Entries from October 2009 ↓

When you’re in the online marketing world, it’s easy to assume that everyone is doing what you’re doing. If I don’t stop to think about it, I just assume that every company has a website, every company is using Search Engine Marketing, and every company is taking advantage of social media. That’s false. It’s easy to forget that close to 40% of SMBs don’t have a website. Even among big companies, who almost all have websites, their integration into online marketing is far from complete. Only 16% of Fortune 500 companies have blogs on their site.

Be sure to keep those numbers in mind next time someone tells you “everyone is on the web and using social media.” It’s not true. What is true is that if you want to innovate (or just follow the times), that you should at least be on the web and experimenting with social media marketing.

So, what is the value of social media? What can it do for you that you can’t do better on your own?

Humanize your company

It’s a paradox that SMBs try to be like big companies, while big companies are trying to be like SMBs. Many large companies, such as JetBlue and Zappos have used the social web with great success to humanize what would otherwise be simply monolithic, faceless corporations. This human aspect is the SMB’s biggest advantage in competition against big corporations, but in order to maintain that advantage, the small business owner needs to be prepared to do at least as much as the big corp to provide a human face to his customers.

Provide Exceptional Customer Service

This is another area that Zappos has done extremely well, so it’s no wonder that they were bought out by Amazon earlier this year for ridiculous amounts of money. Amazon wasn’t looking to buy their technology, they obviously had technology equally as good as that of Zappos. What they were looking to absorb was their culture of exceptional customer service. Providing this customer service on the social web is easier than ever. Monitor the conversations around your brand, and responding to them in a human way.

Develop Loyalty

Customers are not loyal to low prices or fast service, because they can often find things for cheaper and faster. They’re loyal to remarkable brands – brands that make them feel good about purchasing from them. Through the interactive experience that social media provides, by putting in just that little bit of effort, you can make your customer’s experience exceptional, which will lead to loyalty and repeat business, not to mention word of mouth.

Announce Promotions

Seth Godin popularized the term permission marketing to identify marketing that people want to see. The theory is straightforward. Marketing is more effective if you’re targeting it to people who want it. By using social media, your audience comes to you and listens to what you have to say. That way, when you announce a promotion or anything really, you have a captive audience that has already given you its permission to talk to it.

Discover leads, partnerships, opportunities

The social web’s biggest strength is that it’s social. It connects people to one another, and in business, success is about who you know. Through social media, you have the opportunity to meet new potential customers, new potential partners, and to discover opportunities that you may have otherwise missed out on if you were solely relying on traditional broadcast marketing.

Learn

The wrong way to use social media is to simply broadcast over it, without tuning in to the conversations. The value in social media comes from the wealth of information that is given away freely. You can learn more from social media interaction than an entry-level university course if you take the time to listen to the right people.

So, Should I Use Social Media?

As I said in my last post, social media is still young and growing. As far as I’m concerned, it has potential, but it is as yet unproven. It may be cheap as far as the monetary cost of marketing goes, but it is probably the most time-consuming form of marketing you can engage in, and one thing most small and medium-sized businesses don’t have a ton of, is time.

My advice is to try it out cautiously. Begin with one outlet at a time, and once you’re comfortable with it, add on another. Don’t dive headfirst into every social media outlet you can find. There is no easier way to find yourself with no time at all. Instead, start with a blog. Once you’ve gotten the hang of blogging and participating in the blogging community, branch out onto Twitter. If that goes well, see if Facebook can help your brand, and so on. It does not necessarily have to be done in that order, you could do it any number of ways, but my point is that you need to slowly immerse yourself.

Finally, if you decide to take the plunge into social media marketing, always do it as a complement to other forms of marketing. There have been success stories of people who market their business using the social web, but that is the exception not the rule, so be careful. If, after some time you do find that social media marketing is working better for you than anything else, you can start leaving behind some other media, but don’t bet the farm on social media marketing.

I have a confession. A big confession. One that may very well destroy my reputation. Are you ready for it? I’m a social media doubter.

If you’re still reading, and have lost all confidence in everything I have to say, I suppose I owe an explanation.

