My journey has been an epitome of how content writing has transformed over the years. Previously, in the digital marketing landscape, people would use tons of content pieces to rank a website in Google search results.
It wouldn’t matter if content was informative, engaging and conversational — marketers would stuff keywords in every article or a piece of content.
That’s why companies would ask writers to translate Hindi news into English, create content and include 100s of keywords, or copy-paste content from other websites and spin it off in their own words.
However, the times have changed now. Both Google & marketers have realised the importance of high-quality content — Google has begun penalising websites where the content is published solely for SEO purpose.
In the last few years, content has become an integral part of branding and marketing. Whether you’re doing personal branding or company branding, social media marketing or email marketing, content plays a pivotal role in captivating attention of the audience.
At present, there are various branches and dimensions of content which can be defined as follows:
Content Writing
Businesses and individuals use content (articles, blogs, LinkedIn posts, Quora answers, videos, visual images, etc.) to inform and educate the audience. The focus is on solving the pain points by providing valuable information easily.
Copywriting
While many people consider copywriting the same as content writing, there’s a fundamental difference in the purpose — copywriting is used to persuade readers to take an action and buy a product or service or download an ebook or any other resource. Whereas, content writing is used for educating the readers. Copywriting is used for writing copies on websites, landing pages, social media, and other marketing collaterals.
Storytelling
Storytelling has also gained prominence in the last few years. Human brain is wired for storytelling — it helps businesses and brands create an emotional connection with their customers and prospects. Storytelling is nowadays used in both content writing and copywriting.
Editing
“Write drunk, edit sober.” — editing is one of the most underrated-yet-crucial skills to possess. Editing helps in fine-tuning content, structure, style, and final presentation including grammar and punctuation. It can remove fluff and add colours to a piece of content.
Each of these fields has a distinct career and massive growth opportunities. All 4 branches (or at least a majority of them) are used both in branding and marketing on a day-to-day basis.
As more and more businesses and individuals go online to build their brands, content will become even more critical in the near future.
Content, according to me, is a subset of psychology — You need to get into the shoes of your readers, understand their pain-points and behaviour, and accordingly create content.
My ultimate tip to all the content creators: Don’t write in a language that you know best. Write in a language, tone and style that your readers understand and feel comfortable in.
