The Irish government announces that it has given "provisional support" to Portmarnock hosting The Open Championship and the Women's Open.

Thousands of Derry City fans travelled to Dublin for the FAI cup final but the Candystripes lost out to Drogheda two-nil.

The annual Salvation Army collection aims to help Manx families that are struggling financially.

University of Wales Trinity St David plans to move its humanities department more than 20 miles.

Brighton & Hove City Council says immediate action was taken because of fire safety risks.

Community groups say they are being asked to put plans in place for terrorism, bombs and drones.

Britain's biggest cathedral is given a festive makeover in this year's Royal Mail collection.

A petition to relocate the town's Christmas tree to the town centre gets more than 750 signatures.

Somerset Council says the upgrade work on Hurdle Way is vital for pedestrians and cyclists.

Richard Foord MP says there are no NHS dentists available in Devon for adults.

A letter to Newport Town Council claims the animals face distress, fear and mental fatigue.

Manchester's Christmas Markets return for its 26th year, set across nine sites in the city.

The council says it needs to make savings immediately due to a predicted £28m overspend this year.

Lantern parades, fire festivals and light trails mark the start of the festive season in the region.

Thousands are expected at the festival, which opens on the eve of the Strictly Come Dancing visit.

A large slab of plaster fell from the ceiling "exploding" into the venue, company trustees say.

Discover how Hollywood star Luke Evans, who's also been in The Hobbit, is coming to Herefordshire.

Coventry is cutting the amount it spends on Christmas celebrations.

Every website project starts with a leap of faith.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way,” - John C Maxwell, best-selling author, speaker and coach.

Genuine thought leadership is a powerful differentiator for any business.

Articles and reports that demonstrate true expertise, authority and insight stand apart from your competitors’ me-too blah-blah. They build trust, enhance your brand, help close deals and defend your margins.

High-quality content also avoids the Google penalties that come with spammy or AI-created content. Don’t take our word for that, here’s what Google has to say about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. (See our take on AI in marketing too.)

What is high-quality content?

Thought-leadership copywriting provides unique insights, presents new research and uses data. It covers complex subjects in a new and engaging way. It is designed to expand readers’ understanding. It manages to be persuasive but not pushy.

Everyone can write, but not everyone is a writer. High-quality marketing content requires expert copywriters. (Read more about what a copywriter actually does.)

To get it right, writers require a deep understanding of their audiences, clients, products, the wider context of the industry, and the current shape of the market. For businesses embracing thought-leadership content, that’s where the true value lies.

But you have to invest time, money and marketing effort to realise this value. That can be challenging when business leaders and decision-makers can’t see the return on investment (ROI).

Let’s explore the ROI of copywriting and thought leadership to help you build a business case for their value.

What are the likely costs of copywriting and thought leadership?

The short answer? It depends. The long answer? There’s no one-size-fits-all cost and most writers will offer packages or tailored pricing. According to a study by Clutch, the average UK digital agency charges approximately £98.10 per hour. Research by DDIY suggests that a monthly content marketing retainer can cost between £1,805.78 and £23,551.50.

Of course, an hourly rate doesn’t tell you much about how long something will take or the required level of expertise needed to do an outstanding job.

That’s why, at Articulate, we charge for copywriting on a fixed price basis related to the length and complexity of the piece.

For maximum transparency and flexibility, we have a tariff—a kind of menu—of common writing deliverables such as case studies, white papers, or thought leadership articles. Our fixed prices include research, interviewing, writing, project management, editing, proofreading two rounds of revisions (if required), keyword optimisation, and, for blog articles, meta descriptions, a featured image and a couple of social posts.

Our marketing retainers start at £4,100 per month and one-off copywriting projects start at £5,000 for things like a case study library or a lead generation campaign centred around a flagship report or ebook.

We charge for website copywriting slightly differently, on a per-word basis, because of the additional complexity of integrating it with design, search engine optimisation and the rest of the development process. Also, in our experience, writing website copy for clients is like writing poetry and demands a high level of experience and client knowledge for your most important marketing asset.

Broadly speaking though, the cost of a content project will vary depending on the following factors: the who, the what, the when, the where and above all, the why.

The Who

Freelance copywriters and marketing agencies will charge different prices because, of course, their overheads and offerings are different. An agency may cost more but brings benefits such as editing, additional skills (e.g. SEO, research), better availability and turnaround times.

Then there are factors such as years of experience, location, specialisations and so on. You might also consider an in-house or staff writer who will require a competitive salary.

