 Good afternoon everybody and a very warm welcome to our Marketing Club webinar series. I've got a great session for you today on a fundamental skill to have if you're a marketer. That's copywriting. You see I am his very own content marketing manager, Stuart Thomas. If you've watched any of our Marketing Club webinars before, then you'll know how this works, but for those joining us for the first time today, welcome. And before I pass things over to Stuart, I'll very quickly give you some info about the session and how you can get involved in the Q&A. So I'll be hearing from Stuart for around 45 minutes. We'll then move into a 10 to 15 minute Q&A to answer some of your questions. You can post your questions at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark you'll see on your screen. So don't be shy, pop in your questions and we'll look forward to hopefully answering some of those a little bit later on. Stuart's presentation deck is available to download whilst we're on air. All you'll need to do is pop into the handout section and you'll be able to download it from there. And remember, you'll be able to watch the session again, along with all our previous webinars on the CIM YouTube channel. Just head into playlists, find the Marketing Club folder and you'll find them all there to watch whenever you want with sessions on personal branding, digital trends, marketing strategy and CSR among others. And if you would like to share any thoughts about today's webinar or indeed any of our webinars or events on socials, you can use the hashtag CIM Events. We'd love to see your comments on socials, so please do get involved and do let us know what you think of today's session. So before I hand over to Stuart, I'll quickly explain what the Marketing Club is. It was created primarily to help students get the most from their CIM accredited degree and prepare them for a career in marketing. The accredited degree program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions the degree provides. Throughout the academic year, we run a series of webinars tailored to meet your needs, sharing the latest thinking, trends and techniques in real-world marketing delivered by industry experts. We have a dedicated page on our website where you'll be able to watch previous Marketing Club webinars and access articles and insights from podcasts and our content hub. Although the Marketing Club is designed for students, CIM members and other marketing practitioners are also welcome to attend the webinars. So if you're a university student, you can sign up now to receive the Marketing Club newsletter. All you need to do is take a photo of QR code on screen. Alternatively, you can hop onto our website to find the Marketing Club webpage within the qualifications drop down menu. Each edition of the newsletter will provide you with content designed to support your studies and actively manage your professional development by keeping you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. So it really is worth signing up. We'll pop the QR code up again a little later when we head into the Q&A if you want to find out further information or sign up. Okay, so that's enough from me. I'd now like to hand you over to our guest speaker. Stuart Thomas, CIM's Content Marketing Manager. If you want to turn on your webcam, Stuart, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Hello everyone, thank you Phil for that lovely introduction. Yes, welcome to the Copywriting Marketing Club webinar, the basics of a marketing cornerstone. So as we go into it, I thought I'd start by explaining why I'm the one speaking to you right now. So Stuart Thomas, Content Marketing Manager for CIM and my copywriting path, which is about sort of 11 years and counting so far is starting with English at university, Coventry University, I recommend it. On to Com's Assistant at England Hockey Board where I was doing things like match reports and emails and talking about the fixtures that were coming up and the things that had happened in the hockey world over the previous week. After that, then moved on to be a copywriter both for products and blog posts, emails at a couple of Virgin companies where I then also became a marketing executive on the B2B side. So some experience in B2B blogs and emails again, some social work as well. On to e-commerce copywriting again for Online Gardening Centre Primrose which involved blog writing, all of the emails which are sent by someone else but written by me and also a little bit of web development as well because it's surprising that copywriting does actually have some involvement in web development until I got to where I am now, which is a Content Marketing Manager where I now pass on a lot of the copywriting skills and tips onto my team for the sort of fabulous blog posts that they produce as well. So getting into it, what are we going to cover today? We're going to start with the importance of copywriting and why words matter, which then flows nicely into the weight of words and sometimes you've got to be careful about what you say. Speaking for a brand, it's talking about a tone of voice or TOV. The copywriting process, which sometimes isn't as straightforward as you might like it to be, consider the audience, so remember who you're writing for, not just the customer but also your line manager, your director, everybody that the brand represents. Tools to up your game, so things that can help you just become that slightly little bit better copywriter or indeed just a basic copywriter, so things that I have used myself or also that I've heard being used or tested a little bit. Privacy is the soul of wit, which is all about keeping it short and it's a well-known phrase, so remember it well. The point of punctuation. So talking a little bit about what various pieces of punctuation are for and chiefly try and avoid semicolons. Write for your friends, so less about using slang but more about getting to the point and using contractions. Credits for novelists, so you're not going to become a sort of Don Draper with your name in lights and everyone knowing who you are. Sometimes when you're doing copywriting it's more about just the words, not who you are and don't take it to heart. And then last but not least, of course, have fun with it. His language is a thing to be played with even when you're writing for business. So take it seriously but not always too seriously. One word. So the importance of copywriting. It's