Content Writing

To understand why content marketing works, it’s important to understand that it’s one of the two main modes of marketing.

The other mode, interruptive or outbound marketing, involves seizing buyer attention and holding it long enough to communicate an offer. Interruptive marketing only works when buyers are looking for a solutions provider (versus learning about their problem or possible solutions). The problem: just ~5% of your ideal customers are actually looking for a solutions provider at any one time.

Content marketing, by contrast, doesn’t normally involve an offer at all. Instead, it provides free value to your ideal customers through content – an asset or experience where the primary goal is to educate, entertain or inspire the consumer (not convert them to a paying customer). This means content marketing can be relevant for 100% of your target market instead of just 5%.

The cost of content writing can vary hugely depending on the writer, the industry, the length of content, and the amount of research. Although you can find content writers on platforms like Fiverr offering very low hourly rates, you’ll probably get better results using AI.

For quality content writing, you can expect to pay upwards of AU$250 per 1,500 words. Articles that require in-depth research (either via SME interviews or literature reviews) will likely cost substantially more, as will articles for highly technical industries like law, finance, IT and engineering.

Many experienced writers will charge $500–$600 for a typical 1,500-word article, while subject specialists or in-demand creators often charge over $1,000 per 1,500 words.

To measure the success of content writing, you need to look at two types of metrics: leading indicators and lagging indicators.

Leading indicators are proxy metrics. Because content writing doesn’t convert readers to customers instantly, there’s lag between content consumption and content impact – leading indicators help fill in that gap by giving you an idea of how well the content is performing right now.

Examples of leading indicators include organic search impressions, click-through rate, page views, and time on page. While we don’t know whether a page view will actually lead to a sale, for example, we know that there’s a correlation between the two, so more page views is a good indicator that the content will lead to purchases in the future. You can check your leading indicators using software like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Lagging indicators, on the other hand, tell you whether content did contribute to sales or not. Isolating the impact of individual content assets on revenue is both difficult and a bad idea. After all, it’s very rare that a single asset takes a buyer all the way from unawareness of their problem to the point of sale; normally, it’s a combination of assets and collateral from multiple channels.

Instead, a better way to gauge the effectiveness of your content is to measure the number of leads that originate from each marketing channel (for example, organic search/SEO). You can do this using hybrid attribution (a combination of self-reported attribution and software-based attribution). If you’re running an e-commerce business, you can use hybrid attribution for new customer accounts instead.

Yes, if you write your own content, we can certainly edit it. We offer four levels of editing:

• structural editing (reviewing the piece from a marketing perspective and making substantial recommendations about direction, structure and efficacy)
• copy editing (polishing your writing at a line level and fixing mistakes)
• editorial proofreading (fixing grammatical and stylistic mistakes and reworking unclear sentences)
• general proofreading (fixing mistakes).

Each one has a different role to play in your content production process.

Almost every piece of marketing collateral should undergo a structural edit/marketing review and a round of proofreading. Larger or higher-value content assets, such as reports or position pieces, will normally benefit from one or more rounds of copy editing as well.