Content Marketing

Posted on

How to Write Great Case Studies for Successful B2B Marketing

Writing great case studies for effective B2B marketing needs careful planning
Image Credit: Scott Graham/Unsplash

Case studies are a great way to showcase your brand’s authority to the rest of the world. Simply put, a case study shows how your product or service has been crucial in solving a B2B client’s real-world problem in the most effective manner. This is persuasive advertisement because it comes with the power of storytelling. Everyone loves to hear a great story, and you are doing exactly that. Companies often name case studies like “Customer Stories” or “Customer Success Stories”.

Why Should You Create Case Studies?

Case studies are meant to build .your brand’s credibility by highlighting your expertise or offering in a particular area. Its goal is to grow confidence in the minds of prospects who might be looking for a solution to a similar or even the same problem. In that sense, case studies can make great content for the consideration phase of inbound marketing. In fact, according to a 2020 State of Marketing Trend Report from HubSpot, 13% of marketers consider case studies as one of the primary components of their content strategy.

How Do Case Studies Look Like?

Typically, case studies are freely available from a company’s website under the “Resources” section. However, in some rare cases, a business may decide to share gated case studies with its existing customers only.

Some businesses may have many case studies on their website. Canva is one example. Others may not have any or only a few. Depending on how much potential your story has for conversion, you can highlight it on the home page or a landing page.

Some case studies can be downloaded like an eBook in PDF format, while others are available as web copies. This case study from well-known data management software company Talend is a dowloadable PDF file that shows stories of seven of their customers, written in a concise form. The same company took a unique approach by incorporating video in this featured customer story.

What Should Case Studies Contain?

The way you want to present your case studies will depend on what type of information you want to convey to prospects. We will talk about case study structures shortly, but effective case studies are backed by data. Such data can be supplied by the customer, collected by you, or even be available in the public domain. You can present the data using charts, graphs, numbers, infographics, bulleted lists, or screenshots. For example, if your marketing agency specializes in SEO service, your case study can include screenshots of your client’s website traffic behavior from Google Analytics—before and after your changes. But here’s what you need to remember: the information you include must be verifiable, proven, and collected from a respectable authority. This case study from the [M]System Agency is an excellent example of using data in your stories.

There’s no hard limit to the length of a case study. However, since these are targeted at decision-makers, overly long content can easily distract readers or cause them to abandon reading before reaching call-to-action (CTA). We recommend keeping case study lengths between 1,000 to 1,200 words.

What Should You Consider Before Writing Case Studies?

The number of case studies you should publish, or the type of content you should include in those will depend on a number of factors. For example:

  • Who’s your target audience, and what information could they seek in a case study? Will they want to see your product or service’s performance in the market? Will they want to see why other companies are choosing your product or service?

    It could be difficult to know, but this is where your sales team can help because they will have some insight into customer inquiries. If you have no such information, write your case studies for the buyer personas you created for your ideal customer profile.
  • Do you want to highlight one product or service or more in your case studies?
  • How well do you know your customers, and how well do they know you? Do you have a business relationship close enough that even your customer will highlight the story on their social media channel or various events?
  • How willing are your customers to share their stories with you for publishing? Some clients may have regulatory requirements which prohibit vendors from disclosing any information.
  • Was your story with the customer already published or talked about elsewhere? Do you want to highlight it as a star use case?
  • Did your product or service play the most pivotal role in solving the customer’s problem, or was it a small part of the solution?
  • Was it a once-off solution from your product or service line, or the product/service was used by multiple customers in different situations? A flagship product or service is always a good candidate for case studies.

Ideally, you would want to hight the best of your customer stories where the solution played a huge role. Many companies highlight case studies of their well-known and often famous customers.

As you can see, planning for case studies can take some time, but once you have set some basic reference rules, you can start creating case stduy templates and workflows your content creators can use. If you want to get started quickly, you can try out HubSpot’s case study templates.

How Do You Gather All the Information for Case Studies?

The central part of any case study should be the customer you helped. That’s why you first need to discuss with your client if they are happy for you to highlight their story on your website. Nobody likes negative coverage, so you must assure your clients—and ensure—the case study you want to write does not show them in any way that hurts their reputation.

Once you have the go-ahead, you need to set up times with their key stakeholders for interviews. You should interview those who were directly involved during the project and those who can talk about the impact your solution has made on the company. People consider their time valuable, and you will probably get only one appointment with your subject, so make sure you are asking the right questions.

