It’s the marketers’ corporate bollocks de jour. They’ve suddenly woken up to the fact that people are exposed to and use more than one channel.
This has largely come from people who work in these channels realising that customers are seeing something on the website that differs from what’s being said on ATL or OOH. Better cohesion between these channels is needed to avoid confrontation on the phones or in store, potential losses and just a better customer experience.
Much like anything content, companies know they need this, but they don’t know what it means. And, more importantly, how to execute it. They’re all too pain aware – know the problem, but not the solution.
Most copywriters work within their restrictions. They know how much space they have to play with, so write to that boundary. Some may also be aware of the journey and awareness of the reader. However, the concept of writing for omni-channel is somewhat alien.
Big corporations are light years behind headless content solutions, which would need copywriters to reprogramme their thinking. In the meantime, getting into writing for omni-channel is good practice.
The main things to remember are:
Keep things punchy – don’t bog copy down with beautiful prose. We all know good copywriters sell a lifestyle, not product features. So keep this to stating what problem it solves in an engaging and accessible way. It’s rare you’ll have the luxury of a whole webpage, so keep it short. Cut to the chase. And be clear, don’t assume someone has read the thing that came before it.
Concertina content – break it up into headline, subtitle, intro (standfirst), USP 1 headline, USP 1 intro, USP 1 body copy, Ts&Cs, how it works, eligibility, CTA, promo 1, promo 1 benefit, promo 1 redemption, etc. Breaking it up like this means that when something changes, like a promo, product features, legals, it’s easy to identify where it is, so you can update it.
Create an audit – in every role I’ve been in, I’ve created a tracker, so we know what’s live and what’s on the page. In siloed working, this has been restricted to what’s on the website and app, but it needs to be across all channels. This isn’t up to the copywriter to maintain, as they won’t always have a holistic view of what’s happening (which is wrong), but one campaign or product launch could have a panoply of internal and external content providers. It’s up to the product owner to have an overarching view of what’s being said, where. But it’s good practice to keep track of what’s being produced within your own sphere. And, to make sure the copywriter becomes an SME/owner of that particular product.
Tag your work – as copy gets shunted from pillar to post during approvals, it finally ends up with the developer, content editor or marketing assistant who ultimately puts it where it needs to be. So make sure your copy is tagged so they know what’s going where. I normally do it in Word (more on this later), by putting the tag in square brackets. It’s up to you how to tag, you can use the traditional; title, subtitle, etc. or go for HTML tagging or if you’re really good, correspond it to the tags in your CMS.
Think digital and mobile first – when writing for omni-channel, it has to be agnostic. However, make sure your titles and long form copy are SEO ready.
Break out of Word – this is a hard one for me to say, but Word is basically unbeatable as a copywriter’s tool, but it’s starting to show its age. It’s much better to use collaborative workflow tools like Confluence or Yammer. This way, there is only one version of the truth, it’s easier to track content, it gets rid of all the challenges around reviewing and it’s easier to create a copy picklist.
Ensure consistency – there are lot of content producers on one product, from the people who update the internal knowledge base, the people who write the emails, the people who write the webpages and the people who write the ads. For something to be truly omni-channel, these need to sound the same tonally, use the same language and give the same info.
It needs to work alone, as well as together – you can’t assume that someone has seen the poster on the Tube or the Facebook ad. You can’t assume that whoever is on that page, know what it is you’re selling.
Also, be conscious that if someone does see that promoted post and clicks on the link, you don’t want to be repeating what they just read. People are time poor and have low attention spans, don’t waste their time by repeating yourself throughout the journey.
Omni-channel writing isn’t easy. You have to be forensic in your customer journey mapping and product knowledge. It’ll also need a shift in ways of working, as it’ll fail if channels are siloed and multiple copywriters are working on it, but not with each other.
If we’re armed with the knowledge of how to achieve something you can slowly influence marketing managers and product owners, one page at a time. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.
