reynoldswriting.com Blog

You’re too busy to create your marketing content yourself, so you sub that task out to a freelance copywriter. Problem solved, right? Well, up to a point. Your copywriter can work wonders to keep your blog posts, newsletter articles and other content fresh and up to date — but have you told him what you want far enough ahead of time to ensure that it gets done? It’s all too easy to bury yourself in other work and assume that your writer is fulfilling assignments you never assigned. Then one February 14th you sit bolt upright with the horrified realization that you forgot to request that special Valentine’s Day article.

If you’re familiar with this particular chill down the spine, then you probably need an editorial calendar. List your anticipated needs for content over the coming months or quarters, and then distribute that list among your marketing professionals. Your creative folks will always know which assignments are coming up and when, and you’ll have eliminated the “Oops, I forget to tell you” factor on your end.

In fact, it’s smart to have multi-stage editorial calendars for collaborative pieces such as direct mail postcards or newsletters, with separate schedules for idea submission, graphic design, copywriting, revision and publication. The whole project then comes together with Swiss-watch precision, and your team can roll right onto the next job. For example, a mortgage firm sent me a 12-month editorial calendar in January that showed me quite clearly what marketing pieces I’d be writing come December. As a result, we had a year’s worth of email blasts and direct mail postcards ready to go before Spring had sprung.

Of course there will be times when you need to respond quickly to current events. But that’s okay. You don’t have to give your freelancers license to bull ahead with a year’s worth of stuff. Just ask them to keep an eye on the upcoming month or quarter with a “subject to change” disclaimer. It’s much easier to change something that exists than something that doesn’t, and if you have no editorial calendar in place everyone’s just operating on the fly. This can hurt you if your freelancers are non-exclusive, because without prior knowledge they may be working on another gig when you need them.

If you’re a marketing firm ghost-blogging for multiple clients, then you face another obvious challenge. How can you prepare articles months in advance if you can’t always get your clients to send you the necessary background information in a timely manner? Here’s where you hedge your bets by adding alternate titles to the mix — pre-approved, evergreen topics that you can always fall back on. As publication time draws near, if you can’t get the intake on time, go to Plan B. Your copywriter composes the alternate title, you post it on time, and everybody’s happy.

Editorial calendars can make the difference between a last-minute scramble and a calm, smooth ride for your marketing campaign. Create yours today — and then assign the writing to me!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

If you sell products or services during the holiday season, you’re well aware of the need for a strong marketing/advertising push, planned and executed well ahead of time so you can amplify brand awareness and build up a head of steam for those big sales and specials instead of getting lost in the crowd. But if your business closes down for the holidays, you might as well suspend your marketing operations too, right? Well, I’m biased, of course, but I’d advise against it – because the consistency of your marketing and branding efforts in December will determine whether anyone remembers you in January.

For example, this article is being posted on Christmas Day, but of course it isn’t likely to get a lot of eyeball traffic today. It may not get much more attention tomorrow, either, as people continue to enjoy their time away from the office or engage in the mad scramble to return or exchange gifts (an epic struggle that merits its own Hollywood title — Christmas: The Return). Even so, this post, this little chunk of branding, is right here for whoever does see it. I’m displaying marketing activity, therefore I still exist. I blog, therefore I am.

Want to keep your marketing wheels turning and still enjoy a much-deserved break? Then plan for it. Engage your copywriters, designers and consultants early enough to construct the December leg of your marketing campaign well in advance. Many of my clients fast-tracked their December requests for just this reason. They knew I wasn’t going to be around that week, they knew they weren’t going to be around either, but they also knew that their business needed to maintain a degree of visibility and marketing consistency. The sooner you communicate with your marketing professionals, the better off you’ll be heading into January.

