writing Tag

The creative writing is a resource increasingly used in the world of marketing and, more precisely, in the content marketing. The growth of the latter has led to an increase in content generated by brands on their blogs. However, in order to stand out from so much information and captivate readers with writing, it is very important to consider the type of writing that is going to be used, creative writing being one of the types that will give you the best results.

In this article you will learn what creative writing is, what are its characteristics and how we can apply it to a content marketing strategy. In addition, you can get started in this technique thanks to the advice we give you at the end of the article. Will you accompany me to learn more about writing and creativity?

what is creative writing

The increased competition on all communication channels means that new ways to manage them emerge every day and it is more difficult to stand out and get the message across. That’s why you need to look for new ways to communicate, both on your blog content and on your advertising and communications in general. A very interesting tool that will help us is creative writing.

This type of writing was born with a very clear objective: to be able to tell beautiful stories that move away from what was considered the traditional writing scheme. To achieve this, these texts have been filled with imagination, feeling, expressiveness and, how could it be otherwise, creativity. With all this, it is possible to present complex ideas in an entertaining way and, for this reason, many companies and publishers apply this literary technique in content marketing.

There are several elements that make a text considered creative writing. It is these elements that succeed in hooking the reader and keeping his attention focused on the reading until the end of the text. But what elements are we talking about?

• Stories whose protagonists are constructed in such a way that the reader feels identified with them. In other words: a protagonist is created for the narrative (it works for both fiction and reality) who resembles the target audience as closely as possible.
• Use of aesthetic and neat language to present ideas throughout the text.
• Original texts whatever the type of story to be told.
• Using storytelling to emotionally connect with users and awaken those feelings and emotions in them.

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types of creative writing

Once we have seen what this type of literary structure is and what elements distinguish it, we must see how we can use it. Some of the most common examples that we are most used to are:

• poems
• stories
• stories
• scenarios
• trials
• novels

And it is that creative writing allows you to connect with the reader and deliver quality content that is engaging and digestible.

Creative writing in content marketing

As we’ve seen before, content marketing and creative writing can go hand in hand to get better results and stand out from the crowd. And, believe it or not, there are several commonalities between the two techniques:

• First, both seek to foster user emotions through writing and well-structured messages.
• Second, they draw on other literary genres, such as poetry or essays, to enrich their texts in terms of depth and creation of emotions.
• Finally, we can also see how both texts can be used for entertainment or educational/informational purposes.

Also, as we have commented many times throughout this post, the goal of content marketing is to stand out from the competition and provide added value, while communicating in the most human way. possible. Three points on which creative writing can greatly contribute.

Examples of content in which you can find creative writing

There are several types of content that can benefit from the advantages that literary creativity brings, but we want to highlight three:

• narration: An example of content marketing is storytelling. This strategy manages to hold the user’s attention more while managing to convey a message in a natural way. Get it all through a story with a common thread that users can follow. Within storytelling, there are several formats: videos, brand stories or stories that tell the origin of brands.

• Enumerations or classifications: it is a resource that allows you to structure the content well and clearly, with a powerful title. Example:
  

• Success stories, testimonials: For example, SquareSpace, which tells in detail about the use of its services and all the profits that have been obtained through it, used a form of creative writing. With it, it manages to convey a brand message that helps create content marketing. Another example would be DIY Inbound testimonials.

How to Incorporate Creative Writing into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Once we have seen the importance of integrating corporate writing into your marketing strategy, we will see how you can integrate it. To achieve this, you need to follow these six steps:

1. Set goals: you must first define what you want to achieve with the content you create and how it can help your marketing strategy. It will depend on the target you have, the message you want to convey and also through which channel you are going to communicate it.
2. Create a style guide: once you have clear objectives, you can define a graphic charter specific to your brand. This will allow all content created to be on the same tone and have cohesion.
3. choose an idea: to start preparing your first creative writings, you will have to identify the idea and the concept that you want to convey, that is to say, what you are going to write about. Here it is necessary to make a preliminary investigation of what information your buyer may be interested in and how you can use it. A good example of this research would be to do a keyword search.
4. Let’s write, it’s time to write! Once you have the subject matter, write using different writing techniques, which combine quality content with a creative way to convey it. Here are some examples you can use: telling stories, making enumerations and lists, using success stories or interviews, metaphors and similes, etc. You can find other ways to apply creative writing in the “Types of creative writing” section of the article.
5. Apply the final touches: before publishing, we touch on a final revision, ensuring that there is quality content as well as an interesting text that captivates the reader.
6. Results measurement: and, finally, you can review the results to assess which content performed best and what improvements you can apply to your next posts.

