What Is a Content Editor (and Why Every Small Business Needs One)?
Content marketing is a proven, yet, underutilized small business marketing strategy. When you consistently produce high-quality, engaging content, you will attract more qualified leads to your website. While many small business owners would appreciate help with their content marketing, they also have tight budgets and may wonder if a content editor is worth the expense.
How a Content Editor Can Help Your Small Business
Content editors fill a dual role. Their primary goal is to refine your writing to ensure it’s accurate, engaging, and free of grammatical errors. In addition, they are viewing your content as a marketing professional, making sure your content is positioned correctly and aligned with your marketing strategy. Your content editor will use SEO techniques to improve the visibility of your content and ensure that your content reaches the right audience.
Only 57% of small businesses report doing any content marketing.
The Number One Way to Undermine Your Marketing Content
An essential part of any effective small business marketing strategy is high-quality content that is free from spelling errors, grammatical errors, and disorganized structure. Errors in the copy distract readers from your message and ultimately, diminish your credibility. Even minor errors may signal to readers a lack of attention to detail, leading readers to question whether they can trust you.
If you have ever read book reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, you know how damaging errors and typos are. The reviews of typo-ridden ebooks tend to be harsh, regardless of the writing style, character development, plot structure, or other factors. This translates into lower ratings for books that may have had great content but were instead rated poorly for errors that should have been caught.
To establish trust with your audience, your small business needs to publish consistent, clear, concise, and accurate content. A content editor will ensure that all your written communications are high-quality and, at a minimum, won’t detract from your core message. The reader will be able to enjoy copy that is easy to understand, focused, and engaging.
Content editors also enhance your image by fact-checking and ensuring the accuracy of your marketing assets. They verify facts, links, statistics, and sources so that your written content will earn the reader’s trust. Misinformation, even if unintentional, can cause significant reputational damage.
Content Editors Create Content Aligned with Your Brand
Every small business has a distinctive flair derived from its brand personality, values, and identity. In writing, those collective brand qualities are expressed in your brand voice. If, for example, you want your brand to convey friendliness, your writing should have a warm conversational tone. To achieve this, your content editor may, for example, address the reader in the 2nd person (you) and use simple language to attain a conversational feel.
Once you have established a voice that matches your brand identity, that writing style must be consistent across all your written communications (e.g., social media posts, email promotions, newsletters, etc.). Using tools, such as style guides and style sheets, the content editor can ensure the writing style and tone is consistent across all platforms and aligns with your brand.
Techniques to Make Your Content Easier to Find and Read
A strong content marketing strategy uses up-to-date SEO techniques that help your content rank higher in searches, making it easier for your ideal reader to find you. Good content editors seamlessly weave keywords into your copy so that your writing is smooth and natural.
Content editors must stay up-to-date on SEO best practices and know where search engines expect to find your keywords. They can strategically adjust the content to maximize the impact of your chosen keywords. Using effective SEO techniques is a great way to get more mileage from your content without resorting to expensive Google Ads.
To make content more accessible for readers, consider making your writing easy to skim. Of course, we’d all like to believe that our copy is so interesting that it’s read in its entirety in one sitting (you’ve managed to ignore all the distractions in the room while you’ve been reading this post, right?). The truth is that readers are bombarded daily with more information than they can process — they have to skim.
Content editors can make their reader’s lives easier by strategically structuring content that allows readers to skim through the piece and quickly find what they are looking for. Time-pressed readers appreciate the easy-to-follow structure. Editors use headers, subheaders, bullet point lists, and short paragraphs to enhance readability.
Finally, your content editor can liaise with outside writers and designers to coordinate the various tasks for a project. Your editor will collate and organize the various parts to achieve a consistent, unified result.
Maybe you agree that a content editor would be helpful, but is it a worthwhile investment for a small business? Following are 5 reasons why hiring a content editor is an investment that will pay off for small businesses:
Save time: Small business owners usually perform many roles within their companies. By necessity, they are a jack-of-all-trades. Outsourcing some of your content management tasks frees up time so you can turn your attention to other high-priority areas.
Build stronger relationships: Well-crafted, focused content connects with your audience. Your content can educate, answer frequently asked questions, and address customer pain points. Your readers will appreciate that you are helping to solve their problems, which increases their loyalty to your company.
Boost audience engagement: Content editors know how to generate attention using various writing techniques, such as how to create a hook, tell an engaging story, and craft a call to action. These techniques, along with others, generate a sense of flow that holds the reader’s interest.
Enhance online visibility: Using SEO best practices, your content editor can improve the performance of your online content so your site will show among the top 10 results. This is an affordable way to generate highly qualified leads.
Gain fresh perspective: Content editors can offer advice on marketing strategy based on their experiences of what works and what doesn’t. They can suggest how to turn a poor-performing post into one that generates high-quality leads.
In today’s highly competitive environment, small businesses need to find ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing strategies. Hiring a content editor to help create strategic, focused, and high-quality content will help position your company as a trusted subject matter expert. In a business environment is increasingly transactional, you will stand out as the go-to organization for solutions to the problems that small business owners are facing. With a content editor publishing engaging, error-free, optimized content for you, you can focus on other high-priority projects that will help your business grow.