And speaking of January – have you got your 2012 marketing campaign ready for action? I have several clients who already have clear ideas and timelines for introducing new strategies while keeping up the current ones. Those folks will be able to launch 2012 with all systems go because they took the extra steps at the end of 2011 to load the rocket and clear the gantry. Of course you can initiate a marketing campaign any day of the year, but there’s something about the New Year that makes us want to start new things. In some countries it’s customary to clean the house top to bottom, getting all the old dust out of the way to make room for shiny new endeavors. January makes a great time for a clean sweep – so contact me if you’re ready to take a new broom to your company’s marketing copy.

That is all. And now, back to your (and my) vacation.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

I’d love it if every business owner on the planet requested my writing services. The only snag is, I’d have to turn down most of those requests — and not just because of my own creative bandwidth, either. Believe me, I stuff my calendar like Uncle Bob at an all-you-can-eat Thanksgiving buffet whenever I can, even though my brain sometimes cries out for a seven-day fast. But in many cases these prospects haven’t yet arrived at the point where hiring a copywriter makes good sense for their current siutation. So how can you tell if you’re jumping the gun? Here are a couple of major indicators:

You don’t have a marketing budget. It alarms writers when their clients pay cash out their wallet or purse. Why? Because marketing payments should come out of a business’s marketing budget, not somebody’s grocery money. If you don’t have an official marketing budget, you need to make one that fits into your overall business plan, just like any other corporate expense. Save your grocery money for groceries, and pay your business expenses with corporate funds. If you don’t have any corporate funds, then maybe you have more urgent problems to solve before you go on a marketing binge.

You don’t have a strategy. Just as you need a marketing budget to fund any copywriting or other marketing expenses, you need a marketing strategy that dictates the most sensible way to spend that money. What are your long-term marketing goals for your brand? Which media channels can help you achieve those goals, and how should you use each of them in a way that strengthens your overall message? What is your Plan B in case Plan A gets a hole in it? These are questions for a marketing strategist, not a copywriter. If I get called in to write a press release and the client asks me, “What do you think we should say? Who should we write this for?” and so on, I gently steer them toward a marketing consultant who can help them figure those things out. Once you know how you’ll market yourself, then you can figure out whether you need a copywriter’s services.

If you’re not sure whether you’re ready to hire a copywriter — just ask. Most experienced writers are astute and honest enough to point out any preliminary measures you may need to take first. I’m always happy to refer my prospective clients to other marketing experts who can lend a helping hand. And if you know you are ready to pull the trigger, I’m right over here holding up the big red target.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Sometimes prospective clients will ask me if I specialize in their particular industry: “Do you have experience writing for the automated-widget business?” Many times I can truthfully answer, “Yes.” Other times I can just as truthfully say, “No, and here’s why it doesn’t matter.”

So here’s why it doesn’t matter.

Most of us copywriters consider ourselves generalists — professionals adept at absorbing whatever information we need to write on the widest possible range of subject matter. Specializing in a particular industry or subject has its points, of course, both for clients and for writers. Specialists usually require less intake on the subject from the client, eliminating much of the learning curve on the front end of the project. From the writer’s perspective, a more specialized niche is easier to market to because that target market makes up a more cohesive group — people who tend to belong to the same organizations and speak the same lingo.

But as a generalist myself, I think general-subject writers have the edge in some notable ways. For one thing, the sheer cross-pollination of concepts, information and resources that we sift through on a daily basis, year after year, enables us to see the broad view of how your particular industry relates to others. If you work in the “green” industry, for instance, your product or service may impact the manufacturing, real estate, health and wellness, energy, electronics and other industries. Well, guess what? I’ve written for all of those industries and many others, so I can see the connections between them all — which means that I can help your audience see them as well.

At the same time, the outsider’s perspective counts for much. People who live and think in one field 24/7 start to assume that the rest of us know as much about it as they do, so they start speaking in buzzwords and technobabble without even realizing that we’re staring at them with a blank expression. A writer who can step in as Joe Q. Public and say, “What’s the bottom line on this stuff?” can see your products or services from a mainstream audience’s point of view.

