No Don Draper on your team? No problem. Hire a freelance writer online and get them to help you optimize these items to accelerate your business’s growth.
When it comes to making a great first impression, professional quality writing is a piece of the puzzle that’s often overlooked by inexperienced startup founders. The result is poorly written websites, white papers, blogs, social media posts, and brochures that fail to convince their target audience.
In contrast, experienced and successful founders know that if they don’t have a master copywriter in their team, they can invest a modest fee in hiring a freelancer through a site such as Conyac. Working with a pro can ensure concise, accurate, and intriguing copy that helps drive sales, attract new recruits and secure their next investment round.
Not sure where to start? Below are the five essential promotion tools that veterans of the startup world hire freelance writers to optimize on their behalf.
1. Website Copy
It goes without saying that your website will serve as your startup’s primary information resource and promotion tool. When we think about setting up a new site, it’s easy to get excited about the technical and visual design aspects. These are, by all means, crucial to success. However, equally important is the quality of the writing, wording, and copy used.
The language must be informative and resonate with your target audience’s needs. Are you seeking to convince a specialist in the field, or perhaps their boss who decides the budget? It may make sense to have different sections of the site or separate landing pages for different audiences. Before you have your writer get started, you’ll want to have them understand the audience for each page they are working on.
A talented writer can help ensure each page of your website conveys credibility and compels visitors to take action. Depending on your business, this could be installing an app, subscribing to an email list, or inquiring about setting an appointment for a demo.
Visitors to your website should be able to quickly browse your site, instantly understand what it is offered, and find what they’re looking for. Writing in this manner takes time, so enlisting a freelance professional can save you time and resources.
2. SEO
The field of SEO is vast and constantly evolving. What you need to know is that Google today is incredibly sophisticated and almost impossible to trick. Its singular goal is to find the result that its human users will value the most. You, therefore, need to cater adequately to the needs of your human visitors, while ensuring that Google can find the information it needs to recommend each page to relevant searchers.
SEO used to be considered a technical discipline, and in many ways it still is. However, incorporating your target keywords into the content and crafting metadata for each page also requires a high level of copywriting skill.
3. Content Marketing
Any B2B startup can draw traffic to their website through paid means such as Google ads. However, long-term, it pays to invest in regularly publishing content that your target audience will find useful. Do this properly for long enough, and your organic traffic will grow to the point where it catches up to that of your paid efforts.
First, determine the type of content your audience is most likely to get value from. For example:
Well researched articles
Interviews with industry veterans
White papers
How-to videos
Email newsletters
Social media posts
Some content types may appeal directly to your ideal end-user archetype who is seeking advice on implementing specific hands-on strategies, while other content will be more suitable for building credibility with senior executives who need to understand the overall value proposition.
4. Printed Items
For many B2B startups, setting up a booth at a conference or industry event is crucial for gathering leads. In this case, you’ll want to have a freelance writer to assist in polishing up the copy used in all printed items including brochures, flyers, and even catch-phrases used on business cards or banners.
Generally, you’ll be able to recycle the content used online, but having a pro can help tailor it for print media.
5. User Support Documentation
Often regarded as an afterthought, thorough documentation including instruction manuals, tutorials, and how-to videos can be helpful in the pre-sales stage. When a prospect knows that the product or service is adequately documented, they will feel much more secure in spending money.
Furthermore, clear and easy-to-understand documentation can reduce the volume of support inquiries and free your development team to focus on improving your product or service. Proper documentation is both detailed and easy to follow at the same time.
6. User Support Message Templates
Often the people assigned to respond to customer or user support are engineers. They may understand the technology, but struggle to communicate clearly with regular people. In other situations, staff who are assigned full-time to customer/user support or community management may not have a grasp of the bigger picture or be able to empathize with the person making the inquiry.
Over time, you will begin to compile templates for common inquiries. These should be given to a freelance writer to be polished up so that they are clear, convey the right tone, and have a consistent style. This should save your staff time in composing replies and help to give users a better experience.
7. Direct Sales Templates
Your direct sales staff may be great on the phone or in person, but struggle with writing. Perhaps English isn’t their first language. However, over time, they will produce templates for their most common approach scenarios. These can similarly be polished up by a freelance writer to give a more consistent and professional impression.
Conclusion
High-quality writing should be a part of any business’s marketing plan. Incorporating language, statistics, and guides into your printed and digital marketing materials means your audience can quickly understand your unique offering and get immediate value. This is a simple way to build trust and become a resource for your clients and potential customers.
If writing is not your strong suit, try outsourcing to an expert via a freelance marketplace such as Conyac. It will help make a strong first impression on potential customers/users, new employees, and prospective investors.
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