For the interviews, start by asking questions your subjects are most familiar with, and then build upon the answers. Ensure all the questions are open-ended. Also, make sure you are recording the interviews with their consent.

Here’s a sample list of questions you may want to ask.

The Business
  • Tell me about your company—what industry are you in, and what does your business do?
  • Can you please provide figures about your organization, like turnover, number of staff, office locations, type of clients you have, or similar?
The problem
  • What was the business problem you were trying to solve?
  • Was there a particular trigger that made you decide it was time to act?
  • What were the key challenges you needed to address?
  • How was the problem affecting your business? Can you give some quantitative figures?
The solution
  • What were your project objectives?
  • When did the project begin and end?
  • Why did you choose our company?
  • What technologies, processes, and workflows were used?
  • What was the process for developing the solution? (If you’re an IT company, provide the technical details of the solution yourself.  Don’t rely on your client to provide this information, as they may not be aware of the depth/breadth of your work).
  • Were there any extra challenges during the project that our company helped you solve?
Results
  • How is the solution now being used?
  • Has it achieved the project objectives?
  • What quantifiable benefits can you attribute to the solution (e.g., return on investment, dollars or time saved, dollars earned, customer happiness index, number of enrolments, etc.)?
  • What other business benefits have you experienced as a result of this solution?
  • How does this compare to how you were doing things previously?
  • Who are the main users, and what changes has it made to their roles?
  • How have the users reacted? 
Future plans
  • Do you have plans for future development on this solution?
  • Off the back of this project, are there any other projects either underway or in the pipeline?
  • Will you be considering our company for future projects? If so, why?
Testimonial
  • If you were to recommend our company, what would you say?
  • How would you describe your relationship with our company?

This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. The basic rules of interviews apply here: you need to be on top of your questions to get all the answers within the allocated time, but you also don’t interrupt people when they are talking about the project passionately.

Depending on how in-depth you want to go with your case study, you may need to interview stakeholders from your company too. They can be salespeople who closed the deal, presales engineers (if you are a technology company), support staff, or project managers.

How Should You Structure Your Case Studies?

Once you have gathered all the information and data for your case study, it’s time to write it is in a structured manner. A case study structure should include the following:

The Problem

This is where you describe what challenges your customer faced and how those impacted their businesses. Relevant figures and insights can be a powerful driver here. For example, the problem can highlight the money the company was losing daily, the time it took to complete a business process, or the number of opportunities the business was losing.

You, the Solution Provider

This is where you describe how your business was involved and why. Did the client approach you? Did you apply through a bidding process and win the work? Why did the client decide to hire you? More importantly, why did you feel confident you could help the business?

Your Magic Formula

This is the crux of the content. This is where you describe how you approached and solved the problem. Describe in detail:

  • What products and services you used for the solution?
  • Why you chose that path as the best possible solution?
  • What problems did you and the client face when adopting this solution, and how you overcame those hurdles?
  • How long did it take?

Once again, you can use figures and insights to back your points. For example, the client was using an older class of machine that could churn out only X widgets per hour. Knowing the customer’s industry well, your company recommended the newer generation Y machines, which could be easily calibrated to produce more or less than X widgets per hour, giving the customer the benefit of scalability. In doing so, you found many existing pipelines integrated with the older machines could not interoperate with the Generation Y version, so you created a custom integrator in record time.

Points like these not only prove your brand’s expertise but also shows that you care for your clients and are prepared to go the extra mile.

The Happy Customer

In this part, you describe what the client got in the end and how it affected their businesses. As with other parts of the story, figures and charts are a great means of communicating your findings. Side-by-side comparisons of before and after states are a powerful way to show prospective buyers that they, too, can get such benefits by hiring you. As an extra bonus, you can add client testimonials here. Nothing assures prospective buyers more than great testimonials from buyers who have done business with you.

Call to Action (CTA)

This is the last part of the case study, where you ask prospects to contact you if interested. This section should be fairly small and not look like you are making a sales pitch. The CTA should briefly introduce your company and what it offers and include a link to an online contact form or provide other details like an email address or phone number.

Letting the World Know

To ensure your case study is discoverable by organic traffic, it should follow all the basic rules of SEO. These include things like title length, meta descriptions, keywords, headings, and so on.

But you also want to tell the rest of the world about it. As we mentioned before, sometimes a case study can be so important your marketing department may want to highlight it on the home page or a landing page of the website.

