As a marketing leader, your judgement helps guide marketing campaigns through identifying the correct target market, trends in the marketplace, and ensuring marketing activities successfully reach interested parties to guide them to your business. In the previous article “Examples of Tone and Voice for Inbound Marketing” key writing concepts were brought up. Understanding concepts such as tone, voice, and active/passive voice are one thing but employing them is an entirely different matter. Here are three ways to help your team get this correct.
One: Copywriting 101
You don’t need to be a professional copywriter to utilize their methodology. Here are three such tips.
- Research Your Target Market: before writing anything research the target market. A lot of marketers (especially experienced ones) have an idea of what the market is and may draw too heavily from experience and preconceived notions. Knowing who you’re talking to shapes the tone and voice of a work and should always be approached from the perspective of learning new information.
- Be Informative But Not An Expert: inbound marketing is meant to inform. The goal is to educate and draw the interest of the reader not make them an expert. A lot of writers get too into every minute detail which while fairly correct is not needed. Getting too deep into a topic often leads to overuse of jargon at which point the reader is lost.
- Read It Backward: a work with a good voice also has an underlying structure. The most common of these is present the issue, offer a solution, supply supporting evidence of this solution, and come to a conclusion or call to action. This reads correctly backward and forward. Read a work backward and you will see the conclusion, how the writer came to it, and the original question that inspired the research into the preceding evidence.
Two: Trust In Technology
The previous article “AI in MS Word – A Practical Solution For Inbound?” showed artificial intelligence is able to catch common writing errors and offer corrections. Don’t be afraid to leverage technology to make writing better. Many writers appreciate such tools as it saves work and catches errors they miss. One of the best ways to help your team write articles that meet the criteria for the proper structure is to give them tools such as this. Invest in professional grade software and make sure everyone knows how to use it.
Three: Have Other People Read It
One of the simplest ways to test a work for tone, correct voice, and overall readability is to have someone else read it. Writers are often bad judges of their own work with many writers loving everything they do and others hating everything they do. Neither is very useful. An uninvolved third party can look at a work with objective eyes and make a fair assessment. Read the work yourself and have members of your team read each other’s work. The more input you have the better the overall results.
Conclusion
Active/passive, tone and voice are easy to understand and hard to get right. The key to doing so isn’t just raw talent and experience. You have to be able to look to outside sources and tools because these offer additional viewpoints and resources. Using the above tips you can help your team become better educated on the writing process, more open to reading each other’s work, and offering proper implementation of AI tools allows them to access an outside ‘editor’ in real time. Inbound marketing is in itself based on information and the more you have the better.