An artisan can display the beauty of their wares, a patissier can give out samples, but in many other fields – from B2B services to technology, sustainability and healthcare – we usually need to find another way to give away a little taste of the value we know we can add.
In such domains, you need to demonstrate that your brand is an authority in its field, that you’re the experts and can be trusted. To do this, you need to be thinking about sharing your expertise through content campaigns. After all, the best way to convince someone you’re an expert is not to tell them but to show them.
Think about the expert knowledge in your business like the free cube of cheese or thimble of wine at a farmer’s market – something you can use to entice people and demonstrate your quality. Once they bite, you won’t need to work nearly so hard to sell to them. They’ll have a far better idea of the quality they’re getting and whether it’s right for them.
So how do you go about establishing yourself as an expert using a content campaign? Here are some things to think about.
Build your content campaign on lived experience and research – not theory
Lots of people share theory. And theory is great. But theory is cheap, especially in a day when anyone can claim anything online. People can even use AI-generated content to skip the research and writing process.
If you’re making a pure SEO-play this can bring in traffic but if you want to show your words are worth trusting you need to speak to your audience in a way that ChatGPT could never achieve. For more on this, check our ebook why expertise based content wins in a cynical age.
In 2023, we surveyed 32 executives and senior decision makers in organisations. The vast majority said they won’t look at content shared with them by direct marketing (only 3% said they did). Instead most relied on their curated network to share only the most important articles with them.
It’s a noisy world, and it’s a cynical world as a result. These days, people aren’t asking, “What can you tell me?” they’re asking, “Who are you to tell me?”
Pitched right, your content campaign can answer that question.
Locate the sweet spot for your content campaign
Before you can convince anyone you’re the authority in the room, you need to have a good understanding of what the room (ie your market) looks like, what counts as expertise within this space, and how much your team knows. Expertise is a positioning strategy and it’s not one just any brand can choose.
For instance, if you launch a healthcare app but don’t have any healthcare professionals or ex-clinicians in your team, and you haven’t completed any research in the field, your expertise is limited. In this case, frankly, you’re better off promoting your app’s design or features than your expertise.
That said, if your founder was a leading healthcare consultant, or if your team works alongside psychiatrists or GPs on a daily basis, you’ll want to bring their lived-expertise to the forefront of your content.
Their first-hand accounts, their learning, their experience, is the ticket to creating expertise-based content that’s impossible for your competitors to replicate.
Your job as a marketer is simply to tap into that expertise, and find out:
How much overlaps with what your audience cares about
How much overlaps with your wider goals as an organisation
What lies in the middle of that three-way Venn diagram should then form the foundation of your campaign.
An example campaign: how to use expertise to win a new audience
Let’s take a look at a theoretical expertise-audience-goals Venn diagram, and plan a campaign that just might work.
For example, imagine you’re a leadership development consultancy:
Your expertise: Creating team momentum
Your wider goals: Winning contracts with larger organisations
Your audience cares about: Preparing for net-zero
Your sweet spot campaign theme might be something like, ‘How global brands can build net-zero momentum’. This clearly calls out your audience and links your expertise to their goals.
The campaign might include content such as:
A top of funnel thought leadership article comparing team inertia with environmental inertia, which you might even want to submit to industry press.
A top of funnel, highly researched lead magnet on “How global teams are getting to net zero”, anchoring your expertise in real life examples.
Middle of funnel ‘how to’ articles on:
How to integrate ESG-thinking into your executive team
How to engage employees on sustainability
How to handle change management on ESG issues
A bottom of funnel article or case study about how your services can help with the above.
If you were the marketer running the campaign above, you might be concerned that, while you can draw on your internal experts for insights on team momentum, you may not know as much about reaching net zero.
However, you could interview an external net zero expert or two, whose expertise will complement yours. Chances are, this unusual blend of specialist expertise will result in content that’s not like anything else out there.
How we established our own authority with content
Back in 2022, RH&Co had established ourselves as an authority in content marketing and wanted to push harder to demonstrate our expertise as brand strategists.
In 2023 we made this a focus, releasing no less than five campaigns all reinforcing our role in brand strategy. As well as drawing together a tonne of anecdotes showcasing everything we’d learned from working with organisations in specialist sectors, we also interviewed dozens of external experts and conducted a survey of C-suite executives.
Over the course of the year, we:
Conducted a roundtable with brand experts and startup advisers, forming a seven-part series that guides readers through the tumultuous startup to scaleup brand journey.
Published our flagship report, “What do CxOs read?” as part of a campaign tackling the elusive challenge of marketing to the C-suite.
We then found endless ways to repurpose all this content in videos, social posts, ads, e-books and outreach emails, ensuring we maximised the reach and impact of the content.
By the end of the year, the kind of enquiries we were getting had begun to shift. More people were taking us up on content strategy, high level messaging, positioning and campaign design.
More senior people started to engage with our content and share it. One marketing director landed on an article about value propositions and asked us to create a dozen for their organisation.
And much of what we’d written changed the way we spoke in sales conversations – enabling us to close bigger and more strategic projects.
Explain what you do and why your audience should care.
You have 12 seconds.
Here’s one we did earlier:
We find the right words for expert-led businesses. We clarify their brand message and create strategic content to make them stand out as authorities in their field.
That’s the RH&Co value proposition in a nutshell. It took quite a bit of work and a fair few conversations before we were able to communicate this so clearly. And what we do is – in the grand scheme of things – relatively simple to explain. We’re copywriters, content strategists, marketers.
