Discover the secrets to career and business success using publicity outreach for branding and marketing. Find out how to showcase your credentials, experience, wisdom and expertise using publicity success principles and strategy.
By Annie Jennings
Is there a secret to success? Is there more than one? Yes! Let’s find out what successful people, consultants and business pros believe and do that helps them achieve their optimal potential. What is it that they have in common, whether it’s in their beliefs or in their actions that makes them successful?
First of all they use resources available to them including publicity, self-promotion, branding and marketing to create their outstanding advantage in the marketplace. The rest comes naturally. The major opportunities go to the ones who are visible, making a difference, seen and heard by their target market.
Successful people know that they have to take responsibility and follow it up by taking action. You set you own limits. You are defined by the intensity of your commitment and the depths of your knowledge. In other words, commitment without knowledge can equal frustration and limit your potential. The idea is to add the right knowledge to your ambition so you can climb the ladder for yourself.
Those who make it big believe certain things and do certain things to back up their beliefs. They are ready to invest in themselves. They believe that they are they best investment. Successful people create a business model that meets the demands of their target market. Successful people are ready for action, they are committed and they are willing to go for it with gusto.
Showcase your knowledge. Showcase your talent using media outreach. Your clients will love seeing you out there in the media sharing what you know and commenting on the issues. They enjoy hiring a tried and true professional who understands how to deliver the specific outcome. By doing publicity, marketing and promotion, you let your clients get an idea of your knowledge, wisdom and experience. Your client will want to hire you. Clients want certainty. They want to hire the best. In the end, your clients want to buy outcomes and are happy to pay for your services if you are able to define the return on investment and clearly state how your services can help your clients.
Content is critical when showcasing yourself and your knowledge. The media is your opportunity to shine. Do an outstanding job, pack your commentary with valuable content and share your wisdom and experience in all of your marketing materials including your email newsletters. Be sure your website helps you educate your visitors and your clients.
Success is in your own hands. Taking responsibility for both the successes and failures empowers you to make the changes necessary to turn the situation around or to expand on your success. If you feel powerless in both the good and the bad, you will get stuck in your thinking and in your progress.
Have a terrific attitude. Commit to proven publicity, branding and marketing strategies. Do not fight success the whole way. Be optimistic. Success will come easily to you and it will seem as if everything you do has a terrific outcome. Have confidence in yourself. Go with your gut, your intuition and your instincts when making choices. Be high energy. Be ready for success & take action. P.S. Don’t stop until you get enough success!
Access tremendous publicity resources for both your career and your business at Annie Jennings PR. Free publicity, branding and business marketing special reports are available as well as free MP3 audio recordings to empower your corporate communications strategy. Contact Annie Jennings PR at 908-281-6201
Showing posts with label business management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business management. Show all posts
Monday, March 22, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Business Email Culture: Manage It or Watch Your Profits Slide Away
Have you ever stopped to examine how do your employees use their email? How do they manage it, send it, and save it? The habits they adopt, both good and bad, can be contagious. Learn certain practices you can instill into your employees to create a positive email culture.
By Marsha Egan
Every time you let your email interrupt your productive work, it takes you an average of 4 minutes to get back on track. If in one day you let 15 emails derail you, you’ve just lost an hour of billable, productive time. Multiply that by every employee every day and you can see how office-wide unproductive email use can be an enormous drain on your profits.
Have you ever stopped to examine how do your employees use their email? How do they manage it, send it, and save it? The habits they adopt, both good and bad, can be contagious. Since email touches all of us several times a day, an office email culture evolves quickly.
Here is an example. A boss calls a meeting with 3 of his department managers. He sends an urgent email, needing a response within 15 minutes. One manager, who is working on an important project, does not have his email on, misses the request, and angers his boss.
This manager has just now learned that he cannot turn off his email, ever. But it doesn’t stop there; it rolls down the corporate ladder. All three managers now have “permission” to use email as an URGENT delivery system. They use it in their departments, and very quickly, the entire organization is infected. No one can turn off his or her email for fear of missing something vital. Employees become slaves to the “brinnng” and stop productive work anytime an email comes in.
This is just one example of email mis-use that plagues businesses. Think of the practices of copying everyone under the sun, just so you don’t miss someone. Or how about using email as a chat room with multiple recipients to resolve dilemmas? Or the slippery slope of using email to critique someone’s performance? One person does it, others do it. Culture is changed.
