What should you expect out of a good content writer?

Step-2 in my recommended content development process is to set the right expectations. While the writer could share their expectations, here is what you should be asking for.

First, let’s understand what a content writer is capable of delivering. This helps us understand if your writer is under-delivering or doing an awesome job.

Here’s what a Content Writer can deliver:

The list of ‘can-s’ would be longer than ‘should-s’.

Sound research: Writers do a basic amount of online research which includes an overview of your business, industry, competition, and current trends. This gives them a grip to transform your ideas into objective-oriented transcripts.

Why do I call them transcripts? Because they are not ideating for you. You need to provide the core idea to a writer. And, the writer puts them into the right words.

Structure: What should your content asset begin and end with? And, everything in-between. That’s what makes up the structure of a content asset. Good writers also focus on every detail of a sentence structure. This includes grammar, vocabulary, voice, and tone, audience grasp, and whole intent of the asset. Each sentence repeats the brand intent and promise for a different purpose, audience, or rather a use case.

This means good content creators also work on anchors, triggers, validations, persuasion deltas, call-to-actions within a message. These elements would be seamlessly embedded into the message without making it apparent for your audience.

Outline recommendations with edited versions: Feels too obvious? If a writer is looking for outline recommendations, that means they are new to the business and need help. Nothing wrong with that. You can hire new writers and tune them to your needs. But, if you don’t have time for that, then look for experienced writers, who can recommend outlines for web pages, blogs, whitepapers, case studies, proposals, solution briefs, technical documents, and so on. This is part of Content UX.

Stay patient to get all edited versions and the final output to augment your marketing.

Great content writers add more value by recommending topics and titles for future topics. They align their output with your marketing objective and customer needs.

– Nischala Agnihotri

Question to your writer: Some hiring help.

Which type of content are you most comfortable with?

Website content, long-form copy, short-form copy, video scripts, storyboards, ad copywriter, end-to-end marketing bundled content, or any other specific type?

Preferred answer with a note.

I am most comfortable with ______________________________.

All content writers cannot do everything. And, if the writer says, “I can do it all’. Look for another 🙂

– Nischala Agnihotri

For a detailed checklist that tells you what you need from a content writer, during the content development process, download the free e-book ‘Make most out of your content writer’