Month: November 2017

  There are two interesting phrases that come to mind when we talk about Copywriting and how good it needs to be. Both come from David Ogilvy. “It’s not creative unless it sells” “The consumer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife” Keep these two phrases in front of you while writing and it becomes clear on how you need to stop using convoluted language, mindless chatter and wrong CTAs (Call to Actions) in your copy. Content marketing is at an all-time high with millions of blogs being published every day. It has made a wordsmith of almost every marketer. And there lies the problem. We are in the busy rat race of content, writing as much fancy copy as possible that can attract reader attention. In the bargain, the art of writing quality copy is diminishing. Let’s have a look at 5 things we can remove from our copy to make it better with replacements that aren’t jarring to the reader.   1. Going fancy with adjectives and adverbs via GIPHY “The most daringly adventurous scene in the movie is the thrilling ride on the fast-moving locomotive where the two dare-devil heroes make an unbelievable jump over a great chasm”.  Let’s not count the adjectives there.  There is a chance you’ll forget the beginning of the sentence by the time you get to the end of it. Another example: “An innovative solution to the great problem of multiplying your profits while keeping expenses low” We’ve all read the word ‘innovative’ before numerous times only to end up wondering what’s new about the solution in the article that hasn’t been said a million times before. We shouldn’t dismiss adjectives and adverbs entirely. They work well in creating bait headlines that draw the reader in. But the incorrect or unclear use of it ruins the copy. Can the problem be described as ‘great’ or is there a better word for it? Is the solution truly innovative or are you just adding it to the title for the sake of it? What to do with adjectives and adverbs Add an adjective only if it is adding meaning to the sentence. Else remove it. ‘Fiery Chasm’ would make more sense than ‘great chasm’ Remove ‘very’. Instead, use a better adjective. For example, replace ‘very happy’ with ‘joyful’ or ‘very big’ with ‘gigantic’, ‘very bad’ with terrible or very smelly with ‘stinky’. Replace generic descriptors with industry-specific descriptors Instead of ‘high-quality shirts’, you can say ‘stain-proof shirts’ or instead of ‘top-notch mascara’, you can say ‘no smudge mascara’.   2. Selling features and not benefits Image Source: helpscout We all would like to write the saga of how cool our product is and all the things it can do. But your customer is here asking a different question – ‘What can it do for me specifically?’ If you over-do the ‘I’m the best’ routine in your copy, it’s likely that your consumer won’t find an answer to their question and go elsewhere. Count the ‘we’ against the ‘your’ in your copy. ‘Your’ should definitely get more weight. It allows the whole story narration from a customer perspective and gets you both better ranking and engagement. “Our toys come with anti-break feature and are also created with soft rounded edges. Our toys are the best’ Those are the features. Here are the benefits: “No matter how much your child tugs and throws, this toy is designed with well-rounded edges so that it doesn’t break or hurt your child. These toys are perfect for toddlers who have just started exploring the world around them” The second copy would appeal more to a parent as it is talking to them about their child’s safety as a benefit of toy’s features. Saying ‘Our toys are the best’ doesn’t add anything to the copy. Instead mentioning who the toy is a way to let parents know the product-target audience fit.   3. A confusing Call To Action (CTA)   A CTA is the most important part of your copy. It gives direct instruction to the reader on what to do next once they have assimilated the information on the page. Do they order the product, give you their contact information or sign up for your newsletter. If you don’t tell them exactly what to do, they’ll meander around the website and drop off. Have you seen a button called ‘Submit’? How does it feel when you are about to click it? Is someone asking you to Submit? Does it sound domineering, legal or impersonal? Instead of the cliched ‘Click here’ or ‘Buy now’, you can try the ‘Download White paper’ or ‘Try the Demo’ button. Here too, a personalized button addressing the user directly works better. ‘Get My Free Whitepaper’, or ‘I want this’ or ‘See my results” can get a better click rate than generic buttons. Adding too many CTAs on the page too can be a downer as people won’t be able to make up their mind and go for the least risky option. If you have ‘Read more’, ‘Get Started Now’ and ‘Download my white paper’ on the same page, the user is more likely to click on the ‘Read more’ button as it isn’t cornering them to take action but escape with a click. Pro tip: Add a meaningful description of a few words under the Call to Action button which can prod users to make up their mind. Here are some examples: “30-Day Money Back Guarantee. No questions asked” “Get 40% discount on your first order” “Get your free site audit report in 5 minutes”   4. Avoid ambiguity   We’ve all landed on some web pages and bounced off completely confused on what you are doing there. Some of the best examples of such web pages are the “Make millions online with this one sure shot strategy” or “Lose 5 kilos every week with this foolproof strategy”. There is nothing else on the webpage other than more adjectives about the amazing product/service. Instead, there

