The right words to meet your business goals
As a client, when you receive a draft piece of digital advertising or informational copy from your media agency, you might not realise it has been written to match the expectations and demands of three separate audiences. Simultaneously.
Corporate communications have always juggled multiple goals. That’s no different in digital marketing. What it is different are the goals themselves, and, for the first time, one of the goals is to write for an audience that is not human.
Consider the reading audiences for a webpage:
Your customer. This is the reader who you want to engage with and be moved by the page’s message. This might mean a sales response, or teaching them something, or getting them to share/like/follow. Your customer needs your page to be readable, useful, human and coherent.
Google (or any other search engine). All up, Google has ‘read’ something like 30 trillion webpages. What this really means is that Google’s systems have checked, cross-referenced, judged and indexed every public page they can reach. Google likes webpage text that has good formatting, relevant keywords and has what its ever-more-sophisticated software can recognise as natural and grammatically correct language.
You. As a client of a media agency, you are equally important as a reader as the other two. Your webpages are your prepared statements to the world. You’ll want to be comfortable with what you are going to say and then be ready to continue the conversations you’re starting. The re-reading, editing, re-writing and collaborating process you undertake with your agency might even mean you are the single person who spends the most time reading your webpages. Especially after the copy is signed off and the site launched.
Who is the most important?
Well, that depends. You know your business better than anyone: you embody your brand. A writer’s job is to encapsulate that persona to create something that sounds like you – but better, and which with matches the specific needs of the other two audiences.
For example, you might want a strong sales message, but customer analytics might show prospects come to your site for information, not to transact.
Customers might also want to know other things that don’t seem relevant to your goals: Does your showroom have public transport access? Is your premises child friendly? Where do you ship from?
Meanwhile, a search engine’s algorithm might have technical demands that are at odds with your branding and vision or what your customers want. Or both.
Balancing the readers seamlessly
There can be real conflicts between what you want to say, what your customers want to read and the heads and tails a search engine can make of the compromise between. In the middle – crafting, rewriting, advocating and advising – is your content and copy writer.
This is the person who’ll produce something that matches the:
- Branding and business goals of what you want to say
- Clarity and usefulness of what your customers want to know
- Keywords and formats that search engines are sensitised to
Without letting one set of needs obstruct another, a good content and copy writer can achieve best practice for each. Simultaneously.
