As marketers, we all know it’s important to know your audience, and critically important to know as much as you can about your customers. That’s why it still surprises me when a company you feel you have a relationship with just completely misses it. Yesterday I received a clear example in an email from my local car dealer.

Here’s a small snippet of that message below with some information [substituted] to protect the guilty:

The [brand] Model Year-End Sales Event is happening now at [dealer] and because of your status as a preferred customer, you can now get $1,000** Bonus Savings plus 0%* APR financing and a Free Maintenance Plan.+

Visit the link below to receive your $1,000** Bonus Savings today!

Now, I probably have a deeper relationship with my car dealer than most people. Those of you who know me well enough are probably REALLY sick of me going on and on about how great my Prius is. I lease my vehicle for business, so they know I’m back there every 3 years. And, with a growing family each of those last two times we’ve also swapped our family vehicle for something that can fit the kids and their ever-expanding stuff.

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Content is king from a marketing standpoint – now more than ever.  Can you really market anything without some form of content?  Think about it for a second.  Review every marketing vehicle you use, and try to identify one that doesn’t involve some form of content production.

If content is king, then what is the king’s most important weapon?  Another easy answer.  Writing.  And it’s not even close.

Writing is one of the most undervalued pieces of the marketing puzzle.

Let’s do a quick review of some marketing vehicles and how poor writing impacts each:

• Press Release: Don’t even write it if you’re not going to do it professionally.  Journalists and your consumer/business audience will stop reading when they hit the first piece of evidence of poor writing.

• Website: You know that rule, the one that says you have 10-15 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention and convince them to dive further into the site?  You know what can expedite that departure time?  Poor writing.

• SEO: Writing is far more important for SEO than most “experts” are willing to admit.  Here’s one simple reason.  Let’s say you rank #1 on an important keyword, but your meta description tag (the one that smart people read to determine whether your site is relevant to the topic) is too long, which is often the case.  Fewer clicks.  Fewer leads.  Decreased ROI from that SEO effort.

Let’s check out an example.  When I search on “copywriting” on Google, here are two description tags associated with top 10 results:

Tag #1: “Copywriting advice for bloggers and online marketers.”

In case you’re wondering, this is an effective description tag, which happens to belong to a very popular marketing blog.  No surprise.

Tag #2: “Blues icon BB King was once asked how he found his heart-warming, bone-chilling sound. It’s simple, he said. I only steal from the best. After.”

This may lead me to a very cool article or blog post, but doesn’t matter.  I’m not clicking because I don’t understand how this description is relevant to my search query.

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