There are specific skills required to be a good marketing copywriter, including:

• Marketing know-how
• Business, sector and client knowledge
• Interviewing skills
• Research and analytical skills
• Search engine optimisation, e.g. writing with keywords
• Agility with tone of voice and messaging
• Self- and pair-editing
• Proofreading
• Social media writing skills
• Content planning and ideation

It’s helpful to put a good marketing copywriter with a reasonable level of skill and five or more years of experience in the same bracket as, say, a lawyer or an experienced, professional journalist writing for a trade magazine or reputable newspaper.

Typically, in an agency, they will work in teams that provide complementary skills and coverage for illness or holidays. All of this is hard to replicate in-house. (For more on this see our article: Should you hire a marketing person or a marketing agency.)

The What

The nature of your business and its content can impact how much copywriting will cost you. For technical or niche businesses, you’ll need to work with writers who understand your industry thoroughly or who have the skills and processes in place to learn about it efficiently.

You might not need to work with specialists if your company wants more generic content. But generic isn’t going to cut through the noise. Similarly, the length of your copy will affect the price, too. Some providers charge per project, others per word.

The When

How quickly and how often do you need copywriting and thought leadership content? Time-sensitive projects may incur additional costs to help you meet deadlines. And the more content you need, the more it will add up. A freelancer will struggle to produce tens of thousands of words in a short period of time but an agency can bring a whole team and a well-oiled production process to the challenge. You can, however, explore these helpful tips from the Articulate Marketing team on how to make every piece of content work harder for you.

The Where

Where are you posting, hosting or submitting the writing? The platform will impact the word count and, in turn, the price. A detailed report, an eBook or a long-form pillar page will set you back more than a 750-word blog post for your company website, for example. Similarly, copy for your home page might be short but it is very important and getting it right might take longer and cost more on a per-word basis than a more general piece.

The Why

Here’s where it gets interesting. You might know who you want to work with, what you want them to produce, when you need it and where it’s going. But do you know why you’re doing it? Have you considered who you want to read your thought-leadership content? And what you want them to do once they’ve read it?

From top-of-the-funnel content for brand awareness and lead generation to bottom-of-the-funnel content for conversions or customer retention, your copywriter needs to know what role your content plays in the context of your wider business.

In our opinion, the ‘why’ separates good writers from bad ones — and both kinds from the likes of ChatGPT. This is why we call our writers ‘marketing copywriters’ because they understand how to weave their work into broader marketing objectives.

So, what’s the ROI of copywriting and thought leadership?

Whether you choose to go external or in-house, there’s significant value in investing in the art of copywriting. Here’s why.

Demonstrate relevance and expertise

A study by Edelman and LinkedIn found that 73 percent of decision-makers say an organisation’s thought leadership content is more trustworthy for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials.

The same study found that 80% of respondents want to see third-party data included in it, and 44% believe the highest-quality content helps them better understand a business's challenges and opportunities.

Decision-makers want to know why they should work with you. And your knowledge, experience, and expertise are your differentiators. The ROI? As many as 60 per cent of decision-makers say they’re willing to pay a premium to work with a business that produces good thought leadership.

Establish your brand and raise your profile

While thought-leadership and content marketing materials are busy showcasing your expertise, they’re also putting you on the map. Readers get to know your brand and tone of voice (TOV). Decision-makers may even share your content online, quote your research in their content, and reference your work conversationally.

The front of a buyer’s mind is a powerful place to be. Especially when we consider that 70 percent of C-suite executives said thought leadership content made them question their current B2B relationships — with 54 percent realizing other vendors might better understand their needs, according to a study by Edelman and LinkedIn.

Reach new audiences

A key part of establishing your brand with thought leadership is connecting with new audiences. Businesses often have a clear idea of who they want to work with and who wants to work with them. But growing your brand presence with thought leadership content means you’ll start to appear in new places online.

For example, when Basecamp founder Jason Fried tweeted about his company’s new ad, which called out Google’s paid ad strategy, he subsequently received over 1,000 backlinks to the company’s website. Depending on how you value backlinks, that could be worth up to $500,000 in SEO benefits.

This kind of thought-leadership content will help you rank for new search engine queries, generate more backlinks, appear in different social media feeds and so on. You might even find that your successful written content creates entirely new opportunities for you — podcast appearances, webinar invitations, the chance to speak at industry events and so on.

Build existing customer loyalty

Your written content doesn’t just serve the purpose of attracting new audiences. It’s a valuable tool for staying connected to your existing customers (and re-connecting with previous ones, too).

