The need to invest in good quality content is a well-known fact. Numerous research have shown that unique and interesting articles are appreciated by readers. But when it comes to creating the message – things are not that obvious anymore. What should you keep in mind when writing for Internet users (potential customers) and what when writing for your employees?
The first internal publications in Poland appeared back in the early 1990s, but the Renaissance came at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries. This is when the quality of such magazines soared, taking up a new, better shape. When it comes to quality, the border between internal and commercial press is disappearing. Many internal magazines could easily compete with those available in newsstands. Articles for internal magazines are now created with equal amount of care and knowledge as traditional publications. No longer can we see magazines packed with management board messages and press notes copied from the PR department. To manage information well is one of the main challenges of any company and the only way to succeed at the same time.
An employee – that’s the best choice when it comes to internal press. Nothing makes the message more credible than real people, who can tell about the events they witnessed themselves. This solution is very good when it comes to communication, but it does have some drawbacks. Most employees (though not all of them) are not capable of writing a good article for a magazine. So a very important element of successful internal communication is an editor, who can add the journalistic feeling to texts written by staff.
Journalist – keeping in mind the adequate distribution of information and the idea of transparency, you can commission writing articles for your internal magazine to journalists. The texts they create carry information that is meaningful for the staff. They inform about the current events in the company, its strategy, development plans, but they also tell the stories of employees and discuss various non-business topics, showing a different face of the company – the human face. All that serves one primary objective: identification with the company. The disadvantage of this solution is that employees are more willing to read texts written by their colleagues than by someone they don’t know.
The basic element of corporate journalism – just like in the case of traditional journalism – is reliable information. The editors of internal publications have the same writing skills as those working for national media, they use varied writing styles and take care of linguistic correctness. The task may seem simple, but it’s quite the contrary. It often takes finding balance between the management board’s aspirations and the expectations of the staff. They need to be very delicate about the moments of crisis in the company, when they have to talk about difficult things. And they must talk about them, because honesty is a huge power of any internal magazine. It’s what the readers expect and that’s how you get their confidence. Research confirm that internal publications are among the top magazines that draw the reader’s attention for longest.
20 years back the basic source of information was the encyclopaedia, today young people may have difficulties using it, and that – from their point of view archaic – tool has been replaced with the Internet. Along with the technological development people started to search on the Internet not only for knowledge, but also products. As a result, there appeared a demand for online advice articles.
Copywriter – should provide the reader with knowledge in an easy, attractive form. In order to achieve this, the copywriter must know the readers and understand their needs. The text should be written in the language of benefits instead of telling about the product or service. And of course it must contain the magic word (the key word). An experienced copywriter knows how to incorporate it into the text in a natural way, making the article a perfect message and not a pushy advertisement. Last but not least, the writer must remember about the requirements: companies often precisely define the length of the article, which phrase they want to see in it linking to a given landing page, sometimes they decide on the subject of the article.
Journalist – someone with adequate writing skills and lots of ideas for the best text formula, but also with a deeply rooted conviction that an article must be objective. Important as they may be, objectivity and reliability of information can become a trap in the case of online advice articles written for a particular customer. Telling in details about all the qualities of the product may result in emphasizing the elements which the customers doesn’t necessarily want to expose. On the other hand, an advice article written by a journalist – maybe a well-known one – does have its advantages: it is much more reliable because it was written by an information expert and not an advertiser.
The goal of such articles, as the name implies, is to provide advice on a given subject, a solution to a problem, or to encourage the reader to do something. But there’s more to it. For producers it is a great way to get buyers interested in their product or service and encourage them to buy it. For this reason such articles contain the right key words that take the reader to the landing page (e.g. the producer’s website with the product offer). This unobtrusive form of promotion has a chance to reach a wide spectrum of readers, thus supporting the company’s advertising campaigns, increasing its visibility in web browsers and strengthening the brand image. It is also an additional source of traffic on the seller’s website. About 80 percent of consumers prefer to read unique and valuable content than traditional advertisements that directly encourage to use an offer.
Kategorie: school of contentic, B2E, B2C