There are, however, certain practices you can instill into your employees to create a positive email culture. It requires strong leadership and change management efforts, but by following these methods, you and your employees will be able to reclaim more time, and improve your bottom line:
1. NEVER use email as an urgent delivery system. If the matter is urgent, pick up the phone or walk down the hall.
2. Have everyone turn off “Automatic Send/Receive” and set “Receive intervals” to a minimum of 90 minutes. If someone is expecting an email, he or she can always hit receive manually.
3. Move everything OUT OF your inbox. Your employees can manage their work better by putting emails in appropriate folders for easy reference later.
4. Make Subject Lines be VERY specific. By including details in subject lines, you will help others sort and prioritize their work.
5. Copy only the people who REALLY need to receive the email. Each superfluous cc will have to open and read the email, adding unnecessary tasks to their already full days.
Marsha Egan,CPCU,PCC, CEO of the Egan Group,Inc., Reading PA. An ICF Certified Professional Coach, she is an authority on email productivity. She works with forward thinking organizations who want a profit-rich email culture. She is the author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence,available on her website and Amazon.com.The last week in January is International Clean Out Your Inbox Week at http://EganEmailSolutions.com/inboxweek.html
By Marsha Egan
Every time you let your email interrupt your productive work, it takes you an average of 4 minutes to get back on track. If in one day you let 15 emails derail you, you’ve just lost an hour of billable, productive time. Multiply that by every employee every day and you can see how office-wide unproductive email use can be an enormous drain on your profits.
Have you ever stopped to examine how do your employees use their email? How do they manage it, send it, and save it? The habits they adopt, both good and bad, can be contagious. Since email touches all of us several times a day, an office email culture evolves quickly.
Here is an example. A boss calls a meeting with 3 of his department managers. He sends an urgent email, needing a response within 15 minutes. One manager, who is working on an important project, does not have his email on, misses the request, and angers his boss.
This manager has just now learned that he cannot turn off his email, ever. But it doesn’t stop there; it rolls down the corporate ladder. All three managers now have “permission” to use email as an URGENT delivery system. They use it in their departments, and very quickly, the entire organization is infected. No one can turn off his or her email for fear of missing something vital. Employees become slaves to the “brinnng” and stop productive work anytime an email comes in.
This is just one example of email mis-use that plagues businesses. Think of the practices of copying everyone under the sun, just so you don’t miss someone. Or how about using email as a chat room with multiple recipients to resolve dilemmas? Or the slippery slope of using email to critique someone’s performance? One person does it, others do it. Culture is changed.
There are, however, certain practices you can instill into your employees to create a positive email culture. It requires strong leadership and change management efforts, but by following these methods, you and your employees will be able to reclaim more time, and improve your bottom line:
1. NEVER use email as an urgent delivery system. If the matter is urgent, pick up the phone or walk down the hall.
2. Have everyone turn off “Automatic Send/Receive” and set “Receive intervals” to a minimum of 90 minutes. If someone is expecting an email, he or she can always hit receive manually.
3. Move everything OUT OF your inbox. Your employees can manage their work better by putting emails in appropriate folders for easy reference later.
4. Make Subject Lines be VERY specific. By including details in subject lines, you will help others sort and prioritize their work.
5. Copy only the people who REALLY need to receive the email. Each superfluous cc will have to open and read the email, adding unnecessary tasks to their already full days.
Marsha Egan,CPCU,PCC, CEO of the Egan Group,Inc., Reading PA. An ICF Certified Professional Coach, she is an authority on email productivity. She works with forward thinking organizations who want a profit-rich email culture. She is the author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence,available on her website and Amazon.com.The last week in January is International Clean Out Your Inbox Week at http://EganEmailSolutions.com/inboxweek.html
Saturday, November 7, 2009
10 Steps to Effective Copywriting
Don't waste your ad dollars with an over-the-top sales pitch. Well-written copy follows these simple guidelines.
By Susan Gunelius
Whether you're a small-business owner, a medium-size business owner, an eBay seller, or simply trying to break into the copywriting industry, understanding the fundamentals of writing sales-oriented copy and put you on a path to success. At its core, copywriting is another device in a business' marketing toolbox. Well-written copy can make or break an ad or marketing piece. With that in mind, copywriting can equate to either well-spent advertising investments or a waste of advertising dollars.
