Category: Content Marketing

Top content marketing tips: Writing for Mobile – Converting in 3 Words

Top content marketing tips: Writing for Mobile – Converting in 3 Words by Gareth Bull - Director at Bulldog Digital Media - Bulldog Digital Media.  Available from <http://www.netimperative.com/2016/09/top-content-marketing-tips-writing-mobile-converting-3-words/>. [September 21, 2016]

Mobile is the future but where does ‘responsive copy’ fit in? Writing for a tiny screen means getting to the point in an instant and converting people with succinct copy. Gareth Bull from Bulldog Digital Media, offers some essential considerations for copywriting for mobile websites.

Mobile is the future but where does ‘responsive copy’ fit in? People often talk about mobile as if the design was the only thing that mattered, but content is key too. How do you adapt your copy and content creation process to mobiles? Writing for mobile means getting to the point in an instant and converting people with succinct copy, but it also means giving them valuable content and a user-experience that’s comparable to desktop. Here are some essential considerations for copywriting for mobile.

Mobile content consumption

Nowadays, people are actually reading (shock horror) on their mobiles. Technology habits are changing, and the latest smartphones are increasingly powerful and optimised for web browsing. Good mobile content should be a continuation of web content, not a second-class platform that frustrates with its lack of information. A bad mobile experience is bad for a brand.

Despite the need for clarity and succinct copy, it’s wrong to assume a ‘dumbed down’ attitude to writing mobile content. See your mobile readers as savvy content consumers. Give them the good stuff, but give them the option to have it as a takeaway snack if they want to.

Shift to adaptive strategy

There are so many content platforms, with smartphones differing wildly in their capabilities. You need a strategy for how your content will be consumed across ALL different platforms, not micro strategies for every device. This is known as adaptive content: content that will adapt to a customer, situation, and device. Content that is smart and freed from design constraints. Content that doesn’t care so much about where it is, but about where it is best deployed.

Writing adaptive content is about breaking content down into blocks that can then be used by different platforms. Think smart, structured, and adaptable. Write in blocks, ideas, and nuggets, rather than paragraphs and pages. Use structure and metadata to mark up your content for devices. Adaptable content success boils down to proper content auditing, user-testing, refining core messaging, and shifting content strategies away from older desktop-based models.

Content audits

Survey all the content you have- what is being used by people? What is turning them off? What can be re-purposed? Approach your content audits analytically, breaking down content into key ideas, audience, engagement metrics, and possible future value. It’s a good idea to get a few different people involved in the evaluation process to avoid copy blindness. Don’t be afraid to cull useless content. You want to be left with only the essential content that matters to your audience.
Create a connection fast, but don’t be afraid of the scroll

You have three words to impress, seconds to sell- or do you? The mobile copy experience is more about giving people information fast and engaging them…then inviting them in for more if they want to. It’s not about stripping everything way.

  • You have to make sure that the first words above the fold are compelling and that they put the user first.
  • Don’t use a phrase “because you like it”, think about how a user will use it to get to the next step.
  • If you want users to make a choice quickly, lay out all the different pathways for them. Use simple phrases or visuals.
  • Include long-form content on mobile too- people will read it if it’s relevant.

Appeal to mobile user priorities

Information architecture is absolutely key for a mobile website. It’s important to give people key information quickly to make their journey easier, avoiding too much tapping and scrolling. Rejig information architecture to fit around user priorities. Prioritise this over fancy visuals or animations, as it will have a big impact on user-experience and your site’s engagement metrics.

Copy challenges & work flow

Writing for mobile is an opportunity to better your writing across the board. The focus on user priorities, succinctness and functionality should help refocus all your content. Writing for mobile should also help you redefine your copy workflow, seeing copy as adaptable and multifunctional, rather than treating pieces as discrete entities. Embrace spreadsheets and metrics to help you break down your copy into different formats.

Break it down

Often brands and businesses get bogged down with complex brand messaging, positively smothering the user with USPs and selling points. Sometimes breaking an idea down into its simplest form is the most effective way to create a genuine connection. To make an idea stick better, use the tried-and-tested SUCCESS principles. Making ideas sticky and simple is a great mobile copy strategy that will have positive effects across the board.

No easy answers

After all, ‘mobile experience’ means many things- it could mean a small screen and a dodgy WIFI connection on a train, or it could mean a huge screen in a company boardroom. Mobile is just the latest in a long line of digital transformations, and it’s one that businesses and brands need to embrace to compete in the current digital market. Karen McGrane’s e-book on mobile contentstrategy has a lot of fascinating insights into mobile content and writing for mobile if you wanted to explore the topic further.