You should also run a social media campaign once the piece is published. Another great way to promote is to run an email campaign to let your leads and clients know. If available as a web copy, the case study page should also include social share links.

Final Words

So there you have it: our tips for creating great case studies for effective and successful B2B marketing. Although it may seem complex, writing effective case studies mainly depends on getting the right information from the right people and presenting them in a compelling way.

Here at Professional Data Skills, we are really passionate about telling great stories about our customers, and we would love to create great case studies for you. If you want to know how we can tell your story, why not drop us a line?

Posted on

Beyond Blogs: 6 Types of Content B2B Marketers Should Create

Image Courtesy: Arisa Chattasa/Unsplash

There’s a lot more to content marketing than just posting regular blogs to your website.

The industry knowledge your business possesses and the client experience it has gained over time are potent sources of information for creating a range of digital assets. With the right content strategy, you can tap into this knowledge to produce content that:

  • Showcases your business’ expertise and experience
  • Positions your company as an industry leader
  • Educates your audience and help them along the sales funnel.

Producing content other than blog posts can initially seem daunting. Why do you need to write a whitepaper? What’s the point of creating an eBook, and when is a video more appropriate for capturing leads? 

To answer these questions, consider the big consulting or market research companies. These companies produce in-depth trend reports and content on specific topics and industries every year. Such content is usually gated and targeted toward decision-makers. Where do these firms get their information to produce such reports? You guessed it right—they tap into their organizational knowledge. Not only that, they repurpose the content over time.

You may not be running a global multi-billion dollar company, but you too can produce valuable content for your clients and prospects and use those as powerful lead magnets.

Here are six types of content we recommend every B2B company should produce. You should also recommend these to your clients if you are a digital marketing agency.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers may have a reputation for being bland and dense, but well-written whitepapers can truly differentiate your business from your competitors. As we mentioned in another blog post, people read them because they have to, not because they want to.  This is because whitepapers usually have a formal tone, are written for specific audience types, and focus on a single topic from a high level. The audience is usually well-versed on the topic but needs guidance to solve a problem or make a critical decision. When you give readers such information at their fingertips, a well-written whitepaper becomes a well-received resource that establishes your company’s authority. It becomes an essential resource for gaining trust.

Your whitepaper should explain a single problem and offer a solution without being too hands-on or coming across as overly promotional. It’s a high-quality report that persuades your audience with evidence rather than hype. You are educating your readers, not selling them anything.

eBooks

The cool and casual sibling of the whitepaper is the eBook. Presented in a less-formal style, they can be a how-to guide, highlight company research findings, or explain a new service. Typically, eBooks are not as specific as whitepapers when it comes to topics. Oftentimes eBooks cover a broader topic with the content broken up into chapters covering various subtopics. Thus, the content flows less cohesively than in a whitepaper because whitepapers have sections instead of chapters, but the eBook is designed for the reader to skim through.

Also, just like printed books, eBooks often have tables of contents. They also make heavy use of diagrams, imagery, or infographics. Another feature of eBooks is that critical points are often highlighted for the busy reader. 

Like whitepapers, eBooks are high-value resources that can improve your lead nurturing processes.

Case Studies

Case studies are a written portfolio of your company’s work. Unlike eBooks or whitepapers, case studies are usually not gated. They are primarily available as web copies instead of downloadable documents, although exceptions exist.

Like eBooks and whitepapers, case studies show your business’ expertise and commitment to solving customer problems. A case study structure is divided into distinct parts:

  • The client problem: what challenges was the customer facing?
  • The effect of the problem: how was it affecting your customer’s business? For example, losing revenue, lower customer satisfaction, and complex processes taking too much time.
  • When and how was your business involved: how did the client find you? Why did they hire your business?
  • What did your business do to solve the customer’s problem: this is usually a detailed description of which products or services you recommended and how those were pivotal in solving the problem.
  • What else did the customer get: other tangible and intangible benefits besides the immediate solution?
  • Testimonial: did the customer leave any feedback?

As you can see, properly-written case studies can become persuasive social proof. In some cases, long-form case studies can be written as eBooks, or multiple case studies can be bundled into a downloadable resource.

Videos

When it comes to video marketing, everybody seems to know its importance, yet nobody seems to do it enough. The thought process behind this is that videos are too time, resource, and cost-consuming to produce, and there is not enough ROI. Yet, videos are a compelling means to convey your message. And they don’t always have to be created with professional actors, lighting, and studio setups.

