Marketing Writing Resources for Creative Copywriters

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Old news: Green products don't work, and consumers won't pay a premium for them. New news: Investment in environmentally preferable products and technologies can lead to a potent new source of innovation and competitive advantage.

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Writing for business-to-business lead generation is a balancing act: On the one hand, you want as great a response rate as possible; on the other, you don't want to clog the sales pipeline with useless leads—people who don't have the authority, interest, or money to buy what you're selling. Here are five pragmatic ways for you to increase your success rate with the prospects who matter.

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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not just the marketing flavor of the week. It is a very profitable way to get prospects to Web sites for a long time to come. It is direct marketing at its purest. To succeed with PPC, you need to apply all the rules for media, offers, copy, and testing. Here are 10 sure-fire tips.

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The aggressive drive to be the number-one search result in Google continues to change the nature of communication. No one is feeling that more than today's copywriters. In less than a decade, many copywriters have fundamentally changed, or felt pressured to change, their approach to the craft. They have learned that some traditional communications tactics don't register well with a greasy machine named Googlebot.

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The Web has changed the rules for press releases. The thing is, most old-line PR professionals just don't know it yet.

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Not all site traffic is good. Like automobile traffic, sometimes traffic is just... congestion, and just gets in the way of those who you really want to come your way. How can marketers target the *right* sort of traffic?

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Writing an effective questionnaire is not a task for novices. At the very least it requires an understanding of four basic issues.

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As a relatively new player in the increasingly competitive comparison-shopping and online retail arena, pricefish.com needed a comprehensive and creative marketing campaign and strategy to re-launch the pricefish.com brand and generate consumer awareness for the site, among other things. Here's how they did it. Get the full story.

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Most of the direct mail sent uses one of two copywriting techniques. In the author's view, neither works. The truth is there are only four ways of writing a direct mail ad that will raise your response rate.

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With Google AdWords, it is now possible to target prospects at the very moment they are thinking about buying your products or services. Here's how to maximize your success with Google AdWords. With proper preparation and execution, starting Google AdWords can be like planting a money tree that will provide your business with a steady stream of revenue.

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Imagine if half the people that called your sales team hung up within 10 seconds. There are not prospects they were cold-calling either, but interested people calling them. Heads would roll. At the very least, you'd want to know why so many people were disengaging. Well, chances are it's happening to you right now, every day. Your sales team isn't the problem; the real problem is your most visible and active company representative—the Web site.

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If ever a winner-take-all match took place among the marketing heavyweights—direct mail, telemarketing, and the Web—our money would be on direct mail, without doubt. Simply put, the best pound-for-pound method for targeting a large audience and gathering data is direct mail. Armed with the right data, message, and creative, direct mail can be a lean, mean, marketing power puncher that can hit your target like a ton of bricks and deliver a substantial return on investment. But to be effective, direct mail requires the careful combination of three key ingredients.

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Here's a pop quiz: Name a form of marketing communications that can take as little as five seconds to complete, can be accomplished by a nine-year-old child or an adult, and is of absolutely no importance whatsoever. Oh, and it also happens to be the most difficult and frustrating form of marketing communications, by far. The answer is naming consulting, the often-arcane art of creating and applying names to products, services and companies.

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You've carefully selected your list. You've labored long and hard over your letter—every word, sentence and paragraph. It's a powerhouse of persuasion with every key element firmly in place, including compelling benefits, powerful testimonials, a superb P.S. and an impossible-to-resist offer. But all your hard work, your hours of craftsmanship and painstaking attention to every little detail will go for naught, unless your prospect opens the envelope. Here are two distinctly different ways to go about that.

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At a networking event, you exchange business cards with another person. The business card includes an email address. No doubt, it's okay to contact the person by email. But what about including that name in bulk emails? Is that okay... or not? This week's reader collected emails but doesn't have permission to send emails to the prospects. What can he do?

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So you've created a Web log to communicate more intimately and more frequently with your audience. It's supposed to be easy. After all, the technology is simple, the style casual and the content brief. But after the initial wave of enthusiasm, you may find it increasingly difficult to generate ideas for the blog that began with so many thoughts—and so many posts—just a few months ago. Worse, you might be guiding a boss or colleague who may not be a fluent writer, but is the appropriate representative whose voice must be present in the blogosphere. How do you help that person refresh the well of inspiration when she's run out of ideas to draw upon? Tape the following list of ideas, prompts and suggestions over her monitor.

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As tech marketing experts, we have a responsibility to communicate what our product is and what it does—early, and often. If within our array of marketing material we can successfully explain what our product is, how it benefits the customer and answer questions regarding its features, we will differentiate ourselves from the competition and ultimately gain more sales. Here's a first step: avoid the nondescriptive "solution."

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Before you release any communications to prospects or customers, gauge how your copy scores on the B/S Index. What is the B/S Index? It's not what you think it is—it's the Believability/Simpatico Index. There are five components to the Index.

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As the evidence shows, a white paper can be a powerful and persuasive marketing vehicle. Provided, of course, that the reader actually reads it. Here's how.

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Is there a better way to support sales? Is there something you can leave with prospects that's just a bit more memorable—and more effective—than the standard brochure with its forced march through company "visions," product descriptions, and corporate bios? Yes, indeed. Here are eight suggestions, not as comprehensive answers to every sales-communications situation, but as inspiration and provocation for creating material less likely to gather dust—and more likely to draw your company closer to a sale.