention towards their business. Marketing writing is a type of content writing that satisfies this purpose.
Marketing collaterals, including the sales proposals, pitch decks, brochures, flyers, and presentations that help you communicate your business values and USPs to the prospects fall into the category of marketing writing.
Email copywriting is also a type of marketing content as it primarily aims toward lead nurturing and conversion.
According to Litmus, email marketing brings the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel.
Most of the emails fall into the spam folder of the user’s mailbox or in the promotions folder which is the least opened one.
None would want a beautifully and creatively crafted email newsletter to fall into the spam, producing zero ROI of email marketing.
According to Optin Monster, 47% of people decide whether to open or not an email based on its subject line, and 69% of people report an email as spam based on the email subject line alone.
Hence, a skilled email copywriter begins by writing exceptional subject lines for the emails that not only prevent the email from falling into the spam/promotions folder but also intrigue the audience to open the mail.
One of the primary objectives of sending business emails is to motivate the users to click through the CTA. Thus the success of an email marketing campaign is calibrated by the open rate and click-through rates.
Whether targeting a customer to check out their abandoned cart or re-targeting an existing customer, creatively crafted emails can make wonders happen.
5. SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT WRITING
Social media has become a marketing hub, driving audiences towards a business. Even if you could not make a mark on search engines via blogs or SEO, social media could come to your rescue.
Six out of every ten people on the earth have a social network account. The success formula for social media is as simple as creating content that is trending and soliciting the audience’s attention.
In this saturated social media space, create content that appeals to the audience’s emotions, content that entertains, educates or resonates with the audience.
A social media writer has a good understanding of social media algorithms. He/she knows the recipe for creating engaging social media content with the right balance of humour, wit and promotion.
They are aware of the latest social media trends and leverage these trends to stay ahead in the game which is all about driving engagement and initiating conversation with the audience to promote brand awareness and loyalty.
6. SCRIPTWRITING
These days multimedia content, in general audio and video content are breaking the Internet. Every social media platform is trying to promote short videos in its space.
According to Wyzowl’s survey, the video helped 84% of surveyed businesses to generate leads, 78% increase sales and 86% increase site traffic.
Podcasts have become another marketing channel for businesses and individual creators. There are various lucrative reasons to start a podcast as it promotes brand visibility, aces marketing strategy and attracts potential customers.
The demand for multimedia content has increased the demand for scriptwriters in the market. Webinar usage also increased from 46% to 62% in 2020-2021.
A scriptwriter makes efficient use of multimedia content to blend brand storytelling while communicating brand messaging to the audience. A scriptwriter can help you with video scripts, podcast scripts, storyboard scripts and chatbot communication.
7. PRESS RELEASES
Whenever a company launches a new product, embarks on a new initiative or gets into a new merger, press releases are used to make the respective announcements to the public.
These press releases are majorly used from a marketing perspective to make the audience more aware of the brand.
A press release writer is a brand journalist who must have a knack for marketing and writing brand stories in the most fascinating ways. With their stories, they create a positive image of the brand among the public.
8. GHOSTWRITING
Hey, relax man!
Ghostwriting has nothing to do with any paranormal things. Ghostwriting means writing content for someone under their name, without revealing the original writer’s identity to the world.
In this content-saturated world, a well-crafted piece of content can promote brand awareness, pull leads and make sales, hence every business and entrepreneur aims to publish engaging content.
However, the entrepreneurs, CEOs or CTOs do not have enough bandwidth to write content, and they hire writers to write content for them.
Ghostwriters have expertise in shapeshifting and getting into the shoes of the person for whom they write. They think like the person and write well-researched content that leaves a mark, establishing authority in the concerned industry.
With the growing demand for content marketing, the top-notch officials of companies look out for excellent ghostwriters who can become their brand voice.
To ace your role as a ghostwriter, you must have a deep understanding of the niche, good research skills and the mentality to publish content under someone else’s name.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Content writing is defined as a holistic process of planning, writing, editing and optimizing online content that helps a business achieve its digital marketing objectives at various stages of a buyer’s journey.
Content is the currency of your business as it transforms your website visitors into leads, leads to consumers and consumers to promoters of your business.
To quickly define, a content writer is a professional writer specializing in storytelling and communicating to the audience what a business has to offer and how it solves its problems.
The various types of content writing services include Blog Writing, Technical Writing, Copywriting, Marketing Writing, Email Copywriting, Social Media Content Writing, Scriptwriting, Press Releases and Ghostwriting.
CONCLUSION
Content writing is more than a hobby; it’s a business skill that has the potential of making or breaking your business marketing plan. Content writers are one of the main drivers of marketing for a business.
If you are interested in writing, go through the various types of content writing mentioned above and figure out which kind of content writing you relate to.
In contrast, if you run a business or looking for a content writer or a copywriter to help you ace your content marketing game, get in touch with Content Writer OPJ for the best content writing services.