How We Write Our Articles: Approach, Objectives, and Basic Rules

Our mission is to deliver excellent end-user experience to our client’s customers, as well as ours. All our articles are embodiments of our mission and values.

Read more about: Our movement, objectives, and values.

Our approach

As a marketing company, we realize that our only proof of brilliant end-user experience is the high engagement of users with our client brands, as well as ours. We achieve this high-level engagement through innovative marketing methods that set us apart from traditional marketing firms.

As a result, everything we do (internally and in public view) is designed to inspire active engagement from our end users. This includes the way we write our blogs, how we present our marketing assets on social media, our email marketing approach, etc.

This writing guideline is created to help align all our articles to our approach.

The main objectives of our articles

Every article on our blog is written to accomplish three objectives.

To educate:

Marketing is a complex field, with broad branches (e.g. advertising, outbound, social media, email, etc.). Interestingly, it’s a holistic field. This means that all areas of marketing have to be executed together as one multi-layer process. Yes, things can spin out of control fast.

With every article, we chip off an important concept of marketing and break it down well enough for a 12-year-old to understand.

We know our audiences are not 12-year-olds. However, our position is that, as humans, we seek to understand things to their most fundamental levels. And delivering that fundamental understanding is the goal of every article we write.

To guide:

While we break down marketing concepts for our readers to understand, we also offer guidance on how to execute these concepts. Therefore, our articles are practical. They are written to furnish our readers with the know-how of each marketing concept under discussion.

We believe that learning is a good thing, but doing is far better.

To engage:

As mentioned earlier, high engagement is the only proof of effective user experience. As we educate and guide, we also offer clickables, recommendations, and interactives to help our readers engage with our website. This helps them gain a better understanding of our services, trust in our expertise, and enjoy their experiences on and off our website.

Our target audience

We write to help marketing heads of early-stage and growth-stage startups understand and approach marketing from a different and better perspective.

These marketing heads include CMOs, Creative Directors, Marketing Managers, Marketing Directors, CEOs, etc.

Our preferred language, dialect, and tone

Although we have a global team of creatives, our articles are primarily published in North American English.

We maintain a friendly, conversational tone in our articles. We also realize that we’re a B2B brand, so we don’t publish vulgar words and deeply opinionated articles.

To put it in perspective, we write like we’re having a conversation with a colleague.

Worth checking out: Dialects of English: A Comprehensive List.

Our basic referencing rule

The internet is flooded with derivatives. This makes it hard for users to find a trustworthy source of practical information.

Derivatives, in this context, refer to articles that are imitations and spin-offs of original works often with little or no credit to the original source of the idea.

We do things differently. Most of our articles are driven by experience. We document our learning processes and teach from our arsenal of knowledge and experiences. However, our practices are often established and supported by studies.

It is our internal principle to find the original studies supporting our practices and reference them accordingly, through do-follow hyperlinks.

The structure of our articles

For good skimming, easy comprehension, and excellent overall experience, all our articles satisfy a basic multi-level structure.

Consider reading: Microsoft’s Guide to Writing Scannable Content

Sentences

We always keep it short and to the point. Typically, our sentences contain fewer than 20 words on average.

Paragraphs

We also keep our paragraphs short. Usually, every paragraph in our articles contains fewer than 5 sentences.

Sections

Each section of our article is designed to address a specific idea. At times, one idea could have a few spin-off ideas. When that happens, we also address each “spin-off idea” in a specific section of its own, identified with subheadings.

Again, our sections are short and to the point. We usually maintain fewer than 5 paragraphs per section.

Framework

As brief as they may be, a few sections in our articles contain a set of high-impact paragraphs. They are written with our internally developed S.F.I.T. framework. This framework is designed to help writers tactfully communicate complex ideas to the end users in a relatable manner.

Read about: The S.F.I.T. Framework for Writing High-Impact Paragraphs

Hyperlinks

As mentioned earlier, our articles are driven by experience and supported by studies. It’s standard publishing practice to reference the source of those studies through hyperlinks. So, it’s certain to find those links embedded in our articles.

Interestingly though, there are ideas that are originally developed by us and are already published on our website. When these ideas are referred to in articles, they are also referenced through hyperlinks.

Given that extensive articles are likely to have hyperlink clusters, we’ve developed an internally accepted hyperlinking practice. Within our articles, succeeding hyperlinks are typically 100 or more words apart. This is designed to improve the search engine crawlability of each blog post.

Recommendations and quotes

Our articles provide helpful information to users. However, we detest the thought of wasting users’ time or boring them with information that might be too basic or patronizing.

We also understand that some readers may require a little more explanation of certain concepts that may be too basic for other readers. Therefore, we offer recommendations for further reading in the form of quotes within our articles.

While these recommendations help readers gain a more practical understanding of an idea, they are strategically positioned to inspire and track user engagements (e.g. click-throughs) on our website.

Furthermore, remember that each section of an article is short and to the point. So, we often include recommendations for further reading at the end of sections that could be better understood with, well… further reading.

Grammar and presentations

Although our preferred language, dialect, and tone are expressly defined in the preceding section, we strive to maintain uniformity across all our articles. This is particularly important because it helps end users to easily get accustomed to our work.

For our article to remain consistent, our writers also adhere to these 5 grammar rules.

Punctuations

All our articles follow basic English punctuation rules. However, there’s an esoteric debate about which comma is best for writing. Our blog favors the Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma) over its Cambridge alternative.

Consider reading: Some Insights on the Use of Commas from Microsoft 

Also, it’s very unlikely to find the semi-colon in our articles. Our reason for that is simple.

Semi-colons are used to separate two parts of a compound sentence. Writers that use semi-colons often make the mistake of writing run-on sentences. As a solution, we’ll rather write both parts of a compound sentence as separate, stand-alone sentences.

Also, semi-colons are commonly used for listing items within a sentence. Using them for this purpose defeats our goal of keeping our sentences short and to the point. So, we’ll rather use bullet points in this case.

Read about: The Basic English Punctuation Rules.

Contractions

As mentioned earlier, our articles maintain a friendly, professional tone. Nevertheless, we avoid the mistake of sounding too formal to end-users. Contractions are our way of doing that.

We prefer to write phrases (and words) in their accepted short forms, rather than spelling them out completely. A perfect example is the word “cannot”, of which we prefer the less formal contraction, “can’t.” “Might have” is another example of a contractive phrase that we prefer to write as “might’ve.”

Acronyms

Acronyms are generally accepted on our blog. However, the first time we mention an acronymized phrase, we typically spell it out in full and include the acronym as a parenthesis.

For instance, “According to the London School of Economics (LSE)… The same LSE report is supported by studies done at Cambridge University…”

Capitalization

The titles of our articles are written in title cases. This means that every word in the title (except prepositions and conjunctions) is capitalized.

However, the rule doesn’t apply to subheadings, which are written in normal sentence cases. This means that subheadings are written like regular sentences, only that they aren’t ended with a period (also known as full-stop).

Writing numbers, currencies, and percentages in articles

Except we’re referring to large numbers (millions and billions), all numbers are written in their numeric form.

We also don’t spell out currencies (e.g. Dollars) nor do we use their acronyms (e.g. USD). We simply add the currency symbol before the figure (e.g. $30,000).

In the same manner, we use only the percentage symbol (%) to express percentage points in our articles. Our articles are unlikely to contain the word “percent” or the phrase “per cent.”

That said…

We look forward to the beautiful experiences you’ll be creating with us.

 

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