I recently watched a LinkedIn Learning seminar on Marketing Copywriting and had to write a summary on it. What I learned from this assignment is below, as well as how you can apply it to social media marketing!! Here is a link to the video if you would like to watch it yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-to-write-marketing-copy/next-steps?u=2109516
Summarizing: less is more
Summarizing is important in social media marketing, as you may need to take something like a whole event and compress it into one social media post. I learned that when improving my summarizing, I need to focus on using my own words and pulling less from the whole thing. Ultimately, I wouldn’t take whole quotes from an event and put them in my post, but rather use my own words and experience. I appreciate my classmates constructive feedback in pointing this out so I can work on improving it in the future. I need to differentiate summarizing between papers that I write with facts and references.
Format
Remember to use good format in your social media posts! Depending on your platform, you will use different layouts and formats but you always want to make sure that they are easy to read. If your writing is hard to follow, people will give up and not read your content.
Grammar is also very important in social media marketing. Download a widget like Grammarly so that it can check your spelling, punctuation, etc. before you submit a post.
My classmates all said that my writing is easy to follow, formatted nicely, and I had little to no grammar mistakes. This is the first thing people notice and will determine whether you are taken seriously. I used Grammarly to check my work, so I can confirm that it works good based on classmate feedback!
Marketing Copywriting
Marketing copywriting is an advertising type of writing used to persuade an audience to purchase a product or service. There are three ways to classify copywriting: by collateral, by medium and by style. The next way to classify copywriting is by medium. This includes online, print, radio, and in-person speech. However, social media or website is not a form of medium, but rather a channel. It is just the pipe of where the message passes but not the environment where it is received. There are obviously many styles to appeal to an audience, and you can see those different styles on advertisements in all medium and collateral.
Headlines grab attention
Headlines are very useful for social media marketing! They are the first thing you see so remember:
- Not be mysterious
- Mostly avoid fear mongering
- Use a few formulas
- Write lots of headlines
- A headline isn’t a caption
What I learned
Overall, I found this LinkedIn Learning seminar very useful. The most useful tool I found in this seminar is the section on writing headlines. Ultimately, creative title and subheading titles is something I struggle with in my writing for school and work, so having this tool is useful to me moving forward with that. A specific example is that for my current job, I have to come up with titles for events on posters, along with a subheading to intrigue people to come to these events. I find this very difficult to do but moving forward I will definitely write a list of headlines as I usually just keep rewriting the one headline. I will actively think to not be mysterious, but rather direct and clear while staying intrigued. In my charters for my events, I do have to think of social media and poster headlines, and I think the tips in here will be super useful.
My classmates said that this was a good conclusion as I included an example that is directly related to myself and was able to tie in the whole idea to myself. This allows you to relate to your audience and for you audience to take more away from the paper.
I had an event in December called “Latin Night”. My headline was “Is the weather getting you down? Come beat the cold with a spicy Latin party at the Nest.” It is not mysterious as I say what is happening and where, it drags in the reader, and not have any fear. I believe this is a good example.
Lurie, Ian. 2014, May 30. Learning to Write Marketing Copy. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-to-write-marketing-copy/next-steps?u=2109516
Marketing with J 