Entries Tagged 'Words and writing' ↓

Last weekend I visited friend and fellow copywriter Dan Shaw and we were bemoaning the tight creative budgets in this economy. The issue is this: if a client can get an email or a web page written for $100 or $200, why in the world would they hire someone like us at several times that amount?

The answer is that you’re not just paying to get a project completed and checked off in your to-do list. You’re paying for results. And if a page costs 5 times as much to create yet generates 10 times as many leads, clicks, sales or whatever you’re looking for… then it nets out 50% less expensive. That’s hidden money in your advertising which is there for the taking as soon as you look beyond the basics of “how cheap can I get it”.

Writers and designers who do direct marketing well are compensated on results. If we interview with a prospective client we expect they will ask us to show us our “controls”—these are campaigns (the term usually refers to direct mail) that beat out competitive tests or previous controls so thoroughly they become the standard that is used again and again.

The more controls you have under your belt, the better you are likely to be compensated. Because your client is paying for results, they know that a writer who has the skills, instincts and experience to win repeatedly is likely to do better for them on the bottom line.

For example, Dan does some marketing to prospective college students who are choosing a school. He was telling me during our visit about a usability study he attended where he watched students as they interacted with web pages to see what elements appealed to them and were easiest to use. This translates into better results when he does his own pages for clients.  And his clients are quite happy to pay for that knowledge and insight.

With budgets tight, it’s very tempting for a marketing manager to just hire the cheapest provider and it’s tempting for a marketing director to review their direct reports on the basis of “how much money did you save me this quarter?” But it’s a cheap fix and in the end it may cost you more if your true goal is to get more customers, leads, donors, sales dollars etc. which of course it is.

Next time you bid out a project, take the extra step to hire somebody who’s good enough to charge more—and can prove it. If your management asks why you did not choose the cheapest possible solution, tell them you’re paying for results. And that’s how to find hidden money in your advertising.

A good writer quickly learns the importance of developing a voice for his or her writing. Readers get more involved when they feel like a real person is writing to them. And over time you know what that voice is for a particular genre or publication and you fall into it like an actor playing a familiar part.

The author of otisregrets, for example, is somewhat professorial, a bit stuffy, yet tries hard to be approachable and takes extra care to explain what he means if it’s not immediately clear. While Otis M writing on Yelp is very different. That author is about 10 years younger and something of a wise guy. He uses catch phrases and occasional puns and enjoys going off on tangents in his reviews.

I know both these writers well and so do my readers. These voices haven’t always been there, as you can see from reading some early posts in either forum. I didn’t set out to be that person, but rather evolved into it over time.

All of which is my preamble to a theory on why I haven’t developed a habit of Tweeting frequently: I can’t find a way to develop a voice in 140 characters (which I try to keep to 120 for retweetability). By the time I say the bare minimum I have to say, I’m close to the limit.

After I realized this I started looking at other people’s tweets to see who had a voice I can recognize. @the_real_shaq has a voice, but he’s one of a kind. (Shaq’s eulogy for former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, who was shot to death yesterday: “Rip steve mcnair Roo roo q dog”) @broylesa has a voice, but she is nearly always writing about food in the Austin area… maybe very specific subject matter is a key.

Everyone else in my tweetstream is sticking to the facts, unless it’s personal. Here’s @heatheranne who works in advertising which is probably why we follow each other: “Trying to get glass out of my now-jammed garbarator. Oh my…” Now that is good writing, a vivid word picture plus a made up word and comment that makes you feel what she is feeling. I am going to go for adjectives and a personal aside next time I tweet and see what happens.

Free! You! Now! We’ve all head about magic words that help your copy sell more effectively. But what about words that push readership and response in the opposite direction? Here is a starter list of five words (and word categories) to watch out for…. additional submissions appreciated.

1. “I”. Nobody cares about you, except your mother. Readers want to read about themselves. That’s why the presence of “I” in a classic marketing message is a clear indicator you are wandering into dangerous territory. (Social media is an exception, along with scenarios in which you expect to create a first-person story the reader will identify with.)