Many people misinterpret the uniqueness of effective copywriting. I can't count the number of times I've heard freelance writers say they want to shift from article writing to copywriting as if it's simply an extension of their existing abilities. Copywriting does come naturally to some people, but for most, it's a foreign landscape they do not know how to navigate. Copywriting is about more than writing the hard sell sales letter that many short copywriting courses offer. In fact, I cringe when I see those over-the-top sales letters, which do little more than provide an ugly representation of copywriting, sales and marketing.
Well-crafted copywriting doesn't need to beat a person over the head. It doesn't have to drown in bold typeface and capitalization. The message should stand on its own without an overabundance of heavy-handed sales language and design embellishments. I associate many sales letters that are guilty of this technique with a writer who doesn't truly understand the basic purpose of copywriting. However, successful copywriting can be achieved in 10 easy steps.
1. Exploit your product's benefits.
The first step of the copywriting outline is the foundation for your advertising campaigns. A benefit is the value of your product to a customer. In other words, a benefit is what the product can do for a customer or how the product can help a customer. You need to put into words the reasons your product is the best available and better than your competitors' products based on the added value it provides to your customers. The key to success is for you to fully understand all the benefits of your product. Only then can you ensure that the audience knows them and can relate to them.
2. Exploit your competition's weaknesses.
To write compelling copy, it is essential that you know what differentiates your product from the competition. Once you know your competitors' weaknesses, you must make sure your audience knows them and understands why buying your competitors' products would be a terrible mistake. Get started by thoroughly researching your competition and understanding what they offer in terms of products and services. Next, list the elements of their offerings that are inferior to your own. Feel free to tear the competition apart but be realistic in your comparisons. You want to be able to support your claims if you are challenged.
3. Know your audience.
Every person in the world is not going to see every ad in the world. Each ad has a specific audience that will see it, and it's the marketer's job to find the best placement to ensure the target audience will see it. For example, an ad for skateboards placed in a local senior citizen housing association newsletter is not likely to generate a lot of sales. In fact, it would be a waste of advertising dollars. The target audience for skateboards is teenagers or young adults. The vast majority of senior citizens do not use skateboards, and it is not a product category in which they typically purchase gifts. Before you buy ad space, make sure you're spending your money in the right place to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of exposure and building awareness of your product or service.
First, take the time to research your customers thoroughly. In most businesses, 20 percent of customers are responsible for 80 percent of sales (this is called the 80/20 rule in case you're curious about the official marketing terminology for this phenomenon). That 20 percent represents your best customer, and your job is to determine who that 20 percent is. Evaluate your customers and put together a demographic profile of your most valuable customer, so you can advertise in the best places to find similar people who are likely prospects. If you're a small business owner, you probably don't have a budget set aside to conduct a thorough research study and analysis of your customer base, so you'll have to improvise by using your own communication skills and visual investigation. Remember, you're trying to develop a basic profile of your target customer, not a CIA profile of each individual who buys your product. Do your best with the information you have.
There are many attributes you can use to develop a demographic profile of your customers. Following is a list of examples of traits to help you start your own demographic profiling initiative:
• Gender
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Family Status
• Income
• Occupation
• Interests
4. Communicate W.I.I.F.M. (What's In It For Me?)
There are a variety of reasons to create an advertisement or marketing piece. Before you write copy for your promotional piece, you need to understand your goals for that piece. What do you want to get in return? The copy you use in each ad or marketing piece will vary based on your goals for that promotion. While this book does not focus on the development of marketing plans and strategies, I will offer some examples of different objectives for ads or marketing pieces that, in turn, will affect the copy you use:
• Communicate a special offer
• Share information and raise awareness
• Generate leads
Your customers need to understand how your product or service is going to help them by making their lives easier, making them feel better, helping them save money, helping them save time, etc. In this step of the copywriting outline, you'll build on the work you've done so far by taking your product's features, benefits, and differentiators and specifically describing how they directly affect your target audience members' lives in positive ways. Remember the first tenet of copywriting--your product or service is far less important than its ability to fulfill your customers' needs.
Answer your target audience's question "What's in it for me?" Remember, you're paying for your ad space and possibly graphic design too. Don't waste your money by placing an ad with ineffective copy that does not clearly tell your customers what they'll get by buying your product or service. Large companies with big advertising and marketing budgets can test snappy, cliché headlines and copy in an attempt to find the best way to catch their target audience's attention, but small and medium-size business owners typically have limited budgets. For smaller businesses that only have one chance to communicate their message, copy must be written so the message, including benefits and differentiators, is heard and understood by the target audience. There is no room in a small business owner's advertising budget to risk not getting that specific message across to the right people every time.