where most marketing starts. So whether you're planning to become a social media executive or whether you are planning to get into content writing or you may not be planning to do PPC advertising, just those little snippets that go on Google. It's all copywriting ultimately even if the people that do those things wouldn't necessarily write copywriting on their CV. Because it's all about communication and you can barely communicate without using words unless you're sort of working for Intel inside and you can just use that little bit of noise to tell people that it's an Intel piece of content that you're doing. As you can see in sort of like the top left there, it's not just for business writing as well. You can also use it on your CV. So get better at copywriting and you can write yourself a better little intro at the top of your CV explaining who you are and what you do. And you can also use it to write better cover letters and those little bits that you send off to the company to say, please consider me for hiring me for this role. Using your keywords and everything that makes good copywriting can also get your foot in the door. Of course, it's not always roses. Sometimes you'll draw the ire of the advertising standards as authority complaints and sometimes you'll have just regular people complaining. So you've got a crown painting sample at the bottom there and also an example from Duolingo where they were referring to something that was happening in the news that perhaps Duolingo shouldn't have been referring to, whether it negatively impacted the brand as a whole, unlikely, but they would have drawn sort of like a little bit of ire and flak at the time. So think about the words that you're using, which leads into the weight of words. So gone are the days of unverified hyperbole because ads are now pulled if you lie or sort of do a little bit of mistruthing. Example there from I think it's the 1950s at 60 miles an hour. The loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock, which is patent lies. They might have been able to argue at the time and they probably didn't have to argue to anyone because it was the Halcyon days of the 50s, but by putting it in speech marks, they might claim that it was a customer quote and thus they're not beholden to keeping it to the truth. But then just underneath you'll see says an eminent Rolls Royce engineer, so packed full of bias and the sort of thing that wouldn't fly today. An example from today or a couple of years ago, Shell had to take down an ad which featured the slogan make the difference, drive carbon neutral because it's very much putting on the customer sort of you can stop climate change when of course Shell are pumping out all of the gases and stuff that are leading towards climate change. So naturally it got pulled. Typos can impact sales whilst more often than not if you were to see a typo on a particular product that you wanted to buy, it probably wouldn't stop you. It would lead you to sending out a pithy tweet saying ha ha, look at what this company did but you might buy it anyway. But when it comes to Google and e-commerce, typos can be impactful because in the example here, a website called tightsplease.co.uk had misspelled the word tights on their page which obviously Google is then not surfacing it as a result when people are searching for tights. They corrected it and lo and behold, sales shot up. There's also the million dollar Oxford comma which if you download these slides you'll be able to follow the link and read all about it. That's in a piece of, it was contract. It was a contract that was, they'd not separated two things between packing and delivering. So people were able to claim over time because they were just delivering, not delivering and packing. So as you can see it cost them $5 million. The likelihood of you causing a million dollar Oxford comma problem is slim but at some point over the course of your career you may well have to read over a contract. So it's good to be able to think how language can be interpreted. And in the modern day and age it is keywords which are king. The example at the bottom there is if you search the buyer's journey as you can see in those results the buyer's journey is in bold because that is the thing that people have searched for. Google understands that and it's Google that's bolded those words. They might be bold on the blog posts themselves but whether they are or not Google would do it and it just means that you've got to make sure if you're writing about a particular topic or something of interest that you want people to be able to find make sure to use the keyword and use it high up as well. All of those examples will be somewhere near the top of the page I'd wager. So yes, remember the weight of words. Speaking for a brand something that's part of copywriting is that you're kind of being a face of the company or in a faceless way that your words are what people are seeing and you've got to be careful with the way that you write them. You've got to usually you'll be given guidelines when working for a company as to what that tone of voice is and it'll give you a couple of examples of whether you've got to use a particular word or maybe do or don't use exclamation marks things like that because you're kind of embodying the brand when you're copywriting. So there's an example there from Innocent in the top left hand corner. I think it's on the back of a bottle. Life's pretty strange. Here we are in an unfathomably infinite universe. It's a lot of waffle but it's how Innocent likes to do it and it's playful waffle at that so you can identify the fact that it is innocent and you can look at that bit at the bottom where it's about that singing otter. Last year we made a TV advert with a singing otter less silly than it sounds and even though there's not a logo on there you might be able to guess as to who it is and that is Innocent again. And that goes on to the sound without sigils. That should probably be signs and you know that's all part of copywriting it's thinking about it afterwards and how the words could be different but you won't always be able to rely on the logo being next to the words that you're writing in order to identify that it's your company that you're writing for or about or from. So an example there is does exactly what it says on the tin. Some of you will know that brand but some of you won't but it is Ronseal and it was their famous slogan