The Author-izer

Posts Tagged ‘copywriting’

It’s a busy day in the writing world:

• Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) –
• Content Strategy: A List Apart – Content Strategy
• Writing Style for Print vs. Web (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) –
• Guidelines — Web Writing that Works –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for September 20th through September 23rd:

• Publishing A Book To Promote Your Services – RainToday –
• Writing Book Proposals That Win Publishing Contracts – RainToday –
• Blockbuster Books: 3 Ways to Write a Bestseller – RainToday –
• When CEOs speak: How execs’ quotes doom your pitches – Article | PR Daily: Public Relations and marketing in the age of social media
• 18 Resources to Help you Write Better Blog Titles –

Asked by Jordan Thompson on LinkedIn.

Copywriters get paid more. Seriously, the term “copywriter” is older, and it refers primarily to people who write advertising and marketing copy. “Content” has become the catch-all term for material (not always text) that gets published on websites, and its purpose might or might not be to sell something. Blog posts are “content.” You might hire a “content writer” to write blog posts for you, but not a copywriter. (And me, I’d hire a blogger.) And you might not want to hire an all-purpose “content writer” to create a sales letter for you, either.

Writing advertising copy is a specific skill. So is technical writing. So is journalism. Very few people are equally good at all types of writing, so even though it can be convenient to lump all online writing under the heading “content,” it’s not very useful if you have a specific job for which you need to hire a writer.

On the morning of Friday the thirteenth, I got a call from a client saying “Drop everything—we need copy for two sales brochures by Monday.”

If I don’t have an unbreakable commitment (like the BAIPA conference I’m recording on Saturday), I’m perfectly happy to take calls like this, because it means I can add a drop-everything-and-work-all-weekend surcharge.

So after an interview with the sales team that would be using the brochures, I got to work on the copy, first for the enterprise product and then for the family product. We went through some revisions based on input from the team, tracked down some statistics, and made some suggestions about the layout and images, though I found to my startlement that the designer was working entirely in Photoshop, which is an extremely clumsy tool for handling text.

The client loved it and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, hence my desire to show it off to all and sundry.

But as gratifying as it is to have people tell me how well I write, it’s much more useful when people point out the areas that need improvement. And my colleague Baylan Megino of White Light Associates pointed out something very important about these two documents.

They have too much text to work as companion brochures for use during a salesperson’s call. A better approach would be to condense the text into bullet points and leave room to take notes, so the prospect could write down his or her own most critical data.

What these documents really amount to is a script for the sales force. In this situation, that’s a valuable thing to have, because the sales team comes from outside the company and is brand new. But it would probably be a good idea to go back and revise both these documents after further consultation with a few people who didn’t spend all weekend immersed in producing them. (Not to mention getting print-resolution graphics instead of images from the web.)

Now to actually tell my client that part!

Here’s a great LinkedIn question that Will Conley posed on February 21, 2008:

What are some effective ways to communicate a web development company’s complex, obscure abilities in a way that is accessible—without sacrificing the wow-factor?

You can substitute the name of almost any industry for “web development company” without changing the meaning of the question, because if you get down to the details of the processes involved, almost anything is obscure and confusing to outsiders. And probably not all that interesting, either. That could be why every marketing coach I’ve ever met warns you not to talk about the process when people ask what you do.

But here’s what I actually said:

There won’t be a wow factor for most people if you can’t describe what you do in plain English. Showing it may also help—before and after shots of websites you’ve revamped, or your widgets in action.

Perhaps sit down with someone who isn’t in your industry, show your stuff, and ask him or her to describe the bits that s/he found most impressive. Remember to ask how these services make the client’s life easier and benefit the client’s business.

That’s what I used to do when interviewing members of the IT department at a client’s company for the newsletter I used to write for the rest of the employees to read. I knew the readers didn’t care about the details of hardware and software. They cared about how the changes were going to affect them.

And even the geekiest prospects only care about a product’s features or a consultant’s skills because of the results they achieve. That’s where you find the wow.