Marketing Writing Resources for Creative Copywriters

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

This week, our regularly featured "SWOT Team" column gets a new name as it becomes the weekly "Marketing Challenge" column. In it, a reader asks: How do I create a big splash on little cash? Readers respond with four excellent approaches. Also this week, suggest your own answers to the problem: What's the most effective ways to reach teens online?

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Sometimes, less is more. Especially when it comes to content. Many Web sites are too big to professionally manage with the number of staff available. There might be a Web team of four people, yet they have a site that requires at least 10 to properly manage. What happens when you have more content than you have people to manage?

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The columnist, author of "Writing Copy for Dummies," recently joined forces with Jon Warshawsky, coauthor of the newly published "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots." Together, the "dummy" and the "idiot" attacked their archenemy, Corporate Bull. What follows are five practical suggestions for shoveling your way out of the doublespeak and successfully into the embrace of colleagues and customers.

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Whether distributed via email or printed and snail-mailed, newsletters are a cost-effective way for businesses or organizations to keep in touch with employees, customers, prospects or association members. The trick, however, is to come up with a strategy to keep readers engaged and the publication's production and editorial adjustments in line with current budgets. Here are five tactics that you can use to make your newsletter more engaging for your intended recipients.

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Don't choose marketing messages based on whim or personal preference. Educate the product team about the three approaches to formulating messages. Work to identify and hone the messages. You'll find that consistently communicating these messages will help brand your product—and, if your product actually delivers its promised benefits, will increase sales over time.

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Examine your press initiative. Do you know your marketplace, and know how to reach each member of it? Are you continually building trust? Are you delivering only what people need, and only in the way they want it delivered? Or are you shooting words like rock salt from a shotgun—hoping some of it will stick somewhere but resigning yourself to most of it becoming additional unread content on a Web site?

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Web sites run by small businesses far outnumber the Web sites run by large corporations. This means that most sites are produced and operated on a relatively small budget. Each dollar counts, and must be used carefully. But few small business owners are spending enough time figuring out what constitutes an effective Web site before they pour money into the project. Time and time again, small business Web sites waste their resources on the wrong Web site elements.

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Services marketing efforts are moving online not because a few marketing consultants and strategists say they are—but because your clients and prospects are online, and their online experiences are influencing all buying decisions. Here are four arguments you can use to help your firm boldly enter the new world of online marketing.

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This week, add your two pesos to the SWOT Team dilemma: When inventing brands, what works and what doesn't? Also this week, read your answers to last week's query: What approaches work best for holiday campaigns?

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Correctly executed, the written word can be a powerful means of establishing your business in the hearts and minds of your potential customers. Many of us are inhibited, however, by popularly held—yet largely mistaken—ideas of what good business-to-business copywriting should be. Here are five of the most common and destructive myths that may be undermining the impact of your copy.

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This week, add your two cents to the following dilemma: What can a business do to determine which marketing tools are best for a particular project? Also this week, read your answers to the previous problem: How do you market without an advertising budget?

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Sure your Web site looks great, but are you turning enough Web visitors into leads that your sales force can target? Your answer can be the difference between a site that is a moneymaker and one that is nothing more than a glorified brochure. Your Web site can offer your company many opportunities to generate leads and cultivate new business. Here's how.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines. Search engines generally advise to avoid such pages as well as other "cookie cutter" approaches, such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. There are, however, acceptable alternatives.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Developing a great logo is a strange mix of art, science, psychology and (in most cases) a good amount of luck. Last week, in part one of this two-part series, we discussed some fundamentals of logo development and design. Here, in this final installment, we delve deeper into the nitty-gritty: How to choose the right logo, the pitfalls of a too-literal logo, and, yes: size does matter.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

You must make very difficult choices if you want your Web site to work. You can't serve everybody. If you try to, you will serve nobody. The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide which readers you are *not* going to focus on.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Writing blog posts (and comments on blogs) is actually very simple. Keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear, short and search engine optimized. Here are basic blog style guidelines to follow.

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Developing a great logo is a strange mix of art, science, psychology and (in most cases) a good amount of luck. In this, the first of a two-part series, we'll explain what a logo really is (and isn't!), suggest how to start development, and ask a few questions you'll need to answer before you begin.

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If you have clients (or bosses) who want you to write about who they are, you probably witness them thrusting a list of attributes in your face. On the list, you'll find the usual suspects: quality, commitment to service, out-of-the-box this and proactive that. But such vague attributes have little credibility. Instead, consider the following three techniques for transforming unclear attributes into compelling copy.

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With our focus on bold, blunt, "write-as-people-speak" prose in business, we no longer have any fancy phrases to lurk behind. We're on our own. Why has business writing become so much more direct in the comparatively short period of two generations or so?

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We have wonderful tools today that will tell us the value of the physical things in our factories and offices. Now we need to create wonderful tools and disciplines to measure all our information assets.