that they used for a long time and if you write does exactly what it says on the tin everyone would think of Ronseal regardless of whether the logo was in there. You won't always be able to get to that level of salience and you might not even necessarily be able to write I mean that tagline was almost certainly come up with by a team but you can use tone of voice in order to make people think of a brand without using the logo and remember that you're representing the brand when you're speaking. The copywriting process everywhere I've worked that's involved copywriting has followed this broad process which is draft, review, edit, review, publish, review because even after it's published and it's out there if it's a blog post in particular you can always review it, tweak it and improve it if it's something like a press release you're not going to be able to review it or fix it after it's out in the world so depending on how out of your hands it becomes after you publish it depends on how carefully you have to read over it before it goes out because usually with blog posts it'll do a little circle like this so it's review then it's back to edit then it's review again then it might be edit again but be careful that you don't go through too many edit review steps more for your own sanity and not annoying your line manager because if they have to review it over and over again they'll think that you're not listening or thinking more broadly about the suggestions that they're making so if they've suggested that you should use a contraction, change that into that look through the rest of the copy to see other places that you might be able to use contractions and also think why are they telling me to use a contraction is to make it more friendly more readable those kinds of things so yeah, just always be reviewing you don't want to be in an endless cycle though of going through your line manager whether it's published, do the reviews yourself don't necessarily send it to other people unless the edit that you're then going to make after the fact is a fundamental change to that and along with sending it over to into review stage is the phrase kill your darlings that comes up a lot with novel writing usually or maybe your own personal blogs but it's the fact that sometimes those amazing puns that you've written or awesome pieces of alliteration aren't actually selling the product or convincing the customer to do a particular action so just if you think they're particularly amazing feel free to make a kind of a written note of them in order to tell your friends about afterwards or your significant other because you're so proud of the thing that you've written but if you're writing it purely for the fact that it made you smile then take it out because it's the customer that you want to make smile and also probably your line manager's going to make you get rid of it anyway so don't try and hold on to it for the sake of it so that is the copywriting process broadly consider the audience so like that last point where the fact that you're writing for the customer you're also writing for everyone so you're writing for your line manager potentially your area director anybody that's going to read it before it goes out there as well as all the people that are going to read it once it's out there so you've got to think about who's signing it off if you write something that you think is definitely 100% going to resonate with the customer but your line manager takes issue with it be prepared to fight for it a little bit and say look the customer feels this way these words follow with that way but every now and then you will have to just get rid of it but don't take it personally but just know that you don't automatically have to get rid of it just because your line manager suggested it but if they're really forceful about it then you do so yeah the customer is king and the other part of that is that you are not the customer so even if you buy the product of the company that you're working for or pitching for anything like that you have bias that you're bringing to the table you might know more about the product than is actually communicated to the customer or you might get a staff discount something along those lines so you shouldn't be writing thinking this would make me buy it you want to be writing in the sense that it would make them buy it but even after you've followed all of that sometimes the wider world will complain about it you might have I don't know used a word that's a little bit wrong or in this particular example so bringing up crown paints again is that it triggered complaints of misogyny and sexism you may remember the ads it was a crown paints ad where a nursery had been painted a lovely mustard yellow and a chorus of singers were singing about why they painted it that particularly yellow and it's how they decided to have a baby but it was decided to have a baby after having previously chosen not to have children or at least from the mother's perspective and from the father's perspective it was they hope that it's his which obviously caused a great deal of complaints because it's kind of talking about people being unfaithful or people suddenly deciding to go from childless to having children when you know that might be a life choice but it's also the flip side of the complaints was that that is how some people live so whilst there were a lot of complaints I don't think the complaint was upheld by the advertising standards authority because it wasn't lies and you know whilst it was a little bit insulting to a certain group it wasn't insulting to the broad public and it almost certainly resulted in a lifting sales for crown paints so on one side it worked on the other side it didn't so there are two sides to it but always think about who's going to be reading it after the fact I don't think there's a copywriter out there that hasn't at some point had to apologise or go back on the words that they've put out because it's unintentionally caused offence but the main thing is to accept those mistakes apologise for them sometimes you might be tempted to feel like oh no I've been backed into a corner I've got to justify all of these words and decisions I made but the main thing is that on the front face of it that you are apologising and that you just change it because you know your words are not so valuable that they are immutable and can't be changed right the nice easy bit possibly what brought a lot of