Many of our clients, however, are experts in complex subjects that don’t lend themselves to a one or two word description. We’ve worked with a number of them to create foundational copy, messaging and brand voice guidelines to help them clearly communicate what they do.
Here’s a few questions that we’ve found helpful to ask along the journey:
Does every stakeholder in your audience speak your language?
The first and most important step in any communication is to know – really know – who you’re talking to. If you’re a B2B tech brand with a no code/low code product and your target persona is a CTO or CIO who already knows the API calls they need, then talking at an expert level and using appropriate jargon is perfectly acceptable.
If, on the other hand, you first need to win over a stakeholder with less technical knowledge, you’ll need to think about what they might need to understand, what might confuse them, where they might draw the wrong conclusions or be put off by technical language.
The beauty industry is a great example of where brands do value proposition well. Sure, they might mention retinol or keratin or silica to give a gloss of scientific weight to their advertising. But they know that their audience aren’t scientists – they just want younger looking skin, glossier hair, and sparkling white teeth.
We also needed the messaging to resonate with a diverse audience made up of everyone from farmers and estate managers to ecologists and surveyors.
To avoid patronising the technical experts, we needed to talk about ‘data layers’ and ‘delivering biodiversity net gain’ but we also needed to summarise the essence of this multifaceted product in language every potential user could understand.
We settled on messages such as:
“Design a sustainable planet, together”
“Intuitive mapping, collaboration and insight”
And, to make it super clear who benefits, “Join our network of farmers, farm advisors, land agents, estate managers, ecologists, foresters, surveyors and landscape recovery projects”
So even if you’re not an ecologist looking to deliver biodiversity net gain, you can quickly see how The Land App’s product might help you achieve your vision.
Are your features clear in your value proposition? And are your benefits believable?
When it comes to encapsulating benefits vs features in your value proposition, the best description of the concept is the truth universally acknowledged by marketers: no one wants a quarter inch drill bit; they want a quarter inch hole.
The trouble is, these days, lots of brands are claiming to offer the same hole a million different ways.
Attract and retain your customers
Engage your employees
Transform your culture
And, of course, the classic:
Save time and money.
In the end it all sounds a bit like vapourware. Marketers mustn’t forget features in their rush to sell the benefits. Your SaaS product, ESG consultancy offering or L&D programme might be difficult to summarise, but don’t settle for broad, vague promises in an attempt to make it simple.
Rather than toning down the richness of the expertise involved to make your brand understood, it’s more about finding the right blend of features, benefits and language.
Futureground are a team of subject matter experts in the truest sense. Their partners have even described them as polymaths (think Leonardo Da Vinci) of the built environment. However, describing what they do is a much tougher challenge. Not least because it looks different for every single client they work with.
Some of their competitors have floundered here, describing themselves as ‘delivering sustainable solutions’, which is about as vague as you can get.
We went for something more concrete for Futureground:
Who is walking with you through complexity?
We’re sustainable place strategists with decades of experience working across the property lifecycle, and we can step alongside you as a critical friend in this complex world.
Sometimes this means forming an action plan. Often it means working closely with stakeholders. It always means asking good questions. Then we grounded all of that in social proof through case studies. You can find out more about the rebranding journey on the Futureground website.
Does your audience know they need you?
What made the Futureground case even more challenging was that their audience is often not problem-aware.
If your audience is problem-aware, they know they have an issue. But when they are pretty low problem-aware, they need some help defining the real issue. So perhaps they think they need more leads but what they actually need is better quality leads or better CRM tracking.
This is where you really need to drill down and understand your audience – so you can figure out how to position your solution in a way that makes them want to solve a problem they don’t know they have.
This is toughest when you’re looking to disrupt the market in some way. A product or service that sits in a category of its own, or across more than one category, so that people either have no idea what it is or confuse it with things it isn’t.
Let’s take Nespresso as an example. When they first brought out their pod-based coffee model, people may well have laughed. Why would you want to spend 40p on a cup of coffee you had to make yourself, when you can have any other instant for a fraction of the price?
But Nespresso knew that their audience wasn’t looking for a better tasting instant coffee. They were looking for a cost effective alternative to high quality take away coffee, which they could make in the comfort of their own home. And so that’s how they communicated their offering.
Slack played a similar trick in their initial marketing campaigns. They didn’t try to sell themselves as a messaging service or a digital workplace. Instead they simply said: ‘Slack replaces email in your company’. The people came, because while few companies knew they had a comms problem, once pitched against email, Slack made sense instantly.
Use this value proposition pitch format to help explain what you do
Whether you’re selling a complex technology product or you’re delivering your service via a disruptive new business model, it’s important that you can communicate your business offering in a way that is clear and easy for your audience to understand.
Use this pitch format to start honing your key messaging: For [your ideal customers or clients] who are [trying to do X or facing X challenge], [your product or service] is a [product category] that provides [key value proposition]. Unlike [closest alternatives] [your product or service] offers [key features].
If you’re struggling to put it succinctly, you have more work to do.
If you run it by a potential user and they don’t instantly grasp the value, you have more work to do.
You don’t have time to explain everything.
You can’t afford to be misunderstood.
You need a complex value proposition in a nutshell.
Every time someone in B2B describes their brand voice as “friendly but professional” we try not to sigh. Unfortunately, you could be describing virtually every B2B business in the world. No one wants to come across as unfriendly or unprofessional, right?
If you try to adopt a friendly but professional tone, your brand will usually slip into whatever the default tone is in your industry. If you run a creative agency, you’ll seem like all the other agencies. If you’re a hot new startup, you’ll sound like every other new tech company in town.
