Top Tech & Healthcare Copywriting Trends of 2024
As the clock struck midnight on the cusp of 2023 and 2024, we sat down to reflect on the past year in the tech and healthcare copywriting arena. Copywriters found themselves navigating uncharted territories, blending the magic of words with the ever-evolving nature of AI and emerging trends. It became evident that technical copywriting is more than cold, mechanical scripts and sales pitches; instead, it’s transformed into genuine stories that seamlessly weave through the fabric of consumer consciousness.
This article dives into six copywriting trends in tech, healthcare and beyond that will shape the narrative landscape for 2024 and how you can best employ these practices in your workflow.
1. Generative AI & Copywriting
Generative AI, introduced to the public consciousness via tools like ChatGPT, has challenged and revolutionized how copywriters work. AI tools are here to stay, and their scalability is limited only by our imagination. Still, this powerful and extensive tool places responsibility on the copywriter to know the appropriate time and context for its use to prevent a watered-down tone of voice and potential plagiarism concerns.
Workflow Implementation: Test various GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Hemmingway Editor to determine which works best for you, and train it to refine outputs to align with your industry and audience.
Balancing AI with Human Expertise: While AI content tools excel at generating ideas and outlines, it is advisable to exercise caution in relying on them exclusively for all your copy needs. Doing so may lead to penalties in Google search indexing, a departure from your crafted brand voice, and potential legal issues if you publish AI-generated content on your website without copyright protections.
2. Snack-Size Content for Small Screens
We all fall into the trap of scrolling through social media mindlessly, pausing only for content that catches our eye — punchy, bite-sized, and compelling. Writing for the mobile era differs from traditional copy in that copywriters must master concise headlines and scripts that capture readers' and viewers' attention across social and ads.
Clarity and Conciseness: Craft your copy with brevity in mind to make it easily digestible. Employ the power of bullet points, subheadings, and brief paragraphs to break up the text, creating a reader-friendly experience.
3. Visual Storytelling
The mark of a great copywriter is knowing when to let the copy take a backseat and have the visuals tell the story. Fusing intriguing visuals with a well-structured narrative crafts an experience that engages audiences. Whether it’s a video series or an infographic, visual storytelling can highlight a product in a new way.
Multimedia Content: Use a mix of videos, infographics, and other storytelling aspects to amplify branding.
Emotional Connection: Create compelling content that resonates deeply with your audience and guides them toward taking action.
4. Repurposing Content
As copywriters, we frequently tumble into the trap of believing that content lacks value unless it's entirely original. We need to remember that one piece of content can live multiple lives. Repurposing a top-performing blog post into a visually stunning graphic or a carousel on social is a superpower. This practice ensures your content reaches more people in different ways.
Identify Well-Performing Pieces: Use a mix of videos, infographics, and other storytelling aspects to amplify branding.
Cross-Platform Usage: Maintain the original piece’s core message while transforming the content to exist on other mediums.
5. Personalized Content
In tech and healthcare copywriting, we often forgo emotional connection with the audience and focus on selling the product. But great copywriting can infuse a brand with humanity, achieved through authenticity, cleverness, humor, and a deep understanding of the human experience. We must place a focus on talking to people genuinely.
Studying and Understanding: Identify your audience’s pain points via a deep dive into their industry, needs, and level of technical expertise and address them through personalized, relevant content.
Know the Community: Having a foothold in the industry you’re writing about helps you not only gain an understanding of the challenges that the community faces but also their lingo. Spend less time googling the latest buzzy tech and healthcare words and more time knowing how to use it in context.
6. Consistency is Key
Start the presses! Tech and healthcare companies rely heavily on their newsrooms and blogs to provide long-form, SEO-heavy information to their audience. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule across those resources keeps brands top-of-mind amid an industry filled with similar companies and offerings.
Build Authenticity: Engaging with your audience through consistent copy enables you to replicate the sense of security people find in routine.
Standard Style: Maintaining a consistent posting schedule is crucial, but equally, if not more pivotal, to audience growth and retention is a consistent style and tone of voice across various platforms.
