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Business readers often dismiss books as being stale-dated within a year or two of their release. But lately, I’ve returned to Nick Usborne’s classic study, Net Words, to reconsider how you, as a prospective client, can use a good online copywriter for your organization or business. The nine tips to follow (in parts one and two) don’t comprise an exhaustive list, but should assist clients like you in identifying the value of the work I do.

You need to hire an online copywriter because . . .

(1)   . . . The language on your website is not personal:

In this hyper-technological age, there’s been an explosion of knowledge about and for customers, online.  But that explosion hasn’t amounted to a personal experience, when prospects use the web. Personalization software and technology knows prospects only by data, not as people. Usborne notes that technology itself cannot deliver a personal message—only a person can do that (e.g. such as in social media). So, as he writes, “personalization will never feel personal, unless there is some element . . . that touches you . . . [at] a human level” (152). And that element can be good copywriting.

But the trouble is that marketing and IT departments within companies or organizations tend to be disconnected, or to use the technology produced by others, where there are such divisions, within themselves. When marcom specialists like copywriters aren’t respected enough, technology will run rampant and deliver messages that do not connect with customers.

One example (adapted from Usborne) is a marketing email sent from a mail-order company, which reads as follows:

“Dear Preferred Customer,

Welcome to XY’s exclusive email news!

Now that you’re signed up to receive our special fashion mailings, you’ll be the first to hear about exciting new media events, special online promotions and more. These updates will be sent to you (about twice a month).”

This copy fails on virtually every level. It fails even to address the prospect by name (the generic addressee fails badly), and the effort to create spontaneity is undermined by the reference to technology (“sent . . .  twice a month”) and since the claim to “exclusivity” (“first to hear,” etc.) is negated by the reality that the email is mass-disseminated to millions (which the reader knows full well). For a revised version, read on . . .

(2)   . . . Technology has overtaken marketing:

The previous example shows that the company has (in Usborne’s words) “invested in the technology of message delivery, but not in the messages that are being delivered” (155).

Once you have a prospect’s email address, you have an opportunity to become personal with them and to cater to the challenges, needs and interests that they have.  If the personalization technology is “used to deliver personalized messages, then it must accommodate the act of writing these messages in a personal, human way” (Usborne 162). So here’s a revision that does just that: Continue reading “9 Ways in Which You Need a Good Online Copywriter: Revisiting Nick Usborne’s _Net Words: Creating High Impact Online Copy_ (Part One)”

In a recent AWAI webinar, Montreal copywriting great, Nick Usborne, reminded listeners that online, with social media and in other arenas of “marcom” activity, often the more things change, the more they stay the same (“la plus ca change . . . ”–apt, given his geographical location in Quebec ☺ ). He commented that the latest development in “content marketing” in 2014 is nothing new, when marketers in the 1990s often proclaimed that “Content is King.” It’s the practice of writing online copy that should matter, Nick says, not the apparently revolutionary fad of the moment. “Copywriters today need to be sensitive to the voice and tone that they use to persuade prospects,” he says. Writing remains the bottom line.

In his classic study, Net Words: Creating High Impact Online Copy (McGraw Hill, 2002), Nick writes that “the Internet is not a marketing channel or an advertising medium in any traditional sense. [And] the audience you are writing to is [now] composed of active participants and co-owners of the same environment through which you are trying to market your goods and services” (2). Before the web, communication was a “one-way street” from one’s community or the media (e.g. TV, newspapers, radio, direct mail, etc.) by which companies persuaded consumers with repeated messages that told us what to buy. Since the development of the internet, the consumer “has become a participant in the creation and dissemination of advertising messages. And . . . most connected consumers will find the opinions of their online peers more trustworthy than the promises of the manufacturers” (6).

The copy must connect to the culture in which the consumer operates: copy needs to be rewritten with the correct tone for each new context and the consumer has “more control and power online” (11). But he (and most online marketers) are hasty to add that online marketers, such as copywriters, do have something to offer that is “of real value” (11),  so that “if you approach and address your audience with respect for their time and attention, they’ll likely welcome your messages” (11). Being personal, specific, keeping the message simple (without unnecessary acronyms or highbrow language) are all ingredients for earning your prospect’s attention and interest. Continue reading “Nick Usborne’s Rejoinder to Anti-Copywriting Prospects. . .”