There’s really no good reason why companies should sound the same. The average native speaker has 15-20,000 root words in their active vocabulary. There’s plenty of potential for variety – why do we keep defaulting to terms like ‘transform’ or ‘unlock value’? And why, why, why do articles keep starting with the phrase ‘In our fast-paced digital world…’ ?
Even in B2B, you want to differentiate your brand from the competition. And you need to create an instant connection with your audience. If you take a backseat on brand voice, you’ll be skipping over one of your primary ways you build your brand’s success.
Brand voice is how an organisation’s words convey brand personality. It covers both what you say and how you say it, and is influenced by everything from sentence length to individual word choice, and the use of active or passive voice.
Brand voice can literally be as nitpicking as whether or not you use contractions (can’t, I’ve, they’re). We wrote the website copy for a law firm once and they insisted that there were no contractions anywhere, which resulted in them coming across as extremely formal and businesslike rather than warm. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just important to be aware that the language you use will impact how people perceive your brand.
It’s like meeting a person for the first time. Initially, your impression will be based on how they look, how they’re dressed and presented, their facial expression, how they catch your eye, etc. This is the equivalent of brand visuals.
Once they start talking to you, you’ll have much more to go on – not just what they say but how they say it – their accent, pitch and the pace at which they speak. You might conclude that they’re warm, well educated, no-nonsense, boring, try-hard, trendy, quick-witted or uptight. Your potential clients will judge you by your brand voice in the same way.
…their brand was a lot like Stephen Fry – intelligent and knowledgeable about all sorts of things but also lightly funny and humble and very real, appealing to people of all backgrounds and ages.
What can brand voice really achieve?
Pitched right, your brand voice can express your attitudes and values, build your reputation, and even attract your ideal clients. That’s no exaggeration. If your brand voice is distinct from the tone your competitors use, or it helps express old concepts in a refreshingly new way, there’s no reason it can’t be a big part of your brand strategy.
For instance, one of our fintech clients, Weavr, works in an incredibly complex field: embedded finance. In general, this market adopts a hyped up, tech normative voice (using words like innovative, transform, optimise, evolve, disrupt, supercharge, etc. etc.) or an academic one (think McKinsey).
After a workshop with our client’s commercial team, we suggested that they opt for a different tone entirely: that of a popular, cool, research professor who works alongside their students and demystifies complex concepts for them. The result was a voice that was clever but not too academic. Confident but not hyped-up and salesy. Really relatable but not gimmicky.
As you can see, this voice is much more developed than “friendly but professional” and it gave our client some really practical guidance. Rather than they could talk about making B2B transactions as “easy as ApplePay”. Their voice even guided some of their content strategy, such as the creation of a buyer’s guide that demystified an area that is rarely explained in their field – making the brand totally distinct from the competition.
How to develop your organisation’s brand voice
The best way to understand brand voice in context is to think about a conversation between two people – your brand and your client.
1. Start with who you are
First, you’ll want to create your brand avatar or persona. This is who your organisation would be if it was a person. A helpful starting point is to identify which of Carl Jung’s 12 personality archetypes fit your brand best.
Creating a brand avatar is an exercise best done with more than one person – often the business founder and/or the marketing lead at the very least, and ideally a representative from sales too. Really, you want the whole leadership team involved, at least in the initial brainstorming stages.
Together, discuss who your brand would be if they were sitting in the room with you. Would they be young or old? How would they be dressed? What values would they express?
If the concept still feels too abstract, try thinking about which celebrity your brand might be like. Years ago we did some training with a South West tourism organisation. During a brand voice session we suggested that their brand was a lot like Stephen Fry – intelligent and knowledgeable about all sorts of things but also lightly funny and humble and very real, appealing to people of all backgrounds and ages.
Some of your choices will be dictated by what you stand for. For instance, when we were helping to shape the brand voice of Nviro, specialist cleaning provider, we saw they wanted to change the culture surrounding the cleaning profession – celebrating cleaners and putting dignity before profit.
For Nviro, it was vital that they made no hierarchical distinction between their office team and their frontline cleaners. Also the word ‘staff’ would be completely off limits. The same went for any term that suggested Nviro were trying to avoid the word cleaner (like cleaning operative, or cleaning technician). In this team, there was no embarrassment or misgivings about the profession. They were cleaners. And they were proud of it.
2. Think about your audience
As a B2B brand you may think you’re marketing to businesses rather than people, but ultimately even the biggest corporate deal is made by real people. From the gatekeeper to the person approving the purchase order, it’s important that you understand what they need to hear from your brand.
Are they more motivated by targets and goals, or are they a person with a dream or a vision? Are they disillusioned or are they optimistic? Are they interested in technical detail or do they want concepts to be explained without it? Are they in a mood for humour? Or are they looking for reassurance?
One of our fintech clients, Moneyhub, was creating a product for an audience of lenders. Its personas were typically experts in the financial industry, but potentially distrustful of tech companies.
As a result, we recommended Moneyhub choose a voice that included technical financial terms – such as delinquency, manageable risk, etc. – but didn’t slip into techy language – unlock opportunities with the power of data, etc. – which could have alienated the brand from its ideal clientele.
3. Think about your competition
The trouble is, in this conversation, you might not be the only ones in the room. Your audience might be scouting out their options, and they could even already be in talks with a competitor. You need to make sure you sound like a real alternative, and not just more of the same.
When we were working with TPC Leadership to develop their brand voice, we had a challenge on our hands. The global company works in leadership development and cultural change, and if you’re familiar with the industry, you’ll know almost everyone in it sounds alike.
