Why should you be excellent at writing if you want to become a professional digital marketer? These 5 reasons go far beyond writing formal letters to a boss and developing your writing skills.
Top Reasons Why Professional Digital Marketers Should Develop Writing Skills
With more than five years of freelance and full-time experience in web content writing and digital marketing. I still can’t help wondering how little people appear to know about these two spheres.
Interestingly, the circle of these people includes not only my family and friends. Whose jobs aren’t linked to these spheres at all. Some of my customers and even employers may have a somewhat blurred idea of what they hire me for.
Seriously, I’m thinking about writing a book on the art of persuasion and mutually beneficial conflicts.
Still, when asked what I do for a living. I feel like I will explain the quantum theory to a toddler. My interlocutor nods respectfully, pretending that he or she gets what I mean: ‘Ah, digital marketing? Yeah, I’ve heard about it.’ But I’m never sure if they understand what my job is.
At the very dawn of my career, I compared content writing with sensible, purposeful essay writing in high school. Rereading my first blogs, I can’t but notice all those academic banalities.
However, modern digital marketing and content marketing as its integral part. So, demand more advanced writing skills than school or university papers. Let alone much more profound and broader knowledge of everything you are ordered to write about.
Where does writing influence marketing?
These are just rare areas were writing and marketing overlap. This shows why a report can help you get the job done. Check this list to get why digital marketers should develop writing skills:
- Website copy
- Blog Posts and Headlines
- Email subject line and body
- Social Media Posts and Resumes
- Press release
- print the attached copy
- Messaging and Brand Strategy
- customer advice
- eBooks and White Papers
- speeches and presentations
- title and text
- Video Script and Instructions
- subtitle
So, an excellent digital marketer must be a good, knowledgeable, and creative content writer. Nevertheless, there’s no point in waiting till you become as great as Charles Dickens or Ray Bradbury. Content writing is a changeable matter. The more you write, the better you can harness it.
But why do you need to upgrade your writing skills as an aspiring or a veteran digital marketer?
Reason 1 to develop writing skills: Writing Helps Formulate, Develop, and Convey Your Ideas
Digital marketing is a particular sphere of activity. Despite its apparent independence from other areas, it serves as a tool for their development and prosperity. Simply put, digital marketing helps various businesses create and promote ideas for their products or services on the Internet with the help of technology.
Yes, it includes advertising, if you are now thinking about it. But it isn’t limited to making ads and sales.
Marketing itself is about giving life to a business idea, bringing it into being, updating it, and most importantly, maintaining a positive connection between this idea and people, its target audience. However, an idea means nothing until it is expressed with words and turned into a product, which can be sold and bought.
While making a product tangible is a task for manufacturers, introducing it to potential buyers and investors is a task for marketers. Their material is words. The more skillfully they use it, the more chances they have to attract an audience.
Design or graphics also matter much, but they don’t make sense when words don’t have them.
Correctly selected and smartly used words can provide the understanding and impression of a product or brand you need as its seller or promoter. So, good writing skills will stand a marketer in good stead.
Good writing makes customers think what a marketer wants them to believe, however bossy it may sound.
Reason 2 to Digital Marketers Develop Writing Skills: Quality Content Marketing Is Now at the Core of a Successful Business
The Internet is the principal assistant and the main challenge when running a business. On the one hand, it helps to introduce a company, attract people’s attention to an innovative offer, build beneficial relationships with a target audience and monitor its needs and preferences. I bet you can continue this list.
On the other hand, however, it’s getting more and more complicated to fascinate, shock, intrigue, and interest the Internet community and search engines.
When you work on a scientific article or a fictional story, you tailor your writing to real people. But when you work on web content on a blog post or a text for a brand web page, you write for people and for Google (or, maybe, Baidu or Bing) robots. Their unique algorithms are probably even more demanding than humans, though Googlers say that the algorithms are programmed to understand the text as humans do.
If only it all were that simple. Writing for the web today requires an excellent knowledge of your language and an understanding of people’s needs and moods. Content marketing is a crucial facet of information technology, so a content writer must know many tech things.
Quality content is essential for business development, and not just in the online environment. An excellent digital marketer knows it and attaches much weight to writing such content, so it successfully serves a business purpose.
Reason 3: Smart Social Media and Email Marketing Attract Your Audience
Enlisting the support of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other online communities is an outstanding achievement. And a new challenge. Netizens give us 7-8 seconds to catch their particular attention, and then they just scroll down without even remembering what we try to tell them.
But that’s the worst scenario, of course.
We, content writers and digital marketers can use our power over discerning Facebook and Instagram users if we write the right message to them. A picture of a product and a photo or video from its presentation is nice, but we need words. The fewer, the better to explain to everyone why they want this product on earth. However, they don’t even sense that. Yet.
Write for them, write about them, write because they need to know. And consider the quality of your writing – its flawlessness, originality, and logic.
Reason 4: Good Writing is a Key Element of Effective Team Building
Remember I mentioned persuasion and problem-solving? Good writing plays a crucial role in them. Even if everything’s relatively okay with the promotion of a product, communication behind the scenes, within the company or between its specialists and customers, needs correctly chosen words too.
Instructions, reports, presentations, and even corporate emails matter for the success of an idea and a promotional campaign aimed at bringing it to life.
Even if you are a freelancer, writing messages to someone who intends to hire you takes great effort to build a clear understanding of what he or she wants from you. Or is it just me who gets a little annoyed with the phrase “Do it like our competitors did, but differently”?
Reason 5 (Bonus): AI Will Never Replace You
Yes, I follow the news, and I know that the greatest of human brains are trying to create an AI algorithm that would help a robot write an original text.
But content writers, journalists, and fiction writers shouldn’t worry that this innovation will deprive them of their jobs.
Well, that still may happen, but only after we, humans, discover what exactly helps us generate new ideas and put them on paper so skillfully that others of our kind like these ideas and follow what they appeal to.
Science makes no forecasts for that. Assuming that it doesn’t know, we can enjoy our jobs for at least a century. Or, probably, forever.