5. Focus on "you," not "we."
It is essential that you are aware of how you're addressing your customers in your copy. To do this, you need to understand pronoun usage. Think back to your school days. Remember your English teacher explaining first person, second person, and third person? As a refresher, first person (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours) is the person speaking and second person (you, your, yours) is the person to whom one is speaking. It's essential that you write copy that speaks to your target audience and not at them--and not about you. Therefore, the majority of your copy in any ad or marketing piece should be written in the second person. For example, do you prefer copy that says, "Through our first-rate sales department, we can deliver cars within 24 hours" or "You can drive your new car tomorrow"? While the first copy example focuses on the business, the second example focuses on customers and speaks directly to them. It's more personal, and thus, more effective.
Remember, writing in the second person helps your audience quickly connect the points in your copy to their own lives and allows them to personalize the advertisement or marketing piece. This is how the ad is connected to an individual customer's own life. By writing your copy so it focuses on the customer rather than yourself, the customer can personalize the ad and product you're selling and act accordingly.
6. Understand your medium.
As you write your copy, be aware that each different medium where an ad is placed requires a different tone or style. Depending on where you're placing your ad, the copy you use changes based on the audience who will see the ad. Are you placing your ad in a local newspaper or on a billboard? Are you placing your ad in a woman's magazine or in a news magazine? Different media require different copy to most effectively persuade a particular audience to act. Furthermore, different types of marketing pieces require different types of copy. Remember, there are many ways to use copy to promote your business other than traditional advertisements. Use every possible and appropriate opportunity to communicate your marketing messages to your customers.
7. Avoid T.M.I. (Too Much Information)
Never risk losing the attention of your audience by providing too much detail in your copy. Effective copywriting tells your audience what they need to know to act and make a purchase or how to contact you for more information. Extraneous details clutter the minds of your audience, which increases the possibility of them forgetting the most important aspects of your advertisement or marketing program. Unless you're advertising a prescription drug, highly technical equipment, or an exceedingly regulated or complicated product, the best rule to follow is K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). You're spending a substantial amount of your advertising budget on placing each ad. With each ad, you only receive a small amount of space to get your message across to your audience. Wisely use that pricey real estate to ensure you get the highest return on your investment.
8. Include a call to action.
The goal of any ad or marketing piece is to elicit some kind of response from the audience who sees it. A call to action is the element of copy that tells an audience how you want them to respond to your advertisement or marketing piece. Typically, the call to action creates a sense of urgency around a message and provides instructions on what to do next. For example, a call to action might tell the audience to call the advertiser or visit their store or website.
Including a call to action is by far the most important aspect of effective copywriting. It is essential that you make it easy for your audience to act on your ad or marketing message. You already persuaded them to want your product by following Step 1 through Step 7 of the copywriting outline and by writing influential copy. Now you must make sure your audience can respond easily to your ad and buy your product by compelling them to act.
To start, make sure the sentence structure of your copywriting is in an active rather than passive voice. The reason for this is simple. Copy that you write in the active voice is by definition action-oriented, while copy that you write in the passive voice talks about the action in a remote manner. To further explain, when you write a sentence in the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action of the verb in the sentence. On the other hand, if you write a sentence in the passive voice, the subject of the sentence receives the action from the verb of the sentence.
The second step in creating an effective call to action in your copy is developing a sense of urgency. Your goal in advertising is to create awareness of your product or service and, ultimately, boost sales. When do you want to do that? Do you want your customers to act tomorrow, next month, or next year? If you're spending money on advertising now, you most likely want your customers to act now. If that's the case, your copy needs to tell them to get off the couch and get into your store now. There are many words and phrases you can add to your copy to create a sense of urgency.
9. C.Y.A. (Cover Your Ass)
While large companies have legal departments that review copy to ensure it does not expose the company to potential problems, smaller companies don't usually have the budget to seek the opinion of an attorney for each ad they run or marketing piece they print. However, that doesn't mean small business owners have any less responsibility for producing ads and marketing pieces that are honest and not considered deceptive. Most small business owners are sole proprietors meaning if they lose a lawsuit, not only can their business assets be used to satisfy a plaintiff's claim, but their personal assets can be targeted as well. When you're writing copy, consider if claims that you can't prove in your copy (or can't provide appropriate disclaimers for) are worth it once you weigh the risk vs. the potential reward.