2. Even worse, “we”. Still in the first person, but now we’re talking about a corporate presence. “We” is a favorite word of posturing messages that are meant mainly to be read in the boardroom. Writing such messages is called “we weing all over yourself”. Try the We We Calculator to see if you are guilty of too much wee-ism in your copy.

3. “It”. Unless they’re already engrossed in your copy, when you use “it” the reader is going to have to refer back in the message to find out what the meaning of “it” is. They’re not likely to take the trouble.

4. Words that can be read more than one way. “Read” (present tense) and “read” (past tense) is one example. As is “lead” (make people follow) or “lead” (the metal). Anytime readers get confused because they have misunderstood your meaning, they’re likely to just stop reading.

5. Words that look similar enough to be misinterpreted by a hurrying reader. Example: “through/thorough/though”. If you depend on them to get your message across, you’re toast.

And, a bonus phrase:

6. “As I just mentioned”. Using this expression is what I call “as-backwards” copywriting because the reader probably doesn’t remember what you’ve just mentioned. You’re expecting them to reverse direction to find out when, more likely, they’ll just hit the delete button.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”.  Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

The picture at left shows the inside of the men’s room door in the building where I used to rent a studio, in San Francisco. The knob is the way you get out of the room; the much more prominent grab bar is a useless appendage. During the 18 months I rented this space I used the bathroom certainly 100+ times… and at least 50 of those times I grabbed the bar because my sense memories “knew” that was the right thing to do.

People expect things to work a certain way. And this can have important implications when you’re marketing to them. Ads that play against expectations, especially in web video and TV, can surprise and delight and get through to a dulled viewer. But direct marketing pitches that veer in an unexpected direction—introducing a surprise element in the middle of a sales letter, for example—can turn off a reader and cause them to pitch your message in the recycling bin.

The difference with these scenarios: in the first, the prospect is on the outside, tacitly agreeing to let you try to entice them into your world. In the second, you’ve already created agreement and now you’re violating the contract. That’s why so many paragraphs in classic direct mail letters begin “that’s why”—to let the reader know you’ve established your point and are transitioning to another. And why many direct marketing pitches (including web pages and email, as well as print) will include what my clients at Rodale used to call “head nodders”—statements you know your audience will agree with, used to establish that you are on the same page and your message is reasonable and relevant.

It’s OK to be unpredictable… just as long as you know when to use and not use this strategy. If you’re doing intrusive advertising—which would include most examples of direct marketing—then it’s best to stay within expectations and avoid surprising your prospect except with the wonderful news of your offer and its benefits.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”.  Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

A creative brief is a contract between the account team or project “owner” and the creative team. It quickly defines a marketing project so the creatives know what it is all about, what it’s trying to accomplish, and what are the budget and other parameters—no coming up with a web video when the brief calls for a small space ad.

I’ve worked with creative briefs from several dozen marketers and agencies over the years. Although there are variations, most follow the same outline—a series of questions which are answered by the account folks, approved by the client, then handed off to creatives:

1. What is this project about in a sentence?
2. What are we trying to accomplish?
3. Who is the audience?
4. What do they think about our product or service now?
5. What do we want to think? Is there a specific action we want them to take?
6. How are we going to accomplish this?
7. Is there a specific offer?
8. What are likely objections and how can we handle them?
9. Are there any delimiting budget or production considerations?
10. What sacred cows, legal mandatories etc. should we be aware of?
11. What is the schedule?

As a copywriter and creative director, I like working with a creative brief very much. It reduces the element of surprise, tell me my clients will act professionally (and not pile on deliverables or insist “that’s not what I asked for”), and helps me organize my own thinking. In fact, if a creative brief isn’t provide I’ll write one for myself as a way to jumpstart my diminishing brain cells. (But I don’t tell anyone… this is a private and personal exercise. And I never write a creative brief on behalf of a client—something I’ve been asked to do—because that defeats the whole purpose of the document.)

