There’s an important mindset that performance writers embody. It might be called a 30,000-foot view. It could be described as owning marketing performance end-to-end. This mindset represents the coming breakdown of information silos that plague marketing teams the world over. 

Performance Writers Wear a Bigger Hat

But a Performance Writer can wear a much bigger hat, understanding the team’s goals, past performance, and how the brand and target audiences serve those goals. Perhaps that’s because they’re the VP of marketing who wrote plans and the goals in the first place, and now – empowered by AI – can quickly generate the copy to support the campaign. Perhaps it’s because this performance writer is the PPC manager who sees what works and what doesn’t day in and day out. Spotting weaknesses, fixing those brand and audience targeting weaknesses early, and implementing fixes in real time. 

In any case, the performance writer understands how to translate a brand and a group of customers into an input an AI writer can understand. 

The Role of Data and Analytics in Your Content

“It’s a lot easier to leverage these tools than you think. It’s taking your data and developing ways to automatically analyze that data faster and turning that into human decisions.” 

– Tom Kershaw, CTO, Magnite  

Data and analytics are central to modern marketing. And we have highly developed metrics to understand content performance on search engines, ad channels, organic social, or email. We’re talking about metrics like Search Ranking, Domain Authority, Clicks, Sign-ups, Likes & Shares, open rates, and click-thru rates, just to name a few.  

Using Performance to Look into the Future

Until now, these have been largely backward-looking metrics: How did our marketing perform? But weren’t generally asking for a data-based answer to the question, “How will our marketing perform?” 

Performance Writers are using AI to change that too. It can employ large data sets of relevant information to make predictions about future performance, as well as enrich those predictions with new relevant data as your team executes campaigns. 

Using AI to Understand Your Audiences

But this isn’t the only way to add data to your content creation process. In fact, even a small sample of past performance or existing content can yield key insights about which messages resonate most deeply, what tone of voice is present, and which audiences are most likely to be moved by these messages in the future. 

Performance writers understand the value of trusting the data, and will rely on tools that unlock performance data and insights much earlier in the content creation process. 

How to Write Like a Performance Writer

Speaking of the content creation process, in our next post, we'll get specific with some concrete examples of how Performance Writers actually write.

Until then, stay tuned... and Write On!

Click here to go back to the first post in the Performance Writing 101 series.