If content were a living breathing entity it would probably require its own planet. That’s because the amount of content created is astounding – over 2M blogs a day when we were the last counting. Yet, everyone hopes that their piece of content will be the one thing that’ll shake the internet and send traffic by the troves to their website. And not just traffic but leads, conversions and the elusive proof of ROI too. Have you too been hoping that one day a cornerstone piece will magically send traffic your way? If the abra-ca-dabra of a 2000 word authoritative content, regular blog posts, and a social media strategy hasn’t worked yet then your content marketing probably needs some fixes. The fixes aren’t magic (unfortunately). They are nuggets of wisdom that we’ve gathered from our experience and that of industry experts. But it does allow you to look beyond your editorial calendar to see what you can do to create better content. Also, we’ll be sharing a bonus tip towards the end which can help you string together your content marketing from strategy to execution.   1. Do a triple-take on the topic you choose As content marketers, most people have two ways of choosing a topic – the first is to pick an already viral, ranking and popular content and present an original spin off. This allows you to bank on the fact that the topic is already popular and hence may drive traffic. The downside is that it isn’t fully original and someone else is already trending on the popularity. So you may receive only a fraction of the traffic that this topic generates as a whole. The second way is to rack some grey cells and come up with fully original content for your blog. Here are 7 ways to do it (link to JW blog). This method gives you authoritative content but you’ll have limited ways to gauge how much interest the topic will generate. Take a step back into your drawing board to do a content gap analysis. Have you created the best possible FAQs content for your product/service and industry as a whole. If you haven’t then you have a content gap right in front of your eyes. Take at least 3 to 4 customer personas and identify 3 to 4 questions they’ll have through each stage of the purchase funnel (awareness, opinion, consideration, preference, purchase). That’s a good 80 questions that require original content and you’ll have to ensure that you are covering that as a bare minimum. The layer that will encompass these is stories are the ones about your brand, company culture, insider stories and thought leadership. Also, you can’t play the I-me-myself game which will make your content look like an extended company brochure. You’ll have to be real about the topics that affect your customers in general and show them the humane side of your brand too. If you plug the content gaps successfully, you’ll have a traffic generating mechanism set on an autopilot.   2. Fix your content dissemination strategy You now have a hang of what your topic is and who you’ll be creating it for. But how on earth are they going to get to read it? Most people post their content on their company’s social channels and expect that the world will know about it. Or even worse, they’ll expect it to rank on top within a few days and start driving organic traffic. Truth is that both these media have their limitations. Ranking on the search engine may take a few days depending on when your page gets indexed. Social has an incredible amount of noise and only a fraction of people get to see what you post, even if they already follow / like you. It is quite tempting to hit the ‘boost post’ button, do a rough target audience setting and wait for the magic to happen. But paid marketing allows the reach and traffic to sustain only until you throw in money into the campaign. Unless that money is translating into ROI somewhere down the line (and you have a way to connect the dots), this isn’t a good idea. Instead, let’s look at other organic ways to boost your content. Start with your employees: Your employees are your best brand ambassadors. According to lifewire, an average office worker receives 121 emails and sends out 40 emails per day. Let’s say that you have 10 employees. That’s 400 opportunities per day for you to begin circulating your content among a high core target audience who are already aware of your product/services. You can ask employees to not only use a new blog post in their email signature but also share via their personal social handles to amplify the reach. Share with your current customers/subscribers: If you have built up an email list and also have records of all your current customers, you can create a monthly newsletter covering the most interesting topics and news for the month and share it with them. Of course, your content too can be a part of it. Share with potential customers: This works great in the B2B industry where you often have a lot of people in the potential customer pipeline and your sales team is working hard to get them on board. You can share your content with these prospects giving them more confidence in your brand and execution capabilities. Share it with future customers: Then there is a subset of the rest of the universe who aren’t aware of your brand but can listen to you when asked. These are the people who may move in and move out of your sales funnel. You can speak to them with #tags and influencer marketing on social channels. 3. Fix your content marketing format The ways content is consumed has changed over the years. Video has taken over the content marketing world with just YouTube boasting one billion unique visitors a month or one-third