In my copywriting class, I ask the class how many of them have worked with a creative brief and the “yes” group is always under 50%. Then we do an exercise in which we divide into teams and each group follows a prewritten brief to come up with a concept for a space ad. (The class is primarily about writing email and direct mail, but the space ad gives us something to show.) This is a very popular activity. Afterward most of the students say they will demand, or write (if  they’re managers), a creative brief for their next project.

Not everybody I work with personally gives me a brief. Almost without exception the clients who provide a brief are more organized, better funded, and less likely to self-destruct in the middle of a project. Yet it doesn’t cost anything to write a brief, just time and thinking you should invest anyway toward a successful result.

If you’re not now using a creative brief, give it a try on your next project. You will be pleased.

A client and I got into a wrangle recently when he asked me to write a “CEO letter” to other top execs who would be joining him at an event, and the result was not what he expected.  Here’s what I responded by way of explanation:

There’s been a fair amount of discussion and research on this topic in the DM community, as you might expect, and I’ve myself written a number of “C level” or “CEO” letters over the years. I think there is universal agreement the most important characteristic is BREVITY.  An efficient CEO is not going to get down in the weeds of an issue because of an unsolicited letter. What you need to do is instantly establish relevance, describe an action which is quick and easy to take—eg NOT “I am going to take time to research this company because they have provided me with some interesting stats and education” but rather “I am going to ask my marketing director to include this company on his short list to check out”—and then get out.

As for tonality, the most important element is showing the reader you respect his or her time as a fellow CEO and makes clear the offer of a personal demo. The tonality consists in being brief, terse and to the point much as if you would be talking to him or her in person.

Do you write letters to high level executives in your own marketing? What works best—brief and to the point, or laced with personal elements? (That’s what my client was expecting, I think.) Inquiring minds (mine, anyway) want to know!

What’s so different about Twitter? And how do you use it to best advantage? One wonderful SXSWi panel, featuring rhetoric professors from the University of Texas, answered these questions by going back to Aristotle, the original documentarian of the use of words as a persuasive medium.

The original rhetoric, as Aristotle described it in 330 BC, was temporal: arguments were oral and words could only be processed in the order they were spoken. Once the written word came along, texts could be read in any order but there was a new limitation, spatiality: once words were put on paper, the printed information itself could not be moved. The web has made possible easily movable written information and Twitter carries this to the logical extreme with a constantly moving stream which is in essence a personal newspaper with an audience of one. (Here I am brutally paraphrasing the segment of Prof. John Jones which can be seen on ZDnet.)

No two people will ever see the same Twitter stream, and you yourself will never see your stream in exactly the same way twice. Yet it is very easy to control and edit your personal newspaper through the people you choose to follow. My experience is that if you start with a few people you find inherently interesting, like @guykawasaki or @broylesa (the terrific food columnist for the Austin Statesman, who stokes my interest in eating and makes me feel like I’m still at SXSW) and then check out @ tags in their tweets to see who THEY correspond with, you will soon build a fascinating stream. And if you’re interested in a topic, whether news or personal curiosity, a # search takes you in another satisfying direction.

Back to the panel, they said the best way to write your own tweets is to take into account the possibility of modularity and reuse. Prof. Jim Brown observed that every tweet has both an intended audience (the person you identify with an @ tag at the beginning, plus your known followers) and an unintended audience (everybody else, now or in the future.) A corollary of this is that the often-levied charge of Twitter narcissism is bogus. “Narcissism isn’t in the status update, it’s in the person annoyed by the update. If you’re annoyed by the tweet, it wasn’t meant for you.”

Apparently last year was the year of Facebook at SXSWi, and 2009 was the year of Twitter. Many of the sessions were specifically about Twitter, and everybody everywhere was twittering away on the new TweetDeck desktop application. We SXSWiers seem to like Twitter very much. Savant and trendsetter Guy Kawasaki was asked in a session to confirm, “If they charged for Twitter you’d probably pay whatever they asked” and he responded “that’s right.”