According to Accenture, 80 percent of businesses spend less than a third of their time and budget on customer-focused messaging. This presents a clear missed opportunity when considering loyal customers' ROI.

On average, a loyal customer is worth up to 10 times the value of their original purchase, according to the Office of Consumer Affairs. And, Bain and Co found that increasing customer retention by two percent has the same impact as reducing costs by 10 percent. Remember: the grass is greener where you water it!

Content is still king

Powerful, engaging, well-written thought leadership content has a functional role to play, too. Of course, establishing your brand, growing your audience, and giving your customers something to talk about are important. But high-quality written content is necessary to get discovered online. For example, brands that regularly update their blog get 67 percent more leads than those that don’t, according to Absurd Insights.

Similarly, search engines are starting to prioritise the quality of the content they promote to users, cracking down on misinformation, clickbait, spam, and AI-generated content. For example, Google looks for content showcasing experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This is called E-E-A-T content and thought leadership is precisely the kind of writing that reflects these crucial areas.

Recent Google updates penalise companies that fill up their site with cheap AI-generated SEO content. This tactic is just empty calories and now it’s creating marketing heart attacks for companies that tried it. The need for high-quality EEAT content has never been higher.

The final word

The ROI of thought leadership is going to take a lot of work to prove. That’s because it’s about more than just numbers. It’s about value. An AI-generated blog post will save you time and probably be fairly accurate. It may even generate a small amount of traffic (before Google recognises it as AI and penalises you for it, that is). But well-written thought leadership is a conversation starter. It’s the kind of content people are still thinking about after they’ve logged off. It makes potential customers think — and start questioning whether they’re working with the right providers. It’s full of insight, personality, colour and expertise. You can’t put a price on that.

George Clarke will staff the most southerly post office in the world, living among a penguin colony.

Gifts, decorations and festive food.

Son of a nutcracker!

The Santa Stair Climb returns to One Canada Square.

Books, booze and unique stocking fillers.

A fir tree in fairytale form.

Igloos, rooftops and ski lodges.

Spruce up on your arboreal knowhow.

41 times in all.

Meet Dominic Reid, London's 'Mr Big Event'.

Nutcrackers, Snowmen... and A Very Naughty Christmas.

Praying hard for a lump of concrete.

From traditional retellings to drunk adaptations.

When to go, what to see and how to save money.

Pop-up cinemas screening Christmas classics.

The Notting Hill pub gets its festive glow-up.

Listen to the podcast for November 11, 2011 insertAdjacentHTML Mozilla has a nice overview of insertAdjacentHTML, a DOM function that's intended to supplement innerHTML. It's a bit less destructive and plays nicely with content that's already in the DOM. For instance, whereas innerHTML completely blows away whatever is inside the ...

Listen to this week's news roundup (January 30, 2012) I really should have named today's update "Planes, Trains and Automobiles", since those were all involved with my commute this unusual morning! This week's podcasts is surely enough recorded from SFO Airport, so I hope you enjoy the atmosphere and the ...

‘Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on’

In the world of translation, Trados Studio’s PerfectMatch feature is like the overachieving student who always gets straight A’s, and its academic partner is the brilliant but slightly disorganised professor.  PerfectMatch, with its meticulous and precise matching capabilities, often finds itself patiently sorting through the professor’s vast but somewhat chaotic repository of knowledge.  Picture PerfectMatch … Continue reading The PerfectMatch…

This is the last part of a series on training for legal translators. See the first post here. To put yourself on the path to becoming a good legal translator, you need to make one big study commitment. A big study commitment is anything that takes at least a year, challenges you, and costs a lot of […]

1. Bev Priestman out at Canada Soccer in wake of Olympic drone-spying scandal  CTV News
2. Canada Soccer’s drone-spying redactions tell us a whole lot of nothing while it waits out the rage clock  The Globe and Mail
3. Key findings from Sonia Regenbogen's independent review into Olympic drone-spying  CP24
4. What comes next in Canada Soccer drone-scandal investigation?  Sportsnet.ca

1. Trump says Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency  The Globe and Mail
2. Why is Elon Musk becoming Donald Trump's efficiency adviser?  BBC.com
3. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead new 'Department of Government Efficiency' in Trump administration  CTV News
4. George Conway: Musk, Ramaswamy to lead ‘nonexistent department’  The Hill

Aiming at the problems of high error rate, low evaluation accuracy and low investment return in traditional methods, a random forest-based e-bank investment risk evaluation method is proposed. First, establish a scientific e-bank investment risk evaluation index system. Then, G1-COWA combined weighting method is used to calculate the weights of each index. Finally, the e-bank investment risk evaluation index data is taken as the input vector, and the e-bank investment risk evaluation result is taken as the output vector. The random forest model is established and the result of e-banking investment risk evaluation is obtained. The experimental results show that the maximum relative error rate of this method is 4.32%, the evaluation accuracy range is 94.5~98.1%, and the maximum return rate of e-banking investment is 8.32%. It shows that this method can accurately evaluate the investment risk of electronic banking.

