Texting Your Way To Success:

Why Written Content Is Still Important To Your Marketing Strategy

Read any current article on how to produce a great marketing strategy and it will champion the use of video, images, GIFs, memes and podcasts. However, with so much focus on these emerging technologies and trends, many businesses are forgetting to focus on the more traditional forms of communication. This inclueds the written word. Interesting, engaging copy is the solid foundation for any good marketing strategy – both in terms of direct advertisement of your company and when you are working on content marketing. There is still plenty of power in the small, but mighty, SMS. Here’s why you should be turning your attention to written content and more traditional forms of advertising and sales copy.

Establishing a tone of voice

Creating and maintaining your brand identity is the first step in the creation of a successful business. What better way to show off your company’s awesome persona than with lively, punchy copy?

Define everything — from how you want your company emails and messages to sound, to how internal comms should be handled. Clear copy will provide brand clarity and consistency.

Once you’ve mastered your tone of voice, your customers will be able to easily recognize and differentiate your social media posts and marketing communications.

Distributing on multiple channels

Well-written, captivating copy can be lifted from your latest blog post and tweaked slightly for e-newsletters, social posts, texts, and advertising campaigns. (Trying to share a brand video across all of these different channels would prove to be a little more tricky).

With written text you don’t have as many multichannel hurdles to consider; it’s an infinitely flexible medium. Thought you will have to factor in considerations like mobile web design, most modern content management systems are great at scaling and reconfiguring copy.

You will probably also find that recycling written communications for marketing and advertising will help you keep production costs to a minimum.

Getting noticed

If you are anything like us, you’ll have an unspeakable amount of unread messages in your inbox. These marketing messages could be containing an array of different whizzy videos and clever GIFs. Yet, they’ve never been opened. Yet, how many text messages have you left unread? None? That’s precisely why SMS messaging is such a clever marketing tactic.

90% of all SMS messages are read within the first three minutes, making this the perfect opportunity to speak to the consumer directly – to offer a discount, promote a sale or simply get feedback on their latest purchase. Additionally, this form of communication also has great response and conversion rates in terms of ecommerce. Win, win!

Saving time + making more money

Although videos can have an amazing ROI if they are successful, you have to consider the possibility that yours might not be. After spending time and money strategizing, organizing, shooting and editing a video, it may not pick up the traction that you might have hoped for.

However, producing good quality copy can be done on a much cheaper and smaller scale. Therefore, if your latest blog post isn’t the hit you are expecting, then you haven’t wasted too much time and money on it.

Written content is also extremely easy to tweak. Sent out an SMS marketing text with a typo? Just recall your texts, or send out another one to clarify what you meant. Especially for online sellers, texting out voucher codes, sales announcements, or updating customers on deliveries are great ways to up your immediacy scores and improve the customer experience.

Sparking up convos

It’s been recorded that the average mobile user spends 23 minutes per day on messenger apps, such as WhatsApp and Snapchat.Don’t forget about their power when it comes to marketing your brand. Messenger provides personal, two-way dialogue between the consumer and you. It’s a very handy tool to leverage for customer service.

Don’t worry, you won’t need to be glued to your phone or computer 24/7, thanks to chatbots, you can automate responses to replicate real-time interaction with a customer service representative.

Boosting your SEO

With written content there are a lot of opportunities to increase your SEO standing. By having regular blog posts or written updates on your site, you’ll be pleasing the SEO gods. Big tick!
Secondly, you can create content that’s optimized by incorporating key phrases and linking to other authority sites. It’s also worth noting that long-form blog posts generate nine times more leads than short-form ones. You may want to focus on quality, over quantity.

Appealing to the masses

The new-age ways of consuming information on social media via videos etc, may seem completely normal to you or I. Slightly more traditional methods of marketing such as emails, text messages, and even whitepapers still have a weighty mass appeal.

Newer formats may not reach older clients and customers which means you will lose out on their business completely. It’s good to keep up with these classic forms of communication as well as experimenting with new technologies and platforms.

Snapchat filters and video marketing strategies can quite comfortably co-exist with SMS marketing and phone calls.

Yes, you should always strive to be forward-thinking with your marketing strategy. But you shouldn’t be pinning all of your hopes on the latest trends and digital fads. Keep executing those tried and tested written marketing methods in the form of texts, emails, blogs and whitepapers.

Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she loves writing about all things digital. As well as chasing the latest trends, Vicky is a big fan of old-school sales copywriting and good, honest conversations with customers.