Aside from opening yourself up to possible litigation, exaggerating or falsifying claims about your product or your competition is unethical and a bad business practice. If you're caught in a lie (no matter how small), word will spread quickly, and your reputation could be irreparably damaged. Again, weigh the risk vs. the potential reward before you advertise using claims you can't prove.
Be careful of using words superlatives such as the examples in the following list:
• Free
• Guaranteed
• Best, lowest, fastest, etc.
• Or your money back
• Risk-free
• No risk
• No purchase necessary
• No cost
• No obligation
• No investment
• 100 percent
• Promise
• No questions asked
10. Proofread.
It is critical that you accurately proofread your copy. One of the quickest ways to lose credibility in advertising is to allow grammatical or spelling errors to appear in your advertisement or marketing pieces. Customers translate carelessness in ads into carelessness in products and service. They ask themselves, "If this company doesn't care enough to produce an ad without errors, how likely are they to care about taking care of me?" Professional businesses produce professional quality ads and ad copy, and that means their copy has been proofread again and again and is error free.
It Really Is That Simple
Copywriting is truly easy. If you do your research and prep work, your copy will shine. Don't be afraid to take calculated risks and learn from your mistakes, but don't waste your limited advertising budget. By doing the legwork first and thoroughly completing your copywriting outline, you'll have a working document you can use as a tool to produce all your copywriting projects now and in the future. Spend some time up-front to develop a first rate copywriting outline, and you'll reap the rewards later with a boost in sales and profits and a higher return in your advertising investments. Now kick some ass.
By Susan Gunelius
Whether you're a small-business owner, a medium-size business owner, an eBay seller, or simply trying to break into the copywriting industry, understanding the fundamentals of writing sales-oriented copy and put you on a path to success. At its core, copywriting is another device in a business' marketing toolbox. Well-written copy can make or break an ad or marketing piece. With that in mind, copywriting can equate to either well-spent advertising investments or a waste of advertising dollars.
Many people misinterpret the uniqueness of effective copywriting. I can't count the number of times I've heard freelance writers say they want to shift from article writing to copywriting as if it's simply an extension of their existing abilities. Copywriting does come naturally to some people, but for most, it's a foreign landscape they do not know how to navigate. Copywriting is about more than writing the hard sell sales letter that many short copywriting courses offer. In fact, I cringe when I see those over-the-top sales letters, which do little more than provide an ugly representation of copywriting, sales and marketing.
Well-crafted copywriting doesn't need to beat a person over the head. It doesn't have to drown in bold typeface and capitalization. The message should stand on its own without an overabundance of heavy-handed sales language and design embellishments. I associate many sales letters that are guilty of this technique with a writer who doesn't truly understand the basic purpose of copywriting. However, successful copywriting can be achieved in 10 easy steps.
1. Exploit your product's benefits.
The first step of the copywriting outline is the foundation for your advertising campaigns. A benefit is the value of your product to a customer. In other words, a benefit is what the product can do for a customer or how the product can help a customer. You need to put into words the reasons your product is the best available and better than your competitors' products based on the added value it provides to your customers. The key to success is for you to fully understand all the benefits of your product. Only then can you ensure that the audience knows them and can relate to them.
2. Exploit your competition's weaknesses.
To write compelling copy, it is essential that you know what differentiates your product from the competition. Once you know your competitors' weaknesses, you must make sure your audience knows them and understands why buying your competitors' products would be a terrible mistake. Get started by thoroughly researching your competition and understanding what they offer in terms of products and services. Next, list the elements of their offerings that are inferior to your own. Feel free to tear the competition apart but be realistic in your comparisons. You want to be able to support your claims if you are challenged.
3. Know your audience.
Every person in the world is not going to see every ad in the world. Each ad has a specific audience that will see it, and it's the marketer's job to find the best placement to ensure the target audience will see it. For example, an ad for skateboards placed in a local senior citizen housing association newsletter is not likely to generate a lot of sales. In fact, it would be a waste of advertising dollars. The target audience for skateboards is teenagers or young adults. The vast majority of senior citizens do not use skateboards, and it is not a product category in which they typically purchase gifts. Before you buy ad space, make sure you're spending your money in the right place to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of exposure and building awareness of your product or service.