The study investigated the influence of ebullient supervision on employee commitment in a Ghanaian public university through the mediating role of employee engagement. The simple random sampling technique was used to draw 302 administrative staff of the university to respond to the self-administered questionnaire on the constructs. Furthermore, the partial least square structural equation technique was deployed to test the research hypotheses in the study. The results showed that ebullient supervision had a significant positive relationship with employee commitment and employee engagement. The findings further revealed that employee engagement positively correlated with employee commitment. Finally, the study's findings established that employee engagement partially mediated the link between ebullient supervision and employee commitment. The study emphasised that various supervisors in a university's administration should create an environment that favours fun where subordinates can form ties with one another.

Drawn from technology acceptance model, this study establishes a theoretical framework for the analytical interpretation of factors affecting job-seekers intention to use e-recruitment websites. Using the data obtained from 379 respondents in India, ten hypotheses derived from the experimental model are evaluated using a structural equation modelling technique. Vividness, perceived usefulness (PU), and attitude have been shown to have a significant positive impact on the behavioural intentions (BIs) of job-seekers, although perceived ease of use (PEOU) did not. Furthermore, perceived internet stress (PIS) is observed to be a significant antecedent PEOU; and PEOU is of PU. Such findings broaden our knowledge of e-recruiting in various ways and offer qualitative insights into the potential impact of website functionality on the attractiveness of job-seekers.

To assess a country's economic outlook and achieve higher economic growth, econometric models and prediction techniques are significant tools. Policymakers are always concerned with the correct future estimates of economic variables to take the right economic decisions, design better policies and effectively implement them. Therefore, there is a need to improve the predictive accuracy of the existing models and to use more sophisticated and superior algorithms for accurate forecasting. Deep learning models like recurrent neural networks are considered superior for forecasting as they provide better predictive results as compared to many of the econometric models. Against this backdrop, this paper presents the feasibility of using different deep-learning neural network architectures for trade forecasting. It predicts export trade using different recurrent neural architectures such as 'vanilla recurrent neural network (VRNN)', 'bi-directional long short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM)', 'bi-directional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU)' and a hybrid 'bi-directional LSTM and GRU neural network'. The performances of these models are evaluated and compared using different performance metrics such as Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Root Mean Squared Logarithmic Error (RMSLE) and coefficient of determination <em>R</em>-squared (<em>R</em>²). The results validated the effective export prediction for India.

In view of the problems of low accuracy, long time consuming and low efficiency of the existing engineering investment risk assessment method; this paper puts forward the investment risk assessment method of power grid construction project based on grey correlation analysis. Firstly, classify the risks of power grid construction project; secondly, determine the primary index and secondary index of investment risk assessment of power grid construction project; then construct the correlation coefficient matrix of power grid project investment risk to calculate the correlation degree and weight of investment risk index; finally, adopt the grey correlation analysis method to construct investment risk assessment function to realise investment risk assessment. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of evaluating the investment risk of power grid construction projects using the method is 95.08%, and the maximum time consuming is 49 s, which proves that the method has high accuracy, short time consuming and high evaluation efficiency.

Because of the problems of low mining precision and slow mining speed in traditional enterprise marketing investment data mining methods, a fast mining method for enterprise marketing investment databased on improved association rules is proposed. First, the enterprise marketing investment data is collected through the crawler framework, and then the collected data is cleaned. Then, the cleaned data features are extracted, and the correlation degree between features is calculated. Finally, according to the calculation results, all data items are used as constraints to reduce the number of frequent itemsets. A pruning strategy is designed in advance. Combined with the constraints, the Apriori algorithm of association rules is improved, and the improved algorithm is used to calculate all frequent itemsets, Obtain fast mining results of enterprise marketing investment data. The experimental results show that the proposed method is fast and accurate in data mining of enterprise marketing investment.