The Building Blocks of Content Writing
Do you have the right building blocks to construct a piece of high-quality content?
Content writers need building blocks just like fiction writers, journalists, essayists, and other writers do. Yet too often content writers aren’t trained in the elements of craft like other writers are. How can you construct a great blog post, article, whitepaper, or ebook for your clients without having the right building materials and tools in your hands?
Here’s a brief primer on the building blocks of writing and how to use them in your digital marketing content writing.
Characters: Heroes, Guides, and Villains
In a work of fiction, we follow the main character on their journey, the guide that helps them, and the villain who tries to stop them. In marketing writing, the characters are your company and your customer.
How to use it: Approach your marketing writing by thinking of the customer as the main character or hero, and your company as the guide that helps them confront conflict and overcome a problem. There may be a villain as well: the old way of doing things, or other companies who can't solve the hero’s problem.
Point of View (POV)
A point of view is who is telling your story:
first-person POV means the narrator is telling the story from their perspective, using "I" to describe what happened
second-person POV makes "you" the main character, and describes "your journey"
third-person POV is told from a voice outside of the characters, and observes "their journey," "his journey," or "her journey"
How to use it: In content writing, POV is how you engage your audience. One of the best tactics you can use in your writing is to address your audience directly as "you." No longer is a customer an undefined third party. They become the main character being spoken to: "What are you looking for in a particular service?" or "We've developed a solution for you."
Conflict
Conflict is essentially a problem that needs to be solved. It may be trying to get home after a journey, overcoming a character flaw, slaying a dragon — or an everyday problem a customer is trying to overcome.
How to use it: Customers face problems, challenges, and pain points every day that cause conflict in their lives. A company’s products or services help a customer overcome that problem or conflict to live a better life. One convention you’ll use in nearly all of your writing is “Here's a problem and here's how we can help you solve it.”
Vocabulary and Word Choice
Every piece of writing is made up of words (obviously), but the words you choose will determine whether a customer makes a purchase or moves on from your content entirely.
How to use it: Your word choice is what will connect with and engage your audience. Choosing to use more basic or more intellectual vocabulary will appeal to different audiences. Using specific terminology in a certain industry will help you appear more credible — yet using other terminology may kill your credibility. Using a word that has a slightly different definition than you intended may cause your reader to misunderstand your message.
Voice, Style, and Tone
Voice is the unique way a brand presents itself through writing. Style is the way that a brand communicates its unique voice through vocabulary, sentence length and structure, punctuation, POV, and other elements. Tone is the emotion expressed in a particular piece — excited, serious, hopeful, or sad — all while keeping the voice and style consistent.
How to use it: As part of their branding, a company decides what type of voice they want. They may take a lighthearted and approachable voice, or they may use a modern and cool voice. When you write for a company, you write in their voice, using different stylistic techniques to create that voice. You may often change tone as you write pieces — serious, lighthearted, excited — but will always keep the voice and style.
Thesis Statement
If you do any type of longer-form content writing, like blog posts, articles, ebooks, whitepapers, and the like, you'll need to have a clear thesis statement on what your piece of content is about and what your reader will learn.
How to use it: A thesis statement typically comes at the end of the introductory paragraph, after you've set up the problem you're going to solve or the insight you're going to provide. Before moving into the body of the content, you'll clearly state your thesis:
"Here are five ways to improve your approach to ___."
"What follows are ten things to know about the industry today and why they matter to you."
"Based on our research, we found the following that explains why customers want ___ today."
Storytelling
Storytelling isn't just sequestered to novels, movies, or comics. Storytelling is the way that our brains engage with ideas in a personal way. Presenting facts is just information. However, storytelling involves characters, conflict, tension, resolution, emotion, personal connection, and more.
How to use it: Content writers can employ something as big as the Hero's Journey to describe the challenges a customer faces, the journey they go on to find a solution, and how their company comes along as the guide to help them solve that challenge. Or you may use storytelling by including case studies or testimonials in your content — like telling the story of how your product helped a particular client.
Call to Action
A call to action, or CTA, is just that: you're calling your audience to take action on something, whether it's to think differently about a particular subject, click a link to learn more, or purchase a product.
How to use it: Nearly everything you write should have a CTA with it: blog posts, website copy, social media posts, ads. Your CTA doesn't have to be to buy a big-ticket item either. It can be to sign up for a newsletter, read another blog post, download a free resource, or follow you on social media. Your CTA should continue to encourage customers on their journey with your company and move them down the funnel.
The “Why” and the “How”
There are plenty of articles and blog posts today that talk about "what": what a problem is, what it looks like in everyday life, and what impacts it has. But they often neglect the "why" and the "how" — as in "why does this matter to the reader" and "how the reader can take action."
How to use it: Including "why" and "how" is what's going to engage your reader and provide them value. The "why" may come across inherently in your writing, but sometimes it never hurts to pause and write, "Why is this important for you? Because ___." Including the "how" is the answer to the "now what?" Your reader has learned about the problem and has recognized the problem in their life. Now what? Now you write about how they can solve it.
Building anything that lasts takes knowledge, practice, and the right materials. Use these building blocks to construct your content and make it more interesting, engaging, and memorable to your reader.