Your video library can reside in a few places. For example, an introductory video from the CEO can be featured on the main page or landing pages. How-tos, onboarding, and explainer doodle videos can be featured on public or private documentation sites. These can also be on your YouTube channel. People subscribe to such channels when you convey enough helpful information. Think about Google or HubSpot video series as an example.

The types of videos you post can be as varied. Many companies post their webinars online. Similarly, you can post client interviews, new product launches, or award ceremonies, to name a few.

Sites like YouTube allow you to add closed caption subtitles to videos. The text is fully crawlable by search engines and, if SEO-optimized, may often feature on the first page of search results.

Another place to post videos is your social media channels. Social media videos can have a broader impact depending on your type of business. Think of TikTok as an example. Many people think of it as too consumer-oriented, yet brands are slowly but surely using it for awareness and conversion.

The key to video success lies in the content’s quality. When presented succinctly, valuable information can leave a long-lasting effect on the viewer, priming them to return for more.

Infographics

If pictures are a thousand words, infographics are worth the adage (beside videos). These are short forms of content, usually freely downloadable and not gated. Infographics are often part of eBooks as well.

As the name suggests, Infographics show information in a graphical manner. The information is typically statistical in nature. They can show current status, predictions, comparisons, or even how-tos. For example, if you are a luxury car wholesaler, you may want to add an infographic on your website showing the top ten cars based on their market shares, user satisfaction level, and features. By showing such statistical figures through images, you are advising your B2B customers (retail car dealers) on which cars they should buy from you and stock up on. If you are a Fintech company, you may want to advise your website visitors about the top 5 sources of cloud waste.

Outreach Content

The final item on our list is what we call outreach content. We named it so because although such content can be used for inbound marketing, you are not hosting it on your website—you are reaching out on the Internet for potential leads.

The first type of outreach content is your guest blogs (yes, we know, we said this article is not about blogs). You write these blogs on reputable third-party sites where many of your target audience may congregate. For example, if you are a digital marketing firm, you may want to start a publication on Medium or create irregular LinkedIn articles. If you are a tech start-up, you may want to publish on sites like InfoQ, Dev.to, or Hackernoon. Writing in industry-famous publications and linking to your site can help build brand awareness and develop quality leads.

You can create the next type of outreach content on Q & A sites. Your B2B content marketing strategy can target sites like Quora and Stack Overflow and answer questions from possible leads. Again, such content establishes your brand authority. However, such sites usually have algorithmic rules to deter brand promotions. For example, your answer in Quora will not be directly visible if it contains links to your products or services. But the best thing about such content is that it can be featured on Google Answer Box for some queries.

Finally, we have social media posts and email newsletters as outreach content. You may not be creating something new here but using these channels to promote existing content. Writing email copy or social media posts requires careful planning and targeting specific customer segments (email) or hashtags (social media). And unlike blogs, whitepapers, infographics, or videos, social posts or email campaigns happen on a recurring schedule.

Besides promotion, emails are often used to announce new products or service offerings, explain a business decision to customers or suppliers, or even acknowledge and correct previous mistakes. Social media is a powerful tool for answering customer queries and highlighting user-generated content.

Final Words

So there you have it—our list of six types of content you should consider for your B2B business. It may not be possible (or even relevant) to tap on all six, but that’s where you can talk to an agency like ours. We are always keen to hear about your content needs and help you create both content strategies and content.

Posted on

6 Ways to Get Your Blog Posts to Reach a Wider Audience

Image Courtesy: Yvette de Wit/Unsplash

So you have published your latest and greatest blog post.

You have worked hard writing it, ensured you have primed it with carefully-researched keywords, and followed all the golden rules of SEO. Catchy titles, meta descriptions, H2 headings, and perfect header images are all there. In fact, the blog might have been written by the talented folks of ProDataSkills. Google Analytics is showing traffic hitting your page.

But not at the rate you would have loved. 

It’s been a week, and the schedule for your next post is in about another week. Why isn’t traffic spiking? You know you did everything you could have done to attract more traffic.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works anymore. As much as we’d like our blogs to go viral on their own merits, it doesn’t work in a crowded world wide web. You need to tell people about it. Don’t depend on just Google.

So how do you reach a wider audience smartly and effectively? Here are six techniques you can follow.

Technique #1: Make it Shareable

The first step to getting more traffic to your blog post is to make it shareable. Even if your blog post attracts healthy traffic, you want to build on that success and keep the cycle going. What better way to do it than to get the people who read it to share it too? That’s why your blog site should have sharing option. Many sites allow their blogs to be shared on social media, email, or even instant messaging apps. This helps people to share your article without manually copy-pasting the URL.

