Author: Jacob Warwick / Source: Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting Copywriting comes naturall
Copywriting comes naturally for some marketers—yet for many others, writing can feel like absolute torture. It’s no surprise, really. Writing succinctly and persuasively is an acquired skill that often requires endless hours of think-tanking, talking to oneself, brief moments of insatiable insanity, and a handful of untimely swear words. Meld the time it takes to write well with all of the competing pressures and tasks that a marketer juggles on a daily basis, and you have a recipe for frustration.
Learn how to create a strong outline to improve the direction of your content, open the door for team collaboration, and transform your writing into a more polished product that drives audience engagement and results for your marketing team.
Clarify Strategic Direction Before Executing Content
Whether creating ad copy, email nurture, landing pages, or an eighty-page ebook, knowing where to start and how your campaigns will affect your business goals is often a challenging guessing game. Too many marketers discover a strategic direction for their content efforts mid-way through a project, or it’s an afterthought entirely. It’s even common to approach content with a “get-er-done” attitude with intentions to save time, execute quickly, and test multiple variables; however, this mindset can lead to sloppy content execution and be an expensive lesson to learn.
This typically means poor content performance, misaligned brand messaging, or an underwhelming audience sentiment that could damage your marketing campaigns. The key to avoiding this is slowing down your content efforts, even if it’s just by an hour or two, to narrow your focus and strategic direction in an outline.
Creating an outline for your content can help both you and your team collaborate on the specific purpose of your content, the type of research or sources needed to support the content, and how the content can best align with your current marketing goals.
If you haven’t created an outline before, there are five fundamental steps.
Too many marketers discover a strategic direction for their content efforts mid-way through. Click To Tweet
1. Decide on a Topic
Choose the topic and consider the general purpose of your content—such as where it will be published, how you plan to share it with your community, and how search engines will scan and rank your efforts.
It’s best to select a topic that is interesting to…
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