Good Copywriting: The Secret to Empowering Your Brand - with Liz Strikwerda, Content Marketing Strategist, Swipeclock

What makes a good copywriting and how does it help strengthen your brand?

Our guest, Liz Strikwerda, Content Marketing Strategist at Swipeclock, answers this question and more in our podcast episode today! 

“Good digital copywriting gets right to the point. This is for your reader; and for Google and other search engines. If you're writing a blog post, for example, you want to jump right in and say what it's about. Everyone is busy and people have short attention spans. Make sure you use a lot of headings and lists to make your content scannable. In addition–even if your target customer has a high level of education–you want to write to an eighth-grade reading level. It doesn't matter what their background is, your audience wants things to be digestible.

It's also essential to understand your industry and target customers. There is no substitute for in-depth research. You can’t explain how your product or service can solve their problems unless you know what their problems are, so spend as much time learning as writing. It’s time well spent.

- Liz Strikwerda, Content Marketing Strategist, Swipeclock

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Transcript

Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:19
Welcome to The LifeLong Customer Podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. 

Ice Artificio: 0:23
And I'm your co-host, Ice Artificio.

Brad Hammond: 0:26
Today, we have Liz Strikwerda from Swipeclock. Liz, it's really nice to have you on. 

Liz Strikwerda: 0:31
Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Ice Artificio: 0:34
We're super excited to have you on, Liz. Thank you for being here. So before we get on this, as part of the interview, we'd like to introduce you to our guests. Can you tell us more about yourself, more of your story, and then after that, a little bit more about Swipeclock.

Liz Strikwerda: 0:48
Sure. I have been writing for many years in college. I got a degree in broadcast journalism. But when I got out of college, I started writing software manuals. And so it was more technical writing.

In 2007, however, I started writing exclusively digital content online for mainly B2B companies, but also some B2C. And I worked for some digital marketing agencies and then directly for some clients. And for the last three years, I've worked for Swipeclock. In Swipeclock, we make HR software specifically for small businesses to solve their mission-critical tasks, like time and labor, PTO tracking, hiring, all those things you have to do to manage your workforce. And so that's what our software does, and it does it very well.

My job is to explain that to our online visitors. I do write some printings for resellers. Swipeclock sold through a network of resellers since 2001. And just last year, we started going direct. So I write for our reseller partners for their clients. They're generally payroll companies and accounting firms, benefits brokers, PEOs. That's generally our resellers. But predominantly payroll providers resell. They sell our services and our software with their offerings. And then we also sell direct. So I write for direct clients right now, and that's just a little bit different. So that's my focus right now. Last couple of weeks, we're preparing for our reseller summit. So we're all very busy, the whole Swipeclock team, making this a great event for our resellers. 

Ice Artificio: 2:30
That sounds like a lot of copywriting. So with Swipeclock, you mentioned you were talking to partners. So how do you create copy for that? Is it different? I'm sure it's very different from software manuals. But how would you say it's different from all the other types of copywriting that you've done in the past?

Liz Strikwerda: 2:48
Well, you have to think of two customers in mind. So in this case, for a SaaS software system that another small business is selling, not always small, but generally, we have to give them their value proposition, which is that they'll keep their customer longer when you sell more services and that you can solve more of their problems so you can move from just a service provider to be like their business advisor, a trusted business advisor. So I need to explain that proposition to the reseller. 

And then I have to help them sell it to their clients, which are small businesses. So the marketing that we provide, we do complete marketing for our resellers that they can co-brand or they can completely white label it themselves. So some of it is partner-facing and some of it's client-facing. So if it's client-facing, it's generally how I talk to my direct customers. 

Brad Hammond: 3:46
Love that. So let's dive into today's topic, which is how good copywriting improves your brand. Let's first talk about what is good copywriting. How would you define good copywriting versus, say, bad copywriting or mediocre copy? And then let's dive into, you know, how that improves upon your brand.

Liz Strikwerda: 4:07
Okay. I think you have to address how people visit websites. So in years past, maybe you could put a little more background. Now you've got a couple of seconds before your web visitor is going to leave. So I think good copywriting dives right into a topic and tells them exactly what they're going to get because everyone's busy. Maybe some of our target customers, maybe some business owners, CEOs would try to find a white paper. Of course, that would be different.

