To be a good writer, you must learn to master grammar, punctuation, and spelling. To be a good marketing writer takes more advanced skills like learning to:
- Create easy-to-read useful content.
- Make complex topics understandable.
- Write great transitions.
- Craft attention-grabbing openers and assertive conclusions.
- Choose the best words within a specific context.
The last of these is one of the most important. If you don’t have a secure grasp of the vocabulary for the topic you’re writing about, and a deep understanding of what the words and terms mean, your writing will read at best superficial and at worse uninformed.
Terms a Marketing Writer Must Know
Marketing writers do far more than put words onto a screen. they’re an important piece in the content marketing process. There are scores of marketing terms that, once you understand them, will greatly improve the effectiveness of your inbound marketing content. Here are the top 10 you should take the time to read up on.
- Inbound marketing draws customers in via content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. It’s based on earning people’s interest through compelling content as opposed to buying it through paid advertising.
- CTAs or calls to action help persuade a potential customer to perform a desired action. Signing up for a newsletter, joining an email list, downloading a premium offer, or viewing additional content, such as videos, all fall under this term.
- Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting prospective customers who express an interest in a brand’s product or service. Some of the most effective lead generation tactics are websites, email marketing, search engine optimization, and telemarketing.
- Influencers are people who can, obviously, influence the buying habits of other people. In digital marketing, these influential people tend to be social media superstars. The premise is simple: instead of relying on your audience to promote your brand, you gain access to a much wider group of leads via people who are already popular with your potential customers.
- Unique visitors is a metric used to determine how many distinct individuals request pages from a website at least once within a specific timeframe. Each visitor is counted once in the set time, even if they visit multiple pages or multiple times.
- User experience is defined as how a visitor interacts with, feels about, and uses a website. User experience is the overall interaction between a person and a site and has a significant impact on content, design, conversions, search, and everything in between.
- Meta data is information visitors never see but that search engines (and social media networks) use to determine what your content is about. “Metas” include at a minimum the title, a brief description of the content, and an image.
- Churn rate is another important metric that measures how many customers are retained, and at what value. It’s helpful for finding out how many customers don’t stay on a website long enough to make what is spent on acquiring them worthwhile.
- Inbound links are those that come from another site to your website. The more inbound links a site receives, the more likely it is to rank higher in search engines. That makes writing great content that people want to link to vital to your marketing success.
- Lifecycle stages help coordinate contacts based on where they are in the sales cycle. The type of interaction a marketer has with leads depends on what lifecycle stage each lead is in. With respect to content, it’s important to understand that not every piece is appropriate for every stage.
The Bottom Line
The role of a content marketing writer has changed and with each change comes a fresh crop of terms you’ll need to learn. But for all the marketing buzzwords at your disposal, don’t lose sight of how important it is to use language that simply and accurately describes a product or service. The goal is to engage, educate, and persuade. While it’s important to know of what you speak, remember to keep your content fresh and avoid boring your readers with an overabundance of technical terms.