With all of the attention Social Media (SM) is getting these days, in which many marketing gurus are tweeting, blogging and writing with their own take on the topic, I’ve become a major fan of Randall Craig, the no-nonsense Canadian social media and web strategist and president of 108ideaspace.com

I listened to Craig’s webinar on strategic integration of SM for professional associations earlier today, and recommend his Social Media Master Class, coming to Vancouver and Toronto, in the next month. Contact him (www.ideaspace.com) if you want to lobby him to travel wherever you might be.

In his blog, Craig writes  about how to integrate social media into your daily business routine, if you, like many organizations or companies are striving to make optimal and efficient use of SM.

Craig reports that the prospect of engaging SM as a part of organizational strategy often inspires two, different (sometimes polarized) responses: (i) “SM destroys productivity. We’ve got enough to do without it” and (ii) “We need everyone to engage now.”

In the first camp are those professionals who haven’t got time for SM. Craig acknowledges that the 20 or so minutes you might spend on SM daily can’t be recouped for something else. But he warns that the “haven’t got the time” thinking is based on the assumption that people, left alone, will become rapidly unproductive, fail and miss deadlines. On the contrary, Craig says, most professionals today actively work against such things. The few people in your organization who genuinely don’t care, he observes, “would simply abuse something else, if SM weren’t around.”

In the second camp are business professionals who think that SM has to be heavily engaged in, or else their company will lose touch with reality. Craig counters that “at a certain point, the marginal benefit of ‘more’ investment is very low, and the opportunity cost of spending more on SM (versus somewhere else) may be extremely high.”  Yes, the conversation over SM is important. But Craig stresses that the extent of engagement should always be measured and integrated into a larger, overall strategy. SM shouldn’t be an afterthought, tacked on thoughtlessly to the end of your marketing efforts.

If you’re tired of hearing what you’re doing wrong (or failing to strategize) and want to know how to “get things right,” Craig has blogged five tips for engaging SM into roughly 20 minutes of your morning (i.e. daily) routine: Continue reading “Need a Social Media Strategy for 2014? Randall Craig’s Tips for Success”

In my blog, I usually discuss issues pertaining to communications and marketing clients and not to service providers (writers, designers, social media specialists, etc.) But last fall, I began reading and blogging on contemporary books that argue convincingly that improving the careers and lives of women entrepreneurs simultaneously improves the way that business is done. So although I have not directly addressed my past, current or future prospects in these postings, the implications of these arguments for business affect us all.

In today’s posting (my last until 2014), I wrap up this series by drawing upon a powerful recent article by American B2B web copywriter, Dianna Huff. I want to emphasize that it’s not simply the money female creatives are paid that’s at stake here. It’s about professional growth, value and RESPECT (and yes, if you’re hearing Tina Turner here, it’s a sign that this isn’t a new problem, but one that has resisted and become more firmly entrenched than it was to the reforms of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. . . . .)

In her article, “Why Low Self-Worth Drives Lower Wages for Women Freelancers – and What You Can Do About It,” Dianna Huff says that women in copywriting and marcom careers often earn less because they set low fees, often “lack . . . money knowledge” and also suffer from “low self-worth.” The result is what Huff calls the “pink collar ghetto,” in which women make less than men for the same jobs. Women tend to accept job offers and not negotiate for a higher fee, because we think we’re lucky to have the job at all. So Huff found herself making only half of her previous “day job” salary of $42K (i.e. only $21K), when she started freelancing, 15 years ago. That’s despite having already managed for years a small manufacturing firm and having done corporate marcom work. Not surprisingly, Huff says, her first few years were “miserable.” And this is a common complaint among freelancers anywhere that I’ve lived, visited or worked.

Huff cites journalist Mika Brzezinski who has written candidly about her challenges in securing income that matched her experience and worth. In Knowing Your Value: Women, Money and Getting What You’re Worth, Brzezinski says that for many years, her male co-host on breakfast television made 15 times what she did. Like Huff, Brzezinski worked “mega” hours at a beginning freelancer’s wage, seeing red in her bank statements (after her wardrobe, supplies, etc. were paid for) at the end of every gruelling month. Both women (Huff and Brzezinski) worked at a low starting wage and spent their next years “fighting and clawing” their way to a better one (Brzezinski). Both women say that among these mistakes that women make in business, the following are three that recur:

(1)   As women, we tend to undervalue our skills and experience. We should use project (not hourly) fees and raise rates to meet any comparably qualified man in the industry. Yet Brzezinski and Huff kept getting ghetto rates, despite being perfectly able to write anything in their fields and do an excellent job at it. We tend to think we lack experience, that we don’t need more than “pin money,” that we lack awards or recognition that others may have, and that we’re only worth the “going rate” of “10 cents per word” (or other, similarly absurd fees). Continue reading “B2B Copywriter Dianna Huff Argues for Women’s Worth in Business”

Debora L. Spar’s Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)  . . . .