That’s partly because coaches and consultants are selling an intangible offering – and it’s very easy to reach for the same intangible words to describe it: ‘a transformational programme’ or a ‘people-centred approach.’
To make TPCL stand out, we suggested they don’t try to distinguish themselves by their offering and philosophy, but by making it clear what they stand for in bold and concrete terms. As a result, if you head to their new website, you’ll quickly see what they’re about.
Here’s an exercise: go back through the content you’ve produced, any pages on your website, posts on your social channel, or talks given by your CEO or managing director. Then try and pull out phrases that could have only come from your brand and not your competitors.
How to create practical guidelines for your brand voice
Now it’s time to pull these ideas together to create guidelines that everyone who writes on behalf of the brand – both internally and externally (PR agency, marketing agency etc) can follow. This will ensure you get that level of consistency you need to build trust and client loyalty.
Writing brand voice guidelines is a task best left to your marketing lead, or a brand or copywriting agency. It doesn’t matter how your guide is actually formatted, but you want to end up with a document that translates the ideas you’ve had about how your brand should come across into a guide that anyone can follow to produce content that fits.
If the task of creating brand voice guidelines falls to you, make sure you include a concise overview of your client and brand personas. Have a summary of your brand offerings, your values and what makes you distinct from your competitors.
Then spend time creating a style guide and some helpful examples – words and phrases to use or avoid, some sentences written in your brand voice and some in a way that wouldn’t be acceptable, so people can see the difference.
We all know the main types of pages your average website is made up of, right? There’s the home page, of course, which we always say should act a bit like the cover of a magazine. Then there’s the About page, where you can talk a bit about your story, your team, your values and so on.
Next you’ve got what you may consider to be the most important page or pages – those that feature your products and services. This is where you can tell people all about what it is you can offer them, how you can solve their problems and meet their needs.
You’ll also probably want to stick a blog page in there (or perhaps you’ll call it news or resources) and a contacts page of course. And then, that’s it. You’re done. Or are you?
In fact there are three other pages you would do well to think about in order to make your website really sing.
The thank you page
Have you got any forms on your website? Perhaps there’s one asking your visitors to sign up to your newsletter. Or maybe you’ve created a few lead magnets to encourage visitors to give you their email address in exchange for a really valuable piece of content.
If you have even one form, here’s a question for you – what happens after your visitor enters their contact details and hits ‘submit’? Are they taken to a bland page that says “Thank you for getting in touch” and leaves it at that? If so, you’re missing a trick.
If someone has just parted with their contact details, it means they’re interested in you – in your brand, in your expertise, in your value. So why not use the thank you page to serve them more of the same?
Keep them on your website and boost your dwell time by directing them to an interesting and relevant blog post, for example. Or highlight a low cost product or service that might augment the free resource they’ve just subscribed to and see whether you can make a sale. Whatever you do, don’t leave them hanging.
“No matter how careful you are about finding and fixing broken links, chances are one will slip through the cracks at some point.”
The FAQs page
One of the biggest issues we see on websites that haven’t been written by professional copywriters is too much information. Business owners are so keen to explain every last detail of their product, service, processes and USPs that they fill each page with overwhelming amounts of text.
A far better option is to create an FAQs page. Your visitors will expect this page to be text heavy. And because that text will be broken down into the various different questions, they won’t be overwhelmed by it. They’ll be able to scan to find the question they’re interested in and then just read that short answer.
FAQs are also excellent for SEO. In very basic terms, Google looks at your H1 and H2 headers and subheads first, before looking at body copy. So this is where you want to have a good amount of keywords and phrases. And an FAQs page naturally has loads of H2 subheads, which will contain relevant keywords without feeling forced.
Those subheads will also be phrased as questions, which are becoming increasingly important as the way we search changes. Where you might once have typed “copywriter” and “job description” into Google, now you might ask Alexa, “What does a copywriter do?” – and if your FAQs page asks and answers this question, you’ve got more chance of being seen.
The error page
No matter how careful you are about finding and fixing broken links, chances are one will slip through the cracks at some point. So what happens when someone clicks on one of those links?
Do they get a standard, soulless 404 error message written and designed by whoever your website is hosted with? Why not a branded error message that reflects your brand personality and tone of voice instead?
Not only is this sort of attention to detail the kind of thing that will make you stand out from the crowd, it will make your audience smile at the very moment when they could be getting frustrated.
Check out these awesome examples from Pixar and Innocent Smoothies if you want to see how to write an error page with style:
The thank you page, FAQs page and error page might feel like ‘extras’ that are not worth spending the time on. But in a crowded marketplace with not just hundreds but potentially thousands of competitors online, sometimes it’s the extras that make all the difference.
In the 90s the marketing industry declared that content was king. 20 plus years on it’s still hugely important but there’s a challenger for the throne: data. With so much content out there, understanding the real value of your blogging efforts has never been so important.
The trouble is that it’s very hard to accurately measure return on investment for a blog (although there are ways you can improve it). There’s a really good chance it will be one of the touch points in your customer or client’s journey towards doing business with you. But where do you attribute the value of the final sale?
As an example, we got a call from a potential client last year. During the conversation we were able to establish the steps she’d taken on her journey towards getting in touch:
First, she’d met Rin at a networking event some years before (touchpoint 1: face to face networking).
Then they’d connected on LinkedIn (touchpoint 2: social media).
Over the following months she’d enjoyed reading the RH&Co blog (touchpoint 3: blogging).