First, take the time to research your customers thoroughly. In most businesses, 20 percent of customers are responsible for 80 percent of sales (this is called the 80/20 rule in case you're curious about the official marketing terminology for this phenomenon). That 20 percent represents your best customer, and your job is to determine who that 20 percent is. Evaluate your customers and put together a demographic profile of your most valuable customer, so you can advertise in the best places to find similar people who are likely prospects. If you're a small business owner, you probably don't have a budget set aside to conduct a thorough research study and analysis of your customer base, so you'll have to improvise by using your own communication skills and visual investigation. Remember, you're trying to develop a basic profile of your target customer, not a CIA profile of each individual who buys your product. Do your best with the information you have.
There are many attributes you can use to develop a demographic profile of your customers. Following is a list of examples of traits to help you start your own demographic profiling initiative:
• Gender
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Family Status
• Income
• Occupation
• Interests
4. Communicate W.I.I.F.M. (What's In It For Me?)
There are a variety of reasons to create an advertisement or marketing piece. Before you write copy for your promotional piece, you need to understand your goals for that piece. What do you want to get in return? The copy you use in each ad or marketing piece will vary based on your goals for that promotion. While this book does not focus on the development of marketing plans and strategies, I will offer some examples of different objectives for ads or marketing pieces that, in turn, will affect the copy you use:
• Communicate a special offer
• Share information and raise awareness
• Generate leads
Your customers need to understand how your product or service is going to help them by making their lives easier, making them feel better, helping them save money, helping them save time, etc. In this step of the copywriting outline, you'll build on the work you've done so far by taking your product's features, benefits, and differentiators and specifically describing how they directly affect your target audience members' lives in positive ways. Remember the first tenet of copywriting--your product or service is far less important than its ability to fulfill your customers' needs.
Answer your target audience's question "What's in it for me?" Remember, you're paying for your ad space and possibly graphic design too. Don't waste your money by placing an ad with ineffective copy that does not clearly tell your customers what they'll get by buying your product or service. Large companies with big advertising and marketing budgets can test snappy, cliché headlines and copy in an attempt to find the best way to catch their target audience's attention, but small and medium-size business owners typically have limited budgets. For smaller businesses that only have one chance to communicate their message, copy must be written so the message, including benefits and differentiators, is heard and understood by the target audience. There is no room in a small business owner's advertising budget to risk not getting that specific message across to the right people every time.
5. Focus on "you," not "we."
It is essential that you are aware of how you're addressing your customers in your copy. To do this, you need to understand pronoun usage. Think back to your school days. Remember your English teacher explaining first person, second person, and third person? As a refresher, first person (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours) is the person speaking and second person (you, your, yours) is the person to whom one is speaking. It's essential that you write copy that speaks to your target audience and not at them--and not about you. Therefore, the majority of your copy in any ad or marketing piece should be written in the second person. For example, do you prefer copy that says, "Through our first-rate sales department, we can deliver cars within 24 hours" or "You can drive your new car tomorrow"? While the first copy example focuses on the business, the second example focuses on customers and speaks directly to them. It's more personal, and thus, more effective.
Remember, writing in the second person helps your audience quickly connect the points in your copy to their own lives and allows them to personalize the advertisement or marketing piece. This is how the ad is connected to an individual customer's own life. By writing your copy so it focuses on the customer rather than yourself, the customer can personalize the ad and product you're selling and act accordingly.
6. Understand your medium.
As you write your copy, be aware that each different medium where an ad is placed requires a different tone or style. Depending on where you're placing your ad, the copy you use changes based on the audience who will see the ad. Are you placing your ad in a local newspaper or on a billboard? Are you placing your ad in a woman's magazine or in a news magazine? Different media require different copy to most effectively persuade a particular audience to act. Furthermore, different types of marketing pieces require different types of copy. Remember, there are many ways to use copy to promote your business other than traditional advertisements. Use every possible and appropriate opportunity to communicate your marketing messages to your customers.