There are over 2 million blog posts being produced every day. What a number! We all are pretty sure that not all of these are original content. Some are copied outright. Others are ‘refurbished’ versions of popular blogs so that they can ride the popularity wave and get ranking on Google. One fact remains is that writing completely original content from scratch is a super tough job. Sometimes it is a Catch 22 of sorts. You need to write something unique about a popular topic but also see that no one else is writing something similar. Sounds a bit difficult but it isn’t impossible. Here are tips to keep in mind before you start filling your editorial calendar with unique topic ideas   1. Google (Re)Search At the risk of stating the obvious, it is a super common practice to take a blog idea, type it into Google for your research. It gives you an idea of who has already written about the topic, the angles they have used and how many other people have written about similar topics. The one thing that helps here is sorting articles according to the time they were published. This will show you who was the first to write about it, how long the topic has been trending and who is the latest to join the race for the topic. The next tool that Google has is the ability to search by country. This allows you to see how the topic has been adapted to country-specific problems. This will allow you to do a deeper research on local implications of the topic and also if the main topic results include local nuances. When you pick up a topic like ‘7 phrases you shouldn’t use in your writing’ this may differ from country to country depending on the nuances of English language native to the country. This gives you an angle to piggyback on a popular topic and yet write unique and original content.   2. Aim to create cornerstone content Cornerstone is the latest buzz in SEO. As long it is buzzing, you better put on your thinking cap to come up with 4-5 pages of content on a topic for it to rank well. To do this you’ll need to have (or gather) all perspectives on the topic to give a well-rounded view. This can’t be a 1500 word article ballooned into 2000 words but a 2500 word article that is cut down to 2000 with crisp editing. Creating cornerstone content isn’t too hard if you already have a grasp on the topic. If not you’ll have to not only assimilate from all the topics you read online but club it with an interesting point of view that can make it stand out from the clutter. Let’s say you are writing about the impact of IoT on our future. If you pick up the most recent examples for IoT (some of which may not be covered elsewhere), you’ll be able to create an authoritative article on the topic.   3. Unique photos Photos have taken up a big space on the internet. They are growing bigger in our Facebook feeds and better with Instagram to create a more visually engaging experience. Using unique photos to tell a story can definitely be eye-catching for your users – if your photos are of good quality. Most businesses get stuck on sourcing photos though. Where on earth can you keep getting good quality photos on an ongoing basis that make your Instagram account drool-worth? The answer is not very far. Have a look at the new list of websites that offer absolutely free high-quality photos. This is a great place to start. The photos might just end up giving you more ideas for your posts too. For others who have customers walk in (restaurants/gyms), even your customer photos can be a great source of photos. You’ll need to ask for permission and give the right attribution but it’s still a great tool to use. The other option is to have a professional do your business portfolio for a professional shoot. You’ll end up with a ton of photographs that can last a while. The fourth way is to share your own photos that give the ‘insider’ view of your business. It could be your team, your products or ‘in-the-making’ / behind the scenes photos that showcase the ‘human’ aspect of your brand.   4. Lessons you’ve learned These truly make a unique article/blog. Things that come out of your own experience – both success and failure can be a great topic for your blog. These days, failures and lessons learned from them are celebrated as much as success stories. It shows that you have the ability to accept your mistakes and make the better of them. We’ve read stories about companies learning from their hiring processes in order to be able to find the right candidate. Other times, a new campaign strategy that did not work becomes the core of a story. Whether you have successes or failures, these come from your own unique experience. You can ask team members to document their learnings from a specific campaign and then convert it into a blog.   5. Case study A case study provides an in-depth view of what the problem was, how you identified it, how you got the solution, how things were executed and finally, concluding notes as takeaways. Case studies are one of the best lead magnets your website can have. Because this comes fully from your own experience, it is a topic that has never been written before in the way you are writing. For example, a lot of companies may have written about how they use SEO to improve their client’s visibility and ranking. But if you can tie up SEO activities with brand awareness and show exactly how things are done, you have an interesting and unique piece of content. Read this case study of how we increased our client’s

We often have clients asking us what a particular digital or content campaign can actually do for them? Linking a digital marketing activity to goals, execution and then matching the results with a tangible outcome is something we’ve been doing consistently. This digital map has often been created using the client’s long-term vision in mind – on what they want to gain from marketing overall and where digital fits in. In the following case study, you’ll see how we mapped our client’s goal of ‘brand awareness’ into a digital strategy. Words like these often get thrown into the marketing mix without anything tangible attached to it. It translates into ‘views’ for Facebook posts or sometimes even ‘reach’. But do these benefit the client in the end? We had to dig deep to set out metrics that mattered beyond these superficial words. It came down to how many people actually became aware enough of our client’s brand to search for them and their products and services. This is the power of digital laid out for you – it can build a brand and connect the ROI dots right before your eyes. In the duration of a year, we skyrocketed our client’s brand awareness by 149%. Belonging to the highly competitive finance sector, it took multiple strategies and channels to achieve this goal. But in the end, we had a happy client and a story to tell. This case study shares the learnings from the campaign and how you can use similar strategies via your own SEO and Social media campaigns. You are just a click away. Get the case study now!   Alliance Fintech Case Study – How we used content marketing to spike traffic by 149% from Justwords Consultants

