The Copywriter Underground

It’s hardly an advanced copywriting secret. Good news sells. For most copywriters, leading with the good news is second nature — a reflex. You’ll be thinner. Richer. Happier.

You get the drift.

In my writing, it’s second nature. In my speaking life, it apparently isn’t. Last weekend I served as Ride Director for the Shasta Summit Century — an organized, fund-raising bike ride whose crown jewel is the 135 mile Mount Shasta Super Century.

The course is extremely hilly. This year, a rider crashed on a downhill, and needed an ambulance. Back at ride headquarters, we heard the news over the ham radio. We all held our breath.

The news was largely good. He’s still in the hospital, but doing OK, and they’ll release him soon. An hour after the crash, we managed to locate his wife (she was several hours away), and called her.

I took a deep breath. I started speaking. Good news first, right? (Wrong. Scheez.)

Me: “Your husband crashed on a downhill. An ambulance is on the way.”

Her: Drops phone

Me: “No wait — he’s talking, he’s conscious, and everything’s moving. There’s even a doctor right there with him. The ambulance is a precaution.”

Her: More dead air…

Brilliant, eh? Note to self: next time, lead with the “Your husband is doing well, but he had a crash…”

Today’s moral: “Applying general copywriting principles can make your everyday life easier.”

[tags]writing, copywriting, shasta summit century[/tags]

Sure, I’m back from my vacation in Maine (more than a day late thanks to my close, personal friends at Delta Airlines), but I haven’t exactly experienced the soft re-entry you hope for. While I untangle the threads and attempt to restore order, I’m going to throw my readers a little red meat — an excellent Matthew Stibbe post.

The sun has set on my Maine vacation.

Matthew’s on my short list of copywriters whose posts I always read. He’s a real pro who’s willing to reveal the useful, real-world tricks and techniques needed to win business, keep clients, and survive over the long term. (Longevity’s the subject of my next post, but for now, read Matthew’s post and soak up the hard-earned knowledge.)

His post? It’s about the ten free marketing tactics you can use every day to win and keep clients. These aren’t the obvious “get business cards and a Web site” pabulum.

For example, his “Daily Pitch” admonition woke me up from my own complacency (“Marketing consists of building a relationship with people who can buy from you. I find that calling someone or emailing someone or meeting someone every day is essential”).

His other nine tips are just as useful. Read them, put them to work, and you’ll be richer for the experience. In the meantime, I’ve got a bike race to run, and I’ll be back at the keyboard next week.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

[tags]copywriter, freelancer, freelance writer, freelance copywriter, marketing[/tags]

I was asked to write a monthly column for Chief Marketer about blogging and engagement marketing, and my second effort just hit the newsstands (the virtual, online newsstand).

It focuses on The Britannica Blog — a stunning new blog effort from one of the oldest brands in the knowledge business. Until I’m back from vacation (my current dialup access is akin to two tin cans on a string), this will have to do.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

[tags]copywriting, writing, blogging, business blogging, engagement marketing[/tags]

It’s not exactly “Copywriters Gone Wild,” but for the next two weeks, I’ll be posting from a remote camp on East Grand Lake, Maine.

It’s a long ways from my home in the mountains of Northern California, and since I travel about as well as most cats swim, my friends wonder why I bother. Fortunately, I can offer you one very, very good reason:

The Lovely & Talented Nancy (L&T Nancy) relaxing at East Grand Lake, ME.

It’s pretty here. It’s pretty where I live too, but too much of the same kind of pretty breeds a familiarity. And frankly, when you start getting a little crispy around the edges, different is good. Different is our friend.

And while it’s hard to put a value on quality time with my wife when we’re both largely shorn of our career responsibilities, I will say that time’s worth its weight in gold.

Reason #2: The Copy Conveyor Belt

You know the copywriters who can churn out copy, and do so for months on end? Well, I’m one of the other guys.

As lucky as I am to write for a living, I can’t ignore the stresses it generates. We’re supposed to be creative, or persuasive, or hard-hitting, or engaging — and we’ve got to do it all on a deadline.

After a while, that dulls the mind and deadens the fingers, and when the projects blend together and you start dreaming in short, punchy paragraphs, it’s time to get away.

I’ve gotten away.

Still, expect to see a post or two. I’ve blown the dust off a couple of back-burnered post ideas, and I plan to sneak them in around all the rampant recreation we’ve got planned.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

[tags]copywriting, vacation, [/tags]

When you’re selling a corporate product that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, you need to reach executive buyers (Directors and VPs).