My Social Media Experience

My social media journey has been tentative, undistinguished, and lackluster. I started off on the right path. Many years ago, I enjoyed hanging around internet forums and mailing lists, and interacting with people in that manner. That was arguably the earliest form of social media on the internet (unless you count BBS as social media). However, from there, things started to get out of control, and I wasn’t sure I liked where things were going. It started with MySpace and my eery feeling that everyone on it was doing something creepy, so I never created an account.

Then came Facebook, and I assumed that was pretty much the same thing as MySpace. Something happened with Facebook, though. All my friends were on it, and they were posting all their pictures on it, and having whole conversations on it. It even spilled into their regular conversations. I felt lost half the time around my own friends because I didn’t have a Facebook account.

So I caved.

I’ve now had a Facebook account for several years, but it’s always been reluctantly. I have never posted anything more than a profile pic and some basic information. I’ve never added a friend (although I do accept friend requests), albums, notes, or played any facebook games. My presence on Facebook is purely voyeuristic. I’m not an active participant.

Enter LinkedIn. I think I created my LinkedIn profile when I was looking for a new job. Before I could complete it, I’d found one. My LinkedIn profile now sits gathering dust and is only awakened when a colleague stumbles across its comatose form and asks to connect with me.

Then there was Twitter. I resisted Twitter for so long because I thought it would be a huge time sink. A few months ago, I started to experiment with it. I am now active on it. My follower count is underwhelming, and I’m still more of an observer than anything else, but I’ve become fascinated by Twitter and all its possibilities. That doesn’t change the fact that I was right about it being a huge time sink.

Finally, there’s blogging. I’ve been reading blogs for years, but only started my first real attempt at a blog, 52 Short Stories, in January 2009. 52SS remains a personal passion project of mine. I don’t expect many people to read it. The blog you’re reading is a professional endeavour and part of my professional development.  I’ve enjoyed my foray into the world of blogging so far. I’ve learned a lot and had conversations with some intelligent people.

Social Media “Experts”

So why am I telling you any of this? Because I want it to be clear to anyone who reads this blog where I’m coming from whenever I talk about social media. In terms of most forms of marketing, I consider myself to be well-read, experienced and possessing expertise. In social media, I’m a recent convert. I’m reluctant on Facebook, a Twitter neophyte, and a LinkedIn virgin. I study social media fervently, but I don’t have the expertise on it that I can claim in other areas. Instead, when I talk about social media, I’m talking not as an expert, but as a student.

Does that mean you should ignore what I have to say on the topic? On the contrary, I think my learning experiences can be valuable to someone who’s also trying to learn the ropes. You can avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made, or extrapolate on some of my successes and create your own path.

Besides, there is no such thing as a social media marketing expert. Sure, tons of people have written books on Twitter and other forms of SM, but they’re not experts. Social media is too new to have any experts. Everyone is still experimenting. The closest thing to an expert I’ve seen is Chris Brogan, and that’s through sheer immersion. As of right now, there is no right or wrong way to use social media. The rule book hasn’t been written yet, which makes it an exciting place to be. It also makes it a scary place to be for small and medium sized businesses that have little margin for error on their marketing strategies.

That’s why I’m going to be conducting some social media experiments of my own and reporting back on them, and in my next post I’ll look at the value of social media for small businesses and give some tips for starting out in it.

Until then, here are some thoughts to mull over:

How long have you been involved in social media? How much has it changed the way you interact with the people around you? How has it changed the way you meet people? How often do you think of social media in a business sense?

Last week, I was reading Lateral Action, one of my favourite creativity blogs, and Mark was writing about computer programs that were thinking creatively. Using algorithms, computers were able to extrapolate patterns to create new ideas that were judged by a panel to be more creative than similar ideas thought up by humans.

I’m a big believer that creativity does indeed happen in an incremental fashion and is informed by previous experience and knowledge. I’m not a proponent of the “muse” school of thought that tends to favour a theory of sudden inspiration of a nearly other-worldly nature. As such, the idea that algorithms could be used for creative thinking was not terribly surprising to me. However, the idea that computers could be “creative” in the same way as humans and produce “art” was more unsettling.

