There are a lot of things about being a copywriter that get on my nerves. The business is always changing, for example. When folks got serious about marketing on the Web, we copywriters had to begin thinking in terms of smaller bits of copy and headlines with numbers in them, whether we thought it was the best way to reach an audience or not. Sigh. In our age-old struggle with designers for equal territory on the page, we had to concede to briefer copy, because people browsing online are more likely to scan than read.
Since the advent of the Web, somebody has kept moving our copywriter cheese (do you know about that book from the 80s?).
The latest change for copywriters is the need to transform from craftspeople into combined craftspeople and content strategists. It’s not enough anymore for someone from marketing to tell us what objectives to meet. We have to engage our brains, analyze the audience, pay attention to what other writers are doing successfully, and recommend a “plan.” Used to be, the only plan we had to create ourselves was an editorial calendar based on a marketing plan someone else created.
Marketing plans are still being created by marketing strategists (or people bravely acting as marketing strategists). However, when writing “content,” we can no longer simply stand by and wait for guidance in the creative brief. Yes, we still should be receiving creative briefs. There still should be strategy coming from marketers, but we writers are the only ones who can create the type of plan I’m talking about: a plan for connecting with readers’ hearts and minds through many different progressive mediums as they engage with the educational information we post.
What is a content marketing plan
Writing is as much about psychological analysis as it is about language. Every day, we soak up demographics about our audience, make assumptions, test those assumptions, identify what works best to get a message across, and string words together in more than the sum of their parts to get an idea from clients to customers. Some of my bosses and freelance clients have called this work “magic.” We all love that, of course.
But now, it’s not enough to work on a message in a single piece. We have to think about an ongoing relationship being built through content. And because we are the ones who know how to make the magic, we are the ones who need to make the content plan to fit the marketing strategy. We are doing the same things we’ve always done. We just need to think now of using those skills in an extended fashion crossing mediums and spanning a longer period of time comprising the entire customer lifetime.
Becoming a content marketer might seem intimidating, because we are used to leaving strategy up to others. However, there are many benefits to activating our strategic powers. It helps us understand target audiences more deeply. It gives us greater value and usually leads to higher salaries. (Content marketers get paid more than content writers.) It can be more fun to write, because we have a greater say in what we write.
So, although it gets on my nerves to see things changing for copywriters, I’m gonna say let’s just get with the program, learn how to expand our magic, and enjoy those benefits.