you here is the tools to up your game the things that you can use to make your copywriting just a little bit smoother the one that I use the most probably every single day I use this one is the Grammarly Plugin for Chrome it's a simple little extension that you can get from the Chrome extension store but it's free there is a premium option which you can use to look at entire sentences as opposed to just single words but I just use it as a bit of a spellchecker because if you're writing directly into your content management system or CMS you're going to need some sort of spellchecker because I don't think anyone writes everything perfectly the first time it comes out even me so you need something that just kind of checks over your work without you doing it I don't think it's got an auto correct so don't rely too much on that lowercase is automatically become capital I when you talk about yourself things like that but it will underline it in a nice red so that after you finish you check back through and see all of those places that the red is underlined another one that I know some of my colleagues have used in the past is Hemingway I don't think it's an app it's just a website that you go to copy your content into it and as you can see there it then highlights it in various useful colours shows you the slightly long sentences shows you the two long sentences so that example there is almost three lines long don't do sentences that are three lines long and if you see something like that just look for places that you can spit it in half don't think too much about using punctuation to slow it down don't be using commas and semicolons just find a place to slap a full stop in there and use a full stop it's also marked in green passive phrase or passive voice which sometimes you will have to use passive voice is not automatically bad voice because there it's talking about phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice and of course they have you didn't mark them the active voice there would be mark phrases in green you haven't taken an action you wouldn't use active voice to do it whilst we got there we've got the words helpfully and perhaps highlighted in blue helpfully is a word that should be there but the word perhaps you could probably get rid of so again it's just highlighting how you might want to study your language if you're writing for SEO SEO purposes Yoast is a really useful resource for just SEO content tips if it's your entire job you probably want to do a little bit of SEO CIM training in order to for a good few hours in a day or a couple of days just be immersed in everything SEO and it also gives you a greater understanding of why you do those things because it's all well and good saying use a keyword in a heading but you want to understand why you're supposed to use a keyword in a heading if you're writing in WordPress there's a Yoast plugin and it gives you a nice helpful traffic light system as to how well your post is likely to perform from an SEO perspective but don't chase the green light just aim for an amber at the very least if it's coming up in red you've probably got some problems but sometimes it'll highlight things like overuse of passive voice or you haven't used your keyword enough and sometimes over a sort of 1500 word blog post you definitely won't have used the keyword enough you never will it would just end up seeming repetitive so don't worry too much about chasing that green and then last but not least but at the very least you have there's no excuse in this day and age for letting a spelling mistake get through the cracks and the best way to avoid those is drafting everything that you write in either Microsoft Word or Google Docs because both of them have built-in spell checkers and grammar checkers so the screenshot of the editor that I've used there is from the notes that I took for this specific webinar and that one spelling mistake is tights and it just picks up straight away same again for Google Docs I just copied the whole thing in there and it pulled out tight straight away so in Word it is you go to the review panel and then select editor it's on the left hand side, big and blue whereas on Google Docs it is in the tools panel and then it's just spelling and grammar but super easy to use and they're particularly useful for picking up spelling mistakes however what they won't do is pick up spelling errors that are wrong in context so in something I wrote the other day I'd use the word flowing when I meant following when talking about influences and naturally it didn't pick it up in actual fact I think it auto-corrected to flowing after I'd written it as following so you will still have to use your eyes and brain unfortunately and with Hemingway and Grammarly in fact don't take everything that they suggest when it comes to grammar as gospel because sometimes your own or the company's tone of voice or the way that you write isn't considered perfect by their standards but if you are convinced that it's still legible and understandable ignore their suggestion more often than not they'll tell me to take out Oxford Commerce which I absolutely love and if they'd done that with that contract it would have caused an issue from the very beginning so don't do everything they tell you because otherwise also you'll just sound like Grammarly and Hemingway and you want to sound like you slash the brand and if you download all of those slides there are some links to the various ones of those and actually looking at my little nose there I've realised the little secret one that I use myself and that's the Chrome dictionary extension so it won't help you as you're writing but as you're reading someone else's content to consume your content if there's a word that comes up that you don't know what it means or how it's supposed to be used just double click it and it pops a little dictionary definition and then slowly but surely you'll improve your own vocabulary as well bit of fun Brevity is the soul of wit so this is use as few words as possible McDonald's I'm loving it, three words Nike just do it, three words get straight to the point it doesn't just apply to taglines as you can see there it also applies to CTAs, read more, learn more book now, download you don't even have to say that it's now because buttons imply immediacy anyway and buy now which is the one that's usually just fallen back to particularly in e-commerce just buy now the customer knows exactly