David Ogilvy said that the only function of the copy and art on the outside of an envelope is to get it opened. As a corollary, Herschell Gordon Lewis (I think) said that the majority of the creative energy on a project should be lavished on the outer envelope. Same goes for subject lines in email.

All of which makes me wonder what was the process by which today’s example envelope got into the mailsteam. You can see it here: the plaintive muzzle of a loveable dog, with the teaser “When your pet dies, will you know what to do?”

It’s from the Olivet Memorial Park, presumably not a huge outfit to whom this project was so trivial they chose the first headline that came to mind. I imagine there was quite a debate. There might even have had a presentation from a copywriter who came up with this head, and told them why it was really good.

There are many motives to get people to open an envelope. Guilt, for example. “Your pet gave to you all her life. Now it’s your turn.” Or just love between a person and pet. “Now there’s a place to share forever the love you have.” But instead Olivet’s advisory board chose the practical way: “When your pet dies, will you know what to do?” There will be a body to dispose of, probably some health laws to follow, hmm. Yet I would bet if you did an A-B split against virtually any emotional headline, the emotion will win every time.

And on actually opening the envelope, I find that there are indeed some emotional appeals. “Losing a pet is as painful as losing any other family member”… and an offer of a “Pet Memorialization Planning Program”. Putting one of these messages on the outer would certainly have boosted its effectiveness but, like a canny minor league pitcher, Olivet wanted to save its best stuff until last… after the crowds have departed.

As I was writing this, I happened to come across the example “if you died today, who would take care of your family?” web banner and wondered if this was the inspiration for Olivet. But look at the differences. It’s a very clear and specific concern vs “what would you do?” Plus, people trump animals every time.

Work hard on your outer envelope or subject line. Work on everything, but especially on that. If you don’t, you may end up in the pet cemetery.

When economic times are bad and marketing budgets are tight, every promotion has to work harder than ever to pay back its investment with increased sales, leads or visibility. The good news for copywriters is that often we can improve return on the marketing investment with better response at no increase in costs, simply by wringing out every last benefit and bringing it home to the reader.

But how do you deliver a positive message when the news all around you (maybe even including the news you need to deliver in your copy) is bad? Here are three pointers.

Rule #1: Don’t go negative. Stick to a positive message in your copywriting.

At several points in my copywriting career I’ve felt like I uncovered a powerful “warning” or “caution” theme that outweighed anything positive I could say. And every single time this approach was tested, I’ve been blown out of the water by a bland and generic benefits-oriented message that handily defeated my negative scalpel twist.

The reason, I think, is that readers go through a filtering process before they get to your copy. Themes like “how to survive the coming depression” may be fine for best sellers, but people volunteered to read those books or watch those TV shows. You, on the other hand, are one flick of the finger away from the recycling bin or a click to the next web page. You have to earn a reader’s acceptance before they will permit you to market to them. And if you scare them on your initial approach, they’ll simply run away.

Tip #2: Be nurturing. Write copy your readers want to read.

Today’s consumers, even business people, are hurting and they want coddling however they can get it. If you can take them to a quiet and reassuring place even for a few minutes, chances are they’ll stick with you till you get to ask for the order.

One of the most successful promos I was associated with was a subscriber acquisition package for Great American Recipes during the early 1990s recession. It became the first non-sweepstakes control for this marketer by delivering a message of comfort and nostalgia:

Remember when good food meant the best times you ever had with your family and friends?

I’m talking about lazy summer evenings serving home-made ice cream on the screen porch. The fine feeling of knowing everything was cooked just right, and there was plenty to go around. The warmth of neighbors sharing recipes, in a cozy kitchen on a cold summer night…

We haven’t even gotten to the product yet, but this was already outpacing “you may already have won” even in tough times. And an extra benefit is that the product I’m selling is depicted as taking them back to happier days… so not only are readers more likely to order, they’re also more likely to keep the product (the initial pack in a recipe card continuity program) instead of sending it back when it arrives in the mail.

