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Jun, 2021
These days, content marketing sits at the centre of many businesses’ marketing strategies, and what could be an easier way of positioning yourself as a thought leader – and giving your audience insightful content – than with a blog or ten. But if you’re one of the many business owners who doesn’t have a paid content creator on the team, you’ll need to brief someone who can do the job – and believe it or not, the right brief can make or break your blog’s success…
It’s easy to dismiss blog posts as simply something that serves an SEO purpose, but when they’re written solely for the purpose of getting keywords to rank, they read as such – and that’s very bad news for your brand.
The average reader these days can sniff out SEO content from a mile away. Even if they can’t put their finger on quite what’s wrong, they can feel something’s off – the copy’s too repetitive, it’s unhelpful and it’s, well, boring. It’ll turn them off your business before they’ve even made contact – and that’s why we implore you to give more thought to your blog content. It’s worth it, we promise.
Whilst blog content should ideally be pretty SEO-friendly – think relevant URLs, appropriate headings, attractive and optimised images, external links and a well thought-out meta tag – all that should be added once the blog is well and truly written. The best blogs are useful, relevant and packed full of information your customers are looking for – ideally, they also demonstrate your own expertise in the fields and reflect your brand values to boot. As a sales pitch to draw customers to you, they’re a powerful tool and you want to get them right.
If your company has its own in-house content creator – fantastic. If not, you’ll either need to get a non-expert team-member to write it (not ideal), or pass it on to the very safest pair of hands – your marketing agency. Their highly trained, in-house copywriters know a thing or two about crafting the perfect blog post and can be guaranteed to get it right, every time – saving you valuable headspace and team-time whilst they’re at it. And to make sure they hit the bullseye of the blog target, they’ll need a brief from you.
A well-written, well thought-out brief is absolutely paramount to getting the right content from your marketing agency. It needs to provide everything you want included in your blog, as well as set out the target audience, the overarching goals of the post and any CTA you want included – so you need to have a good long think before you brief. Ouch! If that all sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t worry – help really is on hand. To make things as easy as possible for you, we’ve created a nifty briefing template that prompts you with everything you need to give your copywriter. Don’t believe anything could ever be that simple? Download the template and enjoy, friends!