Why read this? : We share how writing about marketing has helped us organise our thinking, and share knowledge and ideas. Learn how that’s given us a fresh perspective on areas like customer insight, brand building and activation. Read this to learn how writing about marketing helps you be a better marketer.
Marketing can be really noisy, right?
For a start, it’s full of extroverts. Extroverts who love to talk about marketing. Some marketers love the sound of their own voices, don’t they? Brand purpose, this. Digital insight, that. CRM and loyalty, the other.
Blah-blah-blah. Yeh, whatever.
But, marketing needs to start with listening, not talking, We’re born with 2 ears and 1 mouth. Good marketers use them in that proportion.
Marketers who listen do better. They understand customers. They build strong brands built on that understanding. And their brand activation is stronger because it’s based on what customers need. Listening makes marketing more effective.
That means in marketing, you should choose your words carefully.
Read about marketing
Of course, we’re also born with 2 eyes. (unless you’re secretly Blinky in the Simpsons). The same principle applies. Use them in proportion to read more about marketing.
But this is another marketing area that’s “noisy”. There’s over 70,000 titles in the marketing section on amazon.com.au, for example.
At one book a day, it’d take you over 192 years to get through them all.
Clearly, not happening.
At best, most of us are lucky if we can fit in a new marketing book every few weeks. (That’s about our pace as you can see from our marketing books review list on GoodReads).
Add to that all the marketing magazines, agency publications and blog articles. It’s no wonder some “marketers” say they don’t read books anymore.
But they’d be wrong to do so. Don’t be one of those people.
Reading matters. Reading about marketing expands your marketing knowledge. It opens you up to new ideas which make you better at marketing.
But you also need to turn those ideas into actions. From big ideas in your marketing plan to small ideas you write about in a blog or social media post.
Writing about a topic like marketing helps you get better at it. You learn to organise your thoughts. You think about how to structure your writing. And it sticks in your head better, because you’ve written about it.
That’s good for you, and for anyone reading your writing about marketing.
What we’ve learned writing about marketing
Our Kindle and bookshelves are full of books which cover what it takes to be good at writing.
They’re also full of books about what it takes to be good at marketing.
But in all that reading, there’s not much which covers both topics together.
One or the other. But not both.
Given we do both, we thought it’d be interesting to share some of what we’ve learned.
Marketing is a broad topic to write about
First, writing about marketing helps you appreciate how broad a topic it is. It’s as broad as writing about “medicine” or “food”. It covers a lot of specific sub-topics. But at its simplest level, you can chunk these into 3 key areas :-
- customer understanding.
- brand building.
- marketing strategy and activation.
Customer understanding
Look at customer understanding, for example. Your first thought is probably market research. After all, you do that to find out what customers want.
But market research is a big topic in its own right. It also breaks into chunks of interest. There’s the overall research process to understand and manage. You need to work with market research companies.
Then of course, you’ve got the different research approaches. Qualitative. Quantitative. Secondary research. And of course, what you do with it.
Digital data
But customer understanding is about more than market research.
Look at the impact of digital marketing and marketing technology, for example. Customer interactions on your website or third-party platforms generates data. Data helps you understand customers better.
But as per our digital data and CRM guides, you need different marketing skills to set these systems up. And different skills to turn the data into insights which improve the customer experience.
Writing about these types of topics, as any digital evangelist or decathlete will tell you helps you get better at actually doing them.
Behavioural Science
Always remember your objective in understanding customers. You want to understand what they do, and why they do it.
Customer understanding often overlaps with some areas of psychology. This shows up in writing topics like behavioural science. (see also our review of one of our favourite business writing books on this). Behavioural science helps you get under people’s skin. Helps you understand why they do things.
Just pause for a moment, though. Think about what all this means from a writing point of view.
We picked a single marketing sub-topic. But we’re already linking it to a bunch of related topics, like market research, digital data and behavioural science.
The challenge when writing about marketing isn’t finding things to write about. It’s more how to connect different topics together in a way that makes sense. Your marketing story needs to keeps the reader wanting to find out more.
Brand building / Marketing Strategy and Activation
The same principle applies to other marketing sub-topics like brand building and marketing strategy and activation. Those also contain many links to other related topics. It’s a big writing challenge to craft those into a clear marketing story.
Brand building
Look at the brand development process, for example. You need to learn many different topics to do that well. Each step has different skill requirements.
Take segmentation, targeting and positioning as a good example. You need to be able to run segmentation research. Use your decision making skills to build market attractiveness models. And apply concept development skills to craft your positioning.
Same challenge with brand identity. Lots of different topics and skills to cover.
How you create intangible brand assets like your brand essence or values, for example. How you create tangible assets like logos and colour palettes. All these fall under the broad topic of “marketing”. But they’re quite different to write about.
All this and you haven’t even started writing your marketing plan yet. The marketing planning process comes with many challenges, so again it’s a rich source of marketing writing material.