She’d also been impressed by the awards we’d won (touchpoint 4: PR).
And finally she’d spoken to a mutual work acquaintance and client of ours to suss out whether we were as good as we appeared to be (touchpoint 5: client referrals / testimonials).
So if you can’t attribute sales directly to your blog, what should you be measuring to help you determine whether it’s proving effective for your business? Start with these metrics…
Assuming your blog is hosted on your website – rather than, say, on LinkedIn, Medium or some other publishing channel – an increase in visitor numbers will show you that people are interested enough in your blog titles to click on them. You’ll be able to see where those clicks come from too, whether that’s a search engine or a social media channel and, if it’s search, what phrases led them to your post.
All of this can help you understand where your audience is spending time and what they’re searching for. For example, if you’re getting loads of traffic from LinkedIn but virtually nothing from Instagram, you might decide to ditch the Insta account. Likewise, by gaining insights into the kind of searches that are leading people to you, you’ll be able to create more content around these subjects and capitalise on that interest.
Bounce rate…
Of course, people landing on your blog is one thing – but if they don’t stay and engage with the site then you have some work to do. Bounce rate refers to how many people arrive on a page through search and click back to the search page without going further into your site. This alerts Google and co that your page wasn’t a good fit for that search – and it shows you that your post wasn’t that engaging.
Now some pages naturally attract people’s attention for just a moment or two – think a contact page, where someone just needs to find a phone number. But ideally what you want is for your readers to finish a blog post and then go somewhere else within your site before leaving. Creating further actions for your readers – for example, giving them internal links to follow – will reduce this rate and improve your SEO.
…and dwell time
SEO aside, though, bouncing away from your site is only really a problem if it is combined with low dwell time. In other words if your reader searches, arrives on your page and clicks away again within a few seconds. That’s a clear indication that they’re not interested in your post.
However, if they arrive and stay reading your piece of longform content for 20 minutes before clicking away, even though technically they’ve bounced (ie they didn’t click through to another page) clearly they enjoyed what they saw. So you’re doing something right.
What we’re saying is that these metrics are worth looking at but you need to be realistic about what you want to achieve and you need to understand the context before getting yourself too worried.
Next moves
So you’ve got people to your site and they’re sticking around, reading your whole blog post and maybe even clicking through to read another after that. What next?
Now it may be that your main goals for your blog are raising brand awareness and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. In which case, clicking through to a second post is a great result because it shows that you’re creating the kind of valuable content people are interested in.
But if you’re hoping to achieve something else – capture email data, for example, or get people checking out your services or booking a free consultation – then you need to track whether your calls to action (CTAs) are working.
Are people filling out the form at the bottom of your post? Are they clicking the link to your services page? If not, experiment with different CTAs.
Social engagement
If you want to make sure your blog is seen by as many people as possible, you’ll need a good social sharing strategy. After all, there are literally millions of posts being published each day and attracting the warm connections in your social network is far easier than trying to stand out on Google.
Keeping an eye on social engagement will help you get a feel of how well your blog is doing. You’ll start to notice which ones are getting the most likes, comments and shares, which ones are starting conversations and getting you noticed by the right people.
This is likely to vary by platform, which will help you shape your social sharing strategy. For example, industry insights might get great engagement on LinkedIn whereas behind-the-scenes snaps from your team may be more popular on Instagram. You’ll only know for sure if you measure the data.
Use this information to refine your blog offering to further boost engagement with the audience you want to engage with.
You’re never going to know exactly what your blog is worth to your business in cold hard cash but measuring your data will get you closer to the answer. It will also help you make better choices about the kind of content you create and how you distribute it, so that you can maximise your return on investment as much as possible.
When it comes to writing website copy, one of the things people find most difficult is the About page. Writing about yourself or your business can feel strange – in the UK we’re taught from a young age that speaking too much about our skills or achievements sounds boastful, and generally prefer a self-deprecating approach.
But an About page is about so much more than listing your achievements. It’s a place where you can share your brand personality and differentiate yourself from the competition. Where you can engage both customers/clients and potential employees alike, setting out your values and sharing a glimpse behind the scenes of your journey so far.
Here are a few key things to think about when writing your About page.
Yes, this might sound counterintuitive. After all, if you can’t talk about your brand on your About page, where can you? But you still need to understand which bits of the brand your audience will be most interested in and make sure to relate it back to their needs.
As an example, on our About page we start by saying this:
“You need powerful words to achieve significant business results. We know how to find them, how to put them together, how to make them sing. Plus we’re nice people, so working with us is fun too.”
There are lots of things we could say about ourselves but we’ve started by selecting the two things we know people care most about when choosing a creative agency: can you do the job and will I like working with you?
People buy people
Whether you’re a sole professional, a young startup or a blossoming SME, your About page is a chance to give your brand a face – or faces. This is where you’ll traditionally find the ‘meet the team’ section, where people can find out more about the individuals they might come across when they interact with your business.
There are different ways to present this section. You can include the whole team, the senior leadership team or just the client facing people. You can list names and titles only, include a short bio or use this space to give visitors a little glimpse behind the curtain with insights into things like hobbies or favourite karaoke songs – just make sure these are relevant and appropriate to your brand or they can feel cheesy.
We love the way that Bristol business McCann Synergy highlight a SynerGuy or SynerGal from their team on their About page each month. It’s a great example of the way they celebrate their employees – something that, as an employer brand agency, neatly shows that they practice what they preach.
An important note about authenticity: if you’re a sole business owner without a team, think carefully before using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. You might think sounding bigger than you are is impressive but it won’t be long before you’re found out and it’s really hard to rebuild trust once it’s been broken.