what's going to happen when they click that button it also applies to your blog content as well, short sentences short paragraphs don't necessarily go so far as me think why waste time say a lot word when few word do trick you still want it to be grammatically correct and have a nice little flow to it but take out the waffle you know, you're not writing an essay, you're not padding the word count if by the time that you're finished the blog post that you've written is 500 words instead of 800 maybe that's a good thing maybe you have in fact said everything that you need to have a little double checked check that you have said everything but generally keeping it short is nice and simple there's a B2B one there which I think is talking about setting up websites build your brand 3 words, sell more stuff 3 words, sign up free 3 words and within those I couldn't even necessarily tell you the brand that it is but you know what they're going to do for you I mean we're trying to be brevity so let's go straight on to the next one the point of punctuation this one has come up several times over the course of my career but just avoid semicolons that search from the University of Sussex says the semicolon has only one major use I'm not sure how true that is I think I can think of two but if it's only got one use how often are you really going to need it and that one use that it calls out is that it's separating two clauses which could be separate sentences to which you automatically think well why aren't they separate sentences and there is no good reason so just make them separate sentences hyphens can replace commas example there because sadly no marketer gets it if you've found that a sentence you've written has got I don't know four commas maybe even just three or more think about where you might be able to use a hyphen instead you can use it at the end of sentence as well to sort of separate your final point like because it is you can use a hyphen before that it implies a pause and that is way that pretty much everyone will read it so there again too many clauses full stop so separate your sentences out it lowers the like readability reading level of what you're writing it's less about making it simplified or maybe it is more about making it simplified but not everybody that's reading what you've put out there has a really high reading level can read to the level of say if you're an English graduate and also they have short attention spans not because they are simple but because they've time is money time is important so just short simple sentences to keep people paying attention to what you've written and also you want to have nice white space which is the lots of line breaks it is essentially punctuation but if you've got two sentences to each other that are just that little bit further apart in meaning or sense you can put in a line break and just separate it into a new paragraph and then that way when you're sort of zoomed out as we are on that blog post there there's lots of white space and it's just pleasing to the eye and it also means that people can skim read more easily and get down to that sweet cta that you should have at the bottom of every single blog post so if you remember anything from this webinar avoid semicolons right for your friends this is less about using slang you can still use colloquialisms particularly if you're trying to sell to a local market so you know if there's a colloquialism from your particular county feel free to throw it in there but use contractions there's this belief that if you're writing for a business you have to write in a sort of that is the way it is done when really you can say that is the way it's done and it gets to the point a lot faster as you can see from these Google snippets you want to get to the point as quickly as possible more often than not answer it in the first paragraph if you were telling a story to your friends you would say something along the lines of oh I fell out of a tree the other day then go into some of the details to how you ended up doing that and then you end it with so I fell out of a tree if you were to start it with something funny happened to me the other day then go through all this description and then end with I fell out of a tree people are going to be bored of what you were saying and that goes just as well for blog posts it might lead to a high bounce rate but if the website that you're writing for has a particularly good retargeting strategy if someone just clicks into a blog post for just a couple of seconds or to get the answer that they're looking for they'll then be followed by retargeting ads so you don't have to worry too much about the fact that they're not necessarily clicking a cta and also it leads to more brand recognition if someone's clicked in and read a blog post that you did they might come back to you for other blog content in the future or they will just think of your brand the next time they're looking for that particular product so what we got here for our examples how to tell the difference between Lamborghinis the side air intakes are the big giveaway and then goes into what those differences are I did write this and the other one there is in short the five stages of your customers buying journey are and then it says all five of them it only goes into the detail of the first one but then that might draw people in to read the rest although as you can tell from the ellipses there the rest of the information is contained within so you just click on it and then you find out everything and then it also pulls through that nice image so yeah don't bury the lead that's a principle from journalism where if you've got like a headline you want to explain what the headline is quite quickly and lastly that B2B doesn't equal boring there's also this idea that if you're writing for a business that's for a business let's say software as a service that you have to write in a really stuffy dull way but the important thing to remember is that you are a person and you're writing to another person someone within that decision making unit the other business that wants to be engaged with they don't want to read a really stuffy thing maybe if you're working for a legal firm that might be approached a little bit differently but still you want the main side of it to be the front side of it to be super approachable, particularly high up the funnel a little bit further down when you're getting into the real nitty