How Working at a Marketing Agency Has Helped My Writing

When I tell people that I make my living writing, they don’t typically think of web content for lawyers and landscaping companies as actual writing. I have worked as a freelance writer and internet marketer since 2011, and I recently began working at a marketing agency as a digital content strategist. That means I get to do a lot of writing.

It’s not the same kind of writing I do in my spare time: writing novels, plays, poems, or songs. However, in addition to paying the bills, working as a digital content strategist for a marketing agency has improved my creative writing as well. Here’s how:

1. It’s good to have a day job.

There are the J.K Rowlings and Stephen Kings out there, sure, and there is a whole batch of new independent authors making a great living publishing their books, but many of us authors also have to have a day job. There is something freeing, though, about having a day job that doesn’t depend on your creative writing.

While there are plenty of authors who write novels full time, I am grateful that I don’t have to rely on my novels to make all my income right now. This would create a tremendous amount of pressure on me and my novels, and it could potentially lead to writer’s block.

So I’m happy to have a day job that’s not related to me creating novels, plays, songs, or poems. And yet, I do still get to write and create content in my job, which is great.

2. I am constantly creating content.

I create so much content on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s blog posts, sometimes it’s copy for one of our client’s websites, sometimes it’s a social media post. Sometimes I create graphics and quote pictures to share. Sometimes I comb through stock photos, trying to find the perfect one to attach to a social media update for one of our clients.

Regardless of what kind of content I am creating, I constantly have to stretch my creative muscles. This is helpful when it comes to the novels and plays I work on when I get home.

3. Brand storytelling has helped me with storytelling in general.

One of the latest marketing trends that everyone is talking about is brand storytelling. I constantly have to reframe our clients’ brands as stories. Focusing on brand storytelling has helped me to create more honest, open, and personal stories that connect emotionally with my readers.

When telling the story of your brand, there are a few questions that must be answered. Who are you? What is the narrative of your brand? How did you originate? What obstacles have you overcome? Thinking about these questions before I work on my fiction has helped me. Not only has it made me think about my author brand, but telling any story gives a writer valuable practice for future stories.

4. Creating targeted content has made me consider my audience more.

In any sort of marketing, targeting your content to a particular audience is important. I also think it’s important to keep your target reader in mind as you write fiction. You have to think about reader expectations, especially if you are writing in a genre like romance or mystery. You also want to make sure your story will entertain the reader.

In my job, we regularly create “buyer personas” to target our blog posts or web content towards. A great exercise for a fiction writer is to create a “reader persona” and keep that person in mind as you write.

5. Writing for different clients means learning about new things.

With our various clients, I’m constantly researching information I never would have learned before. Since I’ve been here, I’ve written about everything from bioidentical hormone replacement therapy to metal roofing to personal injury cases.

Working for a marketing agency has forced me to learn new things in areas I would never have explored on my own. I may not write a novel about a metal roofer any time soon, but you never know when I will need to use information I have learned through writing for our clients.

One of the best things about my day job, though, is that I learn something and use my creativity every day. And that’s something I can definitely be grateful for.

Sara Crawford is a digital content strategist for WT Digital Agency and an author from Atlanta, Georgia. She has written novels, produced her own plays, and performed as a singer/songwriter. She is passionate about the act of creation, and she adores the written word.