Share your values
Another thing that McCann Synergy include on their About page is a section on their values – in this case a video. Consumers are increasingly values-driven which means that they are choosing which companies they spend their money with based, among other things, on whether a brand is environmentally friendly or active within its local community.
Including your values on your About page can help you to define who and what you are as a brand, and set yourself apart from the crowd. SR2 Recruitment is a good example: Founder Chris Sheard was inspired to start the company after reading Dale Partridge’s book People Over Profits and his values are clear throughout the whole website including the About page.
But be warned – this is a very cynical age we live in and if you’re spouting values for values’ sake then you’ll soon find your audience dismissing you as inauthentic. Before you start writing about how you support local charities or embrace flexible working policies to create an inclusive workplace, make sure you can back up those claims if challenged.
Tell a good story
One thing that has been true of human beings since the beginning of time is our love of a good story. So think about how you can tell the story of your business. It could centre on how you as a business owner came to set up your company – as in our company video – or it could be about how your company has evolved over the years.
This can be a good space in which to share or back up your values in a “show, don’t tell” sort of a way. For example, rather than saying you’re passionate about something (which relies on people taking your word for it) tell the story that demonstrates that passion – like the inspiring tale of This Mum Runs does so very well.
Remember, you don’t need to write a novel here. Historic wine merchants Averys of Bristol uses a simple timeline format to quickly walk us through more than 200 years of the company’s history. As we always say, you don’t need many words, just the right ones!
Season with facts
Of course, values and stories can get a bit fluffy if you’re not careful. That’s why it’s important to include the right facts to give your business credibility and prove that you are who you say you are.
These facts might include qualifications, accreditations and memberships of awarding bodies, awards won, years active or number of units sold. You can also include some of the bigger clients you’ve worked with, prestigious projects you’ve been involved in, clippings from when you’ve been featured in the media and more. In short, anything that is indisputable in demonstrating an aspect of your brand so that your visitors don’t have to rely solely on what you’re saying about yourself.
Done well, an About page can be as powerful as for your website visitor as meeting you or your best salesperson.
If you want to check if your website is actually doing what it’s supposed to do, download our free website audit guide, packed with questions and quick fixes designed to help you analyse and improve your website copy. Or if you’d rather someone else did the legwork then get in touch with the team today to ask about our website copywriting services.
If you’re looking to commission a copywriting partner, you’re probably thinking about how good their writing skills are. But there’s an awful lot that goes into a copywriting project beyond the ability to wrangle the written word into the required number of sentences and paragraphs.
Why should you care? Because if you want to choose the best copywriter or copywriting agency – one that will produce results on time, on budget and with minimal hassle for you – then you need to make sure they’re skilled across all of these areas.
No matter how small the project, someone needs to be in charge of managing it otherwise it can get very stressful, very quickly. Project management starts immediately, and in this case includes arranging briefing calls or meetings, agreeing and ensuring deadlines are met, organising amends stages and handling any unforeseen circumstances that arise along the way (and believe us, most projects have these).
Behind the scenes in an agency there are also writers to be commissioned and internal amends stages to be done, plus copyediting and proofing (more on these later). Freelancers have limited capacity not only because they can only write for a certain number of hours every day but because juggling too many clients leads to balls being dropped.
Often we ask questions that challenge our clients to more clearly define what they’re after, which means that they’re much more likely to get a first draft that doesn’t need endless amends.
At RH&Co we’ve worked hard to put process in place that mean things run smoothly. Even in those moments when we’re paddling madly under the surface, our clients should only ever see the gliding swan on the surface. It’s our job to take the stress away for them.
Brief creation
The first and most important step of any project we work on is the brief creation stage. Even when a client comes to us with a written brief, we still add value by interrogating it, bringing our perspective on what’s possible, where problems might arise, and how we can achieve even better results together.
A good brief should cover a huge range of important elements from objectives to target audience to tone of voice. Often we ask questions that challenge our clients to more clearly define what they’re after, which means that they’re much more likely to get a first draft that doesn’t need endless amends. We can also help them clarify their strategy and set goals against which we can measure progress.
At RH&Co briefings are always handled by a strategist and a creative. By bringing in two different brains and skill sets, we ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for the client. That’s one of the benefits of using an agency rather than a single individual.
Research
Before your copywriting partner can start writing, they’ll need to know what to write about. And that means research. This might involve making themselves familiar with your product, analysing data from a survey you commissioned, or hunting for a BCG or McKinsey study to lend credibility to your argument.
In many cases, research will include what we call ‘gold mining’ – speaking to your subject matter experts to draw out their knowledge and experience. This is especially important for expert-led businesses who want to establish themselves as an authority on a particular subject.
Copywriting is the art of persuasive writing so when we talk about top quality copy we’re not just talking about it being well written – it needs to be able to generate the results that our clients are looking for.
RH&Co was founded by a former journalist, and this interview-style approach runs through the whole agency. Whether we’re talking to a reluctant developer, a detail-oriented academic or a flighty founder, we know how to get the best out of them.
Writing skills
It’s worth pausing for a moment to take note of how much value your copywriting partner has already added before they actually start writing.
Once the writing does start, it’s about far more than being articulate. Copywriting is the art of persuasive writing so when we talk about top quality copy we’re not just talking about it being well written – it needs to be able to generate the results that our clients are looking for.
Will the landing page copy convert? Will the blog post engage the reader until the end? Has SEO been taken into account and are the CTAs strong enough?