gritty as to why someone should buy your product or it's a sales person with that direct relationship you can start to get a little bit more boring and go really deep into the details but at the higher up level that most copywriting is, you can be fun with it that example at the bottom there I think is from Slack hooray, your campaign is officially live and people are responding delight customers with your carefully crafted well timed responses and that's Slack it's selling a communication tool to other businesses but they've used an exclamation mark they don't necessarily have to be just the copywriter's crutch that can be used well in other circumstances so yeah writes as though you want other people to read it write for your friends, not for your professor don't pad the word count don't hide what you're trying to just get to the point credits for novelists this is something that's actually come up recently but it's the fact that when you're doing copywriting you won't always get your name on it and that's okay the main point is that you sold a product or got someone to sign up to a webinar or anything along those lines it's not about it's not making a name for yourself it takes usually a long time for your name to kind of get out there as any kind of expert and just don't take it apart when your name doesn't go on it one of the examples that I pulled out there is from my own career a version of incentives the sort of greatest social response that I ever got from anything that I've ever put out and my name is nowhere to be seen and it started with sending a message out as version of incentives saying congratulations you've won a prize please let us know when it comes through that was also followed with some messages sent as my line manager sort of like setting up a little kind of relationship there a little bit of ghostwriting and then the person responded by taking a picture and tagging Richard Branson and loads of social responses the followers of version incentives went up I think sort of tenfold and the only reason you'd know it was me is because that's my handwriting on that little handwritten note aside from that you'd never know it was me and that's just the way it goes so you know when you're writing it's on the social media for a particular company it's unlikely you're going to be signing it off with your own name you'll get that a little bit in customer service when there are different agents they'll sign it off with their name but usually it's just their first name so they're not getting any huge amount of credit for it and with that comes a note on portfolios so both for students and the sort of career marketers alike if you've written a particularly good piece or done something that worked particularly well for your company take some screenshots or print it as a pdf and save it somewhere that isn't on your work computer email it to yourself and that way you keep a record of it because after you've left the company isn't beholden to keeping your author credit or even keeping those posts version incentive could have deleted those posts or like in that 404 example there in career but you might see a 404 when you go looking for that what was that great blog post I wrote three years ago and it's just been deleted because the company feels it doesn't serve a purpose or it's taking up service space any number of reasons that you can't possibly fathom or guess they might delete your work so if you think it's great at the time keep it, keep a copy of it and then that goes on to ghost writing which is the more fun part I would say of credit being removed because your name is not on it maybe someone else's name is on it you get to embody that person you get to imagine how that person would write it can be a lot of responsibility but it's also fun and it's a nice little thing to put on the CV ghost writing experience it makes it very, it's difficult to prove after you've done a little bit of ghost writing but it is a fun part of writing where you can just embody someone else for a brief spell you're not always going to get credit and then lastly have fun with it a lot of grammar rules can be broken for almost every rule in English the English language there's an example of it being broken I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to come up with any of those examples now but that little screen shot there which I've taken from someone else's blog post stand on the shoulders of giants I believe I've put the credit in the notes of the slideshow anyway so what examples have we got here avoid alliteration, always I love a bit of alliteration if you can think of a good way of doing it put it in prepositions are not words to end sentences with yep you can play around with that and there's something about splitting infinitives supposedly you're not supposed to do that but if we didn't have that you wouldn't get the fabulous star trek that we've gone before it's a weighty phrase and it's achieved by splitting an infinitive which you're not meant to do avoid cliches like the plague their old hat cliches are all over the place feel free to use them don't use too many issue ampersands and abbreviations not sure about the use of the word issue there you could have just always said avoid but I guess they wanted to not copy avoid from the previous one but don't use it well you can actually use it to cheat a word count character count rather if you use an ampersand you've saved yourself two characters though one should never generalize you can do that cliches again be more or less specific I'm not entirely sure what that one's all about but you can play around with sort of getting straight to it sentence fragments eliminates I use an example of that just the other day in the smart objective blog post which you can find over on the CIM content hub one of the sentences is literally just the word smart because it follows on where it explains what the SMART stands for smart exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement you can use hyperbole hyperbole you can use it more in blog posts I would say than like printed ads you don't want to get pulled up by the ASA although broadly they will understand the difference between hyperbole and a lie parenthetical remarks however relevant are unnecessary I use brackets, parentheses all of the time so I wouldn't worry about that one you might want to worry about overuse if you're constantly using little sort of side notes and things like that