Structure in Content Marketing

By Adam  |  28 Jul 2015 19:00:00

If you ever take a writing class you'll know that there's one thing that any author will tell you: every piece of writing you do needs to be well structured. Well, they'll tell you many things beyond that (always proof read, don't repeat words, etc) but structure is one of the more important points. Though you may not think it, this also applies to all of the content you write. It is the structure of a piece of writing which keeps people reading and, of course, you want your content to be read! There always needs to be at least a tiny dose of tension, there always needs to be a payoff and you need a good tone as you go along. You may not realise it, but everything you've enjoyed reading has been like this.

The reason for maintaining this structure and level of quality in your writing is obvious. Imagine a man named Morris. Morris is a simple man who doesn't want much out of life. For fifty years things have been going fine and he's been content, but once the rent at his flat goes up, he needs to make a little extra money. He decides that starting up his own eCommerce website is the one and only viable way that he can do this. Morris isn't a very technologically minded person and when he comes online to find out how to start his eCommerce website, he sees two options: one a service called Sellr and the other a similar service called Ekmshopicart. What Morris doesn't know is that Sellr is the one that perfectly suits his needs, while Ekmshopicart will cost him a lot of money and be too complicated to use. What will Morris do? Will he go for Sellr and live happily ever after with his free to use eCommerce website? Or will he go for Ekmshopicart, lose money, be unable to make his rent payments and risk facing homelessness? How will he know which one to go for?

Thankfully, Morris chose Sellr. How did he know to choose Sellr? Because of its content marketing. Ekmshopicart had a blog with lots of posts on it which were all just boring, mindless praise of the business with nothing unbiased to say and no personality. It was a soulless corporation. Morris found the posts boring and so had a look at Sellr's blog posts where he found superb, reasonable and fair blog posts. Posts which were sprinkled with more than a little of the warmth, humour and personality of the business. Morris made the right choice and chose Sellr and lived happily ever after. Well, I mean, this was five days ago, but he's been happy since.

So you see, content marketing is much easier for your customers to digest when it has had time put into it. Your content needs to have structure and it needs to be human. Unashamed, obvious advertising will not work. So please keep that in mind as you write the blog posts on your own eCommerce website! I hope that this will prove to bring you lots of new customers.