Technique #2: Share on Social Media

This is the most straightforward strategy but one that’s often missed. You must inform your followers about your blog post on every social media channel your company has a profile on. LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta company page—you name it.

You can use a free tool like Canva to create a simple graphic with an intriguing excerpt from your blog and post it on social media. And don’t worry—it’s totally fine to post the same graphic on multiple platforms. If you aren’t using graphics, you can use the same or different text-based messages in all the channels. There’s a high probability your audience is different on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram. So copy/paste and post away.

What’s also essential is using relevant hashtags in your social media posts. These will show your post in the timeline of whoever subscribes to those hashtags. This will help those people find your blog.

And don’t think you can’t post the same message about your blog multiple times on the same channel. The Internet (and social media in particular) is a superfast freeway. People won’t remember what they saw three weeks ago. Even if they do remember your post about the blog, at worst, they won’t click on it, and if it resonates with them, they will repost or share it. We recommend you follow this strategy for blog posts with strong potential to increase your viewership, followership, or sales.

So, how often should you post about the same blog? It depends on your number of followers, how often you post, and the channels you are posting to. As a rule of thumb, wait at least two weeks before posting about the same blog.

Finally, if you have the budget, consider purchasing social media ads to boost your post. Although doing it for every post isn’t practical, it certainly helps to spread the word about blogs you want most people to see. 

Here at Professional Data Skills, we promote our blog posts through social media. We also ensure any articles we have written for our clients are promoted on social media channels.

Technique #3: Send an Email Newsletter

Think nobody reads your email newsletters? Well, you might be surprised to see some stats from this HubSpot blog. The average email open rate across all industries sits between 20% to 30%, and the clickthrough rate is between 1.2% to 3% (see Mailchimp and Smart Insights). 

However, think about the 1.5% of your database who open the email and click on your blog’s link. If you have 5,000 email addresses in your database, that’s still 50 people who are getting interested. Many of them might share it on their own social media channels.

Technique #4: Use Backlinks

If your blog post is part of a topic cluster, adding links from the pillar page and the other posts to your blog (and vice versa) makes sense. It doesn’t have to be only for topic clusters—as long as your article can be referenced from another blog, put a link pointing back to it. That way, traffic hitting your newer blog posts can also be aware of the original article.

Technique #5: Post on Multiple Platforms

Most publishing platforms will have strict rules about publishing duplicate content. But some may have more lenient policies. You could post your blog on those platforms (e.g., Medium) and add a disclaimer like “this article was first published on…”. Like topic clusters and backlinks, you can reference your original blog from articles you publish on different platforms. By submitting your blog to an external publication, you are spreading your knowledge to an already established network that could be far larger than your existing following. 

Rule #6: Use Q&A Sites

This goes back to our social media promotion technique. People look for answers on sites like Quora, Reddit, or Stack Exchange. Regularly answering industry-related questions on these sites establishes your brand as a thought leader and allows you to promote your blogs.

Let’s say your company offers a SaaS solution for workspace health and safety management. One of your blog posts is about the top 10 similar platforms. When you answer questions related to such topics (e.g., “what are some well-known workplace incident management tools?”), you could answer the question and provide a link to your blog.

Final Words

So now you have seen a few techniques to present your blogs to a broader audience. As you can see, apart from running ads, all these methods are free. All that’s needed is a little time and effort.

If you want to create thought-leadership or deep-dive, hands-on blogs for your technology company, our expert content creators will be more than happy to help. We can create well-researched content related to your products and services, promote them through social media and email campaigns, and report on subsequent engagement rates. To know more, contact us today.

Posted on

8 Best Practice Tips for Copyediting Your Own Writing

Image Courtesy: Daniel Thomas/Unsplash

In a perfect world, we would all have a professional editor always available to ensure our written work was top-notch. We would write the article, not care about grammar, spelling, or punctuation and expect our authors are smart enough to understand the thought process that went into creating the great piece of work. If it weren’t good enough, the editor would handle the rest.

And why not? With clients, publications, and agencies increasingly becoming tough on quality, it’s hard to submit an article, eBook, or whitepaper without some sort of editing going into it. But tighter budgets and punishing deadlines also mean that in most cases, there will be no one available to edit your work to make it look good. In fact, you are expected to edit your work before you submit the first draft.