That’s why we’re super fussy about who we allow on to our writing team. We have both in-house copywriters and a handpicked team of freelancers who have to go through a thorough evaluation process before they go on our books. Plenty of people are decent enough writers; there are far fewer good copywriters around.
Copyediting and proofing
There’s a particular blind spot that you get when reading your own writing, which is why it’s important that you always get a second pair of eyes on anything you create. This will help you spot unsupported facts, veering off brand, errors in continuity, moments of rambling, changes in tense, random typos and a whole bunch of other issues.
It’s difficult to articulate exactly what makes one piece of copy better than another but we’ve been doing this a long time now and we’re experts at spotting what’s good and what needs work before it’s client ready.
At RH&Co, any copy produced by the freelance team is copyedited in-house, while writing done by an internal writer gets a second look from another member of the team. In some cases we’ll get a third person to do a final proofread, just to be sure the copy we deliver is word perfect.
Administration
It’s worth adding this bit because it’s so easy to forget the millions of little things that keep a copywriting agency – or even a freelancer, if we’re honest – up and running. Invoicing, sorting out insurances, making sure the accounts are up to date, filling out tedious forms of one kind or another.
Without these jobs your copywriting partner wouldn’t exist to be able to take care of all the other stages of whatever copywriting project you need doing. Yes, they add a few pounds to your invoice. But in the scheme of things they are worth it.
By appreciating the many skills that go into a successful copywriting project, you’ll be better placed to choose a team that can support you in creating copy that genuinely delivers results. Hopefully you’ll also have a much clearer idea of why doing it in-house isn’t the easy option it might at first appear!
The Right Words.
Your monthly dose of copywriting, marketing and business advice.
If you’re planning on engaging a copywriter then you’re almost certain to have a briefing session at some point. A good briefing is an essential first step to any successful copywriting project. Without it, you’re likely to find yourself being disappointed with your first draft and going through far too many amends stages before you get what you’re looking for.
A briefing session should help you communicate essential core information to your writer or agency so that they fully understand what is required before beginning the work. We often find that the questions we ask during this session help our clients clarify their ideas about the project by making them think about things that just hadn’t occurred to them before.
So what can you expect to be asked about? Here are some of the things we’d be looking to find out in a briefing session.
What are your goals?
Copywriting isn’t simply about phrasing things nicely. It’s about using words to drive results. And in order to see results you need to have first set some goals. So whether you want to reduce your blog’s bounce rate or get people signing up to your newsletter via your website, it’s important that your copywriter understands what it is that the copy they’re creatin is trying to achieve.
Who are you writing to?
We’ve written many times about the importance of understanding your target audience. Unless you understand what drives them, what they want and what they fear, what interests them and what influences their buying decisions, you can’t create effective content. If you don’t already have one or more customer or client personas, it’s worth spending time thinking about some of the elements that go into these profiles before your briefing session.
What is the core message?
If your reader had to take one thing away from the piece of content you’re asking us to create, what would it be? That you’re an expert in your field? That you care about the environment and are working to make a difference? That they will save huge amount of money by switching to you? Messaging is not always overt but it needs to underpin your content and so it’s important that your copywriter knows what it is.
What are the features and benefits of your offering?
If you’re commissioning words for a website or brochure or any piece of content that sets out what you do or sell, your copywriter will need to set out both the features and the benefits of this. Features are facts – the locally grown ingredients that go into your pies, the types of legal cases you handle. The benefits are what people will get by buying your product or using your service – satisfaction that they’re looking after their bodies and the environment, peace of mind that they’re not going to have to end up in court. Most of our clients are well versed in the features of their products or services but the benefits are as important if not more so. After all, as the saying goes, no one wants a six inch drill bit, they want a six inch hole.
What is your brand tone of voice?
If you’ve already invested in getting brand voice guidelines drawn up then you’re well ahead of the game. These are vital documents that provide copywriters with a huge chunk of what they need to know to ensure a piece of copy truly represents a brand. But if you don’t, prepare to be able to give at least some guidance during the briefing. Are you quite a formal, corporate sounding sort of a brand? Or do you use colloquial phrases like “check it out” and “give us a shout”? Having consistency in this area is vital if you want your copy to breed trust and loyalty and achieve results.
By taking the time to prepare for your briefing you’ll not only find that the meeting is a lot quicker and easier than it would otherwise be, by the results your copywriter delivers will be better too.
If you’d like to discuss a copy project with us, drop us a line on talktous@rin-hamburgh.co.uk or call us on 01179 902 690 – we’re always here to help.
How do you get eyes on your blog posts? Whether you’re a business owner or a marketing manager, ensuring that the content you’ve invested time and/or money in is actually being read is high priority. But far too many people simply press publish, pop the link out on social media and then… nothing.
In reality, unless your approach involves relying solely on SEO, to get good traction on a blog post you need to be putting it out there multiple times. Of course you also don’t want to say the same thing again and again.
That’s why it’s important to be creative with your social sharing copy. This is the text that you write for your social media posts, which encourage people to engage and ultimately click through to read your blog.
Using a range of social sharing copy not only injects a bit of variety but can drive different results. As an example, here’s how we might share our blog post entitled 3 ways a blog will improve your website’s SEO.
Looking for some simple ways to improve your website’s SEO without having to actually become an SEO expert? Today’s blog post looks at why having a well written blog on your site will help.
This is the one most people use as a starting point and is simple and to the point. The trick is not to stop here…
The pull quote
“The goal of a search engine is to lead internet users to the most relevant and useful content for their needs.”