Marketing strategy and activation
And finally, marketing plan in hand, you still need to activate it. Plans don’t win customers, actions do. But writing often underpins those actions from briefs to agencies to project documents to manage activities.
Check out our marketing innovation and advertising guides, for example. The process to do those almost always includes a writing step of some kind. Write your objectives. Write your brief. And write the plan so everyone knows what they need to do.
Better writing skills leads to better marketing skills
When you write about marketing, you learn the value of writing clearly. How to be clear in your objectives. How to write a clear brief. And how to use writing to motivate and influence people inside and outside your business.
Good writing skills raise the quality of everything you do in marketing.
They help you improve the ideas you get through the innovation process. They help you get more of creative teams and media sales teams. Good writing drives good marketing.
With your writing hat on, marketing as a topic give you a rich vein of source material to draw from. Your challenge is how to pick the ones which matter most to your audience, and write content that’s specific and which sparkles on the page.
Marketing readers want specifics not broad topics
If marketing is about giving people what they need, writing about marketing has to do the same job. In most cases, this is about giving information (practical advice on how to do things), insights (stories and anecdotes about how and why things happen) and ideas and inspiration.
These writing outcomes come easier when you’re writing about more specific subjects than broad generalities. Writing reads better when it’s specific and concrete, rather than broad and abstract. It feels more real, more relevant and more relatable.
This is why SEO writing is so important. Use keyword research to find out what people search on that’s relevant to marketing. And organise and structure your work to make it easier for readers to find it.
Organise your writing
Good organisation of your writing helps readers find what they’re looking for. It helps them meet their needs. You owe it to them.
Create headlines and short summaries up front, so readers quickly know what your writing is about.
Add categories and tags to your blog posts to make topics easier to find. Use logical structures to organise your different articles. Set up a clear website schema. This helps both readers and search engines understand what your articles cover, and how to find them.
Searching for content takes time away from reading content. And reading content is what you want from your writing.
Link your writing
You also need to consider how readers navigate through your writing.
With online writing, make sure to link relevant keywords to related articles.
We’ve already shown some examples of how different marketing subjects can link together in terms of telling a story.
But writing online content means you can create actual links which take the reader to the next place they need to go.
You need to find a balance with your linking approach though. Too many links and you risk overwhelming the reader and losing them. Not enough links and you have to constantly re-explain related concepts, which breaks the flow of the writing.
The right balance means links which are relevant, helpful and interesting.
Example - packaging links
For example, let’s say you were writing about the role of packaging.
You need to cover practical topics like how brands stand out on shelf, or on product pages, for example. But to do that, you need to link to related topics like colour psychology, typography and logo design.
But you also want to cover the role of packaging in storage and transport. You link to subjects like supply chain and the order to delivery system.
Linking like this helps you connect diverse topics. Graphic design and warehouses wouldn’t normally be related topics. But packaging links them together. (see also our packaging in e-Commerce article for another example of linking seemingly unrelated subjects).
Marketing is a mix of abstract and concrete topics
Which brings us to our next challenge writing about marketing.
Most writing guides advise you to focus on concrete subjects rather than abstract concepts.
Concrete subjects are easier for readers to understand. They appeal to the senses. You can see, hear, touch, smell or taste them. Readers “get” these subjects quickly and easily.
Abstract concepts on the other hand only really exist in the mind. You have to imagine and create a mental picture. This is harder work for the reader.
This is why you’ll find lot of marketing writing becomes “how to” do things. A “how to” guide contains concrete practical information that’s easy for readers to understand.
For example, when we wrote our beginners guide to Adobe Illustrator, we focussed on concrete practical information. We worked through each basic element of the program. Showed how to use it and what it did.
Explain abstract concepts with concrete examples
But marketing isn’t just concrete topics like this. It’s often abstract concepts too. Those are much tougher to write about.
Writing about marketing forces you to find ways to explain abstract concepts. You can use concrete examples to do this.
For example, our marketing evolution and marketing revolution article talks about abstract concepts.
Evolution. Revolution.
You can’t see, touch, taste, hear or smell those. But you know what they are.
So, we use a concrete example to explain them.
We ask the reader to imagine they’ve got a mouse problem. To solve the mouse problem, they can build a better mousetrap. An evolutionary approach. Or they can buy a cat. A revolutionary approach.
Mousetraps and cats. Concrete topics.
But used to explain evolution and revolution. Abstract topics.
You see this in a lot of advertising. People laughing and smiling (concrete) is easier to understand than talking about happiness (abstract). Someone crying (concrete) is easier to explaining pain, grief or loss. (abstract).
So, if writing about an abstract marketing concept, use concrete examples to make it easier to understand. Link to case studies. Use real-life anecdotes. Tell short related brand stories. These concrete examples make abstract concepts easier to understand.