7. Avoid T.M.I. (Too Much Information)
Never risk losing the attention of your audience by providing too much detail in your copy. Effective copywriting tells your audience what they need to know to act and make a purchase or how to contact you for more information. Extraneous details clutter the minds of your audience, which increases the possibility of them forgetting the most important aspects of your advertisement or marketing program. Unless you're advertising a prescription drug, highly technical equipment, or an exceedingly regulated or complicated product, the best rule to follow is K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). You're spending a substantial amount of your advertising budget on placing each ad. With each ad, you only receive a small amount of space to get your message across to your audience. Wisely use that pricey real estate to ensure you get the highest return on your investment.
8. Include a call to action.
The goal of any ad or marketing piece is to elicit some kind of response from the audience who sees it. A call to action is the element of copy that tells an audience how you want them to respond to your advertisement or marketing piece. Typically, the call to action creates a sense of urgency around a message and provides instructions on what to do next. For example, a call to action might tell the audience to call the advertiser or visit their store or website.
Including a call to action is by far the most important aspect of effective copywriting. It is essential that you make it easy for your audience to act on your ad or marketing message. You already persuaded them to want your product by following Step 1 through Step 7 of the copywriting outline and by writing influential copy. Now you must make sure your audience can respond easily to your ad and buy your product by compelling them to act.
To start, make sure the sentence structure of your copywriting is in an active rather than passive voice. The reason for this is simple. Copy that you write in the active voice is by definition action-oriented, while copy that you write in the passive voice talks about the action in a remote manner. To further explain, when you write a sentence in the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action of the verb in the sentence. On the other hand, if you write a sentence in the passive voice, the subject of the sentence receives the action from the verb of the sentence.
The second step in creating an effective call to action in your copy is developing a sense of urgency. Your goal in advertising is to create awareness of your product or service and, ultimately, boost sales. When do you want to do that? Do you want your customers to act tomorrow, next month, or next year? If you're spending money on advertising now, you most likely want your customers to act now. If that's the case, your copy needs to tell them to get off the couch and get into your store now. There are many words and phrases you can add to your copy to create a sense of urgency.
9. C.Y.A. (Cover Your Ass)
While large companies have legal departments that review copy to ensure it does not expose the company to potential problems, smaller companies don't usually have the budget to seek the opinion of an attorney for each ad they run or marketing piece they print. However, that doesn't mean small business owners have any less responsibility for producing ads and marketing pieces that are honest and not considered deceptive. Most small business owners are sole proprietors meaning if they lose a lawsuit, not only can their business assets be used to satisfy a plaintiff's claim, but their personal assets can be targeted as well. When you're writing copy, consider if claims that you can't prove in your copy (or can't provide appropriate disclaimers for) are worth it once you weigh the risk vs. the potential reward.
Aside from opening yourself up to possible litigation, exaggerating or falsifying claims about your product or your competition is unethical and a bad business practice. If you're caught in a lie (no matter how small), word will spread quickly, and your reputation could be irreparably damaged. Again, weigh the risk vs. the potential reward before you advertise using claims you can't prove.
Be careful of using words superlatives such as the examples in the following list:
• Free
• Guaranteed
• Best, lowest, fastest, etc.
• Or your money back
• Risk-free
• No risk
• No purchase necessary
• No cost
• No obligation
• No investment
• 100 percent
• Promise
• No questions asked
10. Proofread.
It is critical that you accurately proofread your copy. One of the quickest ways to lose credibility in advertising is to allow grammatical or spelling errors to appear in your advertisement or marketing pieces. Customers translate carelessness in ads into carelessness in products and service. They ask themselves, "If this company doesn't care enough to produce an ad without errors, how likely are they to care about taking care of me?" Professional businesses produce professional quality ads and ad copy, and that means their copy has been proofread again and again and is error free.
It Really Is That Simple
Copywriting is truly easy. If you do your research and prep work, your copy will shine. Don't be afraid to take calculated risks and learn from your mistakes, but don't waste your limited advertising budget. By doing the legwork first and thoroughly completing your copywriting outline, you'll have a working document you can use as a tool to produce all your copywriting projects now and in the future. Spend some time up-front to develop a first rate copywriting outline, and you'll reap the rewards later with a boost in sales and profits and a higher return in your advertising investments. Now kick some ass.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Business Planning for the Rest of Us
Having a plan is about managing your company, not explaining it.
By Tim Berry
So let's say you don't need a business plan. You say your understanding has always been that business plans are for starting companies. Or maybe because you're not looking to take your existing company to market, borrow money from a bank, sell it or get new investment, you don’t need a plan. Those are myths, and they don’t really argue against business planning. But let's suspend disbelief for a bit and settle for this question: If I don't need a business plan, do I not want to plan my business?
