The Elements Of Style: Time-Honored Tips For Effective Franchise Content Marketing
As with all writing, the primary virtues of effective franchise content marketing are concision and clarity. All writers must strive for these values, to be precise and pithy. And whether you outsource your franchise content marketing or DIY, ClickTecs can help.
Today’s post shares 5 time-honored tips, inspired by White and Strunk’s seminal writing guidebook The Elements of Style, as they relate to the work of the modern franchise content writer.
Is Your Franchise Content Marketing Sending The Right Signals?
In the dark ages of franchise content marketing, plenty of firms got by with the quantity-over-quality approach. Blog posts and website pages with objectively bad content could still rank well so long as they were stuffed full of keywords.
But all that’s changed now. Google’s ranking algorithms get smarter everyday, and they’re increasingly valuing on-site user activity signals that indicate quality content, such as:
- Content traffic—Is it good enough to generate a consistent readership?
- Bounce rate—Do readers stick around to read it?
- Average/total time on page—How long are readers staying engaged with your content?
- Returning visitors—Are people returning to reread your content?
- Social shares and links—Is your content share-worthy?
These are just a few of the on-site activity metrics that get your franchise marketing content ranked highly. And unless you’ve got a dedicated army of bots doing your blackhat SEO-bidding, the only way to send these signals is to create quality content.
To that end, we present the following 5 tips for writing effective franchise marketing content.
Elements Of Effective Franchise Content Marketing
1. Make The Paragraph The Unit Of Composition
“The object of treating each topic in a paragraph by itself is, of course, to aid the reader,” write Strunk & White. “The beginning of each paragraph is a signal to him that a new step in the development of the subject has been reached.”
Thinking of each paragraph as the basic unit of composition will help with the overall structure of your franchise marketing content, providing a through-line of logic or argumentation, and reduce the risk of waffling. This in turn translates to better readability, which, as we know by now, equates to valuable on-site activity signals.
This may seem rather elementary, but it needs to be said in today’s franchise content marketing climate, where writers are sometimes encouraged to break paragraphs apart to avoid writing dense and discouraging walls of text. The end result is often a bad one, compromising the content structure and leaving your message scattered across the page. Not only are you breaking established reader/writer conventions, but now the user is forced to provide additional manual inputs (e.g. scrolling and clicking) to get your point!
The issue of dense-and-discouraging walls of text is real, but the answer isn’t tearing strong paragraphs to shreds. Instead, revisit those primary virtues of effective writing—clarity and concision—and see where you can find opportunities to kill your darlings.
2. Begin Each Paragraph With A Topic Sentence — Or Topic Header
“Again, the object is to aid the reader,” write Strunk & White. “The practice here recommended enables him to discover the purpose of each paragraph as he reads it, and to retain the purpose in mind as he ends it.”
Digital marketers have a very small window to engage readers. According to eye-tracking studies from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form a first opinion of your brand, then only 2.6 seconds for their eyes to reinforce that impression. This research ultimately influenced Facebook’s decision to implement the “3 Second Rule,” which states that a video must be played for only 3 seconds in order to be counted as a view.
Strong topic sentences make the most of these tiny windows of opportunity. They help readers skim the text and quickly absorb meaning, which ultimately makes your content more approachable and effective.
With franchise content marketing copy, treat your headers like topic sentences, as we’ve done in this article. Headers are bigger than in-line text, which makes them even better for speed-reading and organization, and they’re the perfect place to stick your keywords.
3. Use The Active Voice In Franchise Content Marketing
Using the active voice ensures the subject of the sentence is active, rather than acted upon. This may seem like stylistic nitpicking, but this one tweak transforms clunky copy into snappy, energetic marketing material.
Consider the following example (Note: we did NOT write “let the following examples be considered by you”):
- Active voice: ClickTecs delivers franchise content marketing solutions.
- Passive voice: Franchise content marketing solutions are delivered by ClickTecs.
There are plenty of reasons to add more active voice to your franchise marketing content:
- Active voice conveys authority
- Active voice avoids “corporate speak”
- Active voice is easier to read
- Active voice makes writing more energetic and robust
- Active voice uses fewer words
Still not convinced? Just imagine if Nike’s franchise content marketing team used the passive voice:
While the passive voice is grammatically correct, it lands like a wet napkin.
A quick copy audit from our franchise content marketing team could greatly enhance the results of your marketing campaign, without introducing any new data.
4. Put Franchise Content Marketing Statements In The Positive Form
As Strunk and White say, you must make definitive assertions with your writing, whether you’re trying to paint a picture in prose or precisely detail your brand’s value propositions.
To that end, try not to use the word “not” where possible. Instead of telling the reader what it isn’t, tell them what it is. Thus, instead of saying, “the franchise content marketing campaign was not bad,” you might say:
- The franchise content marketing campaign was cost-effective
- The franchise content marketing campaign was data-driven
- The franchise content marketing campaign was memorable
Whatever your thoughts may be regarding the franchise content marketing campaign, they’re best expressed using statements made in the positive form. “Not bad” could mean almost anything, and that runs counter to the copywriting virtue of clarity.
5. Omit Needless Words In Your Franchise Content Marketing
“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts,” write Strunk and White.
Extra words get in the way of your message, demanding more time and effort from your reader without adding value. Concise copy sings; wordy copy clunks.
Book A Free Franchise Content Marketing Consultation With The Clicktecs Copywriting Crew
Visit the ClickTecs website or call 866-311-7189 to book your free consultation and learn what our content writing team can do for you.
Back