In Conclusion
As digital products continue to command the spotlight, technical content writers and copywriters, our protagonists, face high demand. In this ongoing saga, the stakes rise, and writers moving into 2024 and beyond must embark on a crucial quest to stay updated on current trends in IoT and web-based industries. As writers embrace this challenge, they become navigators of the digital frontier, shaping the narrative of their success in the ever-expanding world of technology and healthcare.
The Power of Copywriting in Tech or: How to Convince Your Engineers that Marketing Isn’t Useless
Introduction: Jobs, or Woz?
At WB Creative Consulting, we have been providing copywriting and content production services to Fortune 500 tech brands for the past 15 years. A common challenge we've encountered is the skepticism of tech engineers towards marketing. Perhaps it stems from the Jobs vs Woz dichotomy, where marketers are seen as non-technical individuals who'll say anything to make a sale.
Despite this distrust, one can't overlook the fact that Apple, a tech giant with stellar marketing, is currently the most profitable company globally. It's not just about their closed-loop ecosystem or high markups; they also offer some of the best longevity, reliability, and security among consumer tech brands. Indeed, if you're a technology-first org that wants to compete in today's global economy, you need more than just technical prowess. You need to reach your target customer base effectively, lest you be rendered obsolete by the big legacy market makers.
In this post, we'll explore how great tech copywriting can make or break your go-to-market strategy, and how working with engineers, especially those who hate marketing, can be the secret to success.
Interview with a TRAMP-ire
Our experience interviewing computer scientists, PhD-holding CTOs, and developers with backgrounds in Transparent Remote Access Multiple Protocols (TRAMP) has taught us a crucial lesson. When talking to a technical subject matter expert, it's a mistake to ask them to explain their technology in their own words. They may feel frustrated having to explain advanced technology to a non-technical person and struggle to convey complex topics verbally, as these concepts fit more tidily into circuit boards, lines of code, and hardware schematics.
Instead, we encourage our interviewees to think of an analogy that illustrates the value proposition in a relatable way. For instance, a CTO we interviewed for a web series found it difficult to describe an advanced technology. When prompted for an analogy, he related it to the Transformers toys his kids loved, a perfect metaphor for their product's ability to transform its very infrastructure to stay up-to-date with future upgrades.
This approach empowers our clients to become storytellers who can convey the benefits of their technology in a relatable and engaging manner.
The Innovator’s Enigma
In Clayton Christensen's “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he describes how successful companies can fail due to disruptive change because they stick to past strategies instead of innovating and adapting.
We’ve observed a similar phenomenon in tech marketing that we call “The Innovator’s Enigma.” Technologists working on cutting-edge products often believe their inventions are so novel they don't require explanation. However, this novelty is precisely why they need to be explained.
This catch-22 can hinder tech organizations aiming to disrupt industries with new ideas. The more innovative a tech product is, the less motivation there seems to be to promote it effectively. The key takeaway? Tech brands that can successfully communicate the benefits and features of their offerings will gain a significant competitive advantage.
Conclusion
The importance of effective communication in tech cannot be overstated. Quality copywriting can bridge the gap between the complexity of technology and the understanding of the target audience. It can make the difference between a product that gathers dust on the shelf and one that disrupts an industry.
If you're ready to harness the power of great tech copywriting, reach out to us at WB Creative Consulting. Let's work together to turn your engineers into storytellers, and your innovative products into market leaders.
How to Spot AI Content in the Chat GPT Revolution
Tread Luddite-ly
Imagine you are a Middle School Teacher who has decided to teach a unit on the Industrial Revolution. To evaluate your students’ mastery of the subject matter, you have assigned a 2-page paper, and are just now starting to review their submissions. At first glance, you are quite pleased to see that nearly all your students filled both pages with observations, definitions, and interpretations that demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of how the Luddites banded together to destroy the textile machines threatening their livelihoods. But then it hits you: a lot of these papers seem similar in their content, tone, and cadence. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but they read like old encyclopedia entries. And since nobody uses encyclopedias anymore, that can only mean that a substantial portion of your students likely utilized AI writing tools to complete their papers. Your first instinct is to run the papers through an AI detection tool, but then you remember that a popular AI content detector recently flagged the U.S. Constitution as AI-generated and is therefore unreliable. You don’t want to make any conspiratorial accusations of wrongdoing like some boorish Luddite, but you also don't want to enable academic shortcuts that will only hurt your students’ abilities to write and think critically for the rest of their lives. So, what do you do?
