For a long time, content marketing company Typeset felt there was a lack of understanding about what’s required to produce effective writing.
“We wanted to find out what habits, processes, and techniques make any business communicator more successful – and by successful we mean how to improve the return on the writing investment we make in our businesses,” Founder, Sarah Mitchell told BusyContinent.
“Typeset, with help from Mantis Research (specifically, our friend Michele Linn), conducted a global survey to learn more about what’s working and where we need to improve, especially in marketing, corporate communications and small-business writing efforts.”
So what concerning findings were revealed?
Business communicators are planning to produce more, despite uneven success. The survey found 76% of business communicators know what successful writing looks like, but only 45% think the content they publish is very/extremely effective.
“There is clearly a disconnect between the intent of our writing projects and the actual results we’re achieving. When we factor in plans by almost 60% of respondents to increase their written content in the next year, it shows us there’s room for improvement,” Sarah remarked.
Other key highlights:
Editorial rigour is a key indicator to writing effectiveness
The most effective organisations are more likely to focus on editorial efficiencies like having one person oversee all written content (65%), holding editorial meetings (67%) and outsourcing writing (50%) than those who are moderately effective.
Communicators grapple with the writing process
Moderately successful business communicators struggle to know what their audience wants to read (65%) and say maintaining consistency in their publishing (53%) and writing (49%) is difficult to do.
Search is not a priority for business communicators
This is quite possibly because it’s perceived as too hard. Despite 64% of respondents telling us they publish more than 75% of all their writing online, 60% of moderately effective communicators find writing for SEO difficult to do or don’t do it at all. In addition, less than a quarter of this group evaluate SEO ranking (24%) or backlinks (12%) when determining the effectiveness of written content.
You can find the full report and analysis here: http://bit.ly/StateofWritingResearch