But what I mainly write is website copy and blogs. And we get a lot of organic visitors to our website through our blog. So if you're writing a blog post, you want to jump right in and say exactly what it's about and that's for your reader; and for Google, for search engines. So it's conversational. Never use a long complicated word if you can use a short one. And there's great tools for good copywriting. But you want it to be easily scannable so you want to break it up with a lot of headings. You don't want long, complicated sentences, even though you're talking to someone with a high level of education, or maybe you're not B2B, generally, you still want to write to an eighth-grade reading level. And they've analyzed that, that people stay on the page longer.

It doesn't matter what their background is. They want things to just be digestible. So I continually update. There's some blog posts that I wrote three years ago that I update every two months. And I'm always simplifying. Always simplifying it, making it easier to understand, and also just good marketing. So you look at just your basic marketing and that is you articulate your value and you sell the solution and you solve the problem. Instead of jumping right in what I can do, you jump in, how does this solve your problem? What can I do for you before you say all the great things that your product does?

Brad Hammond: 6:00
I love that. I think those mechanics of what creates good copywriting is really good to talk about. And if we think about the subjects that you talk about as you're copywriting, how do you do that content planning? Could you kind of walk us through some of your process there in terms of what to write about and how to talk about and what subjects to feature and all that kind of stuff?

Liz Strikwerda: 6:22
Uh huh. So because we are writing about the workplace and about HR, all my editorial calendars were thrown away with COVID. So my process is kind of an art and a science. With my marketing team, I create an editorial calendar because sometimes it's based on a product feature. Often, I'll need to put a post for that. But I usually have at least six months to a year, and then probably twice a month, I put something else in. But at least I start with my plan.

Okay. Then I use tools. So I get my subjects and that can be there based on what's going on in HR. Like there might've been a new law passed for compliance posts or a new product feature. And then I use all the tools I have to do the SEO. So that's a process with tools. So I use tools to analyze the keywords, to analyze the competitor content. And then once I write a draft, I use it to bring it up to a grade for my different tools, with whatever they're measuring. If they're measuring SEO or reading or how it compares to the other articles on the first page.

So that's very scientific. So it first starts with the editorial calendar. So you want a plan in place then just plan to change it every week when the head of the marketing team says, oh, wait a minute, we're doing this. Can you please write something really fast on this? And so hopefully that was enough explanation on that.

Brad Hammond: 7:48
I love that. What are some of those tools that you use? What should other happy writers out there and content marketers be using?

Liz Strikwerda: 7:55
I use Topic. And just so you know, Swipeclock has no connection to any of these tools I'm telling you. But I use Topic, which I can go in there and do keyword research. So I'll think of a topic like say I'm writing on time and attendance for remote workers. There's a hundred. You can put a hundred keywords that have to do with that. So I'll go in and see what has low competition, high search volume. So I go get to see the numbers on that, then I'll tweak that. And often, the keyword I was going to write on, I completely change that because I might see that I can't even get close to owning that keyword. But then some other keywords we ranked first for some of my blog posts have for a couple of years. 

So I use Topic. So I go in and it creates a brief for me. And then once I have a draft, I can put that in there.  And it compares it to the other articles on the first page. I say other V articles on the first page because I haven't published mine yet. But that's what I'm hoping for. And so it'll tell me a word length. That would be good. And it shows what everybody else is covering. And so I can tweak all my copy till I get it up. And it will analyze it using all their metrics. And then I have my A-plus grade.

Or we have a WordPress-based blog. So then I put it in WordPress and then I use Yoast, which is good for some things and other- you know, some of the real digital specialists on my team say don't go buy everything Yoast says, but I do like Yoast because it will analyze my keyword density and different things in the editing window for WordPress. It's just kind of nice to have that there. I use that. 

And then my digital team, the other people on the marketing team use a lot of tools like heatmaps that we can see where our website visitors are. So if I see them on a product page or a pricing page and see what they're on, what they're clicking, I can take all that information for my blog posts.

For instance, we saw we're getting a lot of interest on our pricing page, but I hadn't been linking a lot to that mainly because we'd been selling through resellers. So pricing wasn't something we did a lot on our blog because of our resellers. But now that we have a blog for direct for workforce, [inaudible] HRMS solution, we can talk about pricing. 

So a couple of weeks ago, we went through and we did a lot of linking to the pricing page. And then we can also see with our analytics, I'm sure we use Google Analytics. I get a report assembled for me by our digital specialist, a digital marketing specialist. So I'm not sure exactly what tools he uses. But then I can see what our visitors are for the blog, what the bounce rate and all those basic SEO metrics.