Tip #3: Be specific. Believable copywriting is effective copywriting.

Readers are extra-crabby and hyper-sensitive when they feel threatened. Even more than usual, they’re on the alert for flabby generalities and statements that are not supported by facts. The truth is your antidote, but you also need to be very clear in your writing so readers know you’re telling the truth.

Non-profit fundraising writers know about this challenge because for them, times in are always bad which is why they are raising money. Herschell Gordon Lewis shares a great example of bad fundraising copy, a letter that stars with a sentence something like “Around 2 million people in the western Sahara will go hungry this summer”. The word “around” is the deal breaker. If the writer didn’t care enough to find a more exact number, why should the reader care?

The other challenge is that huge negative numbers seem overwhelming. It’s terrible if famine threatens a region, but what can I as an individual do to help? On the other hand, if I understand that my $100 contribution saves 40 children with diarrhea, that’s that is something I can manage. Apply the same rigor to your benefit statements or descriptions no matter what the product or service, and you’ll be better off in bad times.

A promotion that follows all these rules is a lead generation letter for a major insurance company. It’s about long term care insurance and it starts with the “bad news” that Medicare is not going to cover your expenses in retirement like you thought it would. The lead sentence of this letter is what makes it work and it’s actually very close to something I heard from a salesman during a brainstorming session:

Every one of us would like to live well in our later years and leave some money for the next generation. Is that too much to ask?

Unfortunately, this modest dream could be shattered if you one day need assisted care in a nursing home… in fact you have a 40% chance of being in a nursing home after age 65. A nursing home stay can be expensive, averaging more than $180,000 nationwide. And it can be demeaning, robbing us of our choice and dignity.

Fortunately, Long Term Care Insurance is now available from ((client name)) that helps retain the very options that expensive long term care takes away…

This delivers one specific jolt of bad news (and carefully modulated outrage) but immediately provides the solution for it and proceeds to coddle and nurture the reader for the rest of the letter. It’s been the control for going on 10 years and I expect it will only do better in the current economy. Try the same formula in your own writing and see if you don’t succeed, good times or bad.

NOTE: I’m in the process of installing the contents of my DMA “Copywriting that Gets Results” course on this website. Watch for more articles and pointers coming soon.

Three years ago, I did a post on newspaper inserts and the Super Bowl… and how snack manufacturers contort themselves to create a “big game theme” without ever actually mentioning the Big Game, which is a copyrighted product with big licensing fees attached. Looking at this past Sunday’s crop of FSI’s, it’s reassuring to see that nothing has changed. The nation’s economy may have melted down and the web has transformed marketing for most products, but for salty snacks and their teammates it’s still “game on”.

Smirnoff offers us a “smart choice for your super party”.  Newman’s Own wants you to “go natural for the big game”. Tums will let us “enjoy the game heartburn free” while Pop-Secret popcorn promises a “home field advantage” and Hersheys wants us to “treat your home team” to a “candy bowl blitz”.  Marie’s salad dressings invite you to “tackle the taste” and Dean’s Cool & Creamy exhorts you to “bring the ultimate dip to the ultimate game.”  You can also “score one for the home team” with Ling Ling egg rolls, say “it’s good!” [umpire with upstretched hands holding up two hamburgers] for White Castle or enjoy “football food… ready for game time in minutes” from El Monterey Taquitos.

It’s clear that the marketers are doing an end run around the NFL by not mentioning the Super Bowl by name, and that the NFL has dropped the ball by not figuring out a way to bring them into its licensed marketing huddle. But more important, there’s a flagrant violation by most of these marketers because they forget that coming up with a catch-phrase is not the same as selling a product.

And so the winner, in overtime, is an ad from Butterball cold cuts with the theme “One taste brings the party together”.  Because after all, the reason these marketers are trying to tie in their products to the Super Bowl is that you’re going to serve them at a party—and here’s one marketer with a generic ad (originally created around the election, maybe?) that says how their product is going to make your event a success. Touchdown!