Top content marketing tips: Writing for Mobile – Converting in 3 Words by Gareth Bull - Director at Bulldog Digital Media - Bulldog Digital Media.  Available from <http://www.netimperative.com/2016/09/top-content-marketing-tips-writing-mobile-converting-3-words/>. [September 21, 2016]

Here Are 7 Content Marketing Tips for Your Startup

Here Are 7 Content Marketing Tips for Your Startup by A.  Available from <http://tech.co/7-content-marketing-tips-startup-2016-09> [September 12, 2016; 9:00 pm]

Most effective startups hit the ground running with their content marketing efforts. If you own a startup and want to generate a lot of buzz, build up a base of interested buyers and, take the world by storm, you’re going to need to focus on content marketing way before day one.

It’s easy to assume that kick-starting a content marketing campaign involves a lot of work, and it’s partly true. However, by following these six tips, you’ll be on your way before you know it.

Define Your Audience

While setting up your startup, you should have conducted plenty of market research to determine the types of people who are most likely to want what you have to offer. Take the information that you have already gathered about your target audience and refine it further by creating unique buyer personas for the various different types of people who you will be targeting.

Going forward, use these personas to craft content that is as effective and engaging as possible.

Establish a Strategy

As eager as you may be to get started with your content marketing efforts, there’s no point in proceeding without establishing a clearly defined strategy first. Now that you have defined your buyer personas, you can safely do so.

Your strategy should clearly outline various details of how you will engage in content marketing. Address questions like how often you’ll publish, where you’ll publish, what types of content you’ll use, and who will you be creating said content.

The key is to commit yourself to using the strategy rather than just writing it out on the first day. Making it easy to amend will go a long way as well, because you will almost certainly have to tweak it again and again as time goes by.

Choose Content Creators

As a startup, you probably aren’t in the position to spend huge amounts of money on content. However, making sure that you allocate decent amounts of your marketing budget for it will go a long way in helping you set up right the first time.

If possible, assign someone on your team to produce content for you. With any luck, you already have a proficient writer and marketer on board. Ideally, they should be well-versed regarding SEO and online marketing too.

Otherwise, hit up crowdsourcing sites to find reliable writers. One way to keep costs low is by choosing cheaper writers and then editing their work to suit your standards.

Brainstorm Topics

To keep your content flowing along, it helps to come up with a huge list of topics right off the bat. At first, brainstorming ideas will seem easy. Before too long, though, you’ll get writer’s block worse than ever.

Use sites like Reddit and Quora to see what people are curious about when it comes to your particular niche or industry. Speaking of niches, go ahead and get specific about certain topics to generate more ideas. In fact, in-depth pieces that cover specific aspects of a subject tend to do quite well.

For each topic that you come up with, define the platform on which it will be published. Go one step further by defining when it will be published. With all of this work out of the way, executing your strategy will be a snap.

Be Different

To truly stand out, you must be intentional about not fitting in. Do something beneficial to your audience and remarkably different from what’s common that you get everyone talking about it. One way to take an unconventional approach is to develop an interactive content format for your audience.

A good example is the homepage of Neil Patel’s blog, QuickSprout. Once you input your URL into it and grant it Google Analytics permission, it pulls data from your website, analyzes it and gives you insights on making your better content.

Another good example is the homepage of HowMuchCostAnApp. It leads you through a step-by-step, “if-this-then-that” process that helps you decide what specific features you want in a mobile app and how much it would cost.

In both cases, the content is interactive, benefits the audience and is unconventional.

Choose a Platform

Your first instinct may be to spread your content across as many social media platforms as possible. However, this is a good way to waste a lot of time and money. Instead, turn to the market research that you’ve conducted to determine where your ideal customers tend to spend time online.

Do they generally favor Facebook, or are they more often found on Twitter? If you run a B2B startup, don’t forget about LinkedIn as a platform for your content. Use analytics to see which platforms seem to work well and which don’t.

Continually adjust your strategy accordingly until you have narrowed things down to the most effective platforms and channels for your audience.

Publish, Promote, Refine

With all of the groundwork out of the way, you’re ready to start publishing content. Of course, publishing it–even on the ideal platform–is merely the first step. You must actively promote it too, or it will disappear into the ether.

Therefore, get serious about your social media game. Establish and get active on the platforms that matter the most to your target audience. Don’t just promote brand-new content, either. Over time, pull up old pieces of content and promote them again. It’s amazing how much mileage you can get out of a single, well-crafted piece of content.

Finally, use analytics every step of the way to continually refine and optimize your content and your overall strategy. Remember that content marketing is, by necessity, always a work in progress.

Here Are 7 Content Marketing Tips for Your Startup by A.  Available from <http://tech.co/7-content-marketing-tips-startup-2016-09> [September 12, 2016; 9:00 pm]