Who Stake-holds the Stakeholders?
Before we answer that, let’s switch perspectives. Now, imagine that instead of a Middle School Teacher, you are the Director of Marketing for a $50M+ B2B Software organization who is reviewing content submissions from stakeholders for marketing distribution. And instead of the Industrial Revolution, the content covers a wide range of topics relevant to your company’s target market. Just like the Middle School Teacher, you have a sneaking suspicion that a large portion of these submissions were created using AI, due to their uncanny wooden structure, tendency for repetition, and total lack of brand personality. Except that now you don’t have the luxury of comparing pieces that are covering the same subject matter. They're all different. And they’re coming from different departments within your organization, which means the format, structure, and knowledge base is highly variable. What’s worse, you know that AI content not only has the potential to hurt your brand’s search rankings - as major search engines have begun penalizing indexed pages with lots of AI-generated content - but it could also reflect poorly on your position as Director of Marketing. You have the final say on the quality and quantity of marketing materials your organization is bringing to market. Like the Middle School Teacher, you don’t want to have any uncomfortable conversations with coworkers who may have written these pieces from scratch (maybe they were STEM majors), but you also don’t want to lose your job in 6-12 months when the real impact of AI-generated content embedded in your marketing ecosystem is fully known. So, what do you do?
I, For One, Welcome Our GPT Overlords
We are living through historic times. AI-generated content is here to stay, and AI technology is already saving lives in hospitals, autonomous vehicles, and even human trafficking syndicates. However, this revolution in language, word, and thought processing does not come without its share of pitfalls, as we’ve seen in the two scenarios above. So, how can Marketing Directors, Educators, and everyone in between, reliably check whether the content they are consuming has been created by an algorithm or a human who possesses competency in each area of expertise? The easiest, and most direct, method is to ask the stakeholder questions about the content they've submitted. Not only will this help identify individuals who have no practical understanding of the topic and likely used AI to write their piece, but it will also help reinforce key concepts with those stakeholders who really did write their content from scratch. Questions like:
What are the key takeaways of your essay/blog/whitepaper?
What makes these takeaways unique? What are you saying here that hasn’t already been said?
What do you think some of the key objections to your arguments might be, and how would you respond to them?
When you set out to write this, what surprised you about the writing process? Was there an ‘ah-ha’ moment that happened between the outline phase and the final draft?
What do you hope the reader will do or think after reading your piece?
Spot the Bot
Of course, you may find asking the above questions to be awkward and even confrontational. If you work in an organization with delicate inter-departmental politics, hitting a stakeholder with an AI interrogation may not exactly make you popular around the office (even if you work from home). So, short of asking your colleagues to show, not tell, their mastery, how can you spot AI-generated collateral with your own two eyes? Here are some of the tell-tale signs of AI-writing:
Repetition
Repeating ideas or concepts using different words or phrases throughout a paragraph is a dead giveaway of AI assistance.
Lack of Analysis
An encyclopedic statement of facts, in a cookie-cutter thesis statement and supporting argument structure, generally indicates the content was formulated by AI mining various sources available throughout the internet.
No Clear Voice
Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment long enough knows that stakeholders tend to use insider terms and jargon that may convey a unique brand personality. If these aren’t present, it was likely written by a bot.
Non Sequiturs
AKA hallucinations, non sequiturs are a byproduct of content written by an algorithm that is simply attempting to formulate the closest approximation to a piece that will be recognized as genuine by human beings.
Conclusion
AI content is here to stay. To avoid the negative consequences of confusing AI-generated words with critical thinking from human beings, ask questions, look for the telltale signs, and if all else fails, hire WB Creative Consulting for all your content and copywriting needs ;)