The bad news? There’s no shortage of gatekeepers and roadblocks between you and your quarry, and you’ve got to put your sales rep in the office of a qualified executive, and do it quickly.

So what’s the quickest route to success?

The Birth of a Lumpy Mailer

Regular readers know I’m a fan of lumpy mailers — three dimensional objects (often with a humorous slant) shipped to small, carefully targeted lists. Because they’re clearly not “junk mail” — and they carry an aura of value — lumpy mailers blow right through barriers and onto desks.

In this case, my client was launching eMerchandising software designed to boost the per-cart revenues of large online stores. While we were in the midst of rolling out a largely online “mass media” campaign (nothing’s really “mass media” any more), I discovered our prime mailing list held only 80 names.

The Process

A short list of targets always ignites a “lumpy mailer” fire in my brain, so I started brainstorming ideas. Several scribbled pages later, I’d penciled in three good concepts, and moved onto the research stage — which effectively killed two of my concepts.

The remaining idea involved miniature steel shopping carts, and I was astounded to find them available for less than $7 each (far lower than I expected). A lumpy mailer was born.

I was lucky. I’ve worked with this client for many year (across several companies), and she’s well aware of the door-opening power of a lumpy mailer. You’re sometimes forced to educate clients who resist interesting solutions simply because they’ve never seen them before. In this case, that wasn’t a problem.

The Campaign

Our basic campaign concept played out in an earlier print ad which featured a split headline.

Pointing at the stacked shopping cart was “This is a BroadVision eMerchandising Shopping Cart.” Pointing at the near-empty cart was: “This Isn’t.”

The first run of the print ad offered a white paper, and the ad generated far more leads than expected. Time to breathe a sigh of relief.

After all the other elements hit the market (e-newsletter sponsorship, print, banner ads, PR, etc), we shipped our foot-long shopping carts to targets in large white boxes.

The ready-to-ship cart shorn of some of the accompanying elements.

Each cart carried several supporting pieces — including a foamcore-mounted piece promising the reader they’d never see another empty shopping cart. Also included was a handwritten note from a sales rep promising to get in touch.

That’s a key statement — lumpy mailers can be tailored to generate response, but when you send them to high-value targets, the mailer often paves the way for a near-term contact.

The thinking is simple; cold calling a VP’s office earns you a one-way trip to voice mail. But calling an office that just received a fun, three-dimensional goodie (neatly aligned with your product benefits) lands your sales rep a spot on the VP’s appointment calendar.

Helpful Hint: It’s critical that any followup calls immediately reference the lumpy mailer. Consider featuring a catch phrase in the mailer and to advise sales reps to use that phrase at the start of their call.

Results?

Early reports from sales reps were highly favorable, but because my contact is on maternity leave, I don’t have any numbers (and it’s likely too soon, given the long sales cycle). The sales reps were happy (a rare thing indeed), so the client’s happy, and for the freelancer that’s what counts.

The moral? Much of the marketing world’s attention is focused online, yet the there’s no reason to ignore traditional techniques like lumpy mailers. They work.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

[tags]marketing, direct mail, direct response, direct marketing, lumpy mailer, direct mailer[/tags]

Copywriters boil away all that isn’t essential, leaving behind the essence of a product. Which is why felt strangely at home when I stumbled across a creative writing site dedicated to telling a story in a single sentence. (Consider One Sentence the forerunner of twitter, but with meaning.)

One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials.

Some sentences are humorous, and some are not. But all are pithy. Consider it today’s Underground Entertainment. Can you tell a story in one sentence?

[tags]writing, one sentence[/tags]

I just wrote an online marketing plan for a client. Five years ago, half of the plan’s elements didn’t exist in any real marketing sense. And not only have the media channels changed, my client’s goals have too.

With consumers facing a constant barrage of marketing messages — and marketers struggling to make even a wisp of an impression — we’re witnessing the birth of some pretty extreme interrupt marketing techniques (including the two-second radio “shock” commercial as chronicled by Michael Stelzner).

Escalating the “shock” value of a message offers a temporary refuge, but the contact often acquires an adversarial taint. It’s little wonder marketers are looking for alternatives.

Which is where you step in. You’re the engagement copywriter.

The Rise of Engagement Marketing

Look hard at the emerging marketing arsenal: blogs, social networking sites, wikis, texting & interactive mobile, etc.

All are effective marketing tools. And all are exceptional vehicles for engagement — the loyalty-building tactic where a brand connects with customers via shared values and passions.