Instinctively, I knew this could not be true, but I was at a loss to explain why. In his post, Mark offered the explanation of critical thinking, and that computers can’t critique themselves, but that explanation still didn’t feel right to me.

So, I began thinking about the finished product and what it achieves. A computer can be programmed to do something creative. In that context, creative will mean unique and different. If you take any pattern far enough, you’ll get to a point that no one has been before, and that’s what these computers are doing. They’re taking old things and creating new things. The resulting new thing is different from anything else I’ve seen before, but what is my reaction to it? “Hey, that’s different.”

A human creating something new will basically follow the same basic steps. He will take his previous experience and create something new that hasn’t been done before. Where the finished product is different from what the computer has done is where that product becomes art. Humans can create art. Computers cannot.

Computers can create images, and musical arrangements, and sequences of words, but these will never be art because true art elicits an emotional response. If it doesn’t conjure up some emotion in its audience, it has failed at being art. The reason computers cannot cause this emotional reaction is because to do so, the artist needs to inject his own emotion into the work. Computers with the most sophisticated algorithms imaginable can outmatch humans in logic, but they will never have emotion. Without that emotion, whatever is created by a computer is hollow.

Because an artist injects his emotion into his art, and it then causes a reaction in his audience, art is in fact a medium for connecting artist and audience. So, not only does the art differ because it is infused with emotion, but it serves an additional purpose of creating connections. You can’t connect with a computer, and nothing a computer creates will have any soul.

In the end, this is all just a convoluted attempt to explain the uneasiness that we feel when we hear that computers can be creative. I explain it as a lack of emotion in the work, and a lack of human connection with an artist. Mark explained it as a lack of critical thinking. Others explained it as a lack of personality. Whatever it is, there is something uniquely human about the creative process. It is something that logic and algorithms alone can’t replicate, and whether we can explain it or not, our gut tells us it’s there.

That’s why, I for one, am not scared that computers will take over the creative world.

In my last blog post, I talked about why it’s so easy to overlook copy on the web.  Now that you know why you shouldn’t overlook copywriting, here are 17 steps you can follow to create effective copywriting that will sell your products.

1. Use a call to action. The most common sign of an inexperienced salesperson is that he delivers an entire sales pitch, has a prospect at the edge of her seat and then never asks her to buy his product.  Using a strong call to action is the single most powerful way to improve your copywriting.  There is no point delivering a long pitch if you never ask (tell) your reader to perform the action you want her to do, whether it be signing up for a newsletter, adding an item to a cart, or requesting a quote.

2. Focus on what the customer wants to hear. This goes back to avoiding ego-marketing.  Forget about what you think you should be writing about. Think about what your customers want to read, and write about it. You might think the story of how you created your product is great, but potential customers don’t care. Instead, find out what led your current customers to buy your product and incorporate that. If you don’t have any current customers, conduct informal focus groups asking people what would make them buy your product.

3. Forget the big words. Writers, as a general rule, are word nerds. They use big words that make people reach for their dictionaries. In literary circles, there is debate about whether or not this is a good thing. In the world of copywriting, there is no debate. Use easily understandable language. You’re not trying to recreate Joyce. You’re trying to convey a message. Messages are most easily conveyed with simple words. If a sixth grader can’t understand your copy, it’s too complex.

4. Sometimes grammar is not that important. I’m one of the above-mentioned word nerds, so this rule hurts me. A lot. But it’s important. When writing good copy, the focus is on the impact, and the message. Not on the grammar. If your grammar is so bad it’s distracting, that’s not good. But if you have to massacre grammar in favor of adding impact… do it. Fragments. Run-ons. Poor use of punctuation. Inappropriate Capitalization. These can all work in copywriting.

5. Use short sentences. Short sentences are punchy. They keep the flow moving. They make the reader continue reading. The average length of a sentence in thrillers and suspense novels is shorter than in other novels. It keeps the reader interested. The same should go for your copy. Keep the sentences short, and keep the pace quick. The last thing you want is your reader to get bored.

6. Cut out the fluff. If you read a sentence in your copy and you’re uncertain if it helps you convert, cut it. Fluff just slows down the pace of the writing and distracts the reader. Keep him focused on the end goal of converting. Don’t get him thinking along tangents with extraneous material.

