Sweet Talking Goliath – How to Write for Google, Facebook, and Amazon by Holland Webb

Global digital marketing is a $209-billion-dollar-a-year industry ruled by five titans – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, and Baidu. Any business that markets products online needs to understand and work with one or more of these companies in order to win customers.

As a copywriter, your job is to write for your clients in ways that help them slip through the portals these five agencies have created.

How will you do that?

Let’s start with a quick look at each of these digital players:

• Google is the world’s largest search engine by revenue. It processes 40,000 searches every second, and it owns YouTube – the world’s second largest search engine. Google knows what we want to know.
• Facebook is the behemoth of social media. It has 2 billion active users and earns $27.6 billion in gross revenue per year. Facebook knows who we know and what we like.
• Amazon controls the ecommerce market. About 55% of online shopping trips begin at Amazon (people skip Google altogether) and 45% of them end there. Amazon knows what we buy, what we wish we could buy, and what we buy for our friends.
• Alibaba and Baidu are Chinese companies. If you do not write in Mandarin Chinese, they may not (yet) be relevant to you.

Companies need (and pay) writers who can craft reader-centered copy for each of these platforms.

Small business owners may feel like a rag tag band of soldiers facing five digital Goliaths. They don’t need to worry. You’re there to slay these giants not with smooth stones from a sling but with sweet words from your pen.

Any kind of writing for the internet means crafting a killer headline, using bolded subheadings, putting information into bullet points, providing helpful solutions to readers’ problems, verifying your research, and loving white space. Still, each company needs something slightly different.

How to write for Google. Start with specific, long-tailed keywords. Type your topic into an SEO helper like Moz. It will pull up popular articles and top-ranked keywords. Use these to start defining your article. Next, figure out the questions you want to answer. Some of that is common sense, which is not something you can find on the web. You can, however, use answerthepublic to enhance your ideas for questions. As more and more people use voice search on Google, including key questions in your text will bump you up the results pages.

Finally, write as geo-specific as possible. I just finished a series of articles for a marketing agency on Vancouver Island. They wanted each of the three closest towns mentioned in the article. Sophisticated companies can actually track readers on mobile, determine if they are near their store or a competitor’s location, and send the information or coupons based on their location in real time.

How to write for Facebook. Start with a simple question. Don’t be too esoteric. Facebook isn’t the place to dive deep into the netherworld of the reader’s psyche. Something catchy but short. Answer or expound on that question in a few well-chosen words. You can always offer a link to a longer article. Make sure whatever you say is credible and valuable to your reader. End with a clear, defined call to action. As with all copywriting, strive to be positive and upbeat.

How to write for Amazon. The most personal of the big agencies, Amazon anticipates customer needs and makes offers early. In Amazon’s case, personal means specific. Your titles need long tails showcasing the most relevant keywords first. Remember that Amazon’s buyers are purchase-ready, so they need to know that what your client offers is exactly what they want to buy.

After building your title, describe the product’s features and tell how it solves the customer’s problem. You don’t need to stuff your descriptions with keywords, but you do need to include specific, solution-focused search strings in your text.

Most of writing for Google, Facebook, and Amazon is about putting yourself in the reader’s place. What does your reader want to know? What problem are they trying to solve? Who are they trying to connect with? What do they want to buy?

Help them, and they’ll love your client for it.

Holland Webb is a full-time freelance copywriter and digital marketing strategist living near Greenville, SC. His clients are leaders in the online retail, higher education, and faith-based sectors. Holland has written for brands such as U.S. News & World Report, iLendX, Radisson, Country Inn & Suites, MediaFusion, Modkat, Great Bay Home, IMPACT Water, and BioNetwork. He is a featured writer on Compose.ly, and his monthly copywriting column appears on Almost An Author. You can reach him at www.hollandwebb.com or at hollandlylewebb@gmail.com.