And you better get used to this. There’s nothing worse than the gut-sinking feeling of spotting an error in something you’ve written just after you’ve hit the publish button or have emailed a document to an entire mailing list. 

Check out our simple tips to ensure your writing is polished, professional, and fit for purpose.

Copyediting and Proofreading: What’s the Difference?

You’ve probably heard the terms copyediting and proofreading used interchangeably. In a nutshell, there are two distinct levels of revising written work. Copyediting looks at the big picture, while proofreading takes care of cosmetic edits. Both are essential parts of the revision process.

Proofreading should be the final phase of editing before you hit “submit”. It’s where you tidy up spelling, grammar, punctuation, inconsistent capitalization, and style-related errors. Think of it as the final polish.

But before proofreading, you need to do a thorough copyedit. This is a substantial review of your text and is best undertaken once the draft is complete. It’s where you revise your work to make it better, crafting it into something that shines.

Why? Because what you think you’ve written and what was actually written can be very different. When you put yourself in your readers’ shoes, you will often cringe at the quality of your work. That’s why copyediting often results in rewriting entire paragraphs of texts to improve overall consistency, structure, storytelling style, and flow of information. It also often means rearranging or shortening sentences, reorganizing sections, or elaborating on something you only touched upon. In short, copyediting can see you make significant structural changes to your written work.

The Value of Editing Your Work

Once you’ve put all your thoughts into a written form, sticking to a few simple copyediting rules can make a world of difference.

Copyediting ensures your next email, website copy, blog post, or whitepaper reads like the work of a professional. The aim is to produce a structurally sound document that flows well, avoids ambiguity, and includes all the information the reader needs. If your written work is ambiguous, untidy, or unclear, your readers will treat it accordingly. And worse still, your readers won’t probably read your next piece, and your editors or clients won’t give you further work either.

Importantly, copyediting gives you the best chance of ensuring your document doesn’t contain embarrassing mistakes. A thorough copyedit can catch the flaws in your writing before they’re shared with a wider readership. Sometimes editors and publishers will do final proofreading before publishing, but they may expect you to do the copyediting yourself. It’s not the proofreader’s task to tell you that you repeated the same concept twice within the article or that the conclusion to your story was abrupt.

Also, when you edit your writing, you will learn new things. A classic example is when you must keep your piece within a specific word count. Forced to comply with such restrictions, you will learn how to present your ideas succinctly.

Our Best Practice Tips for Copyediting

Now that you know what copyediting is and why you need to do it, here are some best practice tips.

Tip 1: Take a Break

You may have spent weeks writing your e-Book or several days composing an email newsletter. You have thoroughly researched your topic, repeatedly referenced your notes, made sure you have addressed all the submission requirements and even asked friends or family members to read your work. Everyone agrees it’s a great job. Now you have to do the editing.

Our advice? Take a break. Even when you are under a tight schedule, give it at least a good night’s sleep time and come back fresh.

Why? Because when you have spent a long time writing, you will be highly familiar with your work and be less likely to spot omissions, errors, or repetition.

Tip 2: Keep the Outline Handy

You should start copyediting your written work by checking if it covers everything it’s supposed to cover. One of the ways to check that is by comparing the written piece with the outline.

An outline is a bullet point list of what your written work should cover and how it should cover it. It gives an overview of the sections, subsections, and the depth they should go into. If you are not in the habit of creating an outline before you start writing, we highly recommend you do so from now on. Not only does it help you write the actual piece quickly, but the comparison also helps ensure you haven’t left any vital piece of information.

Tip 3: State your Goal Explicitly

It’s easy to assume that once your audience starts reading, they will automatically identify its aim and what you are trying to say. This is seldom the case. Your article’s introduction should clearly state the problem, why the reader should read on to find the answer, and what you will cover to give them the answer. Unless you’ve clearly stated these points upfront, it’s unlikely your readers will be motivated to read on. This is where your subject line, title, and opening paragraph can make a huge impact. You can use catchy or engaging wording to engage your readers early. If you are writing a multi-part series, briefly mention what the reader learned in the last installment and what they will learn today.  

Tip 4: Check the Document Structure

You should map a clear path for your “story” and ensure you adhere to it. Each piece of writing should have a clear structure with a beginning (introduction), a middle (the body), and an end (conclusion).

