A long time ago in a galaxy far far away from here, old school copywriters spent their time creating copy for print, radio and TV ads to entice people to buy products and services.
To do this successfully, those skilled in their craft knew that certain key indicators – for the sake of snappiness let’s call them ‘power words’ – did the job extremely well.
Power words are those linguistic gems that jump out at people screaming ‘look at me!’ Audiences have learnt to recognise them, be drawn to them, and when they see them, to react in some way. Power words are the semantic signposts that steer their readers towards what they have to do. And there’s a good reason these words have survived the history of copywriting and become assimilated into our era of social media-driven content creation – they work.
Curious to know what these exceedingly useful words are? Read on, as we first explore how to use power words throughout your content for the most clout.
The first and most obvious place to place power words is in the primary source of your traffic – the blog titles that show up in search engines and social media posts. We’ve spoken before about the inherent power of blog titles. Not only are the gateway to your content and therefore your business, they also inform how many reads and shares it gets.
Experiment with integrating power words into your blog titles (bearing in mind that crafting ‘power’ tweets in 140 characters or less requires skill) and see which words and combinations get the most impact.
Another savvy way to use power words is across your social media platforms. Creating a call to action on your Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn posts can drive your audience on to the next step in their online journey.
A third and vastly underused home for power words is throughout your comments on social media. Content marketing is about much more than just churning out posts, blogs and so on across your networks. Marketers often focus on content creation to the detriment of their ongoing communication activity.
While nobody appreciates a comment box spammed with links to businesses, you can experiment with using power words in your social media comments. The goal here is to never come across as pushing sales, rather using power words to call attention to your insightful contribution to the conversation.
In conclusion, power words can offer some invaluable ‘clickability’ and ‘shareability’ when incorporated into a quality content marketing strategy. Some of the most useful examples to incorporate in to your content marketing efforts are:
1. Now
2. Click
3. Free
4. Proven
5. Try
6. Learn
7. Exclusive
8. Bonus
9. You
10. Power
11. Powerful
12. How to
13. Results
14. Increase
15. Guarantee
Over to you
Do you already make use of power words throughout your online content output? Do they make a noticeable impact on click-through rates and shares? Please share your experience in the comments section.
Source: adapted from an article on maximizesocialbusiness.com
Photo: Winston Hearn