Of course, everyone specializes in some way or other. For instance, even though I write on every topic under the sun, I focus on marketing pieces, or as I like to call it, “writing for short attention spans.” The work I do has a specific mission: to grab a reader’s interest and then nail a point home quickly and engagingly enough to inspire a purchase or a phone call. But as a general-subject writer, I can do that for any industry, product or service. So befriend a generalist today — and start getting your point across to the rest of us.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

We had a hot summer here in Central Texas. Now that may not sound like an earth-shaking statement, but I’m really talking hot. Hot as in 80 days of triple-digit temperatures. Hot as in 23 days that topped 105 degrees, with a couple of 110s and 112s in there just to kill off anything that might still be alive. Hot as in, our hottest summer ever. That kind of hot.

What did I do? Most of the time, I hid in my office with the blinds drawn, which worked out fine because I got a lot of writing done with minimal distractions. I avoided the worst of the worst by escaping to New Mexico for a week. Then it was back to my air-conditioned cave to await the inevitable break in the heat.

What did thousands of others in my area do? They went jogging, riding their bikes, sunbathing, walking — and they loved every minute of it. On the absolute hottest day of the year, in fact, many of them were burning their insides as well as their outsides at the annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.

Could you sell me a hiking trip or cycling tour during the dog days of August? Would I drive for miles in 112-degree temperatures to eat hot sauce? No way, Jose. But some people will. You can sell them a bike at the height of a Texas August. You can sell them on a hot sauce festival when the air itself is practically on fire. In other words, you can market products or situations that totally fly in the face of common sense from your perspective, because there’s always somebody somewhere out there with a different point of view. You just have to find that person.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “He could sell ice cream to Eskimos.” Well, I’d bet you the compressor pump on my AC that plenty of Eskimos and Arctic dwellers devour gallons of the stuff — just as many folks in hot climates can’t get enough sun, sweat and salsa. I might not share or even understand their enthusiasm, but I’m not marketing to myself. I’m marketing to that precise niche of individuals who really want what I’ve got, and that market always exists somewhere. It’s your job to isolate it, target it as accurately as possible, and pitch away. The only products or services you can’t sell are the ones you’re pushing onto the wrong people. Pinpoint that ideal target market and you’ll find that you can sell ice cream to Eskimos or hot sauce in a heat wave.

And now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go crank up the fan.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

The opening credits play over a long shot of a multi-story apartment complex, a series of rather drab buildings surrounding a courtyard. Set into these buildings we see window after window — some closed with curtains drawn, others giving us glimpses of the various rooms and their occupants.

We get an intriguing look at the odd but endearing collection of everyday folks living out their everyday lives in these buildings, until we finally pull back just enough to realize that we ourselves are gazing out from one of the windows — Jimmy Stewart’s window, to be exact. We then pan downward from Stewart’s face to see that he is in a wheelchair, his leg in a cast.

What is Alfred Hitchcock doing in the opening sequence of his 1954 suspense classic Rear Window? He’s hitting us with a series of revelations. He reveals our environment, then reveals our cast of characters, then reveals our star, then reveals our star’s dilemma. Stewart’s character, L.B. Jeffries, is stuck in his apartment until he heals up, with nothing better to do than observe his wacky neighbors through the window. But he gets more of a show than he’d bargained for when one neighbor’s bedridden wife vanishes from the premises overnight.

Ever seen the same technique used in marketing? You bet you have. It works for a sales letter or web page just as effectively as it does for a film. Hit your reader with a series of colorful, fascinating opening statements while keeping them just off-kilter enough to feel compelled to look further. Stewart’s character feels the same compulsion. Why is Thorwald, the neighbor, coming and going in the middle of the night carrying a suitcase? Wait, are those his wife’s jewels in the suitcase? Where did his wife go? Why is Thorwald washing the bathroom walls? Why is that dog digging so obsessively at the flower bed?…

I won’t reveal the ending, in case you’re one of the three people on the planet who haven’t seen this movie yet. But the way Hitchcock drips information at us one astonishing dollop at a time keeps us on the edge of our set — we have to know what comes next.