Tips for developing creativity in writing and creating content

By following these tips, you can incorporate creativity into your texts, but let’s be honest: it can sometimes be difficult to innovate and be original.

And it is that creativity is an activity that requires training the brain, as if it were one more muscle in your body. The more you put it to work, the better it will perform. Practice is the key! However, some practices can help you improve your creativity:

• To be curious: The more information and references you have, the easier it will be for you to find inspiration. Reading a lot will help you see different ways to write creatively.
• practice brainstorming: It’s not the quality that counts, but the quantity in the early stages. You never know how far a simple idea can take you, so we recommend that you practice brainstorming often, always trying to find more ideas, even if you then choose the best ones.
• lateral thinking work: It involves breaking with patterns by trying to find new and creative solutions to problems. This in creative writing can result in an unexpected comparison, the linking of two concepts that at first glance do not have it, etc.

With all of this information, you will have already seen the importance of creative writing and the world of possibilities it can open up for your brand. Remember that this is a very good way to stand out from all digital content, since it combines quality content with an emotional and captivating factor that will help keep your buyer persona interested. .

You just need to practice and work your brain to be more creative. Do you dare to put creativity into practice within your content strategy?

Originally published and updated April 12, 2022.

Reviewed and validated by Susana Meijomilinbound content manager at InboundCycle.

Writing is a bit like practice for me – I don’t like it, but I like having it written.

I feel the same about technology. I don’t like enterprise content tech, but I like having ‘tech’. (Is that a thing?)

I know a lot of content marketers feel the same way – about content writing and technology. The ambivalence that content marketers feel towards technology stems from the fact that many of us work with a technology stack that was not designed for the specific needs of content.

As I find myself (too often) telling my clients: “This marketing tool dog do this. But it’s not built to do this.”

Most people in #Content have a love-hate relationship with technology – because they use tools that weren’t designed for their needs, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click to tweet

Why martech is not the (only) answer

Technology to improve marketing and communications operations is not new. In the 1980s, database marketing systems helped store customer information and enabled pre-digital marketing efforts like mass mailings. I remember helping my mom figure out how to do a mail merge with Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. (If you didn’t have to press Alt-F3 to “reveal the codes”, have you ever really written?)

It’s easy to forget that the explosion of marketing technology in the early 2000s was born out of a desire for automation. you go out. (There’s a reason for the Salesforce company name.)

The marketing technology stack has evolved from the growing complexity and importance of digital marketing and the evolving sophistication of the technology that enables it.

Salesforce automation, email marketing, analytics and digital content management have become the heart of the ill-defined martech stack – a set of software intended to make marketing operations and processes more scalable, efficient and measurable.

There are a myriad of category definitions that belong to the martech stack. Scott Brinker’s famous Martech 5000 chart documents more than 8,000 solutions in half a dozen categories.

The typical enterprise marketing stack may include technologies for:

• Marketing resource management
• content management
• email advertising
• marketing automation
• social media post
• customer relationship management
• internet audience analysis

But don’t tell me about the other 14 categories I missed. That’s the point. The marketing stack is a bit like digital marketing: ill-defined and anyone’s guess.

Why content needs its own stack

Content operations need a different technology now that content has become a separate function from sales automation and CRM (just like digital marketing).

Content strategy (when it exists) usually resides somewhere in the marketing and communications teams. But there are content professionals in many other areas of the business. Technical writers, content strategists, copywriters, media experts, and even sales people and other executives all have a role to play in content. (I often say it’s easier to count who isn’t creating content these days.)