maybe think if they could be just a separate sentence afterwards or how they might be expanded so as to not be in brackets but feel free to use them and who needs rhetorical questions you'll use questions in blog post titles all of the time so don't worry too much about rhetorical questions because you'll then answer it anyway and it doesn't always have to be straightforward so this example here from a slack bug fix often you'll see on bug fix things like fixed text bleeding out of a window or fixed button not visible when using iOS 15 those kinds of things and then the example here you've got is fixed when viewing a conversation on iPad people notice that there was sometimes a back button that would be visible but which did nothing when tapped upon this was meant as a reminder of the linear nature of time and that no matter how much we may yearn for certain elements of the past we must press on, ever forward undeterred, unyielding can you imagine if that were true it was absolutely a bug, all bad it's a lot more worse than it needs to be but it's just a little bit of entertainment and slack is great at that think about the micro copy it's really fun things with it so here are the rules words matter think about the words that you're using and don't draw the eye of either your audience or the advertising standards authority internalise the TOV, embody that tone of voice and the brand that you are writing for think if the brand were a person how would they speak always be reviewing, very simple write for the customer the customer is king but also write for your blind manager reading it, but the customer matters most Grammarly is not a genius but you can use it to fix those spelling mistakes keep it clear short sentences that describe exactly what the point is be hyphen happy, hyphens are probably my favourite piece of punctuation so use them all the time get to the point, don't bury the lead copywriting is not equal to authoring what was expected to get your name on it and then of course have fun with it an example there from a little juggling man there so that brings us to the end of that copywriting webinar and now I think it's time for a Q&A so I'll pass it back over to Phil it is indeed Stuart thank you very much those are really great some fantastic tips throughout the entire presentation as Stuart said we're going to move into the Q&A we've already received some great questions to get us underway but please do continue first of questions and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 10 minutes or so just look, remind us if you want to comment on the socials about today's webinar then you can use the hashtag see our events which we've popped up on screen again along with the QR code to find out further information about marketing ok let's head off to our first question we've got loads here Stuart I'm just going to go swimming in chronological order I think top tip for avoiding writer's block the sort of thing that I use to get over writer's block is to just start scribbling things out on a notepad say that it's a a topic that you've got to write a blog post about write the keyword of the topic and then just write things that are associated with that word and just that simple process of getting words on a page can help you get past it sometimes it's simply a case of writing is writing that first sentence I mean admittedly that might even be the point of writer's block is that you can't write that first sentence so think about the 10th sentence just go a bit further down from those words that you've taken off those topic which one of those things can you write about and start with that and then you might be able to skip back to you know what the main topic is about and yeah it's all about just getting things on a page that aren't necessarily the blog itself just getting in the practice of just getting words out of your brain okay great thanks to it here's one which you're going to love hyphens or dashes that can be a big issue yeah so within Microsoft Word if you're using hyphen to kind of separate two points once you start typing and then hit space it becomes a I think it's called an M dash really those are the ones that you should be using but when you're writing directly into a CMS it's not going to do that automatic change most people aren't going to notice those couple of pixels difference between a hyphen and a dash so you don't have to worry so much about how it looks once you've written it in I consider the two synonymous but I will sometimes if I notice that it hasn't done that automatic lengthening within Microsoft Word I will copy it from somewhere else and put it in but if it ends up being left as a hyphen that short version don't worry too much about it unless you're doing something where you're writing in Excel and then turning it into page code sometimes the dash can be shown a little bit different but as long as you know to look out for it it's easy to fix after the fact okay thank you should any potential insult or controversy be avoided or is some provocation acceptable it depends on the brand that you're writing for so take Brudog for example they have a very strong brand tone of voice and it is or can be sometimes a little bit insulting or like provoking like I think do they use the swear I don't think they used the swear word but I think they did use like F Asterix hashtag K which everyone knows what that really means if it fits your brand yes but be absolutely sure that it fits your brand if you do it for a brand or an audience that isn't receptive to it the negative effects massively outweigh the positive ones so be very very careful with provocation this one's a hot topic what are your thoughts on copyrighters being replaced by chat GPT do you think copyrighters have a future I'm not hugely worried about being replaced by chat GPT or at least not in its current state it has a tendency to be mistaken which is surprising really considering this computer program but because the way AI works is what goes in is what comes out so if it's trained on bad data or questionable or bias data it will kick out bias whereas and it won't realise that it's doing it whereas a person can usually think on their bias and think how they can avoid it and also something that's happened recently is between chat GPT and I think it might be Bings AI the two of them now refer to each other because their results are being put on the web and so they're ending up in this sort of cycle