You want your marketing content to lead your readers by the hand in exactly the same manner. Dump the whole load of information on them right from the start and it will just land with a thud, like the movie trailer that reduces a two-hour drama to a series of sound bites and car crashes. You have to build your story from one point to the next, giving your reader time to absorb each one.

That’s how you build suspense — in the movies, and in marketing.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Not too long ago I got a call from one of my regular vendor partners, a firm that specializes in marketing strategies and campaigns for small businesses. The owner of the company was trying to come up with some fresh branding for one of her clients, but the combination of triple-digit Texas heat and her busy schedule had left her feeling the need for a creativity boost. Could I come in and brainstorm slogans and angles with her with an hour or two? Well, sure I could.

If you don’t have your own marketing firm or department to knock ideas around with, you too might find creative consultations a huge help. No, I’m not a full-blown marketing strategist — but as you see from the example above, even marketing strategists can use a second set of frontal lobes on occasion. Brainstorming with someone who uses a high degree of creativity for a living can help you dislodge old ideas, free yourself from inertia and help you confirm that you’re on the right path.

I’ve posted before about how business owners can sometimes lose perspective on their own products and services. If you find yourself in that situation, it’s time to call in a third party — preferably one who can look at your marketing with both objectivity and a certain level of professional insight. You’d be amazed at how well a simple comment such as, “Oh, what you’re really trying to say is this” can bring your branding and messaging into sharp focus. And clear concepts make for clear writing.

Maybe what you need from your copywriter doesn’t fall neatly into a category. Maybe you could really use a set of slogans, or ten different metaphors for the same idea, or a fabulous punch line. Maybe you don’t even know what you need — you just know that you need something. Contact your copywriter and borrow his brain. He’ll happily rent it to you, probably at reasonable rates. Just give it back to him when you’re done.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Next time you’re at your local mega-super-multiplex cinema, watch the movie patrons as they walk out of whatever film they just finished seeing. What do you expect to witness? Stunned silence from the audience of a grim war drama? A throng of kids bursting out the door, zapping each other with imaginary ray guns after an afternoon with a sci-fi action flick? Smiles, laughter and hand-holding between couples as they exit a top-flight romantic comedy? That’s what I would expect from a movie that has done its job well and entertained in the way it meant to entertain. (If you ever see stunned silence from an audience as they file out of a romantic comedy, you may safely take that movie off your list of things to do.)

A successful movie or play takes pains to make sure its audience leaves the theater in a specific emotional state. Even after weaving a powerful spell for two solid hours, however, the movie can still falter if the ending doesn’t follow through. Either the viewers immediately forget what they just experienced, or they walk away frustrated and confused. Either way, they don’t return, nor do they tell their friends to go see the movie, and so the movie tanks.

You and I face the exact same challenge with our website or print-marketing content — only for “ending” substitute the term “call to action.” You can lead your reader by the nose all the way from the opening header to the closing paragraph, but you’ll still lose the sale without an inspiring finish.

An effective call to action is consistent in tone with what came before (no jarring shifts that wreck the mood), clear (because an ending should feel like an ending) and commanding (“Laugh! Cry! Think! Buy something!”) Do it right, and your audience will go forth doing what you want them to do. Do it wrong, and they’ll just go forth.

May your next marketing venture earn four stars from your most demanding critics — your target market!

For information about my writing services and current deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

The curtain rises on a murky, foggy night in Elsinore. A man atop a platform stands watch nervously, his lantern the only point of light in the gloom. He hears a sound, leaps to his feet and demands that the semi-obscured figure identify himself. The figure replies with the same demand. Fortunately, it’s only his friend come to take over the watch, but something’s clearly got everyone spooked. Why all the unease? Because of the ghost, of course — a dreaded apparition that haunts the castle.