The key is two-way communication; not only do customers receive messages, but they respond to them (in fact, that’s kinda the point). In some cases, they generate their own brand-related content and network with other “brand fans.”

It’s an active (and welcome) alternative to traditional media channels, where customers are expected to sit idly while messages are shoved down the pipeline. Engagement isn’t a replacement for traditional interrupt marketing, but it’s an interesting (and growing) discipline that binds customers to brands.

It also expands a customer’s “acceptance bandwidth” (the amount of time they’ll invest in your message), and creates the brand loyalty so many “membership” programs strive for but don’t achieve.

The good news? You won’t have to rebuild your copywriter’s toolkit — the techniques are similar. But engagement copywriting does have its own set of rules.

The Rules of Writing For Engagement

The engagement copywriter combines the snap of the direct marketer, the charm of an entertainer, and the passion of a poet. More often than not, you’re writing a blog, e-newsletter, social network or other similar media channel (long-term gigs). So how do you do it? What are the rules of engagement?

• You’re engaging the reader around shared passions and values (which often excludes flogging product features)
• The conversation is typically “chunked” into small bites and dispensed over time
• You must be authentic — or the passion-drive partisans will sniff you out and hang your brand in effigy
• Invite your readers into the conversation; let them define the direction

Where Do Copywriters Go Wrong?

Where most businesses (and writers) go wrong with engagement is the product copy — or rather, the utter lack of it. Some of the better engagement blogs talk about anything but the products in question, and why not? If the goal is to bind the reader to the brand, then a demonstration of shared values or passions is the strongest adhesive known to the marketing world.

After all, product superiority is fleeting; whatever advantage your product enjoys today can disappear tomorrow. Engagement typically binds customers to a brand more than a product, a reality which elevates the conversation far beyond features and bullet points.

The second most common mistake? It’s not inviting participation. I’m writing an article for an online magazine about a pair of business blogs that appear to be publishing the right content, but fail badly in the “ask for a response” department.

It’s yet another way the engagement copywriter practices the same craft as the direct response writer; in both cases, you need to ask for the response you want.

In fact, the central tenets of copywriting apply to writing for engagement: be clear, be intriguing, be captivating, and be dramatic (no writer bores a reader into submission).

The Future of Engagement Copywriting

It’s tempting to declare traditional copywriting “dead” and announce the ascension of engagement writing in its stead.

Of course, it’s bullshit. A good “interrupt” copywriter will be a good “engagement” copywriter — provided you recognize the different goals and techniques.

[tags]copywriting, writing, marketing, [/tags]

Many, many years ago, I was the sole copywriter for an ad/PR agency that touted its “synergistic” approach to marketing (not my word for it). In fact, we repeatedly pitched ourselves as “print, broadcast, PR, events and direct mail experts.”

Which was fine… except we weren’t.

Direct mail? I was the agency “expert” and what I knew (or didn’t, actually) was largely limited to where the fake stamp should go on the envelope. » Read the rest of this entry «

One benefit of blogging is visibility. In my case, that visibility translated into a client or two, though even clients who find me via my “static” copywriting site mention my copywriting and engagement marketing blogs.

After all, credibility and visibility are critical elements of the sales process. Blogging helps with both.

It’s how Chief Marketer magazine found me when they wanted to interview a business blogging “expert” — which went well enough that I was asked to write a regular article touching on engagement marketing and business blogging.

Frankly, it’s little different from writing blog articles. But it exposes me to a whole new audience. That’s desirable for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which reflects one of my concerns about the blogosphere.

It can get a little incestuous. After all, the universe of non-blog-reading potential clients is huge. And — given my fascination with engagement marketing — I want to talk to the businesses who aren’t blogging or reading blogs.

Who do you want to talk to? And are you sure they’re reading your blog? If not, what are you doing to talk to them (instead of hoping they’ll find you)?

[tags]copywriting, blogs, business blogs, chief marketer, engagement marketing[/tags]

Roberta Rosenberg of the Copywriting Maven tagged me as one of the five blogs that make her think (if only a little).

I got a little rush from that; I read Roberta’s posts religiously (at her own blog and her guest posts on the Copyblogger site). We’ve both been around a long time, and frankly, she keeps me honest. Her “ground truth” approach nicely counters my wilder flights into the aether, serving as a reminder of what it takes to survive for better than two decades in this business.

Can You Name Five Thought Provoking Blogs? » Read the rest of this entry «