This dispersion between functional groups creates tensions as content becomes a more strategic and complex function in the organization. Content professionals need to balance:

• Unique governance structures
• Scalability
• workflow
• content creation
• content management
• Activation
• The measure
• reassignment

Unfortunately, the tools at their disposal were chosen and implemented as part of a classic martech strategy. That’s not bad, in and of itself. But it’s designed to optimize marketing operations, not content operations.

The tools most #Content teams have were chosen to support marketing operations, not #ContentOperations, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click to tweet

Content technology is the athleisure garment of technology

So where are we?

Organizations must adapt traditional martech solutions to include technologies designed to optimize content operations.

Some of the unique attributes of the content technology stack may include tools designed to:

• Editorial content and workflow collaboration. A whole content process takes place before the production tools put it into its final form. Specialized technology exists to assist with ideation, collaboration, intake, scheduling, workflow, and actual content measurement creation process.
• Content and Asset Management Solutions. What is raw content and what is an asset? These questions have unique answers given the context of a company’s content strategy. But you need different technologies for each. And I don’t mean that you should embed content or assets into anything the company uses to run the company website. Gone are the days of thinking that one enterprise content management solution could (or should) rule them all. The technology needed to support AI-powered, personalized mini-content experiences differs from that required for static enterprise websites.
• Optimization of content operations. Content operations differ from marketing operations. The challenge of managing multiple resources, independent teams, managing media and content projects is different.
• Creation and application of guidelines and standards. Pervasive technology that integrates into all the different tools (CMS systems, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, etc.) can help content creators meet content and writing guidelines, standards, and manuals. There are technologies that can help content become more standardized by suggesting SEO changes, applying brand and editorial style guides, and more.

Developing, managing and optimizing an enterprise content operation is a pressing concern. And it’s not going away.

The convergence of content marketing, content strategy, and content operations reminds me of the recent growth of activewear in fashion. Both are now so widespread that they are no longer trends. It’s just the way people work (and dress).

As you evolve your content strategy, ask for the technologies that can make your work and processes much more comfortable.

Ask for #Content technologies that make your job much more comfortable, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click to tweet

Upgrading (to modify a phrase from Lululemon marketing) will allow you to move around with confidence and comfort.

Get Robert’s perspective on content marketing industry news in just three minutes:

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

My German book was recently published. Delayed almost two years in finalizing it. The reason for this is very simple. She always spent time with him on Saturdays before the rest of the family woke up. This gave me between 60-90 minutes of time to make progress. It wasn’t a lot of time that I could dedicate to it, but since I did it continuously, in the end, it was handed over to me.

With the Amazon book I don’t have so much time anymore. The delivery date is the end of April and if you look at the calendar you will see that there is not much left. It’s a matter of putting my batteries. The good thing is that I’m already on a good path. So I am achieving it.

Delegating jobs to my team

There are little things that can steal your time. In my case it is the search and creation of images. I am making a book about Amazon that is very detailed in some parts where the reader receives step-by-step instructions. I can delegate part of this work to my team, which in this way allows me to focus on writing and not waste time with images.

Advance through chapters

When you write a book, the process is important in a sense. I have created an index where I mark in green the finished chapters, in yellow those that are in progress and in white those that I have not yet played. When I have everything in green I will have finished. Also the fact of not putting everything in a document allows me to have it better structured. When I’m done the tender thing to put it all together but until then I can move faster I don’t go through hundreds of pages because every time I want to write in the book.

Adapt the index continuously

At first this was expressed in an amplification. You write one thing and you realize that this other thing is missing. When you are in the last meters and you want to finish, you prioritize and even eliminate chapters that you had added in an initial phase. It is important to get to the point of delivery of the sketch. I have eleven days to do it.

Add wording blocks to finish

Right now I’m at 80% completion. It is always usually necessary according to the Pareto law always more time. To reduce this time as much as possible I am going to focus on finishing and not be too perfectionist in these last meters. Apart from Saturday I have to add writing blocks between weeks. Otherwise, it will be impossible to finish. Hopefully this week and next I can find time (and no luck too).

You will see that as almost always there is no magic trick to finish. What you can still get out of here is that if you can, it doesn’t hurt to have an assistant to carry out research and/or image creation tasks for you. He can even write rough paragraphs that you then give him training. Let’s see how this final sprint goes.

Stay tuned.