Yes, I’m describing a play — Hamlet, to be precise — and not a brochure, website or print ad. On the surface, in fact, this scene would appear to have nothing at all to do with marketing or sales copy of any kind. After all, Shakespeare’s not selling anything here, is he?

Sure he is. He’s selling Hamlet.

An arresting opening to a play, film or literary work sells interest in the rest of it. It must hook its audience quickly and strongly if the author wants to see warm bodies in the seats for Act Two. Similarly, a great opening to a gigantic epic novel can persuade a reader to wade several hundred pages deeper than anyone expected. (“Call me Ishmael” has a lot to answer for.) Raising a brilliant opening curtain is like casting a magic spell — it may not hold for very long, but it’ll do its job long enough for you to strengthen and reinforce your command over those people for the period of time you need it.

The beginning of your marketing piece must command the “stage” — in this case the inner stage of the mind — just as firmly. This is especially, brutally true on the Internet, where we all have the attention span of a gnat with attention-deficit disorder. When someone lands on your homepage, you have a precious few seconds to cast your spell. So hit hard and aim true. Whether you open with an entrancing mood, a vivid depiction of a painful moment, a hearty laugh, an astonishing concept, or any of the other weapons in your mage’s staff, make sure you point that initial moment straight at the heart, mind or funny bone of the specific people you want to enthrall. Ask yourself, “What will get my ideal customer’s attention right now and hold it long enough for me to keep them from mousing away?” Then fire away.

The same principle holds true for print marketing as well, though generally readers will give you more time as they take in the pretty pictures or the nice slick paper. Even so, they want to encounter the good stuff ASAP, because they’ve got other things to do. So tell them in a big way, right from the opening header. Then follow up on that initial promise with more goodies as you guide them through the piece.

You don’t have to be a Shakespeare to grab your audience’s attention. You just have to know what will make their collective heart skip a beat, and then put it in front of them as the first thing they encounter.

Curtain up!

For information about my writing services and current deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

I starting running late on this blog post because I was sick. Not falling-down, call-the-doctor sick or anything — just one of those minor but annoying bugs that tries to hijack your brain to Cuba for a couple of days. Or let’s just say that was my excuse for running late. Why would I dismiss my perfectly good reason as an excuse? Well, maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t have any trouble writing my clients‘ regularly scheduled blog posts on time, as always. And that website job…and that editing job….and that brochure job….

It’s interesting that I wouldn’t dream of blowing off a client’s writing project while I’m willing to leave my own marketing high and dry. I know better. But it seems to be a universal issue — the expert who fails to take his own advice. I’ve talked to plenty of other copywriters and marketing consultants who admit to occasionally letting their own marketing efforts slide down the priority list. We’re so busy putting our clients’ needs first that we forget our own: “I’ll get these big marketing campaigns off my desk, and then if I have a few minutes to spare I’ll work on my own stuff.” A marketer short-changing his own marketing is like a CPA who forgets to file his own taxes, or a doctor who never has time for her own physical.

You can see the problems in such an approach. First of all, failing to keep up with critical everyday tasks in your own business hurts your ability to conduct or grow that business. Second, failing to “eat your own dog food” gives the impression of hypocrisy. A marketing consultant can’t preach the importance of blogging regularly and then fail to blog regularly. And you might laugh at a movie scene in which a chain-smoking doctor coughs and splutters within a halo of smoke while listening to a patient’s lungs — but how seriously would you take that doctor’s lecture on the dangers of smoking?

If I had followed my own advice, I would have built up a stockpile of ready-to-go blog articles for those days when I’m feeling sick, stumped or just plain lazy. My clients who order my Blogger’s 4-pack enjoy just such a benefit. They receive four finished blog posts at a time, and if they stagger their purchases they can end up with more blogs than they need at any given moment — a perfect strategy for refreshing their online content on time and on schedule.

So from now on, I will treat myself like one of my writing clients. I’m looking forward to it, actually. I’ve heard good things about this guy….

For more about my writing services and current deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.