At the Content Bureau, we produce a lot of marketing assets. A few are crucial but short-lived one-offs, for events or other special occasions. Most—like web copy, case studies, and infographics—are designed to serve your business for much longer, in a variety of situations.
And then there are copy blocks. As the name implies, they’re designed to be the versatile foundation pieces of your marketing program, the reusable base elements in which your messaging comes to life. Copy blocks describe your product, service, or business in customer-facing language. They’re clear and succinct, communicating exactly (and only) what you want to say to your customers—and they’re ready to cut and paste verbatim into your marketing content. We often write short, medium, and long versions to give clients ready-to-go language for a variety of uses.
Is there anything copy blocks can’t do? Well, you be the judge. You might use them and reuse them as text in marketing assets like these:
But copy blocks have some deeper (and perhaps more surprising) uses as well. Consider how they can help your team or business hone these important qualities:
- Clarity. Writing copy blocks (or working with the Content Bureau to do so) forces you to clarify your thinking. If you’ve got, say, only 50 words to convey your message, you have to make every word count.
- Focus. Who’s your audience? Existing customers have different information needs than prospects—or partners. You can’t write effective copy blocks without becoming very clear about who you’re speaking to and what they want and need. We often write copy blocks by customer type, persona, role, business size (enterprise, SMB), or other criteria.
- Consensus. The process of developing copy blocks forces you to involve multiple stakeholders, and to find ways to communicate what’s important to each of them. Good copy blocks take time—often because the internal feedback process can reveal differences in how different team members think about the offering. Much better to do the hard work now, producing a result that everyone can get behind.
Have you found any surprising or innovative uses for Content Bureau copy blocks? Let us know!