We talked about the introduction briefly. The document’s body should present the story’s central theme in a logical, easy-to-follow path. In other words, there should not be any abrupt jumps from one concept or event to the next. If you expect the reader to be familiar with something, don’t just assume it. State such assumptions where necessary. If you are writing an essay or a blog and you don’t want to want extraneous information, make a reference to an external link. Your readers will appreciate this.

Finally, the conclusion should be where your readers will make their own decision. You can state what the reader has learned or what the story has covered and give direction for where to go. It could be a simple call to action for signing up for the newsletter, an invitation to an event, or a prompt to check out other written works from you. It could even be a simple message for the reader to contemplate on.

Tip 5: Remember Your Audience

Even though you have put your heart and soul into your writing, remember that you are writing for your readers. Keep your audience’s level of understanding and time in mind. If your writing is for new mums about their newborns, you will want to use a compassionate voice and keep your message clear and short. Why? Because typically, they will have a short time available for reading and will be looking for relevant information only. Being overly patronizing or using medical jargon (unless you explain) won’t help here. If you are writing about the latest multi-player games, you must remember that your readers are tech-savvy and want to learn something new. Using a sales pitch won’t resonate with them. As you read through your work, ask yourself how each piece of information you provide will benefit your readers and if it should be there.

Tip 6: Don’t Repeat Yourself

When passionate about a topic, we often stress the same point more than once. However, your readers will appreciate brevity and clarity. If you have stated an opinion or fact once, leave it there: no reason to state it differently or say, “as we have said before”. If your text contains waffle words that don’t serve a purpose or make a point, take them out. Getting rid of repetition saves valuable time for the readers and allows you to add more relevant information.

Tip 7: Use Simple Sentences

In the same way that we find it easy to switch off when people talk in a monotone, readers will also quickly move away when they are not engaged. Try varying the length of your sentences. You may need to combine some sentences or shorten others. Similarly, don’t use convoluted sentences that go nowhere. As we showed in another blog post, writing in plain language makes reading much easier. This means you will have to break down complex sentences, use less jargon, and be concise. Similarly, paragraphs can be reordered to flow more smoothly, and text can be shuffled around. Use tools like Grammarly or Hemmingway, and look up synonyms where necessary.

Tip 8: Don’t Cram Everything in One Place

Some subjects can be quite lengthy to explain. Don’t try to tell the story in one piece if there’s too much information to fit in. For example, anything above 1500 words for blog posts will usually see readers losing interest or moving away. Break down your story into a multi-part series and create logical links between them so readers can follow through. What you leave out can be as important as what you leave in.

Final Words

Copyediting is the first line of defense against mediocre writing. It’s worth investing your time and effort – you’ll be rewarded with clear, concise, and compelling words that people want to read, and your readers will thank you for that.

If you liked this article, you can contact us for your corporate content marketing needs.

Posted on

Why Work With a Content Marketing Agency Instead of Freelancers?

Image Courtesy: Marvin Meyer/Unsplash

So you have decided to add some content to your company’s website.

As the newly-appointed CMO, you know the value of inbound marketing, and when you looked at the site, it seemed too outdated. The CEO wrote the last blog two years ago when the company was still a start-up.

Time to add some great SEO-friendly content regularly, you tell yourself. There should be blogs, case studies, eBooks, whitepapers, and perhaps even videos.

Great idea, your boss tells you (or you tell yourself). So how do you start? Where do you start? And who does the writing?

You turn to your marketing team. Sure, you got some great SEO specialists, but they don’t have the technical knowledge about the product.

How about the SMEs? The engineers are busy developing new product features and fixing bugs. They don’t have time to spare. A couple of them write the first two articles, then get busy again. That’s when you have the idea. How about freelancers?

You start hiring freelancers from popular marketplaces and give them the briefs. But the quality somehow isn’t something you were expecting. You have to get your SMEs to recheck the blogs; most of the time, they have to rewrite the whole piece.

Don’t get us wrong. There’s nothing wrong with freelancing authors. Here at Professional Data Skills, we love freelancers and the freelance life. But this is a picture we see all too often in our customers’ marketing journeys. And we believe, as a bonafide marketing team, you will probably get more value working with an agency than a solopreneur when it comes to content marketing. As talented as freelancers are (we’ve been there!), Nothing beats working with a squad packed with different expertise and skill sets.

There are many reasons why engaging an agency is beneficial to your business in the long run. Here are a few of our favorites.

Seamless Experience

An agency will have developed tried and tested processes, tools, and systems that make working together easy. This can include everything from streamlined onboarding steps to detailed briefing documents to collaboration platforms, dedicated account managers, and monthly reporting.