And then as I tweak and update my posts, I take all that into account. And then let's see, what is the Google query one? Search Console. Yeah, for the query. And so what I think is interesting is you can do all your SEO, you do all that, everything you know to do. And then you post your blog and you see that the queries might not really match up to what you thought and stuff that has been interesting.

For instance, we've had posts on compliance, which is always an important topic in HR and working and managing employees. So many of our posts- and when I came to Swipeclock, there were hundreds already posts that I now took over to update. And some of those, we got thousands of visitors a month, but when we looked at the queries, we saw that's not our target market, it was employees.

Like a post on breaks and meal laws? Well, it was employees saying my employer's cheating out of a break. So I had to go change these to appeal more to the employer, to our customer, and give it that sort of twist. So I think a blogger, if they go in and just go buy, you've got to look at your queries, which will tell you if you're really connecting with what you were trying to do. Does that make sense? 

Brad Hammond: 11:35
Yeah, totally. I love that. So you plan out the content and then you write it, and then you do all this technical stuff, keyword research, everything to make sure it actually gets distributed and viewed and read by people. How do you track performance then once it's all planned and written and launched and all this? How do you measure it in measuring success and all that? 

Liz Strikwerda: 11:55
Well, more tools that other people on my team use. And I am happy to find exactly what those are because they compiled them for me into a report. And I'm not sure all the tools they use. I'm sure they probably use SEMrush and different ones. But then I can see our organic visitors compared to our pay-per-click, direct source. And I get all those in different graphical formats.

And that has been really good because, for instance, we acquired an applicant tracking company two years ago. So I got their blog. I needed to incorporate all these. I think there was maybe 200 posts into our blog on applicant tracking. And they had some posts that had really gotten a lot of SEO traction that now I have taken, updated for new product features and just new factors in the employment world.

And like I was telling Ice was I never would've guessed which post. We get thousands of visitors, for instance, on a post about interview scorecards to score candidates when you're interviewing them, which is probably something I wouldn't have picked to write about, but consistently for now over two years, that has been a top post. 

So be open. That would be my advice. When you- also, if you're in a company and you're writing for them, and they're acquiring companies, you're going to get their blogs that you probably incorporate into yours. It's in your product depending- maybe you'll keep the other website, just depending on how you do it. But then you have a whole other library of content that you need to update for your brand, but you might just have some SEO gold in there. You might have some great things that will help your SEO. So that's buying applicant stack when we acquired that, that really helped our- cause they had a good blog with a lot of organic reach.

Then we launched a new WorkforceHub blog last winter. So we had a Swipe blog a long time before I came to the company. And we launched our WorkforceHub blog, product focus for direct sales, and it already has so many visitors because we all had all that organic traction and, you know, organic traction sticks with you. Pay-per-click dies off when you quit buying that. 

But we have good organic, and I know we got a new digital marketing that heads that. And he was really- said, wow, this is a brand new website, I'll run- we have all this traction because of the organic traction that we have built up with our Swipeclock blog. 

Brad Hammond: 14:18
I love that. So for other content marketers out there that are creating content and they're doing the research or creating great copy and all this stuff, what are some of the traps that they could run into? What are the landmines that you can hit? What advice would you give to kind of guide around a few of these?

Liz Strikwerda: 14:36
It's always good to look at your competition, but I wouldn't copy them exactly. And I think you can't expect to write until you really know your industry. And I've been studying HR and HR software for now almost four years, and I'm still learning things. So I think time spent researching is almost more important than the writing. Because for instance, I listen to all the HR podcasts, all the main ones, and I read so much. And you need to get so much of the knowledge so you can start having your own ideas and synthesizing everything.

So I would say put a lot more time in than you think to research rather than just going- if you could look generally, and since I've written for so many companies in so many industries, I always had to go look at what else is out there in the space. And you will find that 90%, they're all writing the exact same things. They're all those posts because they know that people click on the headlines and they know how to craft a headline to get the most clicks and all that. And you just get a lot of the same. And it's useful. It's good content. But it's really rare to find someone in your space that is saying something new. 

And that would be a thought leader that has so much more experience, I would say decades. For instance, Josh Bersin in the HR space. He is an expert on HR technology, has been for decades. And I find that he's usually saying something very unique perceptive and also forecasting it in the future and kind of predicting how the industry will go. 