So it follows that if you’re producing lots of valuable content that answers your audience’s questions, you’ll rank more highly, right?
Just one way a blog can really help improve your website’s SEO. Find out more in our recent blog post.
Is there a line in your post that either summarises the core message or is inspirational or intriguing enough to capture people’s attention? A pull quote is a device that has been used in print publications since before the internet was invented to catch people’s attention. Follow up your pull quote with a call to action that leads them on to your blog post.
The engagement question
How confident are you that your website is SEO friendly? If you’re short on time just answer A, B or C…
What’s SEO? It’s something to do with Google right?
We did a bit of keyword research when we last updated our website…
We’re fully optimised, from metatags and indexing to quality backlinks.
If you’re not sure your website is getting noticed by Google and co, read this week’s blog post to find out how blogging for your business can seriously improve your SEO game.
Not everyone who likes your Facebook page, follows your Twitter account or connects with you on LinkedIn will see every single post you share. But there’s a much greater chance they will see one if other people are engaging with it – that’s just the nature of the algorithms. So if you can encourage people to comment by using a question format, you might find your click throughs also increase.
The powerful statistic
Over 60% of our website visitors arrive on a blog post.
That means if we stopped blogging, we’d reduce the number of people looking at our website by more than half.
If you’re trying to get more eyes on your website then read this week’s post to find out more about how a top quality blog can help you boost your SEO and increase traffic now and for the future.
Everyone likes a good statistic. If your blog post includes ones one, share it as a way to catch the attention of your potential readers on social media. Even if you don’t, find one that’s relevant and use it to introduce your subject. In the example above, the statistic isn’t included in the blog post itself but it’s powerful enough to attract the kind of audience who would be interested in the post we’re promoting.
The thought leadership
How do you get the balance between a website that works for your visitors and one that makes Google happy from a keyword point of view?
We all want our brand to make it onto the first page of Google. But if you focus too heavily on key words and forget that real human beings are reading your content, you’ll soon find your SEO strategy backfiring.
Luckily it doesn’t have to be a case of one vs the other. Read our recent blog post to find out more.
If you’re trying to establish yourself or your brand as experts in your industry, then being a thought leader is important. Get involved in discussion, have an opinion, and use that to direct people onto your blog.
The sales pitch
Blogging can help improve your website’s SEO in many ways. For example:
By increasing search term mentions
By reducing bounce rates with internal links
By regularly adding valuable content
You can find out more in our latest blog post. And if you need help producing quality, targeted blog content that will attract and engage your audience, get in touch to see how we can help. Call 01179 902690, email talktous@rin-hamburgh.co.uk or visitwww.rin-hamburgh.co.uk for more information.
Social media isn’t the place to sell, right? Actually that’s not exactly true. Making people aware of how they can work with you isn’t a problem as long as that’s not all you’re doing and as long as you’ve spending time building relationships, adding value and so on. Don’t do it all the time but equally don’t be afraid to sometimes shout about how you can help people.
You may find that some of these social sharing copy options sit more naturally with your brand than others and that some work better at driving traffic to your blog. Experiment to find out what will be the most effective for your and your audience. But marketing is, in many ways, a numbers game so don’t be afraid to share your blog posts more than once.
PS Guess what? Writing social sharing copy is an add-on option we offer to our blogging clients. If you’re interested in finding out more, get in touch.
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Lingo. It’s so easy to use when you’re surrounded by it all day. Whatever industry you’re in, it’s likely that there are certain terms, acronyms and so on that everyone uses. And because you hear them all the time, you start to feel like everyone understands it.
The problem is, when it comes to your customers and clients, that’s not always the case. Even I’ve fallen into this trap. The other day a client admitted she’d read a word on one of our blog posts that she hadn’t understood and was too shy to ask.
So by way of apology and in order to help you better understand some of the words your copywriter, marketing agency or even designer might use, here is a glossary of copywriting terms that are worth knowing:
Body copy: The main section of text on a page, as opposed to the peripheral text such as the headline, standfirst, subheads and so on.
Brief: A written document that sets out what is required from the job, giving the copywriter something to follow.
Call to action (CTA): The part of the copy that actually tells people what it is they should do e.g. buy now, sign up, call us etc.
Content: Any kind of marketing device that people actually want to engage with e.g. social media posts, blog posts, videos etc. as opposed to the more intrusive marketing materials like banner ads and junk mail flyers.
Copy: Simply put, written text. Most often the word is used to refer to either marketing or journalistic text.
Copywriting: The act of writing persuasive text in order to further a business goal.
Evergreen content: Content that is not linked to a particular date or time, so can be reused some months or even years later.
Headline: A short sentence at the top of a piece of copy that summarises the main message of the content.
Para: Paragraph – a group of sentences arranged together without a break.
Pull quote: A line of text that is ‘pulled out’ of the body copy and used as a graphic feature to catch people’s eye and draw them in.
Sidebar: A graphically separate section of text, smaller than the body copy, that is used to give more information. Also known as a box out.
Standfirst: A short paragraph of text that sits below a headline and is used to convey a bit more information about what is contained in the body copy.
Subhead: A line of text that is used to separate large chunks of text into more manageable bites, usually formatted in a larger or bolder font. In websites they take the H2 format which is important for SEO.
Strapline: A short sentence that helps convey the essence of a brand. For example, our strapline is: “You don’t need many words, just the right ones.” Also known as a tagline.
Are there any other terms you’re not sure of the meaning of? Let us know on social (we’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram) and we’ll be sure to provide a definition.
