Inkovations: Copywriting strategy

Go to the gym every day! Never drink gin! Delete Facebook!

No. I’m not a big fan of wildly optimistic New Year’s resolutions either. With the notable exception of January 2001 when I gave up smoking as a student (it was either that, or give up electricity) I’m just not very good at sticking to them. Also I don’t do the gym and wouldn’t...

“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one” John Steinbeck

One of the key pillars to growing a successful brand is a deep understanding of who you’re there to serve.

Who are your users, customers or...

As Maya Angelou famously put it - “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

We all like to think we’re rational creatures. We all pride ourselves on our clear thinking and intelligence (which are important, and uniquely human) but the science...

As a follow-up to our previous post “26 Vanilla, Vague and Overused Words That Weaken Your Web Copy" here are a few words that may have been fresh, interesting and wacky at first but have become total clichés over...

In this installment of our brand language series I’m going to contradict myself slightly.

It’s perfectly fine to use run-of-the-mill words sometimes. Sometimes you need to ‘say what it does on tin’.

So, as well as your lexicon of...

In this next instalment of our brand language series we’re thrilled to bring you this guest post from Jo Gifford of Killer Content Academy- we know you’ll love her as much as we...

Last week I wrote about how easy it is to fall back on the same bland, well-worn phrases that everyone else in your industry uses.

Instead, I recommended that you build a lexicon of interesting words that express your brand personality and help you communicate with a consistent tone-of-voice.

Your

In a tone of voice workshop I ran several years ago, I tasked the group with using the tone of voice of different celebrities. The funniest one by far was the press release written in the personality of Jamie Oliver. He has such a distinctive way with words, everything’s “pukka”, “rockin”, “outrageous” or “new stylee” in Jamie’s world....

Before I started copywriting, I believed in the myth of the starving artist writer. I thought you had to wait in agony for an idea to peak, like a surfer waiting for a wave on a glassy sea. When that rare crest of inspiration came your way, then you must ride it for dear life, lest it be your last!

Then I became a copywriter. Writing was...

We all know that creating useful and engaging content is crucial for our businesses, but it’s so easy to get overwhelmed.

Hands up if you have (approximately) a squillion billion half-formed ideas in your Dropbox or just hanging around in your head? Yep, us too.

So let’s look at some ways of making content creation easier on...