As I introduced in my last blog posting, the “quest for perfection” in the corporate or creative or academic worlds often underlies women’s fears, anxieties and choices, reducing our creative energy and work. (e.g.The power cranny affects not only those who stop before reaching the 16% at the top of the pyramid, but also the women who were there [or destined to be there] and who bow out of high stakes corporate America to raise children, often because their husbands’ careers demand it).

Perfectionism isn’t only about society-based pressure, but is also about the internal dialog that results when we take pressures on, in inherently unrealistic and unfair messages and standards.  What creative woman (or man) hasn’t felt, when reaching for a contract that is beyond their experience, “maybe you won’t be good enough to do this”?

One criticism I have of Spar’s book, Wonder Women,  is that while she discusses perfectionism for women, she tends to fall into the old trap of essentializing women’s perspectives and characteristics, saying that we tend to stress “consensus,” to be risk averse, to want to share power and to be liked by our peers and associates, etc.  I’d like instead to argue that our culture has not succeeded in raising girls to be women who feel strong enough and strongly supported enough to want to overcome the 16% “power cranny.”

Having seen their mothers or aunts fight to find a rightful place against the “glass ceiling,” young women (e.g. Generation Ys or Millenials) often settle for less in their careers, and settle early, at that. They see the road ahead to having “more” in their careers too encumbered with difficulties that feel too great to be overcome. (cf recall Sheryl Sandberg saying that young women today too often “lean back,” instead of “leaning in.”) Spar says that some of her own students foreclose their own careers, choosing lesser professional standing in anticipation of having family, etc., long before their lives actually take that turn (if they do, at all.) Put simply, young women expect less than their mothers, aunts and (sometimes) even grandmothers did. And young women today quietly rationalize the loss of those dreams as the reality of not being able to “have it all,” instead of envisioning a culture in which an imperfect but important career and an imperfect and important family could be held in tandem. There, one still “can’t have it all” (no one, including men, can, as Spar acknowledges). But women can nonetheless achieve no less at work and at home than men or than anyone else.

I agree with Spar that the contemporary workplace is still “mired in the patterns of the 1950’s,” with employers being unable and/or unwilling to accommodate working mothers. But Spar also rightly observes that that doesn’t explain why women respond differently than men do, when dealing with tensions between work and family. Why do women bail first? And “jump quickly,” when they’re not passionate about their work?

Women, unlike men, when choosing between compromising a job versus compromising their family, almost always preserve the family, Spar says. It’s an “all or nothing,” a perfectionist pattern of thinking. Meanwhile, men most often choose the jobs that best pay the bills.

The “mismatch” between jobs and commitment varies by time, gender and industry (e.g. women leave in droves in banking, law and consulting, while more stay in academia, medicine, entrepreneurial ventures) (187). If their husbands are large wage earners, women often opt out after having children, or if they feel ambivalent toward their careers, which may have been haphazardly entered into, before they began raising children.

Spar interestingly argues that under US law in the 1970s and 1980s, women’s difference from men has been banished in favour of gender neutrality, in which it’s assumed that “given the  same opportunities, women will behave more or less like men” (193). She finds, on the contrary, that those differences may and may not involve non-aggressive consensus-building, leadership-inspiring, etc. (But see my paragraph above on the risk of essentialism.) She finds that women don’t work or provide leadership like men do.

In fact, Spar rightly calls for investigation into the ways in which institutions are qualitatively run differently by women, which she believes would prove the merits of having more women aboard in top professional positions. But at the end of the day, I agree with her fully that it’s just “common sense” that the 50% of the population that women represent need to participate in the highest professional ranks of our society. As she aptly says: “. . . the issue . . . is not about pulling token women into public places to pretend that their presence is more widespread.  The issue is about making it easier for all women to have the jobs and careers they want, and for all organizations to benefit from the diversity of perspectives that women tend to bring” (199). Continue reading “Gender in the Workplace and Beyond: Re-Writing Perfectionist Narratives for Women’s Inclusion (Part Two). . .”