Here are some reasons to have a plan, regardless of whether or not you need to show one to some outsider:
Long-term goals: You want to manage, develop, review and implement long-term business strategy.
Business management: You need to manage teams, tasks and accountability. The problem of who does what, when and how much it costs comes up again and again. Responsibility has to be defined. All of this needs to be written down. You need to know what's going to happen. You need to coordinate between people, vendors, events and so on.
Cash-flow management: You need to manage money. You have to watch sales to be able to manage expenses and, more important, cash flow. You don't need any surprises.
Staying strong: You want to keep your business healthy. That means watching for new opportunities, threats and new developments in your market. You don't want to stagnate.
All of these goals are related to business planning. None of them, however, relates directly to the classic business plan document. They don't involve validating your market or showing off your management team. Nor do they involve valuing your company for investment or proving your company to bankers.
They are about managing the company, not explaining it.
My suggestion: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Do your planning, whether or not you develop a full, formal business plan. Do just what's necessary, not what the formal business plan would involve.
But what is it, then? Where is it, how do you do it, how do you share it? Here are my recommendations:
Assume the plan will live on your computer. Don't worry about printing it out.
If you're more than one person in your business, get the others involved. If you're a lot of people, then get the important managers involved. Share the planning process. Do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. Set up a schedule for review meetings for comparing plan vs. actual results and making course correction.
Define your strategy in simple bullet points, perhaps pictures. Identify what's special and different about your business--a focused target market, and what you're offering to solve somebody's problems. Include the SWOT. Don't worry about format or tools or software; do whatever works best for you.
Set up a list of dates and deadlines and decide who does what. Determine what is supposed to happen to make that strategy happen.
Run some basic numbers: sales forecast and expense budget.
You don't have to stop life, even temporarily. Don't wait for the big plan to be done. Get going. Put your plan together one piece at a time, on your own schedule, and keep it somewhere easily accessible. Before you know it, you'll be planning to manage your business.
By Tim Berry
So let's say you don't need a business plan. You say your understanding has always been that business plans are for starting companies. Or maybe because you're not looking to take your existing company to market, borrow money from a bank, sell it or get new investment, you don’t need a plan. Those are myths, and they don’t really argue against business planning. But let's suspend disbelief for a bit and settle for this question: If I don't need a business plan, do I not want to plan my business?
Here are some reasons to have a plan, regardless of whether or not you need to show one to some outsider:
Long-term goals: You want to manage, develop, review and implement long-term business strategy.
Business management: You need to manage teams, tasks and accountability. The problem of who does what, when and how much it costs comes up again and again. Responsibility has to be defined. All of this needs to be written down. You need to know what's going to happen. You need to coordinate between people, vendors, events and so on.
Cash-flow management: You need to manage money. You have to watch sales to be able to manage expenses and, more important, cash flow. You don't need any surprises.
Staying strong: You want to keep your business healthy. That means watching for new opportunities, threats and new developments in your market. You don't want to stagnate.
All of these goals are related to business planning. None of them, however, relates directly to the classic business plan document. They don't involve validating your market or showing off your management team. Nor do they involve valuing your company for investment or proving your company to bankers.
They are about managing the company, not explaining it.
My suggestion: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Do your planning, whether or not you develop a full, formal business plan. Do just what's necessary, not what the formal business plan would involve.
But what is it, then? Where is it, how do you do it, how do you share it? Here are my recommendations:
Assume the plan will live on your computer. Don't worry about printing it out.
If you're more than one person in your business, get the others involved. If you're a lot of people, then get the important managers involved. Share the planning process. Do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. Set up a schedule for review meetings for comparing plan vs. actual results and making course correction.
Define your strategy in simple bullet points, perhaps pictures. Identify what's special and different about your business--a focused target market, and what you're offering to solve somebody's problems. Include the SWOT. Don't worry about format or tools or software; do whatever works best for you.
Set up a list of dates and deadlines and decide who does what. Determine what is supposed to happen to make that strategy happen.
Run some basic numbers: sales forecast and expense budget.
You don't have to stop life, even temporarily. Don't wait for the big plan to be done. Get going. Put your plan together one piece at a time, on your own schedule, and keep it somewhere easily accessible. Before you know it, you'll be planning to manage your business.
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