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Copywriters are some of the most creative marketers you'll meet, but they're also the most tortured. Theirs is a life of one-off projects, grammar checking, and constant re-writes. They are doomed to try articulating the miming hand gestures and vague ideas of their clients. The last thing these folks need to be told is that they're leaving money on the table. But if they're not integrating inbound marketing elements into their projects, they're doing just that.
By baking inbound tactics into their proposals, copywriters can position themselves to increase their average project size and, given the ongoing effort required for inbound marketing, increase their number of retainer clients. And because content creation is the sweet spot of copywriting, as well as one of inbound marketing's four core services, agencies with this skill set can easily embrace the methodology without going too far beyond what they do best.
Here are five strategic steps copywriters and copywriting agencies can follow to leverage inbound's proven strategy for better success.
1. Leverage Domain Knowledge
If you've been researching industry language in order to nail a product or service page description, put the knowledge you've gathered to work by pitching the idea of a blog to your client. Written in the customers' language, blogs help create the need for your clients' products and services. Communicate to your clients that websites with active blogs generate more traffic and leads than those that don't, and that you can easily be the point-person for this effort.
2. Give Your Best Content Growth Hormones
Blog for a month or so, and then measure which posts performed the best. Bubble those posts up into an uber-topic, and get your client to commit resources for writing a more extensive and premium piece of content around that subject, like an ebook or a whitepaper. Give this the loving touch of a copywriter by dressing it up with a genius title, illustrative pictures, compelling charts, and witty headlines.
3. Unleash Your Premium Content
Build a landing page for your ebook or whitepaper to live behind, so that a website visitor has to exchange their contact information in order to download. Then place links to that landing page within and at the end of your blog posts. Make it your goal to have that link "complete your reader's thought," meaning if they read something high-level on your blog, the ebook or whitepaper is an opportunity for them to really dig in.
4. Make a Goal-Line Handoff From Sales to Marketing
By linking to those landing pages, you have built real lead generation potential into every blog article you post. Continue by building the potential for real customers by listing out the specialties of your client's salespeople, and matching each rep to a landing page. Doing so will ensure that the name and email address of every lead generated gets funneled to that rep with the best chance of closing the business.
5. Rinse & Repeat
Get in the habit of measuring everything. It will allow you to build on successes you're having, report on content that might be falling flat, advocate for increase project scope, or earn a retainer deal from your client.
In what other ways can copywriting agencies leverage inbound marketing methodologies to attract more business?
Image Credit: Maewe