  In light of the recent news about a ‘void’ being discovered inside the Giza pyramid, we’ve just got out of an article that said: “New theory proves that aliens built the pyramids”. We delved right into the rabbit hole of ‘theories’ that fed our imagination about the extraterrestrial and almost convinced us that this could be possible. Would you call the headline a ‘Click bait’? This one border on a thin line. As marketers (and reasonably sane human beings) we know that the alien theory may not be the best representation of facts about the discovery. But we click to read it anyway. In some ways, the article delivered compelling theories on why the pyramids couldn’t be built by humans. So the headline did deliver on its promise. So won’t then call it a click bait.   What is a click-bait headline? A clickbait headline is an interesting one promising to deliver content to the reader, which it finally doesn’t. It misleads the user into believing what it can offer and leaves the reader dissatisfied. Persuasive headlines are often viewed as click bait. But the truth is that, if your content delivers what it promises then what you have is a damn good headline and not a click bait.   The science behind crafting good headlines When it comes to crafting outstanding headlines, you can’t even begin the conversation without mentioning BuzzFeed. You have to agree that they have absolutely irresistible headlines that make you want to click and read whether it is a story in your Facebook feed or search result. So what makes their headlines so good? TrackMaven conducted an in-depth study in 2014 on what makes Buzzfeed headlines one of the major sources of distraction. Here’s what they found   1. A ‘question’ headline         Out of the 1.2 million blog posts we analyzed for the report, 94.89% of blog post titles did not include a question mark, but the 5.01% that did yielded 46.30% of social shares for the data set. The other part that came to light about these question headlines is that they were directly addressing the reader. “Which mythical creature are you?” “Which car should you drive?” “Who should you marry?” “Design a bedroom and we’ll tell you how basic you really are” The inevitable ‘you’ factor in the headlines coupled with the question is a big factor in getting ‘you’ crazy until you find the answer.   2. Listicles There is a way Buzzfeed writes its listicle headlines and it works so well in pumping up our curiosity. Here’s the general format Headline = “number + adjective + noun + descriptive clause For example: “28 shocking pictures that prove The Illuminati is all around us” “33 amazingly useful DIY hacks that you never knew existed” Buzzfeed took out the top 5 and top 10 and introduced odd numbers like 26, 33. 41 and more to satisfy our craving to keep scrolling and keep reading. Besides the taxonomy in the list makes it easier for us to compartmentalize the big read into small chunks.   3. Creating emotionally endearing headlines     This Kid’s Pure AF Apology To Her Best Friend Is What You Need When The World Is Garbage https://t.co/oufVT5wCrp pic.twitter.com/mbFklkwVxD — BuzzFeed India (@BuzzFeedIndia) October 30, 2017   When it is not listicles or questions, Buzzfeed headlines work hard to create an emotional connect. “This Kid’s Pure AF Apology To Her Best Friend Is What You Need When The World Is Garbage” “This dad has the most adorable reaction to discovering he is going to be a grandpa” You see, it isn’t just an apology, its pure AF. And you need it when ‘the world is garbage’. It isn’t just dad or just reaction but ‘the most adorable reaction’. The connect pulls you in to see what the fuss is all about. All of these headlines are super viral. Yet, none of these are click baits. Because in the end, the content manages to deliver what the headline promises. While its wholly tempting to write these headlines, here’s what to do if you want to stop it from being called a click bait.   How to avoid a click bait   a. Don’t use questionable sources     Sources form an important part of backing the ‘truth’ behind your content. If the source itself is questionable then people won’t be able to trust your content either. It doesn’t extend to just one part of your content or even to the article but to your entire brand. One mistake these days leads to an online reputation crisis. So pick out sources that you know are well-reputed and well known. If you don’t find a source with such credibility, be sure to mention in your article that you’ll need more sources to verify the fact of the matter.   b. Don’t use questionable statistics     Having a big and interesting number of your content spins the whole content around, so much so that you make the statistic a hero and your entire content the reason behind an action to be taken. Let’s take a stat that says”18% people who view your business online are likely to become your buying customers” The statistic is interesting for any retailer, in fact, compelling enough to make the re-look on how they are ranking locally. But without mentioning the source, it can’t give credibility to the stat.   c. Don’t present fallacies     Presenting a fallacy means you misconstrue and present the data with a bias.  Consider a headline that reads “Huge spike in moral decline of the country” The first question that comes to mind is how can you measure morality. By whose standard is good morality and bad morality defined? With the basic premise itself being questionable, what can you do with such a statistic? Let’s say the ‘huge spike’ mentioned in the headline is actually going from 20% to 22%. In a graph that plots 0-100%, this spike