Blog

Turning words into fame (even if they don’t come with an award trophy)

social buzz

When it comes to scheduling tweets, there is more to it than you think. Every message you come across opens a new window onto endless writing and content idea opportunities. Since we were already helping our client Woodhouse (a Marshalls specialist business, designers of street furniture, lighting, and signage) with social media management, we decided to take this activity into a new level: ghostwriting.

With this in mind we started a writing collaboration with Woodhouse and introduced a monthly production of blog articles which soon enough taught us a valuable lesson: you can learn a thing or two about blogging from lighting designers and the architecture industry.

Turning words into fame (but without the trophy)

Where do you start when you have to reach an audience you don’t already know? When you have to write not just inspiring but also knowledgeable pieces, over 1,000 words long, about psychogeography, sustainability, or green architecture… You use social media!

You listen, you analyse and measure the success of topics, timings and reading tendencies to fully understand readership habits. With this knowledge in mind, you produce targeted content that gets noticed (by publishers, editors and journalists) and make others inspired and talkative.

woodhouse siteIn our case this is what lead to success: our content strategy for Woodhouse was recognised in October 2014 by the Social Buzz Awards, one of the UK’s biggest social media awards. The innovative way in which we use social media as a listening, discovering and distribution tool made us fair rivals for MTV, Paddy Power, and The Children’s Society in the Best Blog category. Sadly on this occasion it wasn’t us going home with the award, as believe it or not we had to gracefully concede it to Paddy Power, this year’s winner.

But you know what, it’s not the trophy that counts. For us, we were a winning team already, as we discovered the perfect recipe for creating nice fat content that has a positive impact on a business: a 209% of increase in page views to the blog since 2012. Out of this experience, we have created a unique content case study, as we have really come to understand the publishing process, and built the perfect framework which works for us and our clients.

Most of all, we have learned that the ingredients behind sharable posts are passion, teamwork, a balance of various skills, and client involvement (big kudos here to Romy Rawlings, Guy Harding and Jon Scott for their ongoing help!).

Need a hand with your blogging experiment? Follow these tips:

  1. Instead of hiding from the writing task, face it straight on
  2. Treat your readers with respect
  3. Never write anything which you wouldn’t want your family to read
  4. Always remember that the key to successful blogging is unique and useful information
  5. When writing, never forget that your posts should do at least one of the following: educate, entertain or engage
  6. Write your blog posts in the way that you’d actually speak
  7. “The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.” – David Ogilvy

Now it’s your turn: create, publish and amaze!

By Kasia Piekut

About markmaking*

mark-making* is an award-winning creative agency specialising in branding, campaigns and communications