So I would say spend more time than you think you need to to learn, and learn your customer. I'm always talking to small business owners. Always. Are you doing your hiring? What are you using? Do you have employees working at home? Because right now, our staff work will help them track, and manage, onboard employees, remote teams, hybrid. And now that all these companies are, are we bringing employees back? Are they going to still be working at home? They're trying to manage these flexible working environments and conditions. 

So spend more time learning about your customer. And if you're in a big enough company that you have a marketing team that makes your customer personas and all that in sales, find out where they are. If someone has those, if it's an outside agency, maybe they have done those. I find that a lot of time in companies, and especially ones that are growing quickly, you've got resources there that you might not know about. So find out what's been done, update it, and just put the time in to learn because there's no substitute for learning about your subject.

Brad Hammond: 17:06
Love that. Well, as we're wrapping up here, any last words of wisdom or advice or closing remarks here?

Liz Strikwerda: 17:13
I would say your best pieces, give them legs. Continue to update them because my best posts, five or 10 of our posts get 90% of our visitors. And so I update them. I used to update them every six months or so. Now I'm going every couple of months because the world of work is changing so quickly. 

So I would say, just keep tweaking them, keep making them better. And your time is a lot better spent than continually coming up with new content. You know, Neil Patel, who Ice and I talked about him that we follow him. They'll tell you that you just keep updating those posts. So when you put time into research and write a good post, use it. Turn it into a white paper, turn it into an ebook, turn it into an infographic.

And then you can have a whole package. You know, if you're doing a campaign, we create those for our resellers. Every month, we create a complete campaign in a box, we call it. And it's got an ebook, and it's got a blog post, and it's got social posts and it's got an infographic. If you're an entrepreneur and you are the marketer, you run your whole business and you do your website, think in campaigns, think in how you can do a complete campaign around a piece of content, and that you'll get a lot more use out of it and your time will be-

Brad Hammond: 18:27
Totally. That's great advice. And a quick follow-up question to that. What's the process to update your content? Do you just go through back like those top posts and do some more research and see if you can add more to it? 

Liz Strikwerda: 18:40
Well, yeah, you would update if your branding has changed. You would update if you have new features. If you are in an industry that's affected by compliance issues and legal, which pretty much everyone, you would update for something happening. 

And now with COVID, because the whole world of work has been turned upside down in just continual disruption, I can look at posts even from, say, January 2020. And it doesn't say anything about it. If we're talking about mobile employees, it's just mobile employees. Now it's 80% of your workforce, except the people that have to be onsite or those companies that their jobs can't be done at home. So it's a full holistic approach for all those different reasons. And it can always- you'll always find something. When I go back and look, I'm always changing. I'm never satisfied with what I've written. I can always make it better.

Brad Hammond: 19:28
Love that. Do you make a note that this is updated? Or do you just update it and you wouldn't notice if you're- 

Liz Strikwerda: 19:34
No, I keep track of everything. It's all documented in different project management software and in WordPress and in my own spreadsheets. So very well-documented because we have hundreds, I think we have over 600 posts. Wow. I have a lot to manage. So yeah, you want to, you want to take very good notes because you'll forget you think you updated something, you changed your product name, or you just continue to produce and you go wait a minute, that will keep this up. 

Brad Hammond: 20:05
So you have 600 posts. Which one gets updated then? How do you decide which one needs to be updated? 

Liz Strikwerda: 20:10
The most visits, the ones that get the most visits. 

Brad Hammond: 20:13
I see. 

Liz Strikwerda: 20:15
And then you want to do your backlinks and your cross-linking with those. So often, you're just updating links because, hey, I wrote a post two years ago. I was linking to other blog posts and I wasn't linking to product pages because now it's on a website that's new that we didn't have the product pages, and they've all changed.

So you might just go in and update your links, and to higher performing posts and newer. So if you went in, you had a post from two years ago and you're like, this was a good one. We ought to update that. Go to what you linked to. Those are probably not what you want to link to now.

Ice Artificio: 20:51
I love that. Always optimizing what's performing. That's really good advice.

Liz Strikwerda: 20:55
Yeah.

Brad Hammond: 20:57
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing all your wisdom and insights here. I really appreciate it, Liz. 

Ice Artificio: 21:03
Thank you. 

Liz Strikwerda: 21:04
It's been a lot of fun. Thanks, Brad and Ice.

Brad Hammond: 21:08
Totally.

Ice Artificio: 21:09
Absolutely.