There are key moments in the content and campaign building process that are deeply enhanced by clear, performance based data. Remember, there is no rule book yet, and we are defining how AI will be used for years to come. So let’s discuss those moments, and how best to leverage data for true Performance Writing that can bring sustainable results to your marketing efforts moving forward.
Planning & Research
The process of idea generation plays a vital role in marketing planning and content creation. Even with the advent of AI, this fundamental aspect remains unchanged. A Performance Writer understands that AI can, nonetheless, be a powerful tool to expand your idea generation capabilities. By leveraging AI and providing carefully crafted prompts, you can unlock new and innovative content ideas that may have previously eluded your team’s imagination.
One of the significant advantages of AI-powered idea generation is its ability to analyze and interpret audience data. By analyzing your messaging, AI can extract valuable insights and accurately identify the preferences and behaviors of your target audience. This data-driven approach ensures that your marketing strategies align with your audience’s expectations, leading to more successful campaigns.
Don’t forget about your past performance! Taking a Performance Writing perspective means identifying the very best messaging, those high-performing talking points that resonate most deeply with audiences. By leveraging AI-powered analytics, you can uncover patterns and trends that will most effectively drive marketing results. This knowledge empowers every Performance Writer on your team to refine and optimize messaging, emphasizing the aspects that resonate most with your audience.
In addition to idea generation and audience analysis, AI can also assist in maintaining consistent brand guidelines. Every marketer knows how hard it can be to keep messaging on-brand – a particular problem for most AI solutions. Performance Writers can distill your brand’s tone of voice and key rules, ensuring that all marketing content aligns and supports a strong, trusted brand identity. This streamlines the creative process and ensures a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.
The beautiful thing about Performance Writing is finding new workflows, technology, and automations to streamline the research and planning process, freeing up critical time for strategic initiatives and creative projects.
Performance Writers are always looking to increase efficiency and impact. This enhanced efficiency allows your entire marketing organization to operate at its full potential, driving innovation and delivering exceptional results.
Articles & Blog Posts
Keyword research and strategies have basically been the only ‘data’ included in long-form content creation heretofore. Writing to a given audience, staying within a brand voice – all these capabilities were the purview of professional content writers.
But a Performance Writer looks for additional ways to build data into their writing process. After all, a high search volume for keywords tells you nothing about who is searching. If they aren’t your target audience, that search volume could be infinite – it won’t help you achieve business results.
So where do you bring more data into the process? It begins with the title. An enticing title is your invitation to readers to dig in and get some value. Luckily for the Performance Writers in the room, it’s easier than ever to leverage enormous data-sets to predict headline and first paragraph performance. Comparing your title with billions of top-performing marketing assets allows you to balance your taste as a writer and the hard reality of performance. Opting for a title that scores high, based on real marketing data, will set you up to rank on Google and reach the right audience.
The data your long-form content is sharing with the internet is also something to consider. The information on your website and how it connects with other concepts is an important factor in ranking long-form organic content.
What other pages on your site does the content link to? What external sites are you linking to? Does your keyword density come across as organic, or does it feel overstuffed? Are you delivering your audience real, original, up-to-date and valuable information? Is your content tied to the rest of your marketing techstack? Are you achieving your goals of more signups, demos and leads?
Website and Landing pages
Landing pages often go hand-in-hand with paid ad campaigns. And there’s never been a better place to enhance your message with real performance data. Performance Writers of the future will wonder how we even wrote landing pages before the ability to easily select top-performing messaging from past campaigns.
Something even more important to consider: Is your messaging stacking up with your competitors? Compare the talking points on your page and similar landing pages from competitors. See what words your team is missing by simply scanning their site and letting the AI derive the top-performing messaging to use in your next, competition-killer campaign.
Email Campaigns
The same goes for email. You can take the data and insights we’ve been discussing and include them when you generate email subject lines and body copy.
Don’t forget to include specific target audiences, so your emails feel personal and less spammy.
Social Media & Ads
Social media and ad platforms are at once some of the most data-rich environments marketers work within, and the most challenging to manage. Each channel has its own culture, best practices, and trends to attend to. This could have an impact on your tone of voice, the formatting you use, and yes, the words you choose.
A Performance Writer will instinctively tie future content to past performance. What messages are resonating? Which posts are getting engagement, and how do you build upon that precious momentum? And they seek out tools to scale their success in both organic and paid posts.
It’s worth running an analysis session with your team to assess your existing social footprint. Here’s a quick sample agenda:
- Review connected channels to assess past performance
- Score a sample of existing posts
- Take a close look at key talking points, CTA messaging, and its relationship to your predicted performance
- Find the audiences that resonate with your messages
Plan your next content push around top-performing copy, formats and channels. And of course, don’t forget to connect your brand, audiences, and messaging across your planning and research, long-form content, landing pages, social content and ads.
Can I Use AI for More Than Just Copy Generation?
I’m so glad you asked. YES! And that’s the topic of our next installment of the Performance Writing 101 series.
So stay tuned… and Write On!
Click here to go back to the first post in the Performance Writing 101 series.
