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Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

We know the score as content writers (and copywriters, for that matter); we’re writing a block of words for you, and of course, we’re expecting feedback. Of course we are. We’re doing it for you, after all. We’re not spending our time writing about ‘WAN and IT cloud infrastructures’ or ‘open banking’ just because we necessarily enjoy it.

We want you to put your eyes on our draft and give your feedback so that we can make those final tweaks and — basically — move onto the…

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Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

Who in their right mind writes a piece straight off, and that’s it — done?

No one, that’s who.

That’s because revising/editing/refining what you’ve done — however, you want to describe it — is at the very heart of it all.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “the only kind of writing is rewriting.”

If you imagine a piece of content to be like a block of raw material a sculptor might work on — that raw material needs to be chipped away at and ‘shaped’, until it…

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Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

If part, or indeed, all of your role is dedicated to editing stuff, you’ll know that it’s always a disappointment to receive drafts that look a bit like this:

My relationship with ‘content’ has revolved around writing or editing it — in some form or another—since around 2006. But at the time, I had no aspiration to be someone who blogs, or otherwise ‘broadcasts’ their thoughts to an online audience.

I just did marketing. Then I went home and didn’t write anything.

Then I just did digital marketing. Then I went home and didn’t write anything.

And that was fine.

Wind on to early 2016, and one day I decided to try and build my own site. Building the first iteration in under a day, I added a ‘Blog’…

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Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

My story as a user of LinkedIn might well be similar to yours.

I’ve been an active user of the platform for just over 10 years now, and I’m a firm fan of it.*

It’s an undisputed social media powerhouse platform; an essential channel for anyone wanting to generate leads, build new relationships and raise brand awareness.

*bar the odd rant about certain aspects of their user experience.

It’s been an excellent place for me to make new connections, raise my profile a little bit as someone…

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Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content. 

Since content marketing moved from the more rudimentary, offline forms into a digital form (c. 2004), and with drivers such as subscription-based content marketing platforms and the decline of cold sales pushes elevating the practice into the mainstream, the level of focus placed on the importance of content has continued to gather pace. And that’s no bad thing.

However, in my experience, while organisations and big corporations might have finally gotten more of a grip on the notion that content is needed to provide the backbone for…

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Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

Killer content — is there such a thing?

I would argue not.

During one of my turns as host of #ContentclubUK, I must have had this on my mind, because it was the first question I asked.

I think that, around that time, these two words were being used a lot like a thing, and I was feeling a bit irked by it. I’m not 100% sure why. Perhaps I resented the sensationalist undertones of the phrase — it sounded a little bit clickbaity.

You only…

Crafting social ads isn’t rocket science

But… there is a bit of a knack to it.

And, linked to this is the ability to think about the following:

a) What makes for an impactful ad (which includes your messaging and creative)

AND

b) How to optimise ads so they perform the best they can on your social platform/s of choice

Here are some questions/a checklist you can use to ‘sense check’ any paid social ads you have in production (there are actually a few more questions I could include here, but the below are based around the issues I believe…