7. Don’t sound like an infomercial. “Call now and receive, not one… not two… not three… but 17,467 widgets. But wait! That’s not all…” Believe it or not, this kind of marketing is effective in the right circumstance. However, chances are your copy is not the right circumstance. The above methods are used in infomercials that play on television late at night, when nothing else is on. They have a captive audience. They have a bored audience. And there’s something strangely hypnotic about the television ads. Unless you’re selling a Slap Chop, chances are your customers are too smart, and have too many other things to do with their time to be attracted by this sort of writing.

8. Offer a guarantee. Consumers don’t like parting with their money. They are afraid that they will give it up and not receive something of equal value in return. The best thing your copy can do is relieve that fear. Offering a guarantee is the easiest way to do that. If you have a good product, you don’t need to worry about it costing you too much. The amount of sales it will lock down will outweigh any losses.

9. Remove barriers to entry. Your copy should not be a long explanation of how the reader can obtain your product. Your copy should be a sales pitch that talks about the benefits of the product. How the user obtains the product should be as simple as possible. Amazon has become the most successful online retailer in the world because users can place an order with a single click. They make it easy.

10. Be specific. Don’t talk about your product in vague generalities, use as many specifics as you can. If your product saves your customers money, don’t tell them it’s going to save them money. Don’t tell them it’s going to save them thousands of dollars. Tell them exactly how much it’s going to save them. Generalities smell like BS, and consumers are weary of BS.

11. Test your copy. No matter how much you edit your copy, you won’t know how good it is until you see how it converts, and you won’t know how to make it better until you test it. There are a number of tools available to test web copy and design. I’ve used Google’s Website Optimizer in the past. In The Four Hour Work Week (amazon link), Tim Ferriss talks about how he used a PPC campaign to test different titles for his book. The ad that got the best click-through-rate was chosen as the title for his book.

12. Use formatting intelligently. In the last post, I talked about how copy and design need to work together. Part of that is knowing how to use formatting intelligently. DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME. Don’t bold random words for no apparent reason. Don’t write in hard to read colours. However, using formatting intelligently and in the right places can help your copy. Straight text with no formatting is boring to the average reader. Spice it up, but don’t go overboard.

13. Use testimonials. I stumbled upon Gwen Bell’s website a few weeks ago, and one of the things I loved about it was how she has peppered in testimonials. The testimonials are in italics, so they stand out, but they’re also unobtrusive and don’t get in the way of her message or the navigation. Testimonials are social currency. They build trust with your reader, and if you have your reader’s trust, it’s much easier to convince her that she’s buying a quality product.

14. Follow a logical flow. It’s important that your writing flow and follow in a logical pattern. Have you ever read copy that jumps all over the place? It’s like being pitched by a chimp with ADD. You need to carry the reader through the copy and deliver him to the end where he will convert. If you jump around, there’s a good chance he’ll jump right off your page.

15. Tell a story. The easiest way to create a flow in your copy is to tell a story. Stories create their own flow because they are a series of events that lead to a natural conclusion. If you can craft your copy into a story, then the reader will follow along into the natural conclusion of converting.

16. Don’t give options. Make sure your copy has single-minded focus. If it’s to convert to a sale, the copy should point to a “buy now” button. If it’s to lead to a newsletter sign up, then it should lead to a sign up form.  If it’s to request a quote, it should lead to a quote request form. Don’t write copy that tries to do many things at once, even if those things seem similar. For instance, don’t try to sell two different products with the same copy. The dual purpose of the copy takes away from its effectiveness, and you lose the reader in the flow. The other thing that happens is that consumers are typically paralyzed by choice. People think they want more choices, but really, what they want is for you to make their life easy and choose for them.

17. Use a call to action. “Didn’t you start with that?” I hear you saying. Yes, I did. And I’m closing with it. The same way your copy should open and close with a call to action. One call to action is good. Two is better. How many is too many? That depends on the copy, but all copy can use at least two calls to action.

There you have it.  Some of you with copywriting experience may notice a few traditional tips that are lacking here such as “Turn features into benefits.”  My goal here was to give some practical tips straight from the head of someone who gets paid to do this stuff and not sound like a textbook. A lot of the more traditional tips will take care of themselves if you follow the above.