spiral of just making up references because the other one said it rather again a copyrighter can avoid that and so far I think I've been broadly able to identify when something is written by chat GPT because it has a certain style and you can tell when it doesn't match the copywriter's previous output so I think there is still a future for copywriters at the very least if it ends up being that copywriters don't write huge blog pieces anymore they will still be checking them over for facts and inserting references and making sure that it follows a particular tone so yes I think there's still a future for copywriters and I'm not worried yet Emoji's in copy for social media yes or no I mean that's just yes but again it does depend on the brand they shouldn't always be used to replace words because not everyone's kind of emoji dictionary is advanced as you know your average social media executive but you can absolutely use it to kind of like emphasize a point or give across emotion sometimes that can be a little bit difficult with just words but I feel like they're slightly replacing the exclamation mark as the new copywriter's crutch so they should be used with thought and with care not just slam-dash wherever okay so there's a couple of questions around entry level jobs really the first one is copywriting the right start from entry level digital marketing job and similar question what's the best way to get your job in copywriting or digital marketing with 80 degree or experience mm-hmm so my bias would be that copywriting and studying English is a good start to your kind of like marketing career but it's by no means requirements just having a good understanding of English language is useful so you can start as like a copywriter or you can be like a proofreader if you're good at reading over other people's stuff that can take you surprisingly far social media I I haven't gone for any social media roles myself and I think most people probably have a good sort of like social media ability and provided you're good on your sort of like LinkedIn Twitter wherever it's easy to prove mm-hmm but entry level you know copyright and roles do exist if you don't see like copywriter as the specific role at a company you may well just see marketing executive or marketing coordinator and then you'll see sort of like copywriting first and foremost mm-hmm things to study any language I think will probably give you a good basis so you know if you've studied French or German they give you a good understanding of kind of like grammar and how things flow mm-hmm and probably any marketing degree really will give you a good fundamental understanding of any copywriting role okay thanks to it I think we may have lost you part way through that but I think we've got the general gist of the answers I don't know I just think it's just a connection okay do you have any tips for reviewing copy balancing changing wording to how you'd write it with not rewriting someone's work mm-hmm I think the a good way of sort of not rewriting someone's work is to have a draft sent to you in Microsoft Word or Google Docs at reviewing level not editing level so people can make suggestions but then you the person submitting the copy can go through and either accept or reject the things that people have said sometimes it will be a super obvious thing like a spelling mistake that's pretty straightforward sometimes it will be that you're reading it and it just it doesn't feel quite right mm-hmm because the person that wrote it has a clear understanding of what it is they're trying to get across but if you're not completely convinced as to what you've read either makes sense or gets the point across or says what the person was trying to say you can just kind of put a little comment on it saying what's the point you're trying to make here mm-hmm and also you can do things as comments rather than direct suggestions of edits so you can say things like you might want to think about shortening this sentence or could you add a line break here and if you put them in as comment suggestions rather than direct edits the writer is more likely to think about what it is they've written rather than just like yeah fine I'll accept all of these changes and move on thank you where can I find the best cases and learning resources stroke insights on copyright well on the CIM content hub you'll find a great deal of articles about copywriting if you just go on there and search copywriting you'll find every article that has copywriting I think in the title but it might go into the copy itself um what sort of resources have I used um at the earlier on in my slides I showed the book each shoots and leaves by Lynn Truss a little resource for me that just kind of helped with you know how to use punctuation and sort of little grammar rules and stuff like that reading other companies blogs will give you a sense of what good copywriting looks like even if they aren't themselves copywriting tips so you just look at how they've written a particular thing some blogs better than others I think where I learned a lot of the short sentences short paragraphs frequent subheadings HubSpot they do a really good job of the way that they lay their blogs out okay um I think we've run out of time for questions now I think Stuart you've already mentioned the CIM's content hub there's loads and loads of articles and blogs content on there around the whole subject of copywriting and the content hub is fully searchable so let's do a suggestion that's a very good place to start if you want to sort of hone up on the subject but anyway thank you again Stuart some really great questions and some really great answers there unfortunately that's all the time we've got for our webinar today I'd just like to thanks Stuart once again for delivering an absolutely fantastic presentation and we do hope you've enjoyed the session and been able to gain some handy tips to take forward and apply to your next piece of content thank you Stuart we'll be back with our final marketing club webinar on Wednesday the 26th of April with George Honnibal and some practical advice on how to unlock the power of LinkedIn to boost your online presence you'll find further details listed on the events and marketing club pages on our website where you can also register for the session so that just leaves me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today and we hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon