If you’re a content marketer—whether you’re just starting or already established and looking to up your game and expand your business—the best copywriting resources will help you get the most out of your skills and abilities.
There’s a lot of competent marketing content writing out there that’s typo-free and provides useful information (and a fair share that isn’t and doesn’t). Yet, if that content doesn’t ultimately lead to conversions for a sales team, it won’t mean much to your client.
Clients want copywriting that gives them results.
How well your content performs can be measured by several metrics. These could include:
- Click-through rate (CTR) – How many times someone clicked your link versus just viewing it.
- Visit – When someone makes a request to view your website and online content.
- Session – The details of an individual visit—how and how long a user engaged with your website and online content.
- Conversion – When a visitor takes a desired action, such as a purchase or an email sign-up.
- Bounce Rate – How often someone visits a single page and leaves without taking action.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rankings – How well your content ranks on web searches.
The goal is to move a visitor—a potential customer—through the buyer’s journey, ultimately to engage with your client’s brand. Hopefully, visitors will invest in your client’s product or service and become a dedicated customer. Think of each of the metrics we mentioned as a piece of a puzzle. When you put them all together, you get a complete picture of a customer’s engagement and whether they’re taking actions that move them along their journey.
Here’s what you should know about content marketing and the best copywriting resources to help you succeed.
What Is Content Marketing?
In short, content marketing engages a company’s target audience through meaningful and relevant online content. Successful content marketing inspires the audience to engage with the brand and take action, such as making a purchase, donating to a charitable cause, or spreading brand awareness in their community.
A common approach to content marketing is what’s referred to as “inbound marketing.” As opposed to direct marketing content like ad copy, inbound marketing is a strategy of producing organic leads by simply creating content your audience can search for and find on their own through Google searches or other avenues.
In other words, if you can build the kind of content people find valuable—the kind that answers their questions and solves a problem for them—your audience will find you.
Pro Tip: Check out HubSpot’s Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing. In fact, HubSpot is a great place to learn about the inbound content marketing approach in general—or any topic about marketing, sales, and more!
Great content is:
- Engaging
- Accurate
- Easy to understand
- Visually appealing with text broken up by white space, headers, graphics, videos, a table of contents, etc.
- Clearly calling its audience to action
- A match for its audience’s needs and expectations
- Written in a brand-appropriate voice
- Search Engine Optimized
Content can take many forms, including infographics, blogs, webpages, ebooks, white papers, webinars, podcasts, social media posts, videos, and more.
How Does Copywriting Help Marketers?
Learning how to write inbound marketing content can be advantageous in helping you build your copywriting career.
Many of your clients will want you to write this kind of content. While direct advertising also has its place in a marketing strategy, being able to write both helps your clients build a long-term content strategy that doesn’t rely only on short-term direct solicitation.
Different types of content can be tailored to unique demographics within a brand audience, called “personas,” to not only match their needs and interests but also to match their specific stage in the buyer’s journey.
Pro Tip: Use Semrush’s buyer persona templates when you’re in the discovery phase with a new client and want to clearly document your audience’s needs.
Since not all members of your audience will be immediately ready to make a purchase, meeting them where they are helps marketers foster a lead that will ultimately be valuable to their clients.
While you may hear this referred to by different terms—a journey, a funnel, a pyramid—the terms are less important than the intention, which is to understand the different types of content your audience is likely to engage with at different times, and how to optimize your content to meet that expectation.
Content can be written to fulfill these different expectations, including:
- To bring awareness to those looking for a solution.
- To educate someone who wants to learn more about a specific solution.
- To highlight the advantages of a solution a company may offer.
- To sell a product or service to someone ready to buy.
While the first two in that list work great for inbound marketing content, the latter two work better for direct advertising materials.
The Best Copywriting Resources to Write Copy That Performs
To meet the goals of your clients and craft the best content possible, you need the best copywriting resources you can get your hands on. Here are some that will help you achieve your goals and thrive as a copywriter.
The Best Copywriting Resource for Analytics: Google Analytics
Google Analytics lets you track metrics across multiple devices, like clickthrough rates, navigation, SEO performance, and number of conversions. You can see how users interact with a single page or across all pages to evaluate how effective your marketing efforts are for your clients. Google Analytics offers a free version that’s perfect for individual copywriters and a paid plan for enterprise-level users.
The Best Copywriting Resource for Readability: Readable
Learning to write readable content that keeps your audience’s eyes glued to the page takes practice. A tool like Readable goes beyond a basic grammar check and uses multiple readability scoring metrics to give you detailed feedback on how to make your content more readable. This can include things like clichéd language, overuse of adverbs, passive voice, and buzzwords, as well as keyword density, tone, and sentiment. Individual content creators can use Readable for an affordable $4 per month.
The Best Copywriting Resource for Connecting with Clients: Copywriter Exchange
Looking for blogs, articles, and guides on how to become a better content writer and build your business? How about free templates for invoices, client contracts, and content briefs? Looking for a copywriting certificate? Look no further than Copywriter Exchange. You can also connect with new clients by signing up with Copywriter Exchange today.
Ultimately, the best copywriting resource out there is you! Just know that every day you dedicate to learning and working hard at your craft is a day you’ll improve. By finding the best resources, such as copywriting guides, templates, and automated tools, you can put your best foot forward—and that’s one more step toward your copywriting goals.
Author Bio
Connor Holmes is a content writer with Content Workshop who comes from a diverse writing background. He worked as an award-winning public safety staff writer at his hometown newspaper, The Cape Coral Daily Breeze. He earned his MFA in creative writing and has professionally published fiction and poetry. He has also tutored English to students from grade school to grad school.
At Copywriter Exchange, we exist to help copywriters thrive in today’s economy by connecting them with the resources they need to step up their game. Join now to access the best copywriting resources, including our templates, guides, and courses to help you grow your career, skills, and network.