That being said, there are also a lot more tips that aren’t here. Perhaps you can fill them in.

What do you think? What are some copywriting tips that I missed? What do you think of the above? Do any of these not make sense to you? Were they helpful? Let me know in the comments.

A few weeks ago, I was reading a post over at Men With Pens.  In it, James shared a letter from a reader that spoke of his frustration with his team at work because they were privileging design over copy.  This led to the question, which is more important, design or copy?

My purpose in this post is not to determine which is more important, design or copy, but rather to highlight the importance of not neglecting one or the other.  Specifically, I have found that in working with a lot of businesses, the emphasis is often put on design while copy is neglected.

That’s a mistake.

Why Design Gets More Attention

I see it all the time, especially on the web.  Businesses decide they need an online presence, so they hire a web designer.  They might even hire a graphic designer.  If they hire good ones, the end result is they get a website that looks beautiful.  The business owner is happy because now he’s got a shiny new site.  What does the site say?  He’s not sure because his web guy asked him to provide some copy, so he banged something out in fifteen minutes and the web guy stuck it in there.

Then the business realizes they need to get traffic to the site. So they start advertising, or SEO’ing, or doing whatever it is they do to get people going to the site.  Something’s wrong though.  People are showing up at the pretty site and nothing’s happening.  All these leads are not converting.

That’s because the copy sucks.

So, how did the copy get missed in all of the above?  Most entrepreneurs can’t design a website, so they have to hire someone to do it for them.  Most aren’t great graphic artists, so they need to hire someone to make a logo for them.  Most will look for help in advertising their site.  However, all of them know how to write.  Copy is nothing more than words on a page, right?  That means that everyone who can write can produce copy, right? That means that it doesn’t matter who writes your copy, right? Wrong.

Entrepreneurs overlook copy because they assume that anyone can produce copy.  And if anyone can produce it, then it can’t be as important as something that you need a specialized skill set to produce.

It’s true that anyone who can write can produce copy.  The issue is that most people don’t know how to produce good copy.  Copywriting is a profession with a low barrier to entry.  Anyone with a word processor can label himself a copywriter.  Compare that to a graphic artist who needs to have skill with certain software, as well as an artistic eye before he can produce something that clients won’t laugh at.

Because there are a lot of people out there who started hammering at a keyboard and calling themselves copywriters, it’s easy to assume that copywriters are a dime a dozen and it doesn’t require a whole lot of skill to be one.

However, if the entrepreneur is paying attention to his conversion rates (and he should be), he’ll notice that’s not the case.

Why Copy is Just As Important

The problem with letting just anyone write your copy is that you end up a with piece that’s all style and no substance.

Good copy builds trust.

Good copy guides customers through the buying process.

Good copy helps the customer choose.

Good copy sells.

Sure, just about anyone can write.  But can just anyone write something that does all of the above?

One argument for privileging design over copy is that, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”  I don’t doubt that, but which thousand words is it saying?  The trouble with relying on a visual message is that people interpret visuals differently, and so it’s impossible to be hyper-specific with an image.  An image gives the customer a vague sense of what you want her to see, feel and do.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but if I only have one shot to get my point across, I’d rather use a thousand written words to make sure there is no mistaking what I’m saying.

Does that mean that you should go fire your graphic designer, strip down your website and post a text-only version instead?  Of course not.  Design is also important.  Design can do a lot to set the emotional triggers needed to encourage the purchasing process.  Not to mention that design is what creates the first impression.  When walking into a store in the mall, the first thing you notice is the decor and the layout.  The store could be selling the greatest product in the world, but more than half the people that walk in won’t stay long enough to actually appreciate it if it’s not well decorated.

My goal is not to shift focus away from design.  It is to ensure that the design exists to complement solid copy.

Copy is the most important part of your marketing.  Don’t be so naive as to think you can get away without giving it as much attention as you do your design.

What’s your take?  What’s your process for creating marketing campaigns?  Do you start with a design and then insert the copy?  Do you do it the other way around?  Am I overstating the importance of copy?  Let me know in the comments.