What does that mean for you? It means working with an agency (like ours) will be seamless. From the initial meeting to collaborating and receiving the finished product, an agency will have got the process down pat.

It may not seem important, but believe us, once you’ve spent a few months or weeks chasing individuals to make the edits you requested or frantically finding a replacement author for last-moment cancellations, you’ll notice the difference.

Wide Skillsets

There’s no denying that freelancers are generally highly skilled in their fields. But a well-structured agency? They hire a range of freelancers or employees to offer a broader range of expertise.

Take us, for example. We have engineering authors who specialize in every possible area of IT, tech reviewers, project managers, copy-editors, and account managers who can take your content topic, ask the right questions or do the right research, and produce a polished product within the timeframe. Looking at individual skills, we’re specialists, but as a team, we deliver values that a single-person band simply can’t provide.

If one author doesn’t have the knowledge you seek, we will work with another author who does. Better still, we can turn work around faster because we have more resources available. And we are always researching authors and hiring them. We ensure potential candidates have passed two exams before they are called for an interview. The result? Quality you can trust.

Quality Assurance

Speaking of quality, professional content marketing agencies will have strict quality checking processes in place. A single person can only do so much for quality assurance. An agency will have reviewers, proofreaders, SEO specialists, and even graphics designers who can add value to the content.

Here at ProDataSkills, we check everything from word count to adherence to writing guidelines to plagiarism to writing style, language, and grammar once an article is submitted. It then goes through extensive tech review cycles by dedicated SMEs. Finally, once all the kinks are ironed out, our copy-editors polish it off. The article is then dispatched to the client. 99% of the time, our work is approved during the first round of client review. This saves you time and money you’d otherwise spend re-working the piece. And, of course, we accommodate client requests if they ask for further changes. With individual authors, you may find it hard to do.

Team Collaboration

Another area where you may find yourself better off with an agency is when it comes to collaboration. You may have your in-house writing guidelines and probably use a dedicated content management and publishing platform like WordPress. With an agency, you can have your content written and delivered in the format you prefer or posted through your CMS. We know this because we have delivered content in formats ranging from MS Word to Google Docs to Markdown to HTML. We have delivered documents via Google Drive, WordPress, or even Notion. Clients often give us access to their content calendar and project management systems so both parties can collaborate on deliverables.

Freelancers often have limited capacity when it comes to such collaborative content development. Most freelance sites allow freelancers to upload their work as standalone files (Word, PDF, plain text, etc.). There’s no scope for “real-time” edits and comments, nor is it feasible to give access to your content calendar or CMS to every freelancer you work with.

Faster and Guaranteed Delivery

Sometimes you have to have content delivered within a short time or a very tight deadline. For example, suppose your company builds security tools for Windows or macOS. In that case, you may want to run an extended content campaign before a new version of Windows or macOS comes to the market or when they release a new patch for a security vulnerability that’s just been discovered.

You may find it hard to source the person with the right knowledge, experience, and authoring skills to write such content. Even if you find, the person may fail to deliver on time due to unforeseen circumstances. With an agency, you don’t have to deal with this. You simply ask your account manager, and the rest is taken care of. Most agencies will have agreed-upon SLAs with you; some can even offer a money-back guarantee.

Here at ProDataSkills, we build enough buffer into our workflows to ensure we deliver on time. We have dedicated project managers and content leads who work with authors, manage the pipeline of work, and keep in touch with clients.

Cost-effectiveness

You may think working with a freelancer will be a cheaper exercise, however, working with freelancers can cost you more in the long run in some cases. For example, you may hire a freelance content writer to create a blog but then pay another freelance copy-editor to edit it and another SEO freelancer to ensure it’s SEO-ed. Although agency rates will be higher, it will not be the same as hiring multiple freelancers for the complete delivery cycle. You will work with a professional team, and the pricing will include that team’s service.

Also, consider your capacity. Do you have time to manage multiple freelancers and keep track of their work? The answer will probably be a “no” because if you had, you would have made them part of your team in the first place.

Final Words

Having freelance resources work on your digital marketing projects is a great way to save time, cost, and effort. However, not every aspect of marketing is a great fit for solo players. Sometimes, you need a dedicated team—particularly when your requirements involve guaranteed delivery of high-quality service.

Here at Professional Data Skills, we take pride in our service quality. Check out our services, see how we work, or contact us for your content needs.

Back to top