Marketing is hard to be definitive - context matters
The next challenge in writing about marketing is context. Context matters a lot in marketing.
Yes, there are general principles for areas like segmentation and brand identity, for example. But how you apply them changes depending on the context.
This is a challenge when you have to write about these topics. Examples, case studies, anecdotes and stories help. But without context, you end up trying to cover too many bases. And when you do this, you end up using what writers call “weasel words”.
Weasel words are when you hedge your bets when writing. This “might” happen. That “could” be true. “Possibly” this, and “it depends” on that. It’s hard not to let these creep in when you’re writing about marketing, because it’s a hard topic to be definitive on. A lot of the time, it does depend on the context.
There are very few certainties in marketing. It’s more about probabilities than certainties. You have to work hard to make your writing style sound confident and not sit on the fence too much. Use those examples, case studies, anecdotes and stories to give context. Use them to build the reader’s confidence in what you write.
But also, write with confidence. Build your knowledge of good writing principles and apply them consistently.
Writing about marketing - apply good writing principles
In previous articles like what we learned writing in 2020, we covered key writing skills like the importance of building good writing habits, learning to draft and edit and many more.
These all apply when you’re writing about marketing. That’s whether you’re writing a blog or writing advertising or sales copy.
Writing is writing after all.
Good writing, whatever the topic, applies all these good writing principles.
Example - be concise and specific in what you write
One of our favourite pieces of writing advice is this :-
“omit unnecessary words, with eagerness and relish. Vigorous writing is concise.”
It’s from The Elements of Style by Strunck and White. (see more on this in our 5 habits to enhance your writing expertise article).
In marketing, there’s a lot of unnecessary words. Marketers love to talk about marketing, remember? They love jargon. If there’s a way to say something in a more complicated way, that’s how many marketers will say it.
It’s really hard when you write about marketing to avoid this trap.
Sometimes you’ve no choice. Take a marketing topic like segmentation, for example. It’s a long complex word about an abstract concept. But, there’s no real synonym, so you’re stuck with it. Using a long-winded sentence to explain it is worse (e.g. “when you break up the total market into smaller segments”). In writing about marketing, sometimes big technical words are necessary, unfortunately.
But not every time.
Finding ways to explain complex marketing subjects with the minimum amount of words is one of the more fun parts of writing about marketing. Do this with eagerness and relish, as Strunck and White put it, and your marketing writing will be more vigorous.
Vigorous writing is good. Vigorous writing is readable.
Writing about marketing needs to be readable
Readability’s important. If you writing isn’t readable, it won’t get read.
There’s 2 ways to improve readability.
The first is the traditional manual way of doing it. Use an editor. Use beta readers. Ask for feedback from readers.
The other option is to run your writing through automated readability checks. For example, you can use Yoast (if your site runs on WordPress), or one of the other free readability tools you can find online.
Though not perfect, these automatic tools help you diagnose readability issues.
Too many long words. Too many long sentences. A lack of transition words. All these can make your writing less readable.
We always look at our Flesch Kincaid readability score after writing a first draft for example. It gives us a good idea of whether we’re on track to write readable content.
Our marketing articles are at a minimum in the 60-70 (8th and 9th grade). Many of our articles score over 70. A few are even 80+.
This is a good benchmark for online writing about marketing. Leave more detailed and complicated content to the academic world.
Your writing about marketing needs to be readable, because readable content helps you hit your objectives.
The objective of writing about marketing
When you write, your objective is to communicate and connect with readers. You want to grab their attention, and for them to enjoy reading your content. And of course, you want them to influence them towards your marketing objective for the writing.
There’s a strong connection between writing objectives and marketing objectives. Attention. Engagement. Influence. Writing helps you achieve your marketing objectives, by building connections with customers. Influencing them to think, feel or do something differently.
The better the marketing writer you are, the righter your marketing will be.
Conclusion - Writing about marketing
Many marketers undervalue the power of good writing skills. They either assume it doesn’t matter much, or they farm it out to specialist copywriters at their agency
Don’t let that be you.
Writing about marketing helps you organise ideas and share marketing knowledge with a wider audience. Writing helps reinforce thoughts and makes them stick. You’ll be more able to recall ideas as and when you need them.
The rewards will come through in the clarity and impact of your writing. You’ll be more influential within your business, and have bigger and better impact with customers.
Check out our quick and easy tips on copywriting article to learn more about where writing and marketing overlap. Or drop us a line if you need help writing about marketing.
Photo credits
Typewriter (edited) : Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash
Dog ears : Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash
Woman with mug reading : Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash
Glasses : Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
Angel (edited) : Photo by Gary Butterfield on Unsplash
Code (edited) : Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Hypnosis Pocket Watch : Photo by MK Hamilton on Unsplash
Person typing on a Macbook : Photo by Thomas Lefebvre on Unsplash
Rope : Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
Man in blue shirt writing : Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
